Any Day is their sharpest set of songs to date, but Sam Prekop's languid melodies still prove defiantly elusive. [Jun 2018, p.35]

Here they sound truly alive, impassioned and buoyant on their finest LP to date. [Jun 2018, p.33]

It may sound like a gimmicky stunt but it produces mostly beautiful results. [Jun 2018, p.30]

It's more of a subtle restyling than a full-on reincarnation, the soft-edged weightlessness, sumptuous tones and gauzy vocals still instantly recognisable. [Jun 2018, p.24]

It feels as if she now trusts the power of her music to imbue even cliche with emotional power. [Jun 2018, p.29]

[Graves reinvents] himself as wistful purveyor of psych dream pop. It happens to suit him. [Jun 2018, p.27]

Harrowing subject matter, and yet these raw confessionals have a stark, compelling beauty that ultimately feels bravely defiant. [Jun 2018, p.37]

Low-key but engrossing, Tranquility Base is a slow-burner, self-doubting but pushing ever onwards. It's a brave new step, even if it can be a little one-paced, and a little withholding. [Jun 2018, p.25]

[An] impressive solo debut. Largely focused on synths, it still leans on hypnotic, motorik rhythm, if more reflective than her band. [Jun 2018, p.37]

Just as it's a struggle to name parallels beyond Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, it's equallly difficult to imagine why anybody would want to. [Jun 2018, p.24]

It sounds, to its considerable credit, very much like the record that might have followed. [Jun 2018, p.24]

It sometimes feels a little pedestrian, though Jurado excels when upping the pace. [Jun 2018, p.28]

Even if the landscape is occasionally a little too pleasant, the overall trip is well worth taking. [Jun 2018, p.32]

The band's newfound eagerness for moodier tempos and treatments allows frontman Elias Bender Ronnenfelt to dig deeper into his Gun Club fetish on "under The sun" and make like he's stumbling out of a Kurt Weill musical on "Showtime," a stunning piece of punked-up cabaret. [Jun 2018, p.28]

Conquistador plays out against a cavalcade of dark, intense, downward thrusts that linger and fold back on themselves, each time getting slightly deeper and more daunting. [Jun 2018, p.24]

The deep, pulled-back grooves of Critical Equation reveal the harnessed intensity of the songs and performances so deliberately that their myriad pleasures and embedded hooks will sneak up on you. [Jun 2018, p.27]

Though his jazz instincts can still send him into incantatory live orbit, all he wants here are the boyhood comforts of his early record collection. His voice remains admirably supple, though. [Jun 2018, p.33]

Liz Harris's 10th album continues her slow ascent out of the appealingly murky haze of her early releases towards structured, if still frail, songwriting. [Jun 2018, p.28]

In every respect, the performance captured here is as raw and un-redacted as the original record. ... What times. [Jun 2018, p.42]

Eleanor Friedberger is rejuvenated on fourth solo album Rebound. [Jun 2018, p.27]

This is a pretty exhausted soundworld. [Jun 2018, p.37]

If Sheff's still finding the best way to speak this newly direct, loving language, its naked conviction is touchingly plain. [Jun 2018, p.33]

The ramshackle, campfire vibe is endearing, bu this is neither a fully immersive experience like Dead Man or a third LP with POTR. [Jun 2018, p.36]

Though some of its textures could do with a little more edge, the result is undeniably poignant, with HArdy's voice elegant and expressive as ever. [Jun 2018, p.28]

There's nothing in here not to love. [Jun 2018, p.30]

What lingers longest on this remarkable record is an uplifting sense of resilience. [Jun 2018, p.26]

Vide Noir unspools with cinematic seamlessness, as quicksilver psychedelic buffers bridge its 12 tracks, which shift between folk, country and heartland rock. [Jun 2018, p.30]

Wells favours minimal lyrics and skeletal, looping arrangements that an feel overly austere, but the improvised viola scraps and sampled splash of New Orleans jazz on "A Quiet Life" show an evolution towards Matthew Herbert territory. [May 2018, p.30]

This 15-track album is daft, sprawling, naive and full of contradictions--but rarely less than entertaining. [Jun 2018, p.37]

The results has to be the blandest record in which either Sting or Shaggy has ever been involved. The lyrics are beyond banal. [Jun 2018, p.34]

Its distinctive musicianship leads to some powerful moments. [Jun 2018, p.35]

The results are almost too intimate to bear. [Jun 2018, p.33]

The Other sees the slacker goofball King Tuff reborn as a spiritual thinker, albeit one with an excellent groove. [Jun 2018, p.30]

An extraordinary instrumental album full of hypnotic rhythms and minimalist melodies that are both stunningly beautiful and at times oddly unsettling. [Jun 2018, p.28]

A bold, brisk, rather beautiful zip through multiple pop genres. [Jun 2018, p.26]

Pedal steel and fiddle waltz around a crystal-clear baritone on a succession of laments to hillbilly heartbreak that ooze class from every pore. [Jun 2018, p.28]

Sometimes this nomadic approach produces some sublime pop, but more often the results are erratic--odd even--but never dull. [May 2018, p.33]

Hippo Lite feels like Le Bon and Presley's own little musical microclimate. You don't have to know exactly what they're on about to recognise that it's something special. [May 2018, p.25]

With Dave Cobb's production reinforcing their boisterous dynamism, Volunteer surveys the sacrifices Old Crow make for their music, the camaraderie of the bandmates and heroes at the expense of the stability of family and home. [May 2018, p.29]

Weirdly, it sounds like a modern-day Alice Cooper album.[May 2018, p.35]

He's been inspired by the Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout, but in truth the synthetic textures and drum machines bring to mind a more downbeat Bruce Hornsby. [May 2018, p.33]

Their playing and singing has laser-sharp focus, while still allowing the songs and their rich, raw melodies the space to breathe. [May 2018, p.35]

Tortoise's John McEntire, producing, keep the whole rhapsodic jam on an even keel. [May 2018, p.30]

Their dogged adherence to the Southern rock template remains at once a strength and an intermittently frustrating weakness. On the upside, the Atlanta group do what they do with devoted attention to detail, and the correct balance of sincerity and swagger. [May 2018, p.24]

It's not all straight A's, but that hardly seems the point. This feels like a necessary act of burning and rebuilding. [May 2018, p.33]

It is the weirder, wilder, experimental material that makes this a significant new career benchmark for the German duo, their boldest and possibly best album so far. [May 2018, p.32]

The songs here are lean, supple, confident. [May 2018, p.18]

Like the stormy contents of 2015's Transfixiation, songs like "Never Coming Back" have no lack of velocity and ferocity, though APTBS often fall between two poles, being not quite able to deliver memorable songs yet unwilling to let the music dissolve into purer forms if turbulence. [May 2018, p.23]

The distinction between their sensibilities remain strikingly apparent. [May 2018, p.33]

Laughing in the face of mortality is a preoccupation, from the honky-tonk close "When I Get To Heaven" and "God Only Knows", but Prine's playful wit is best captured in "Egg & Daughter Nite, London Lincoln Nebraska, 1967 (Crazy Bone)." [May 2018, p.33]

A satisfying whole that demonstrates Taylor's mastery of his peculiar strain of zonked late-night soul. [May 2018, p.35]

Shook might not possess the vocal range of kindred spirits Lydia Loveless or Nikki Lane, but she clearly a force to be counted. [May 2018, p.26]

A batch of songs that snap and snarl in all the right places. [May 2018, p.27]

Roberts continues to mine the traditional songbook, the sound is dominated by McGuinness' keyboards. Composer Amble Skuse adds squirts of electronica, bringing understated ambience to these brutal old songs. [Apr 2018, p.32]

Best are tunes that showcase Cash's plainspoken lyricism and mould his musing into fully formed songs. [May 2018, p. 37]

Impressive stuff. [May 2018, p.30]

While "Symmetry" and "Say Hello" seem destined for pole positions on motivational playlists, such displays of ebullience are well balanced with evidence of Wye Oak's more melancholy side. [May 2018, p.37]

Neither the songs nor their delivery are perfect, but that's perhaps the point. [May 2018, p.30]

Conceived to celebrate the band's 20th anniversary and features everybody who has ever recorded with the band, which basically means they called in a bunch of old drummers to thump out a backing rhythm for Jason Simon and Steve Kille's incessant groove, snarl and swing on choice tracks like "Here With The Hawk" and "Nobody Home." [May 2018, p.27]

Not a while world away from the primitive throb of his Stiff pomp. [May 2018, p.37]

The reassuringly lo-fi results might not be drastically different to UMO's previous three records, but the execution is certainly impressive. [May 2018, p.37]

Effective, if not quite thrilling. [May 2018, p.30]

Predictably overwhelming. [May 2018, p.27]

Emotions played out against a backdrop of upbeat, urbanised alt. folk and groovy pastoral soul. [Apr 2018, p.23]

Uplifting and upbeat; it's the sharp-suit Saturday night to Buena Vista Social Club's Sunday Morning. [May 2018, p.33]

Golden Hour doesn't carry quite the same bite as either 2015 predecessor Pageant Material or 2013's Sam Trailer Different Park, preferring a more loved-up vibe that favours pillowy sophisti-pop over bittersweet country. [May 2018, p.30]

Throughout, the virtuosic performances and subtly evocative lyrics sustain intensity through understatement. [Apr 2018, p.37]

Thrillingly perma-bored, sarcastic and suffused with the stench of inadequately ventilated student accommodation. [May 2018, p.28]

There's great charm to these yearning tunes. [May 2018, p.28]

Both are versatile players, and while "Tonight The Bottle Wins Again" is a swaggering blues, Harper leans towards Otis Redding on "When Love Is Not Enough." [May 2018, p.28]

Mostly the album's best songs are simple, contemplative and poignant. [Apr 2018, p.36]

It's one of those records that is somewhat sui generis, and yet with an appeal that is universal and accessible at the same time. [Apr 2018, p.33]

A powerful, unusual record. [May 2018, p.24]

Longwave is languorous and amiable. ... The largely unchanging pace prompts yearnings for more frequent shifts from second gear, however. [May 2018, p.26]

It's no drastic reinvention, but the PRS cheques keep on coming. [May 2018, p.37]

Every song on New Material has a one-word title that captures a mood--"Disarray," "Decompose," "Doubt" are typical--while tunes like "Manipulation" and "Solace" have a propulsive relentless but also melodic ease that are something like a funkier War On Drugs. [Apr 2018, p.32]

Her follow-up, produced by Mark Howard, adds country-gospel choirs and fussy arrangements to her palette, steamrolling any nuance she might bring to these characters. [Apr 2018, p.23]

Across 14 varied tracks, Avery's compositions become engulfing, such is the pull of his palpable textures, dense soundscapes and tantalising beats. [May 2018, p.24]

The strongest songs on Dungeness have Trembling Bells playing at a fierce peak. ... Sometimes, though, things don't quite cohere. [May 2018, p.34]

There's no straining to distance themselves from their former band [Stereolab]. [Apr 2018, p.24]

Their elastic moods are endlessly absorbing, typified by the almost weightless "Cernubicua" and the grinding, Malevolent buzz of "Inkstain." [May 2018, p.27]

A sometimes mystifying but often inspired work. [May 2018, p.22]

Burch's sings sound familiar, but her lyrics cut straight through the warmth and sweetness with frank reflection on relationships and, on "Asking 4 A Friend," scoring drugs. [May 2018, p.26]

Accomplished but oddly characterless, and despite the high hook count, forgettable. [May 2018, p.30]

More of a safe record than a spectacular one. [May 2018, p.35]

This seven-track beauty marries the bucolic indie-pop of Woods with Dungen's Scandi Drone. [May 2018, p.37]

Sensual beauty abounds. [Apr 2018, p.24]

Space Gun fizzes with an energy and seamless melody that recalls the band at their mid-'90s peak, and there's an intriguing assortment of songs to be found. [Apr 2018, p.27]

Having coloured in right up to the edges in previous projects, it's a pleasure to hear Ruscha exercising restraint on "Lights Passing By" and "Gravity Waves." [Apr 2018, p.35]

His style remains unequivocally distinctive on these two succinct pieces. [Apr 2018, p.32]

Some good, powerful rock songs aside, this is a strange, honest, but not altogether convincing way to go out. [Mar 2018, p.32]

Temet manages to broaden their sound further, forging links to funk, soul and jazz. Crucially, though, they've retained the traditional rhythms that make them so captivating. [Mar 2018, p.26]

It's a remarkably immersive and generous album, emotionally as well as musically. [Apr 2018, p.18]

It's all uncomplicated and focused on instant gratification, capturing that ethic that made The Strokes so thrilling. [Apr 2018, p.27]

I'm Bad Now feels as much a modest masterpiece as Spring Hill Fair or Tigermilk. [Apr 2018, p.32]

Firepower delivers an agreeably familiar mix of skull-pummelling drums, eyebrow singeing guitar pyrotechnics and multi-tracked operatic vocals. [Apr 2018, p.28]

Despite also cooking up a glam stomp with "We All Die Young," it sometimes feels overly contrived. The epic "Rusalka, Rusalka/The Wild Rushes" is a notable exception. [Apr 2018, p.26]

Even if Mr. Dynamite sometimes feels like a light-hearted sideshow to more established musical careers, these moments of transcendence make the detour well worth while. [Apr 2018, p.32]