Awash with Crosby, Stills & Nash chemistry, 12-string trills and the Joni-inspired "Seemed She Always Knew". [Apr 2025, p.28]

"You Were The Ones I Had to Betray" is a heady opener, the title track is a rich stunner, while the brilliant, bittersweet "Yesterday's Hero" is a bold missive from a songwriter who is still producing some of his best work. [Apr 2025, p,39]

Songcraft conventions - choruses, recurring riffs - are daringly absent. On repeat listens, though, the meandering strands - from the dreamy acoustica of "Two Horses" and choral harmonies on "Mary" to the Philip Glass-like horns of "Nancy Takes The Night" - begin to stick, aided by frequently arresting lyrics. [Apr 2025, p.28]

It's a strikingly bold venture, and a refreshing take on the Roxy soundworld. [Apr 2025, p.29]

There's an enduring warmth to the record that comes from the fuzz of psychedelia that holds everything together. [Apr 2025, p.27]

The enigmatic ensemble head out on taut, Teutonic disco manoeuvres on "Dancing In Transit" before making like a feral 808 State as they imagine Raoul Duke and Don Quixote in conversation on "Raoul". [Apr 2025, p.35]

"Earth 1" demonstrates the band's ability to pursue any number of loopy tangents without losing the woozy charm that comes more strongly to the fore in the dreamier "Heaven 7". [Apr 2025, p.39]

Airy arrangements, wonderfully agile musicianship, songs pooled from numerous sources into flowing ensemble pieces. [Apr 2025, p.33]

He reanimates blues standards like "Mystery Train", "Rollin' & Tumblin'" and "Bright Lights, Big City" with his knowing, tattered voice and economical licks. [Feb 2025, p.35]

Now in his forties, Lakeman may no longer be the great white hope of English folk music - but he's never sounded more compelling. [Feb 2025, p.36]

This is a much more expansive and impressive affair [than his 2022 debut]. [Feb 2025, p.39]

These songs insinuate via a vaguely vintage sound that recall both Jonathan Donahue's spangled dreaminess and the (s)weary brio of Father John Misty. [Apr 2025, p.29]

A record as sonically rich as it is lyrically bold. [Apr 2025, p.35]

The effect is somehow lush and minimalist at the same time, and utterly immersive. [Apr 2025, p.35]

The quintet's most vibrant album in two decades. [Apr 2025, p.35]

Constant Noise is a majestic state-of-the-nation polemic, novelistic in scale, eclectic in sound, humane and lyrical even at its most nihilistic. [Apr 2025, p.28]

As ever, Lewis's lyrics are the standout. [Mar 2025, p.35]

Plenty of charm and style, not much originality or depth. [Apr 2025, p.29]

Polished but never bland, and comes dotted with a wealth of special guests. .... But a big part of what makes Tonky compelling is how he stitches his tales into a wider fabric of African-American experience. [Mar 2025, p.36]

Unashamedly shaggy compared to the sibling' meticulously crafted Lemon Twigs LPs. .... An illuminating look under the hood of the creative process. [Mar 2025, p.31]

It's unquestionably a more electronic record, but the band show that they still know how to make a racket. [Mar 2025, p.33]

The mix of prog, neo-classical and folkish influences, with Anderson's flute as ubiquitous as ever, is exactly as you'd expect, yet he has plenty to say of contemporary relevance in songs about Israel ("Over Jerusalem"), climate change ("Savannah Of Paddington Green") and the avarice of politicians ("Dunsinane Hill"). [Apr 2025, p31]

Beautifully harrowing music. A trove of demos, alternative takes, live cuts and liner notes, but the main draw are the Fundamentals, half-hour studio experiments that contain Tweedy's first stabs at so many familiar tunes. [Feb 2025, p.55]

It's all fairly dry, but listen closely and its charms emerge. [Mar 2025, p.41]

Showcase[s] the melancholic beauty of Zauner's songwriting, her storytelling skills honed across mediums. [Apr 2025, p.31]

Though this set is necessarily reflective, nostalgia and self-pity don't get a look in. [Apr 2025, p.33]

Once again ably embracing a broad range, from the knelling, Marty Robbins-ish "Death Of Bill Bailey" to the string-drenched Billy Sherrill-style ballad "This Crazy Life" to "Jamestown Ferry". [Apr 2025, p.28]

"South Coast" and "Albatross", especially, are the sound of a band growing no less peculiar and wonderous for their familiarity. [Mar 2025, p.41]

Her strikingly rich, four octave voice is the axis around which producer Andrew Broder has directed dark, ambient, degraded bassmusic, industrial pop and dungeon synth, with feedback and software fubars playing their part. [Apr 2025, p.28]

It's clever, surprisingly enjoyable and utterly insane. [Apr 2025, p.39]

Musically, the tunes blend pop stickiness with sonic experimentation, but there is a strong sense of place. [Mar 2025, p.24]

It's more of a halfway house, with both acts' distinctive styles diluted as they server up '90s breakbeats ("Kokiri", "Fleece") and light industrial spoken-word pieces ("Nowhere"). Only the jangly promise of "passerine" sung by Emma Acs, hunts at a newish direction. [Mar 2025, p.35]

Amid opiated baroque arrangements, Allison's impressive vocal abstraction stays the main attraction. [Feb 2025, p.33]

A vivid, endlessly beguiling listen. [Mar 2025, p.34]

Commits to the craft, shooting through stadium-sized choruses with mischievous humour. [Mar 2025, p.37]

The music mirrors the persuasive charm of the narrator, hooking you in even as the singer boasts they're a bit of a heel. [Mar 2025, p.38]

Leithauser has worked solidly on his strengths - muscular and expansive, pop-rock songs with standout lyrics - to distinctive effect. [Apr 2025, p.33]

The somber mood is finally blown away by Crazy Horse-style closer "So Long" as The Lumineers churn into intriguing new territory while doggedly holding onto their entrenched melancholy. [Apr 2025, p.35]

Paradise... brims with life and imagination, humming with the brilliant paradox of a communal spirit imbued with Ahmed’s creative imprint over every note. [Feb 2025, p.32]

A charming, confident voyage through sonic moods he's explored throughout his career. [Apr 2025, p.27]

An album that feels comfortable and confident, and made by a group of people who have found their own idiosyncratic rhythm. [Mar 2025, p.32]

The closing "That Way My Garden" typifies playing of purposeful spiritual strength, crashing through into some great beyond. [Apr 2025, p.28]

Even on songs which tap into more difficult territory, such as "When Your Heart Is Broken", he delivers it with such a seamless knack for melodic songcraft, that he even turns heartache into foot-stomping riffs and sing-along choruses. [Apr 2025, p.30]

It's a good snapshot of how Hecker approaches such [soundtrack] commissions. But it also suggests there's an occasional paucity of ideas here. [Apr 2025, p.31]

These songs should reach and endure far beyond their context, as they're extraordinary even by Isbell's standards. [Apr 2025, p.31]

Is by turns light, sunny and soulful, if a bit self-satisfied in places. [Feb 2025, p.34]

Boldest of all is the grimy techno pulse and bass thrum of "Lake Disappointment", which pulls off a stylistic switch while maintaining the winningly smoky atmosphere of the album as a whole. [Mar 2025, p.31]

Darkside opens up on Nothing with a playfully weird set of baroque pop that takes in bluesy '70s skanking and cavernous grooves. [Mar 2025, p.31]

Its watery, dreamlike soundscapes are totally immersive on one of those records that - temporarily at least - can make the cares of the world seem to melt away. [Mar 2025, p.29]

A bewitching album. [Mar 2025, p.31]

Just as the absence of the usual guitar fireworks allows the group vocals and rhythmic elements to come strongly to the fore, the shift away from the original's angry spirit opens up a richer well of feeling in Moctar's pleas for a more just world. [Feb 2025, p.37]

Lonesome sounds, but comfortably familiar. [Feb 2025, p.34]

They're lean and immediate in nature, with melodic ease that belies lyrics awash with loss, uncertainty, regret, overwhelm and defeat, feelings that sit on the surface, undisguised. [Mar 2025, p.40]

Curlicues of psychedelia also lap intermittently at the edges, once again making for a gloriously idiosyncratic listen. [Jan 2025, p.41]

There are a number of lovely themes that repeat through “Unraveling In Your Hands”, though its central phase – an unrelenting, hypnotic stream of shivering strings, tiny flecks of light dazzling as you plunge deep into the repetition, while following a snaky melody through the thickets – is certainly unforgettable. [Jan 2025, p.33]

The inconsistent textures, pace and flow of the album all point to a band still trying to work out who they are. [Feb 2025, p.37]

Hood's gift for the character study abundantly justifies the extra room to roam, and the ambitious arrangements spanning folk to jazz to electronica are fleshed out by a stellar cast of collaborators. [Feb 2025, p.35]

An album replete with a rich, warm vibe that is more country-soul than punk rock, with swirling organ prominent in the mix. [Feb 2025, p.43]

He's delivered 12 songs of poignant autobiography rather than nostalgic wallowing. [Mar 2024, p.41]

He's unafraid to risk sentimentality in his quest for real feeling. At the end of a vexed, troubled third album, it feels like a hard-earned affirmation of his roots, people and community he's still a part of and still committed to. [Mar 2025, p.30]

The real keeper here the brooding, seven-minute "The Old Homestead", as cryptic as anything he'd written since "the Last Trip To Tulsa". [Mar 2025, p.53]

Though former folk musician Jiha employs electronic means to embellish her pieces, its' her yanggeum, a hammered dulcimer, teasing out "Grounding"'s gentle melodies and hypnotising ius with a metallic tapping throughout "Breathe Again"'s gentle breeze. [Mar 2025, p.37]

His songwriting's as powerful and moving as ever, with all the darkly comic touches he excels at. [Feb 2025, p.33]

This is the kind of record that Albini's notoriously no-frills production style served best: a brooding and intense post-punk, equal parts visceral and cerebral. [Mar 2025, p.32]

What may be The Wombats' most plain fun album to date. [Mar 2025, p.41]

The Delines' sixth and finest album to date. .... You'd have to reach for the likes of Bobbie Gentry's Patchwork or Rickie Lee Jones' Pirates, or indeed a film like Robert Altman's Raymond Carver amalgam, Short Cuts, to find a world so rich and intimately strange. [Feb 2025, p.40]

Even more impressive [than 2022's Versions Of Modern Performance]. [Feb 2025, p.35]

A set of soft-focused pip imbued with simple but stickable hooks and emotional honesty reminiscent of Brendan Benson or Elliott Smith. [Feb 2025, p.34]

On this hometown stop with his Quartet he parallels Monk's freaky, aslant piano attack in the serpentine stutter of his alto intro to "Rhythm-A-Ning", followed by quick, clenched phrases like compressed planets. [Jan 2025, p.32]

Impressively, the lustrous-voiced Reid has changed tracks without derailing the train. [Feb 2025, p.39]

Weirdest of all is "Don't Forget Jayne", where JBL freaks out over a wonderfully odd fusion of Taylor's disjointed samba drumming and Wener's smooth jazz guitar licks. [Mar 2025, p.34]

Here he bans repetition of verses and choruses, compacting a double album's detail into 40 minutes. [Feb 2025, p.35]

Mostly, on Friar Tuck, that leads to an exhilarating 40 minutes. It doesn’t have the madcap range of 1991’s Peggy Suicide or the following year’s Jehovahkill, records on which Cope explored the rough and ready, first-take ethos he’d discovered on 1989’s Skellington and 1990’s Droolian, but these 12 songs are brimming with a breezy vitality that’s not always been present on Cope’s epic releases over the last couple of decades. [Jan 2025, p.28]

In the past few years Hayden and McLoughlin have teamed up with Richard Chamberlain in Schisms. Their ultra-lo-fi fuzzball psychedelic improv can be exhilarating, but exists on a very different planet (or at least in a far muggier climate) than the exquisite acoustic snowglobe of Cold Blows The Rain. [Jan 2025, p.24]

As with most ambient works, English's LP plays best as a set piece, through gauzy, soft-gushing epic "V" is a particular beauty. [Jan 2025, p.34]

These songs often have a conceptual bent - take the lyric of "Last Scene Of All", collaged together from fragments of Shakespeare plays - although Lewis' vocal, a world-weary baritone with shades of '80s Scott Walker, ensure they slip down fairly easily. [Jan 2025, p.39]

Despite the number of musicians there is a more focused feel to tracks like "Eye For Keys" and even a drop of trippy folk on "In The Tall Trees." Fans of Comets On Fire will find much to enjoy. [Feb 2025, p.39]

An album that is as imaginative as it is innovative. [Feb 2025, p.39]

The outcome isn't exactly surprising, as it falls in line with a relatively recent explosion in modular exploration (see Bitchin Bajas, Caterina Barbieri) but at times it is very beautiful. [Mar 2025, p.32]

These days Chacon can't stop telling it like it is - and long may he do so. [Jan 2025, p.32]

The current lineup lacks that ritualistic Jamaican component - the nyabinghi-style conga playing of the late Pablo Gonsales and the Skatalites-influenced sax of Mike "Bammi" Rose - but there are still great moments. [Jan 2025, p.32]

A slippery amalgam of Chicago house, Detroit techno, acid house grooves and sleazy electro-pop. Delirious fun it is too. [Jan 2025, p.32]

Pursues the vibe [heard on 2022's We've Been Going About This All Wrong] further, enjoying a kind of midlife techno-goth glow-up, on tracks "Idiot Box" and the incendiary "Indio" coming on like a female-fronted Future Islands or Pet Benatar joining Curve. [Feb 2025, p.43]

The Purple Bird is a consummate listen-through that makes highlights hard to pick but "Boise, Idaho", a yearning beauty with a fine arrangement and hints of Glen Campbell, is one. [Feb 2025, p.30]

Hiatt has rarely rocked harder than on Forever. Yet those moments are also smartly tempered by songs that sometimes flirt with '80s psychedelia ("Ghost Ship") and the kind of country-roots balladry with which she first made her name over a decade ago. [Jan 2025, p.34]

At other times he falls back on elegantly vintage-clad pastichery, but then the stomping baroque pop duet of "I Gotta Limit" and the sun-dappled wistfulness of "To Live For What Once Was" prick up our ears once again. [Jan 2025, p.31]

Only an underpowered "Nightclubbing", slathered in hair-metal guitar-rock slammers dilute an otherwise exhilarating night of impressively gutsy jazz-metal bruisers. [Feb 2025, p.39]

Just gorgeous. [Jan 2025, p.40]

Folk bends under their queries, but doesn't break. [Jan 2025, p.31]

In returning to their foundational style, Tunng sound as full of surprise and mystery as ever. [Jan 2025, p.41]

C Duncan's fifth album, like Ricard Hawley's catalogue, is imbued with an old-fashioned, Technicolor warmth. [Feb 2025, p.34]

Their playing is more expressive as ever. Happily, the maturation of Larkin Poe's sound coincides with a step forward in songwriting. [Feb 2025, p.39]

Five tracks of interlaced and overlapping open tunings and drone where individual parts shape the eloquent whole, to irresistibly radiant effects. [Jan 2025, p.31]

It's four-square Manics Big Music, with James Dean Bradfield's guitar especially eloquent, echoing Keith Levene's sour whine on the title track and beautifully relaxed on "Being Baptised"'s Smith-like elegy. [Feb 2025, p.37]

A richly inventive trip made off the usual musical map. [Feb 2025, p.43]

Lankum producer John 'Spud' Murphy helps bring form to these candid candlelit songs of rapture and reflection, while guests include Cormac MacDiarmada and multi-instrumentalist Anna Mieke, whose strings prove gently transportive. [Feb 2025, p.40]

Lower fused dream-pop, experimental hip-hop, indie sludge and illbient, with texture and production effects crucial. ... Best are the wonky blues-hop of "Pompeii Statues" and "Hope For The Night Time", which suggests the raspy-voiced Booker joining a lo-fi Mercury Rev on Spacebomb. [Feb 2025, p.33]

They take a clear delight in topping their scrappy indie-pop tunes with folk-rock vocal harmonies. [Jan 2025, p.34]