An unexpectedly impressive comeback. [Apr 2019, p.32]

A meaty, confident comeback. [Apr 2019, p.34]

If Better Oblivion Community Center has a recurring flaw, it's a reluctance to hit these higher gears more often, the best of BOCC, however, both earns its place in Oberst's already formidable canon, and further confirms Bridgers as an artist likely to assemble one. [Apr 2019, p.37]

The second [disc], using poems and letters from World War I, is almost unbearably poignant at times. [Apr 2019, p.39]

[Susan] Tedeschi breaks free from those Bonnie Raitt comparisons that have long dogged her. [Apr 2019, p.39]

Songs packed with macabre humour, melodic contortion and gruesome discord. [Mar 2019, p.27]

Royal Trux remain unique, one of a kind: still going wrong like a hydrogen bomb.[Mar 2019, p.36]

Wildly ambitious in its melding of industrial bombast, free-jazz skronk, horror-film atmospherics and psych freakouts. [Mar 2019, p.34]

This fifth studio release is no less diverse, hitting hardest with the Woody Guthrie-alluding title track, a raging blast of rap-hop that addresses prejudice and intolerance in the Trump era. More frequently, though, Clark immerses himself in funk and soul. [Mar 2019, p.26]

A set of one-take, fragile musings, predominantly for acoustic guitar and voice. [Mar 2019, p.23]

Bingham embellishes the arrangements with Exile-style female backing vocals and country-skronk raucousness. ... The reflective moments pack a wallop as well. [Mar 2019, p.24]

Her second LP as Du Blonde plays it two ways: first with unremarkable, lunging dynamics and fuzz-caked riffs, then in a leaner and more soulful style, wit nods to prog and '70s folk-pop songcraft. Tha latter is more convincing and a better fit for her great voice and brutally honest lyrics. [Mar 2019, p.27]

The spoken-word pieces court tweeness, but Yorkston's delivery keeps things the right side of mawkish. [Mar 2019, p.37]

Cathartic in its honesty but no less depressing for that. [Mar 2019, p.33]

A family of songs that are strikingly evocative, but never overwrought. [Mar 2019, p.25]

A meaty maximalist feast, richer and riper than its predecessor. [Mar 2019, p.27]

In his own quiet way, Texas Piano Man finds Ellis maintaining a degree of reckless abandon in his creative life. [Mar 2019, p.26]

A collection of unabashedly hooky '80s-informed rock songs. [Mar 2019, p.30]

Tiersen now explores their middle ground without any hint of compromise. ... All ends well. [Mar 2019, p.37]

There's a sense of spacious freedom to these dozen songs. ... Gorgeous. [Mar 2019, p.34]

While the singles "Until The Fire" and "The Animals" are satisfyingly sleek and sinister, Lady tron seem most energised when they head deep into the darkness in the starkly Numan-ist "Paper Highways" and "Deadzone." [Mar 2019, p.29]

Producer Ed Stasium keeps the production crisp, melodic and controlled. [Mar 2019, p.30]

All The Young Droogs plots a grotty course through its age, but finds something joyful and heroic at the bottom of the bargain bucket. [Mar 2019, p.38]

Despite convoluted explanations about their relationship with nature, these compositions are surprisingly straightforward, with "Everyone Sleeps" and "Hands In The Anthill" almost primly formal. [Mar 2019, p.29]

An absorbing, illbient record magisterial in its power but minimal in execution, it works best as a set piece. [Mar 2019, p.27]

Breezy and agreeable though it all is, it mostly reminds how nice it would be to hear something new of The Lemonheads' own. [Mar 2019, p.30]

Sympathetic rock collaborators have written fine new Mavis albums in her spirit, and her gigs are exhilarating revival meetings for her friend Martin Luther King's mission. Focusing on those new songs, these 79th-birthday recordings don't quite capture that fervour. [Mar 2019, p. 34]

Why You So Crazy is the sound of a group that--reasonably, at this point--discern no reason to start being anything other than themselves, and is accordingly laced with trademark Americana, stomping glam, droll boogie and the occasional addled aberration. [Feb 2019, p.26]

It's generally a thoughtful collection: stripped back so as to not stamp on the originals. [Mar 2019, p.27]

Tip Of The Sphere represents McCombs' practised skill as a shaper of his own world, with pride in his craft, a deep respect for tradition and the drive to refresh it via his own, idiosyncratic iteration. [Mar 2019, p.18]

Lucinda Williams' version of Gentry's iconic "Ode To Billie Joe" leaves much to be desired but. ... Overall, this one's worth it. [Mar 2019, p.30]

A glowering inferno. [Mar 2019, p.24]

Pratt doesn't recreate the lo-fi sound of her previous records so much as she elaborates on it. [Mar 2019, p.32]

It's a new direction, one stretched fairly thin across nine similar tracks, but at least he's escaped that old echo chamber. [Mar 2019, p.32]

There's nothing eruptive here: effects-drenched guitars, synths and electronics conjure a hushed, hypnotic ebb and flow that's bleakly comforting if over familiar. [Mar 2019, p.34]

"The Look You Gave (Jerry)" feels plucked from an '80s synth-pop record. The album manages to avoid nostalgia however, instead offering the pair's own doomy electronic voyage into the uncertainties of the future. [Mar 2019, p.24]

Restraint didn't run in the family, perhaps, but a flair for interpretation did. [Mar 2019, p.30]

This LP captures him very much on the up. ... A delightful heaviness to songs like "Irrational Poison" and "Sin King" that gives the whole thing real heft and drive, protecting it from whimsy. [Mar 2019, p.32]

It's Brown's voice that holds it all together. [Mar 2019, p.24]

As a back-to-the-roots album which at the same time packs a vital contemporary relevance, Mira does everything you could ask and more. [Mar 2019, p.28]

Encore is a perfectly good record. ... But one can't help but wonder how Dammers' wayward genius might have added a level of glorious unpredictability to proceedings. [Mar 2019, p.22]

A worthy, if more subdued, companion to Kacey Johansing's The Hiding last year. [Mar 2018, p.37]

If Drift Code can't quite match the rural psychodrama of its predecessor, it boasts its own quizzical magic. [Mar 2019, p.32]

Production touches aren't enough to elevate a set of songs that when stripped to their skeleton are sufficient if unspectacular. [Mar 2019, p.32]

Now adds a shimmer of spiritual awaking to the mix. ... An energising release. [Mar 2019, p.27]

Abrasive album. ... Tracks like "Pleasure Seeker," "Oblivion" and "Power" demand the listener either sit up and take notice or run screaming for the hills. [Mar 2019, p.26]

It's Creevy's charismatically odd lyrics and playful, St. Vincent-style subversion of angsty feminine stereotypes on provocative curios such as "Daddi" that keeps us transfixed. [Mar 2019, p.26]

Gallipoli is the most acoustically rich Beirut album to date, with studio buzz and random dissonance deployed as musical texture more than ever before. [Mar 2019, p.35]

A stripped-down set of acoustic songs sung in a voice that is sometimes overly winsome but at its best is hauntingly ethereal. [Feb 2019, p.24]

On this sixth album, there's a deft combination of denseness and groove that is never easy to master, but also a freestyle improvisational quality. [Feb 2019, p.29]

The result is endearingly scattershot. [Dec 2018, p.39]

Now and then she's too laconic for her own good but the self-deprecating humour of "It's So Weird" and "Staying In" hits the mark. [Feb 2019, p.27]

There's a spiritual quality to these streams-of-conscious compositions, which sound open-ended as though she's posing questions to the woods around her. [Feb 2019, p.34]

He straddles the line between known and unknowable, and that's a mighty fine place to reside. [Feb 2019, p.28]

A further shift away from the full-throttle krautrock of their early years into something more sumptuous. [Feb 2019, p.37]

Like much of Kent's work, the mood is melancholy and the focus is on her intricate production. There's plenty to admire in Kent's elegant phrasing, her cello longing and mournful. [Feb 2019, p.27]

There are moments where gusto, melody and thunderous guitar riffs meet to powerful effect but there are some tired moments to wade through to get there. [Feb 2019, p.27]

Feedback-soaked rockers like "Little Drama" are played with maximum oomph, but much like, say, Ty segall, Krol laces his songs with all manner of sly twists and turns. [Feb 2019, p.29]

Apart from the odd off-kilter minor key melody, they sound anything but bereft as Bagg's dreamy soprano, layers of melodic synths and soaring strings cast a dramatically romantic sheen over their pain. [Feb 2019, p.30]

Psychedelic beguilement a la Syd Barrett and Wyatt-ish pastoralism bent into eccentric shapes figure, but variety is key. [Feb 2019, p.30]

The author's humanistic, heart-first approach, coupled with his songs' compellingly opaque expression and egoless playing makes reliability more rewarding. [Feb 2019, p.22]

The spacious, Neil Young-ian rumbling of the title track and the bulked-up power-pop of "Spiked Flower" both see co-founders Adam Franklin and Jimmy Hartridge venture beyond the template of Raise and Mezcal Head without making the faithful worry they've ditched their distortion pedals. [Feb 2019, p.34]

This is voluminous in length and style. [Feb 2019, p.33]

Rough-hewn thrills abound. [Jan 2019, p.21]

Painted Image is as stylistically omnivorous as it is emotionally acute. [Feb 2019, p.24]

Classical-inflected electronica, with nary a chrome-plated breakbeat in sight. [Feb 2019, p.34]

With Fool, his focus is as much on method as material. [Feb 2019, p.27]

It's good to hear him finally write and record with a proper band. About The Light is at its best when it takes advantage of this new freedom. [Feb 2019, p.29]

It's less punky and psychedelic than anything they've done before, sounding more like a piece of self-conscious, well-crafted Americana by, say Richard Hawley or Alex Turner. [Feb 2019, p.30]

Love Hates lacks some of the naive charm of their debut and a couple of attempts at Garbage-style industrial pop set the album off on the wrong foot. But the all-or-nothing passion that courses through "The Breath Of Light" and "For The Wild" is quite something. [Feb 2019, p.29]

BAG's core values remain intact, but it's an exhilarating advance. [Feb 2019, p.24]

This is no desperate grab at nostalgia, then, rather a chronicle of important personal moments reexamined through the lens of time. [Feb 2019, p.30]

The album is perhaps a little lacking in knockout tracks but instead highlights Bear's clear talent as a producer with a craft for melody and rhythm. [Feb 2019, p.37]

It's understated excellence at best, perhaps a little inoffensive at worse, and entirely a continuation of the aesthetic the Brooklyn-based guitarist has honed for the last two years. [Feb 2019, p.27]

Most consistently enthralling album thus far. [Feb 2019, p.36]

Violence, guilt, betrayal and despair assail singer-lyricist James Graham's protagonists, while Andy MacFarlane marshals something miasmic, sometimes glistening synth glides and doleful guitars, suggesting Johnny Marr's wilder Smiths experiments. [Feb 2019, p.37]

If the music at times fails to convey the particularities of her lyrics on the trip-hoppy "Memorial Day," Van Etten remains an insightful chronicler of small moments that produce overwhelming emotions. [Feb 2019, p.37]

Overall there's a warmth lacking on last year's lo-fi Swim Inside The Moon. ... Elsewhere, echoes of Bon Iver and label boss Sufjan Stevens suffuse "All Your Life," his rejection of suicide, while "Time's" whistled melody confirms his latent optimism. [Feb 2019, p.26]

[The union] is clearly well-judged. [Feb 2019, p.37]

Boone's soulful presence in the Delines brings a different slant to Vlautin's characters, her voice transmitting something more hopeful and tender. [Feb 2019, p.26]

Delightful for a dark night in. [Jan 2019, p.27]

Some of Deerhunter's prettiest songs to date. [Feb 2019, p.13]

Two decades on, the luxuriantly layered soft-rock production still sounds roomy and glossy, albeit a little ponderous in places. ... Expanded and enhanced. [Feb 2019, p.46]

Veers dangerously close to tastefully understated ethno-trance wallpaper on chiming, drowsy throbbers like "Zemlya." But thankfully Edwards is too smart to be seduced by the shallow allure of pointless beauty. [Feb 2019, p.32]

A pygmy in the grown-up pop world, maybe, but in his own tiny corner of the cosmos, a giant. [Feb 2019, p.30]

Throne might be her boldest and most intimate statement yet. [Feb 2019, p.29]

The overall effect is immersive, wallowing, sad but often beautiful. [Feb 2019, p.27]

Nova's smoky, sullen vocals sometimes sound a little stilted, but she surpasses herself on "You Wanna See My Teeth," a cinematic mini-symphony inspired by the killing of Trayvon Martin, which moves through nervy electro and anguished rock to screaming rage. [Feb 2019, p.30]

A strange, untethered creation. ... But when Romano Keeps it simple, he's terrific. [Feb 2019, p.32]

Uneven but mostly engaging third solo album. [Feb 2019, p.30]

A festive 10 tracks. [Feb 2019, p.29]

An understated debut of mature sophistication. [Feb 2019, p.27]

Multidimensional. ... This rotating playlist of styles and sincerity will rankle with some--it's very earnest about addiction, love and our internet selves--but rather that than banal conformity. [Feb 2019, p.23]

The album works in isolation but maybe watch the film on Netflix first. ... Tonally, we're in the territory of Nebraska, Tom Joad and Devils & Dust, but there's also the deep romantic melancholic tones of Darkness and The Rising. [Feb 2018, p.18]

Beautiful, weird and wasted, Songs For Judy never lets us forget it. [Jan 2019, p.28]

Working with producer Jack Splash, they craft a dense, bracing, kaleidoscopic avant-soul backdrop for frontman Paul Janeway's musings on religion, politics and family. [Oct 2018, p.32]

Bowles' music is rarely less than seductive, the product of both a gifted multi-instrumentalist and restless cultural forager. [Nov 2018, p.26]

Uncompromising, adventurous score. [Dec 2018, p.27]