At times Sheer Mag are miraculous pop hustlers, still pulling off the most absurd trick shots on the scuffed three yards of stained green baize. Which isn't to say that they're not above a little experiment. [Mar 2024, p.22]

A moving collision of past and present. [Jun 2016, p.78]

Featuring gently swooning arrangements by Nico Mhly, four duets with Beth Orton, three nimble reworkings of children's singing games and an affectionate R Kelly cover, I See The Sign inhabits an enchanted universe, not a million miles from Sufjan Stevens' "Michigan." [May 2010, p.83]

Nashville is clearly a home away from home, though, as this set from September 2008 proves. [Jul 2011, p.92]

Coltrane, Eno and Metheny are touchstones, but Shabason's abstraction is sensual, his language emotional. [Sep 2017, p.37]

Rarely before have the pair achieved [moments of transcendence and preserving them in amber] with this much grace and finesse. [Sep 2015, p.68]

These 10 supple, radiant songs blur the boundaries between African pop an funky American new wave with the same glorious ease as Talking Heads' Speaking in Tongues. [Sep 2011, p.84]

Four albums in, feels like Marr is finally settled into the business of a solo career. [Mar 2022, p.31]

Charmer plies the familiar recipe on a bed of pealing guitars and burbling synths. [Oct 2012, p.84]

Blends bluegrass, backwoods folk and hammered blues with a motorik groove. [Apr 2006, p.106]

Kempner's lyrics are visceral and specific. [Aug 2023, p.36]

The sound is urgent and instinctive. [Dec 2006, p.124]

Live Forever crackles with outrage and compassion. [Jun 2026, p.32]

Caroline's 2CD sampler of her moonlighting efforts features charming interludes from past lives. [Nov 2015, p.96]

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 M Ward-produced Livin' On A High Note is a wonderfully chiselled Stax forgery. [Mar 2016, p.80]

Pearson’s clear knack for melodic songcraft is plentiful, across the breezy “Talk Over Town” or the sugary indie-pop of “Alligator”, resulting in an album that nails introspective songwriting just as seamlessly as it does infectious pop. [Aug 2022, p.31]

The result is a collection that sounds like nothing so much as a modern-day Dock Boggs signed to the Lost Highway label.

[A] set of lean, characteristically nuanced, folk-edged songs. [Aug 2022, p.30]

It's a bittersweet study of fate and circumstance that resonates long after it's over. [Apr 2016, p.70]

Despite a few rote movements, becomes an early contender for 2009 Top 10 lists. [Mar 2009, p.92]

These are quietly quixotic pieces, rich and poignant, possessing a stilled, slowly unfolding melancholia. [Jul 2019, p.27]

The ex-pat Brit displays an affecting, fluid picking style that at times sounds comfortingly English. [Aug 2017, p.28]

Reaffirms their status as masters of white heat smoulder, turning down the amps but heightening the ravaged intensity.... A career high. [Oct 2002, p.119]

It works well, the results low-key but luminous. [May 2013, p.69]

The music is purposeful and powerful. [Jul 2003, p.114]

If I'm New Here was a triumph for Russell and Scott-Heron, We're New Here reveals a maverick production talent in Jamie Smith that his band's records have only hinted at. [Mar 2011, p.95]

On Dissolve, his best LP to date, he's gone full colour. [Jun 2011, p.79]

Revitalising indie-pop. [Feb 2004, p.78]

Puts welcome top-spin on a genre fixated on Suicide by reviving Devo, adding the glamour and flamboyance of The New York Dolls, Ziggy-era Bowie and Roxy Music, then whipping the lot along with the Glitter Band's ludicrous stomp. [Jul 2004, p.112]

The overall effect is almost hallucinatory. [Jul 2014, p.83]

Their head conceptualist is now guitarist Helios Creed, who's kept the vision tight, true to the corroded metal, viscous electronics and Burroughsian collages of their signal albums, 1977's Alien Soundtracks and 1979's Half Machine Lip Moves. [Sep 2014, p.71]

Combined with June's remarkably careworn vocals--they suggest that the young Tennessean has been around the block more than once. [Jul 2013, p.77]

The greatest compliment it can be paid is that it sounds like no time at all separates it from its predecessor. It's a(nother) fine album of gently joyous country songs. [Dec 2019, p.25]

The result is a provocative and sensual album. [Sep 2013, p.90]

Spiky, lyrical, quiveringly pretty. [May 2006, p.100]

Banjos, acoustic guitar, pedal steel and piano arrangements honour the songs' origins and add lilting texture to an album that will charm those who hear it, irrespective of their age. [Dec 2011, p.104]

The result is lush, beautifully busy-bodied ambient music with a roomy, lo-fi hiss running underneath, as though they're creating these sounds in a basement somewhere. [May 2019, p.30]

Songs lurch from amphetamine ballads to sullen dream-pop and always keep you guessing. [Review of the Year 2023, p.23]

An existentialist’s song cycle, Vacilando's grim, lonely songs reinforce each other with an impeccable internal logic, fashioning its own little world-weary universe, wherein less is more, simple guitar strums signal seismic shifts in mood, shadows bump into one another.

The album's leitmotif is a lush, dreamy string sections, which bring a gorgeous poignancy not only to the metaphysical songs, but also his radical reworkings of a pair of '50s rockers. [Mar 2009, p.81]

This is a vivid song cycle that's part ecstasy, part-sadness--but unfailingly lovely. [Jan 2010, p.119]

Odd Blood comes a cropper at times, but mostly this is an involving album of vivid weirdo pop. [Mar 2010, p.107]

There's a slight tiredness about the new album. It's too laid back to grab the attention, which must scan closer for clues. [Jul 2003, p.116]

Hardcore contains some of their most affecting tunes since the early singles, instrumental parts coiling around each other in graceful, liquid polyphony. [Mar 2011, p.97]

A record where mature contemplation and a relative flexibility triumph over despondency and formula. [Mar 2004, p.94]

While themes of race and gender are woven into this richly sensual second, notably the defiant spoken-word piece “Changes”, they do not define her kaleidoscopic work overall. [Dec 2021, p.29]

This more captivating follow-up, mixing originals and inspired covers, fuses sultry blues and deep jazz with Trucks' training in Indian classical music to create an alchemical hybrid. [Jul 2012, p.84]

Where on 2001's Lack of Communication their cranked-up Stoogeisms were adorably desperate, here they're glibly glamorous, energised by a Pixies-like concision. [Mar 2004, p.87]

It's fascinating territory and Merchandise sound like a band still exploring thier huge potential. [Aug 2013, p.73]

The band shift tempos and settings constantly, veering into the space rock of Tangerine Dream and the kosmische jams of Can. In these juxtapositions between styles, Blood Incantation find an operatic drama as big as all outer space. [Oct 2024, p.33]

It was a landmark in prog rock. [Dec 2016, p.47]

[It] revisits the chamber pop of their 1998 debut... equalling it in beauty and surpassing it in punch. [Nov 2006, p.123]

Concise at 12 tracks, the stylistic coherence seldom fails to engage. [Feb 2007, p.73]

Feels like one of his least fussed-over releases. [Apr 2021, p.37]

Just as the record threatens to flatten into artifice, they bust out their best Clash and Cheap Trick moves on 'Middle Management,' gleefully shattering the porcelain into smithereens. [Jan 2008, p.82]

The album's best moments shrewdly recall the stark, booming sound of Clipse's 2006 coke-rap masterpiece Hell Hath No Fury. [Jan 2014, p.76]

A further example of his fluency in the ancient, internationally shared languages of wonder and imagining. [Apr 2025, p.36]

This reunion feels like they've never been away. [Nov 2008, p.102]

In the space of an economical 40 minutes, crystallise everything that makes Crosby such an alluring, vital and still relevant force. [Sep 2021, p.22]

Eagle is as good as anything he's ever done.

Like fellow minimalists The xx, Blake takes from dubstep an awareness of space and silence; he appreciates the power of a perfectly weighted pause. [Mar 2011, p.98]

As long as nobody mentions Aled Jones, this is exhilarating. [May 2010, p.94]

To be fair, there’s an element of You Never Were Much Of A Dancer that feels a little like an index of possibilities, as though Raymond’s setting out what she can do: future albums will, hopefully, be yet more coherent, more conceptually thoroughgoing. But for a first album, it also feels stunningly confident, in full possession of its art. Guitar soli is in very good hands here indeed.

Over it all, Vek free-associates with the kind of bland monotony which serves his music--and these times--surprisingly well. [Jul 2014, p.83]

At a time when all things punky or funky with an NY zip code are the peak of chic, Talking Heads ought to be lauded as authentic pioneers. [Jan 2004, p.118]

The most common description of this much-discussed album over the past few months is that YHF is Americana's Kid A. In truth, it's more successful than that. [May 2002, p.112]

These 10 songs are intimate, graceful and surprisingly hooky. [Oct 2018, p.24]

Prophet's approach is tailored to suit, exploring modern and antique mythology through the vernacular of folk music. Despite the stylistic departure, The Land That Time Forgot is busy enough to accommodate trace elements of the roots-rock that made his reputation. [Jul 2020, p.28]

There aren't many groups whose experimental cojones nestle comfortably alongside arch-classicist songwriting, but Califone solved that thorny equation long ago. [Sep 2013, p.85]

"Hard Drive," meanwhile adds spoken word and Bogie's swirling saxophone to a touching tale of psychic recovery, before "The Ramble" concludes with pretty pastel drones. [Mar 2021, p.31]

Magical. [Apr 2007, p.114]

Avoiding the ponderous repetition that dragged down songs like “Bullets” on the first record, they concoct a gentler, dreamier atmosphere with less apparent anxiety, and create a shadowy veil of sadness, shot through with hopeful transcendence.

Twice as long as the band's debut, it's also more than doubly assured. [June 2008, p.99]

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

Mos Def can still create the year's finest hip hop album. [Sep 2009, p.88]

Baltimore multi-instrumental duo Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack have raised their game with this third LP. [Apr 2011, p.103]

[His] best collection in more than a decade. ... These songs present an entirely unromaticised, often harrowing portrait of the outlaw genre. [Jul 2017, p.28]

This is a beautifully executed love letter to the eternal pop rush. [Jun 2012, p.82]

It's the band's ability to so gracefully coexist in these seemingly contradictory worlds that makes them such an inimitable outfit all these years on. [Oct 2020, p.39]

These songs are full and rich, with longtime foil The Strangers creating honky-tonk, country shuffles and even Tin Pan Alley backdrops that often explode with life. [May 2010, p.98]

This follow-up is lighter still, housing Friedberger's gorgeous voice and diary-entry love songs within a freewheeling sound that bounces around the late '60s and '70s, looking for classic pop clues. [Jul 2013, p.75]

The peppy “Setting Sun” recalls the guitar jangle of the band’s early days, but for the most part this is a bold and seductive exploration of symphonic pop that relishes pushing envelopes at will. [Jul 2024, p.31]

Over-the-top histrionics are nicely downplayed by the lo-fi indie faction. [Dec 2003, p.124]

Even at their most glibly bombastic, there's a melancholy undertow that they can't shake. [Album of the Month, Dec 2004, p.136]

It's all very wry, but rather endearingly so. [Dec 2019, p.30]

Sasami's aim is clear: she forces you to pay attention. [Mar 2022, p.35]

It's a majestic transformation. [Dec 2005, p.102]

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

While nothing on this best-of collection quite matches the exquisiteness of Grant's solo work, you can still hear him testing the waters and laying the groundwork for what was to come. [Jan 2015, p.87]

Historian fulfills all the promises of 2015's No Burden. [Apr 2018, p.26]

He chucks deep vocal house and astral UK bass, with the title track crucially offsetting a tendency to overly tasteful restraint. [Feb 2015, p.73]

Predictably overwhelming. [May 2018, p.27]

These slight but beautiful tracks have gossamer-thin melodies and are held together by repetition, willpower, a creaky Steinway piano and some stunning vocals. [Review of the Year 2023, p.23]

The Party is definitely worth celebrating. [Jun 2016, p.79]

Devotees of Crover and his stalwart partner Buzz Osborne--joined here by bassist Steve McDonald-get ample does of both the band's stock-in-trade of gnarly, fuzzy bruisers and demonstrations of its more experimental side on the film soundtrack that comprises the second half. [Aug 2017, p.32]

Handsome melodies are dispatched with nonchalant flair, while the lyrics are consistently wry, whether concerning romantic or political entanglements. [Sep 2019, p.33]

Whatever its emotional well-spring, her expression is clear, purposeful and strong in its directness. [Sep 2018, p.38]