Retro-kosmische pastiche is now firmly established as a lazy good-taste signifier, but it does not excuse mundane plodders such as "Turncoat" or "Motorbath." Thankfully, Soft Error move beyond retro-hipster orthodoxy on their best tracks. [Feb 2017, p.38]

With his band's thrilling fourth album, Baldi successfully develops his own take on the merger of powerpop and hardcore brawn. [Feb 2017, p.24]

Self-aware and possibly self-satisfied, this is wildly overloaded pastiche taken to ludicrous but highly entertaining extremes. [Feb 2017, p.28]

The retro musical mood on Happy Rabbit fits the lyrical tone. [Jan 2017, p.24]

The delicate touches and melodic strengths shine. [Jan 2017, p.23]

[The] now East Memphis-based artist comes off as an eloquent country/folk songsmith. [Feb 2017, p.26]

It seems relocating from Vienna to L.A., getting married and becoming a father has nudged the British-born producer-performer closer t conventional R&B electro-pop on his second album, with mostly positive results. [Feb 2017, p.38]

Powerful and intriguing stuff, but the emotional spark never quite catches. [Feb 2017, p.21]

The xx have expanded their horizons without sacrificing any of the emotional intimacy that makes them one of the most compelling acts around. [Feb 2017, p.22]

Oczy Mlody continues the Lips' longstanding mission to explore the joy and sadness of simple human consciousness, so that even when the album loses its footing--which it does, often--it never loses its way. [Feb 2017, p.34]

The production has opened up enormously. [Feb 2017, p.32]

In this case, sustained synth notes and chimes entwine to create a meditative environment that, while no longer as revolutionary as Discreet Music once seemed, is just as serene. [Feb 2017, p.26]

Major Stars risk the ridiculous to try and access the sublime, somehow reaching the latter every time. [Jan 2017, p.25]

All round, it's more than the sum of its parts, if not quite the event that is clearly hope for. [Feb 2017, p.40]

Johannsson's use of vocal manipulation on "Kanguru" and "Ultimatum" add splashes of colour to his full-bodies minimalism, each lingering note loaded with ominous intent. [Jan 2017, p.24]

Tribe carry their burdens as lightly as they did on rap landmarks such as People's Instinctive Travels and The Low-End Theory. [Feb 2017, p.38]

It is a remarkably assured piece of work, gracefully furnished and artfully wrought. [Feb 2017, p.36]

Most of the time, however, Epoch sounds like the album Ulrich Schnauss has been promising for a decade. [Feb 2017, p.38]

Patterns Of Light grasps the surreal potential of the situation and responds with an OTT concept album. [Feb 2017, p.28]

This fourth album is his most satisfying yet. [Feb 2017, p.28]

The album finds Escovedo veering between anxiety and celebration. [Feb 2017, p.26]

The gambit [space-age sheen and quantised grooves] works on the trippy title track and the confrontational "If You Want It," but elsewhere it robs the band's hyper-rhythmic attack of its viscerally human feel. [Jan 2017, p.28]

The third installment of Jarre's eco-themed trilogy follows the same pattern as its predecessors. [Jan 2017, p.24]

Electa is at its best when the folk rears its head. [Jan 2017, p.32]

The playing is empathetic throughout. [Oct 2016, p.39]

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

It hardly needs saying that this mammoth box is not intended for the casual Dylan listener. Even committed fans might think twice. Essentially, what you get is the same songs played in the same order over 23 nights. But, by God, how they are played.

Low on cheer, but richly rewarding. [Dec 2016, p.38]

"1832" is a departure, with emotional unease preserved in glowing folky amber, but it's an inspired curveball on a largely routine course. [Jan 2017, p.32]

Sounding emphatically Icelandic on every note, sister act Ásthildur and Jófrídur Ákadöttir coo gorgeously flinty, frosty, intertwined harmonies over stark, piano-led chamber-folk arrangements. [Sep 2016, p.78]

Bell's music is refreshingly uncomplicated. [Dec 2016, p.28]

Tolchin's best work comes when he unburdens his soul. [Jan 2017, p.31]

The showpiece is "Blue Remembered Hills," a 20-minute closing epic about 1970s Britian that is part musical theatre, part bittersweet lament.[Jan 2017, p.32]

The result is a work that blends crackling blues, jaunty country and mesmerising folk balladry that sends shards through the heart. [Jan 2017, p.22]

Sprawled across 40 years of high and lows, A Very British Synthesizer Group is inevitably bumpy in quality, but still rich in pleasant surprises, and shot through with the bloody-minded punk genius that defines so much music from the People's Republic Of South Yorkshire. [Jan 2017, p.38]

Daniel takes care to keep things minimal. [Jan 2017, p.23]

The result: gorgeous, unpretentious post-folk melancholy. [Jan 2017, p.32]

The Colourist & Emiliana Torrini draws on the singer's back catalogue, infusing it with added warmth, texture and elegance. [Jan 2017, p.31]

The famous guests broaden the appeal--but ultimately it's the Syrians who are the true stars. [Jan 2017, p.32]

Unreleased mixes, instrumentals and PiL's semi-legendary 1979 concert at Manchester's Factory are worthy additions, stretching the dense, dubby miasma out for four hypnotic hours. [Dec 2016, p.51]

This gradual sense of revelation is reflected in Gas’ musical development. Each album has its own characteristics.

Weighty and impressive. [Dec 2016, p.49]

Everything is done with the casual-sounding confidence that comes with hard experience. [Dec 2016, p.38]

Marc Collin's French collective remain a one-trick pony, but it's still a great trick. [Jan 2017, p.28]

This is arguably The Coal Porter' finest yet--a deft, thoughtful and beautifully arranged set with an airy sense of melancholy. [Nov 2016, p.25]

At times, mellifluous minimalism shades into mundane monotony, but these electro-mechanical reveries mostly achieve a kind of hypnotic power through accretion and repetition. [Jan 2017, p.24]

It's a mind-boggling assemblage of swingin' 50s "space-bop" like "Soft Talk" and "Super Blonde," processional chants such as "Rocket #9" and "Journey To Saturn." and electronic keyboard voyages like "The Perfect Man" and "Disco 2021," an edited taster of the monumental "Disco 3000." [Jan 2017, p.46]

Some of the rather quizzical couplets here, all of them set to heart-wrenching chord sequences that hark back to the band's favorite 1970s guilty pleasures. It set SFA apart from the world of Britpop in the mid-'90s. [Dec 2016, p.51]

This double-CD set offers clues as to how Welch and Rawlings got there [on Revival], and glimpses down roads not taken. [Jan 2017, p.49]

Future Standards is both an intimate, low-key experience and a highly welcome new detour. [Jan 2017, p.25]

Bushnell provides that perfect kind of bass you barely notice. Keltner's percussion is a different story. Captured mostly in first or second takes, he doesn't so much keep the beat as respond to what Young is doing, an improvised interplay of odd, shaggy patterns. The record often becomes a duet between Young and Keltner. [Jan 2017, p.20]

There's nothing fussy about the way Chatham County Line continue to go about their business, their acoustic music occupying the sweet spot between Del McCoury and The Jayhawks. [Jan 2017, p.22]

Harvey maybe a bit too in love with a crunchy delay/distortion footswitch combo, but the likes of "Space Monkeys," he and his younger guys make a creditable, spacey blues. [Jan 2017, p.27]

The theatricality of the Nick Cave-penned "Late Victorian Holocaust" and Roger Waters' "Sparrows Will Sing" perfectly attuned to her autumn-years, grand-dame image. [Dec 2016, p.28]

Utterly addictive and reality-shifting. [Jan 2017, p.21]

[Haxan] presents the Stockholm quartet at the top of its game. [Jan 2017, p.23]

A couple of tracks are interesting alternatives versions of songs from A Weird Exit, while on the all-new pieces, the general mood is mellower than usual. [Jan 2017, p.31]

She produces a cumulative effect that's both shattering and exhilarating. [Jan 2017, p.31]

They situate their voices on a pillowy bed of experimental pop, freak folk and, best of all, the sax-enhanced exotica of the title track. [Jan 2017, p.31]

The mood is pained, the production suitably spare, pushing the singer's understated lyricism to the fore. [Jan 2017, p.28]

Patience is required to navigate his smirking in-jokes. [Jan 2017, p.28]

The angry bricolage of noises, voices, stabbing guitar and jittery programmed drums sounds like the world splitting apart, the first of a series of scarified dubscapes created by The Pop Group and their perfect collaborators. [Jan 2017, p.28]

[A] sonically rich, mostly great album. [Jan 2017, p.28]

Her third album finds her developing her instrumental palette, often allowing moody strings rather than piano to dominate arrangements. [Jan 2017, p.28]

The high concept here is a paean to the ancient Greeks, inspired by the derring-do of gods and heroes: "Diana By My Side" and the breakbeaty "Mars" are suitably Elysian. [Jan 2017, p.28]

Devil Music's relentless velocity and heaps of fuzz and reverb are easy to savour even if it could use more songs as strong as "Lion's Den" and Patterns." [Jan 2017, p.27]

Spread over two discs, it can get a little samey, but "Here Comes Revenge" and "Moth Into Flame" have plenty of bounce. [Jan 2017, p.27]

The LP struggles a little in variation of pace and tone, and the auspicious spark fizzles out somewhat but the end. [Jan 2017, p.24]

The follow-up is a considerable upgrade. [Jan 2017, p.23]

Infatuated by the noirish romance of European coldwave, the likes of "Portland U" and "Collene" cast Stewart as something of a bedroom modernist. [Jan 2017, p.22]

At their best, on "Someone Far Away" and "Give Up," the group blends pop sparkle and melancholy indie charm in the manner of The Chills. [Jan 2017, p.21]

An exhaustive audio souvenir of a momentous event, simply to remind us--and perhaps Bush, too-- that it really happen after all. [Jan 2017, p.16]

A measured set. [Jan 2017, p.23]

Blue & Lonesome feels like a major reassessment from a band, returning to the source and in doing so reminding us why they mattered in the first place. [Jan 2017, p.26]

"Blue Noise, Black Lake" and "Rusty Machines, Dusty Carpets" both overdo the tension-release dynamics--but it is always compelling. [Dec 2016, p.35]

"Close To You" confirms how much she sounds like Karen Carpenter but, amid the over-familiar songs, most interesting are the relative obscurities. [Dec 2016, p.35]

Out Of Times sounds slight, so pop-driven that it feels weightless; in '91, it sounded like a triumph, but really it was a herald of triumphs to come. There is, however, something extremely reassuring about the volatility of this album, its out-of-time-ness, which suggests that the music isn't simply confined to the past but thrives in the present. [Dec 2016, p.46]

Bachman proves himself an extremely resourceful player, as well as a masterful storyteller. [Dec 2016, p.25]

For now, Lady, Give Me Your Key shows us some of the steps Buckley took, during a feverishly creative year, to pursue the totality of music.

Andrew Dragazis' fifth album is masterfully serene. [Nov 2016, p.25]

It's a document of poignant intimacy and imagination, characterised by simple melodies, devastatingly heart-on-sleeve lyrics and the odd burst of euphoric pop. [Dec 2016, p.38]

The songs on Ruins are sharply focused and blessedly heavy. [Dec 2016, p.36]

Though the title track and "The Magic In You" recall his early triumphs, it's all a bit 'shoe-business' as usual. [Dec 2016, p.37]

Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay balance their belligerent side with a refined, progressive sensibility, a side increasingly foregrounded on Woman. [Dec 2016, p.30]

The songs' real power comes from a sense of foreboding that undercuts the easy listening. [Dec 2016, p.30]

While the deliberate shapelessness can sometimes appear strangely listless, the rhythmic intensity of "Abstract/Actress" takes things to another level, with the pair working the sound into a primal fury of feedback and clamour. [Dec 2016, p.25]

The sheer length and repetitions make end-to-end listening of these six sides something for the dedicated, but as a tribute to a still-missed talent, it testifies.

Though lacking killer songs, Wainwright is always a compelling vocalist, variously evoking Patti Smith, Debbie Harry and Piaf. [Dec 2016, p.38]

There's a lot to take in, but the standard is remarkably consistent and occasionally dazzling. [Nov 2016, p.31]

Following much beauty and polymorphous perversity, the climactic take on Histoire De Melody Nelson's "Cargo Cult" is a fittingly epic finale. [Dec 2016, p.30]

It's not quite as majestic as last year's self-titled album, but still a cut above. [Nov 2016, p.32]

A troubling journey, but happily an ongoing one. [Dec 2016, p.35]

While there's a shining beauty that recalls Stereolab and The Sugarcubes, the mood is overwhelmingly melancholic and extremely infectuious. [Dec 2016, p.35]

A towering success. [Dec 2016, p.32]

Slugger is low-key but, true to form, leaves a mark. [Dec 2016, p.37]

There's still a preponderance of fuzzy guitars--notably on "Ching," where they almost overwhelm Lorena Quintanilla's vocals--but elsewhere, as on "It Must Be The Only Way," her dreamy vocals provide a welcome contrast to droning guitars. [Oct 2016, p.32]

The arrangements are meticulously layered rather than stripped down, dynamic drum tattoos, dramatic basslines and an epic amount of reverb ensuring the sounds is as panoramic as the "unplugged" tag can accommodate. [Dec 2016, p.37]

Sadness is necessarily these songs' anchor, but there's hope and resolve, too. [Oct 2016, p.35]