This lively debut is full of fertile mash-ups. [Nov 2016, p.23]

It's a thoughtful, profound and intensely beautiful late-blossoming career highlight. [Nov 2016, p.30]

It is this methodical exploration of the ancient and modern that makes Weyes Blood such a seductive proposition, and the ambitious Front Row Seat To Earth--intimate and enveloping, romantic and psychedelic--marks a significant progression in Mering's increasingly impressive career. [Nov 2016, p.38]

It's become a cliche to treat every latter-day Cohen album like a potential swansong but it's hard to imagine a richer, finer or more satisfying finale than this. [Nov 2016, p.18]

Purling Hiss set aside their chaotic brand of psychedelic garage rock in favour of a collection that seems to owe a surprising debt to British New Wave of the late '70s and early '80s. [Nov 2016, p.35]

Despite these potentially dour themes, Running Out Of Love is far from a gloom-fest, couched as it is in disco and '80s-influenced electronica. [Nov 2016, p.35]

The demos for Be Here Now don't reveal much in the way of nuance or additional texture. You have to dig deep to find genuine curios. [Nov 2016, p.51]

"Feedback Delicates" and "L'Quasar" shelter their hooks amid shimmery, heatstroke production; but there's an urgency here, too. [Nov 2016, p.40]

There is a minimalist anti-folk vibe to Dermody's songs. [Nov 2016, p.37]

The mix of baroque pop, prog rock and psychedelia is as bewildering as it is entertaining. [Nov 2016, p.32]

The album title translates as "chameleon butterfly" which sums up the surreal ambience nicely. [Sep 2016, p.74]

A gorgeous neo-Krautrock thump of a record. [Oct 2016, p.31]

A more polished and focused affair that demonstrates the breadth of Duncan's sparkling ability, not to mention his pop chops, while conveying a gorgeous otherworldiness that effortlessly channels peak Cocteau Twins and Radiohead. [Nov 2016, p.26]

It's the interplay between the core duo, and between the American and African influences, that gives Wood/Metal its hypnotic pull. [Nov 2016, p.23]

This is Cretan folk music played with a rock'n'roll intensity that is truly immersive. [Nov 2016, p.36]

Half of a worthy comeback. [Oct 2016, p.25]

Far the best things here are the relatively restrained title track and the acoustic ballad "Die Trying." Elsewhere, it's the stodgy gruel of yore. [Oct 2016, p.37]

The three proper songs are the highlights, though, with the Bacharach-esque title track among the finest Rhys has ever produced. [Nov 2016, p.37]

It is, in fact, a portrait of life’s triumphs and travails, its joys and sorrows rendered in wholly compelling detail.

Everything is carefully weighted and considered, the minimal arrangements helping to foreground these inner lives with poetic candour and convincing detail. [Nov 2016, p.32]

Utopia Defeated justifies the hype. [Nov 2016, p.26]

Jones displays a fluid keyboard touch and nuanced vocals, not unlike Diana Krall's recordings. [Nov 2016, p.31]

[A] profound, funny, intricate album. [Sep 2016, p.63]

A sturdy, touching arrival. [Nov 2016, p.31]

Smash The System is looser, punchier, a surrealist pop masterpiece. [Nov 2016, p.28]

It has its moments. [Nov 2016, p.39]

The resulting album is a homage that feels and sounds fresh. [Nov 2016, p.26]

Marten now has an appealingly gentle voice and an intuitive feel for melody. [Nov 2016, p.32]

The bland, fist-punching positivity of "Hole In My Soul" and "Parachute" are pitched somewhere between Cold Play and The Killers, but occasionally the reinvention works. [Nov 2016, p.31]

The result is a playful and moving return to themes like the battle of the sexes, and love lost in a blur of alcohol. [Oct 2016, p.37]

This first solo release in 10 years finds him in majestic form. [Nov 2016, p.40]

The most prismatic Hiss Golden Messenger record to date, one that ranges confidently from the folk shuffle of "Say It Like You Mean It" to the taut rural funk off "Like A Mirror Loves A Hammer." [Nov 2016, p.22]

Over time, however, a fondness for arpeggios becomes as predictable as island life. [Nov 2016, p.39]

It's just a lovely collection of songs, in which the serenity of voice and understatement of band create a humane intimacy rather than anything more mystical. [Oct 2016, p.32]

Surreal humour, suave style and deluxe Europop make for a potent comeback. [Nov 2016, p.40]

Whatever it is that keeps him singing still packs a potent emotional punch. [Oct 2016, p.35]

Revolution Radio, happily, shares more with the zestier (and earlier) likes of Nimrod. [Nov 2016, p.28]

Though Requiem doesn't quite match the free-flowing intensity of some of Goat's earlier work, it's continually enriched by a fervent sense of joy and abandon, and an infectious eagerness to get lost in music. [Nov 2016, p.28]

An album that's both sad and angry, thoughtful and impassioned, and desperate for America to escape its chequered past. [Nov 2016, p.18]

Unhurried passages of string melodies dominate, but often underpinned by unsettling notes of cello and bursts of shortwave radio as he explores the myth of Orpheus' escape from the underworld. [Oct 2016, p.32]

Physicalist feels like a heavyweight statement. [Nov 2016, p.26]

This audio companion to Springsteen's upcoming autobiography serves as a decent best-of. [Nov 2016, p.52]

Young Americans is one monster hit album, but stripped of "Fame," the record's pre-Lennon form as The Gouster makes an immersive, alternate take on Bowie's Sigma sessions. [Nov 2016, p.49]

The second album is a little more groove-oriented than the trio's 2014 debut LA Spark. [Nov 2016, p.40]

Simple, unforced piano ballads sit besides florid pop singles. [Nov 2016, p.37]

The trio [is] on reassuringly unpredictable form. [Oct 2016, p.40]

The Mood is subdued but cavalier, more of a mixtape. [Nov 2016, p.24]

The sprawling haziness still lingers, but the songs are sharper and studded with guests. [Nov 2016, p.24]

The sound is brighter and bolder. [Nov 2016, p.26]

[Producer Blake Mills] deftly applied his gift for song-serving ornamentation and transformed sluggish Dawes into an aggressively inventive band. [Nov 2016, p.26]

The spartan tracks without drums, backed only by clumsy piano, remain highly effective. [Nov 2016, p.31]

"Dandy," a fond-but-smart homage to Bowie that channels the spirit of "All The Young Dudes" with unashamed nostalgia. It's the standout track on his first album of new songs in six years--but there's plenty else here that's worth hearing, too. [Nov 2016, p.31]

This is bold, imaginative, and, on occasion, deliciously strange. [Nov 2016, p.32]

No-one would argue this is the equal of his '70s production heyday, but he remains indefatigable in his energies. [Nov 2016, p.35]

It's the usual earnestly proficient, blandly yearning fare, every song a Hallmark valentine set to a John Lewis Christmas advertisement. [Nov 2016, p.35]

Peyroux's smoky, Holiday-esque voice has seldom sounded finer as the trio's jazzy ambience is lent a wonderful natural reverb by the vaulting acoustics. [Nov 2016, p.35]

Russian Circles display a welcome eagerness to cut to the chase whether they're crafting gentler soundscapes like "Overboard" or hurtling through the doomy mathcore of "Vorel." [Nov 2016, p.37]

Sea Of Noise feels not just formally but emotionally authentic. [Nov 2016, p.39]

Argentinian rockers Los Enanitos Verdes turn "Travelin' Band" into a turbocharged burst of bilingual tropical rockabilly, and Spanish singing star Bunbury adds a thrilling salsa dance workout to "Corre Por La Jungla." [Nov 2016, p.40]

Brian Jonestown do this stuff so much better. [Nov 2016, p.40]

They sound reinvigorated, if somewhat aimless. [Nov 2016, p.40]

These 10 songs feel bold, nourishing and emotionally resonant. [Nov 2016, p.34]

It's touches like these--the suggestiveness of the pauses, the silences, the miniature worlds between the painterly notes Cooper and Hoare play--that makes Dusk, for all its influences and its rear-view mirror vision of classicist pop, such a seductive album. [Oct 2016, p.30]

Overall, the palette is dusky, the tone understated. [Oct 2016, p.25]

Carson Cox's over-emotive delivery and a bombastic arrangement tip the album's power-ballad finale, "I Will Not Sleep Here," into Night Ranger Territory. Thankfully, the trio is more careful about its point of reference elsewhere. [Oct 2016, p.35]

The only pity is that navigating one's way around the three hours and 20 minutes of music is such a fiddly business. [Oct 2016, p.46]

The underlying sense given off by the LP's inventive chord changes, soaring melodies, eloquent language and silky vocals--notably on the rhapsodic "Semaphore" and "Flight"--is that of a 21st century Joni Mitchell. [Oct 2016, p.31]

It's when Leithauser plays on his home ground of rueful romantic desperation (as he does on the title track), though, that he really hits his stride. [Oct 2016, p.31]

The pair navigate a procession of deep, massaging drones, crashing waves of pink noise and shimmering tone clusters that shift between tranquil calm and coruscating melody. [Sep 2016, p.79]

Despite its old-school roots, Lady Parts sounds sharp and invigorating. [Oct 2016, p.31]

The absence of Kim Deal--who left in 2013--continues to be felt: her natural warmth and goofy charm would add welcome nuance here. [Oct 2016, p.37]

The Staten Island quartet blend the fixtures and fittings of noisy US slacker rock--Sonic Youth drones, Pavement squalls--but add a bubblegum pop sensibility. Their vocalist Joseph D'Agostino, however, remains something of an acquired taste. [Oct 2016, p.26]

He seems to have found his metier on his new label, Lost Map, where he delights in roving electronica. [Oct 2016, p.37]

In the same jolie-laide class as Red Krayola and Pere Ubu at their most ungainly, its ugliness may be a new form of beauty. [Oct 2016, p.37]

Rennie's lyrics remain full of transfixed wonder, sketching places where ghosts swim in the air and sea kelpies call fro, the shallows, while Brett's lugubrious tones are a perfect conduit for songs like "Gold," "Gentlemen" and state -fair attraction "Tiny Tina," the world's smallest horse. [Oct 2016, p.32]

Blood Bitch confirms her singular methodology is now at its most surgically precise and bold. In realising her uncontainable ambitions, one might even suggest it represents Hval's coming of age. [Oct 2016, p.38]

The result is a beautifully atmospheric travelogue on which their voices and guitars, plus occasional harmonica, are accompanied by nothing more than the sound of the rails humming and a whistle blowing. [Oct 2016, p.34]

Ten-minute jazz romp "Night Terrors" aside, Berry's sweet tooth brightens what is otherwise his straightest set yet. [Oct 2016, p.25]

It's the instrumental miniatures that impress the most. [Oct 2016, p.31]

What Acoustic Recordings best illustrates, though, is a consistency to White's songwriting that has endured through his myriad projects, even as his music has swung unpredictably between playfulness and intensity. [Oct 2016, p.48]

This remastered version certainly sounds clearer than the muddy original. ... As far as the songs, go, there are a few surprises, just some frenzied romps through the band's greatest hits at this point. [Oct 2016, p.47]

Cosmonaut is as stylishly warped as ever. [Oct 2016, p.35]

It's an assured and heartfelt work built carefully around McMorrow's falsetto vocals. [Oct 2016, p.35]

The songs benefit from a sharper focus than the quartet ever achieved before. [Oct 2016, p.37]

The album sounds like one good idea stretched out to a meandering and repetitive 40 minutes. [Oct 2016, p.32]

His style is scraggly yet sophisticated, ranging boldly from country drones to rambunctious rural ragas. [Oct 2016, p.26]

It's a sprawling affair. [Oct 2016, p.26]

A set of eloquently sombre, Americana songs heavy on pedal and lap-steel. [Jul 2016, p.79]

It's solemn stuff. [Oct 2016, p.39]

This is one of his richer projects: a breezy Laurel Canyon love-in. [Oct 2016, p.28]

Kin still sounds like the work of a clued-up hipster who doesn't particularly like the grimly effective pop songs that she's able to write. [Oct 2016, p.40]

The material, largely chosen from recent releases, sounds primal and immense. [Aug 2016, p.83]

The five numbered tracks of Trouble total a monolithic 82 minutes and trace heaving faultlines of their own making. [Sep 2016, p.73]

D.A.R.K's serviceable but derivative electronica frames an unremarkable marshalling of collective talents. [Sep 2016, p.73]

This LP leans towards narrative, rather than racking out kits, but its ambition is very welcome. [Oct 2016, p.25]

The trouble with studiousness is its tendency to inhibit invention, and such is the case here on their third long-player. [Oct 2016, p.23]

There are some great passages of live-wire electronica, but more often it's strangely lacking any aura or elemental spark. [Oct 2016, p.39]

An ambitious, perceptive set. [Oct 2016, p.35]