He pulls it off in style. [Apr 2009, p.91]

Royal Trux remain unique, one of a kind: still going wrong like a hydrogen bomb.[Mar 2019, p.36]

It's a fine country record refracted through a DIY folk-rock lens. [Feb 2021, p.30]

Welch delivers clunky self-help lines wrapped in elemental metaphors. [Jul 2015, p.76]

As ever, he showcases a poetic turn of phrase and hopscotches across a dizzying array of styles. [May 2016, p.69]

The familiar tropes of nomadic wrangler life are present--trusty steed, blood-red sunsets--but, refreshingly, the masculine cliches are not. Instead, the country-rocker concentrates on intimacy, tenderness and ambiguity. [May 2019, p.33]

[Working with four young producers] isn't necessarily an ideal recipe for coherence, but [Giles] Martin--the producer of the music for Love, Circue du Soleil's Beatles show, and for the Rock Band video game--keeps it under control.... with each song treated as an individual entity and allocated its own musical resources. [Nov 2013, p.64]

Idealism is essentially a retread, but a superior retread with subtle character definition. [Jun 2007, p.97]

A fair amount of cosmic fannying involved, but this is framed by some cracking songwriting. [Jul 2012, p.79]

Generally, Dumb Flesh is more gleaming and monolithic than ever. [Jun 2015, p.71]

An engaging thing it is too. [Apr 2020, p.28]

As the album goes on, the songs gets richer and stranger. [May 2020, p.29]

A worthy addition to a glorious canon. [Jun 2021, p.24]

While Pigs x7 couldn't get much heavier, they sound noticeably angrier on this follow-up to 2020's Viscerals, adding lyrical themes of self-loathing and misanthropy into the mix. [Mar 2023, p.32]

Fragrant ballads "When The Night" and "Marie Cheri" add a softer dimension to a bold collection on which Annie rarely puts a foot wrong. [Nov 2009, p. 81]

It's a giddily emotive affair, primarily slow and sensual. [Jan 2015, p.86]

It's all deftly constructed and beautifully realised. ... Some songs tend to play it safer, lessening their impact in the process. [Jul 2019, p.26]

Occasionally a little too meandering. [Oct 2019, p.26]

He thrives in intimate surroundings, furnishing these songs with discreet and sometimes adventurous embellishments - drum machine, say - that enhance his message, rather than detract from it. [Apr 2020, p.26]

There's a beautiful simpatico between Prochet and Danell throughout that elevates everything, and the El Michels Affair contribution points outwards, to new experiences. It's a lovely album - 30 minutes well spent. [Jan 2026, p.20]

Live may well be the best place to encounter them. [Feb 2007, p.73]

This may well be the most exhilarating debut of the year. [Nov 2003, p.107]

Arguably slight at first, it rewards repeat listening as its seductive, heartfelt stories unfurl. [Mar 2004, p.90]

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

As ever, when Los Lobos content themselves with sounding like Los Lobos, they're marvellous.... The lighter touches make less impression. [Nov 2015, p.79]

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

Throughout, the songs are delivered with a powerful undertow that recalls Emmylou Harris' Wrecking Ball. [Feb 2017, p.33]

Only the lovely, finger-picking folk of "Ceilings" and the pulsating "Breakers" approach the perkiness of their breakout single, "Airplanes." [Feb 2012, p.74]

A set that feels avant and outre and yet deliriously danceable at the same time. [May 2016, p.75]

The music is cinematic in scope, offering Armageddon and salvation in turn. [May 2020, p.25]

Four Tet's epiphany is concerned entirely with the properties of sound itself. [Jun 2005, p.117]

Like 1999's The West, The Civil War negotiates a fragile entente between Americana and electronica, but does so on a bigger, constantly astonishing scale. [Oct 2003, p.122]

It's hard to shake the sensation that the band have become rather more ordinary as a result [of the departure of Frank Carter.] [Nov 2012, p.73]

Heavy on stately soul pianos and produced by singer-songwriter Richard Swift, its strength-through-adversity feels is held back from flight by Burhenn's entirely earthbound voice. [Jul 2010, p.115]

A sparse, occasionally foreboding mood weighs on these 13 cues, appropriate to Richter's increasingly prolific contributions ti European arthouse soundtracks. [Aug 2010, p.93]

A first half of pop-punk nuggets.... The second half, though, is more reflective and psychedelic although still in thrall to Big Star and Teenage Fanclub. [Jan 2015, p.75]

They've proved here that they're more than capable of escaping from, or expanding on, that familiar sound. [Dec 2018, p.24]

Classy but underpowered. [Aug 2021, p.24]

Andrew WK's most lucid slab of party politics since his 2001 debut I Get Wet ditches the improv piano to embrace the 39-year-ld's steroid-enhanced take on cutie-pop. [Apr 2018, p.37]

Every Valley feels far more substantial [than 2015's The Race For Space], as PSB's amorphous brand of prog, motorik and post rock integrates fully with BFI clips and first hand interviews. ... Pathos and fortitude are plentiful. [Aug 2017, p.35]

Taken together, the music of Year Of The Spider is anything but stuck in the past. Its novel sonic alloys, and punk rock spirit, very much ring of right now. [Sep 2021, p.20]

It's easily her most accessible album yet. [Jun 2026, p.32]

A Positive Rage is something of a misnomer, since hardcore fury rates low on the Steady agenda. More crucial is the band’s 3-D storytelling on muscular guitars, and Craig Finn’s traditional chat about joy in the encore.

She's performing and singing at her peak. [May 2014, p.83]

It's often breathtaking. [Mar 2018, p.22]

Glorious soundsuite. [Oct 2020, p.37]

The results are sometimes too meta to be particularly satisfying, but when but coheres - as on the bracing, static-smeared "Backwash" - it's worth the effort. [Nov 2022, p.29]

Same Old Man won't upend the form-book, but it's an agreeably unpretentious addition to the Indiana-born veteran's canon. [June 2008, p.93]

Despite--or perhaps because of--its viscous air of paranoia, this record is unputdownable. [Mar 2004, p.100]

Red Barked Tree is the most successful product to date of this examination. [Feb 2011, p.86]

More organic than their 2004 debut, Parades is just as richly rewarding. [Nov 2007,p.98]

The Bride Screamed Murder channels the band's two-kit battery into intense percussion romps topped by burly call-and-response bellows, like a military drill conducted on strong hallucinogens. [Aug 2010, p.88]

It's commendable stuff, but you can't help wishing he'd kept the scattershot, carte blanche approach of before. [Nov 2007, p.121]

Toussaint masterfully irons oout the kinks and the dissonances from the city's music. [Jul 2016, p.77]

Migration, road-tested in SJ sets, finds Green cruising into that emotional landscapes occupied by the likes of Jon Hopkins and Mark Pritchard. [Feb 2017, p.23]

If Hypnotic Eye was just about the snarl, it'd lose steam fast. Instead, it's only one element of a story that's bigger and richer, which is how a storied American band returned to the core principals of yesteryear without having to pretend to forget all they've learned in the meantime. [Aug 2014, p.63]

More than a specific era, Real Estate conjure a sense of place and experience as vividly as any US indie film of the past five years. [Nov 2011, p.97]

As with the best bedroom punk records, the bloody-knuckled passion and immediacy of these 13 rapid songs transcends any cavils about sound quality. [Oct 2003, p.130]

It's a rootsy affair that evokes the spirit of the MC5. [Jul 2003, p.112]

The album stands or falls by the seductiveness of its atmospheres and the memorability of its hooks--and here, it must be said, Release fails to imprint itself, leaving an impression mainly of dejected weariness. [May 2002, p.95]

Gedge hasn't sounded this belligerently broken-hearted since 1987's "My Favourite Dress." [Mar 2005, p.100]

Their energy is extraordinary. [May 2005, p.97]

The Outsider is delivered with the forthrightness, jive and firepower of a hip Southern Baptist preacher. [Aug 2005, p.102]

A fearsome blast. [Jun 2006, p.100]

Living With The Living finds them at their most assured. [Apr 2007, p.113]

Overall... the mood remains one of pleasant inconsequence. [Apr 2007, p.94]

There's an elegiac beauty to these tracks. [Oct 2007, p.114]

North Star Deserter is among his finest, sublimating Chesnutt's occasional tendency to cloying whimsy in gothic folk backdrops. [Oct 2007, p.87]

Loose, raw, a bit funky, it illustrates the band's knack for creating new-but-classic-sounding songs and getting them down on disc with a sizzling live feel. [Aopr 2009, p.87]

This stellar set is anchored by existential bar-band thumper 'Just About Time' and 'homeland Refugees.' [May 2009, p.86]

The Liberty Of Norton Folgate--a title which makes sense in context but is otherwise unlikely to be jamming up the ringtone sites--is Madness in both their pomp and their prime.

Henry lacks Wait's distinctive voice and lyrical personae, but his way with deftly arranged melodies is often superb. [Sep 2009, p.84]

It's a short album, just 30 minutes, and "Weird Feelings" is one song that stands for most: full of hooks and sparks it's fun while it lasts but over in two minutes and too easily forgotten.

Cantrell'a sprightly tribute LP is beautifully rendered, her bell-pure voice and the chops of Chris Scruggs, Fats Kaplin and Lambchop's Mark Nevers lending old songs a new, urban sophistication. [May 2011, p.92]

It all adds up to an album that is as satisfying as it is unexpected. [May 2012, p.79]

Fans of Hawley's rueful view of love and relationships, his fine guitar playing, and his magnificent singing voice will find them all present and correct here, if displayed in unexpected ways. [Jun 2012, p.75]

After the lackluster Touch, Mantasy at least captures the bonhomie that permeates the best releases from his house and techno label. [Nov 2012, p.77]

With Rough Carpenters, the pickers are deeply respectful of the revenant forms they're extending, but the music is never leaden. [Mar 2013, p.67]

Doldrums' frequently multi-tracked falsetto is the icing on an appealingly irregular cake. [Apr 2013, p.71]

Mostly, Dear Mark J. Mulcahy, I Love You sounds supremely happy to be here: it's an infectious feeling. [Jul 2013, p.82]

A 40-minute guitar wig-out at the end of the immense White Numbers--filling two CDs or three LPs--will delight Bevis Frond fetishists, but the toytown pop of "More Chalk" and teary madrigal "She's Just Like You" better showcase the cottage industrialist's skills. [Jul 2013, p.71]

For a record that often shifts all over the place--someone busks "Wonderwall" on "U1"--it's an absorbing listen. [Jan 2014, p.74]

Climax is both poundingly heavy and pleasingly melodic, at times recalling the Sisters Of mercy in their crossover pomp. [Feb 2014, p.71]

An engaging distillation of Weiss' rumbustious style that locks the listener into a groove and doesn't let go. [Jun 2014, p.74]

We find their extreme metal interspersed with more reflective moments. [Dec 2014, p.80]

Night Surfer is a swashbuckling set of blasted guitars and rootsy grooves. [Dec 2014, p.80]

What A Terrible World continues to sharpen the band's sound. [Feb 2015, p.81]

Fernandez's tunes have an endearing air of fragility. [Jul 2015, p.75]

Understated and in, places, unfashionable. [Oct 2015, p.83]

Their third and strongest album, pitching them closer to Captured Tracks labelmate Mac DeMarco. [Oct 2015, p.84]

Due to Joe Dilworth's propulsive drumming and Holger Zaf's synth work, these 12 tracks never stray into stuffiness. [Mar 2016, p.71]

Broad in scope, and naturally playful, this is a spectacular, fresh as the proverbial, triumph. [Sep 2016, p.73]

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

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

A mixture of original songs, among them the propulsive title track, and covers, each of which are given a richly visceral makeover by massed female voices. [Apr 2017, p.26]

Their 10th album in 25 years underlines their skill at combining heavy guitar solos with gauzy pop melodies and blizzards of noise. [Apr 2017, p.25]

Stanley's "Rosewood Bitters," a slice of swampy country rock with Todd Rundgren on keyboards, is a highlight, along with Dewey Terry's "Sweet As Spring." a gnarly love song with frenetic orchestration. [Jun 2017, p.51]

It's a beautifully judged (electronic) psych-pop record that hums with warmth, quiet eccentricity and gentle wryness, recalling Robert Wyatt, '60s French pop and Gruff Rhys' solo fare. [Jul 2017, p.39]