This scintillating set pulls and pushes extant studio ideas into wonderfully weird new shapes. [Apr 2021, p.32]

If its redemptive poignancy often recalls Richter's masterful Sleep, Voices is more dynamic, instead provoking--not subduing-thought. [Sep 2020, p.35]

The best-kept secret in the Coltrane archive seems to leap between every stage of his career, like a greatest-hits sampler being improvised in real time. [Sep 2018, p.45]

13 Rivers is a sparse, raging and noisy record. [Oct 2018, p.37]

The more menacing "Fuzzbuster #09" could almost be an interlude on Sonic Youth's Confusion Is Sex. A few other discoveries are equally astonishing. [Jul 2023, p.48]

Thirty years later, these songs have lost neither their grandeur nor their menace. A wealth of live tracks, rarities and covers. [Sep 2018, p.47]

Joining the fun are pals such as Ethan Miller, Stephen Malkmus and Cass McCombs, who add to the sense of chaos, but do not diminish the cohesion that make these diverse jams so stupidly, thrillingly rewarding. [Dec 2015, p.79]

An amazing album. [Mar 2007, p.75]

Weathered and intelligent, these songs resonate like folk antiquities from another age. Even more remarkably, they never sound forced. [Apr 2007, p.116]

Ultimately, it's that compassionate vision of song that resonates through Life Is People, as Fay observes the passing of the days with redemption in mind.

Richard's voice slowly becomes an instrument that blends into this song cycle, creating a blissful spiritual balm. [Nov 2022, p.35]

This is the best childhood summer holiday you ever had, condensed into 45 minutes of delicately arranged, beautifully performed, big, bright, cheery music. [Jul 2003, p.118]

Double Negative is their biggest step forward to date, an album that scrambles their sound completely; it sounds nothing like Low and everything like Low. ... Low have made what might be their most relevant album, one that holds a mirror up tot he world. [Oct 2018, p.18]

Make no mistake, X&Y is an exceptional pop record. [Jul 2005, p.98]

This reissue eschews context and explanation to let their catalogue stand as its won defiant rock monolith, And as it should. [Dec 2014, p.93]

Some of the most effortlessly insightful songs in the modern country-folk canon. [Nov 2020, p.37]

A dazzlingly clever record--great beats, brilliant production, top tunes and some of Albarn's best singing. [Jun 2005, p.106]

Donald's back in his self-referencing sweet-spot, and all's right with the world. [Nov 2012, p.69]

Songwriting of the highest calibre. [Sep 2003, p.104]

The LP opens with “My Golden Years”, a delectable mélange of Harrisonian 12-string riffs, Wilsonian harmonies and layer-cake hooks, and reaches its apex with the glorious Beach Boys homage “In The Eyes Of The Girl”, with Sean Ono Lennon co-producing and playing bass. [Jun 2024, p.35]

Best of all, perhaps, the skill and imagination she displays in her arrangements suggest that there's a lot of scope for adventure in the future of a musician who found her groove but seems unlikely to get stuck in it. [Nov 2017, p.34]

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

On Transmitter, Cut Worms' fourth album, Max Clarke reaches a rarefied level of expressiveness and self-assurance alongside Jeff Tweedy. [Apr 2026, p.29]

The Most Lamentable Tragedy feels like a quintessentially modern album, a scintillating examination of mania and neurosis that uses the history of rock'n'roll as mere stage dressing for its bravura performance. [Sep 2015, p.65]

Down-home majesty. [Sep 2024, p.29]

This is a record of rare beauty and poise. [Nov 2003, p.107]

It’s a fantastic album, containing poppy firecrackers like “Jackie Down The Line” and moments of timeless, mature lament such as “The Couple Across the Way”. [May 2022, p.28]

It sounds both timeless and brand new. [Oct 2018, p.43]

She takes on the Trump administration in "ByeBye25!", one landmark among many in her forward-thinking solo career. [Apr 2026, p.33]

There are barely any duff Sault tracks. [Sep 2021, p.26]

Ya Know cuts deep, with the best singing and wiliest melodies of his career. [Jun 2012, p.96]

What threads these eight songs together into a true album rather than just a compilation is the idea – the threat, the inevitability – of leaving and being left. Partly that’s due to Auerbach’s judicious curation, but that fear of loss animates almost all of Son House’s music, if not all of the blues in general. ... House conveys as much joy on these songs as he does pain, telling us so many years after his death that we cannot experience one without the other.

The band's range has expanded impressively from their debut. .... Again is the confident fulfilment of the promise of Lush Life, from a band with the spirit and the songs to match their work ethic. [Dec 2025, p.22]

Intermittently funny and never depressing, this confirms him among America's greats. [May 2005, p.108]

through his efforts to convey a profound experience of loss in a long-gone summer, these songs offer an uncommonly generous wealth of grace and beauty. [Aug 2023, p.32]

This is the Slowdive you've been waiting for. [Oct 2023, p18]

Ghedi expertly shapes traditional tunes, covers and dazzling originals into a deeply personal vision. [Feb 2025, p.35]

These cuts are glorious on their own merits. [Jun 2012, p.92]

This is the most powerful, literate and just plain individual British debut album since The Streets' Original Pirate Material. [Jul 2006, p.94]

The self-lacerating starkness of "Drive" still freezes the blood, while at the other end of the emotional scale, "Nightswimming" finds solace in snapshots of a lost summer. [Dec 2017, p.42]

Professor Beam has made his first art movie, and it's a stunner. [May 2013, p.70]

Her sixth is as deeply personal as it is un-self-pitying, the lyrical punches falling with even more righteous force. [Mar 2023, p.29]

The musicianship lifts Sad Songs... even further into the realm of the extraordinary. [Dec 2003, p.133]

Call it an expansion rather than a reinvention--but it's a dramatic and rather dazzling one. [Mar 2020, p.27]

Rarely has anyone making such exciting and fashionable music been so unapologetic about being mature, too. [Apr 2007, p.97]

Sable, Fable is an album that is felt as much as heard: the contraction of its opening tracks, the release of its love songs, the resolve of its closing numbers. [May 2025, p.34]

Saloon's light touch makes a strong impact. Wonderful. [Aug 2003 p.104]

Rarely since the Laurel Canyon heyday of CSNY, Jackson Browne et al, has the confessional mode been quite so unashamedly mined for artistic ore. [Jun 2013, p.68]

This... is still very much a Dears record: confused and unfocused, a messy kind of masterpiece. [Sep 2006, p.90]

72 minutes of creeping contemplation and subdued drama. [Jul 2021, p.31]

The Radio Dept. recall that giddy moment before sounding like the Stones was considered revelatory. Only these Swedes re-tweak the formula, sounding, if anything, better than Ride, Slowdive, Lush, Boo Radleys et al. [Sep 2004, p.100]

The larger-than-life Elton of the live stage gets a workout on "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting" and "Benny And The Jets," pounding rockers on the most impressively diverse collection in his catalogued. [Apr 2014, p.91]

The rootsy exuberance of Lullaby giving way to a mixture of romantic longing and social commentary. [Nov 2017, p.22]

This crisp new full-album remix merely enhances the brilliance. [Nov 2015, p.93]

What should have been the next step in Branch's innovative career became a tragically beautiful final document that captured an artist cresting a peak. [Oct 2023, p.30]

As much as these graceful and meditative pieces became threnodies for Sakamoto's condition, 12 is also something of a personal and creative victory for the composer. [Mar 2023, p.30]

Though feisty honky-tonk numbers like "I Don't Do Windows" shimmer, the worldweary ballads--especially the Johnson/Alison Krauss duet "Make The World Go Away"--are Sublime. [Feb 2013, p.74]

Across 14 varied tracks, Avery's compositions become engulfing, such is the pull of his palpable textures, dense soundscapes and tantalising beats. [May 2018, p.24]

For all the baubles and padding presented with this definitive edition, the disc you’ll turn to again and again is the one you’ve been playing all your life.

With its combination of Goodman's ache-filled vocals and Crazy Horse clamour, "Keeper Of The Time" is an even more striking demonstration of what she can do. [Aug 2022, p.26]

Bursting with warmth and character even when nearly tweaked beyond the point of recognition, Murphy's voice has rarely had a more satisfying showcase. [Oct 2023, p.31]

As a whole, it's brilliant. [Dec 2013, p.68]

An album of hope and humour and beauty, Phantom Power is frequently as deep and mysterious as the title intimates. [Aug 2003, p.100]

As vital as any of their previous four LPs. ... All Nerve's highlights are myriad and frequent. [Apr 2018, p.24]

Every bit as special as promised. [Jul 2025, p.29]

This is what The Graceless Age as a whole does so unforgettably, bearing witness to a burning world. [Sep 2012, p.70]

Heroes may be elegiac, but it's as spirited as it is poignant. [Jun 2012, p.70]

Matangi is her most exhilarating and mulch-faceted album. [Jan 2014, p.75]

Summerteeth captures the band as they shed the last vestiges of their alt-country beginnings and introduce the ingredients that would catch fire on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. [Dec 2020, p.53]

Your Picture is full of love, radiating Beach Boys bliss with that killer thread of melancholy, and evoking Pastor TL Barrett's choral devotionals. [Review of the Year 2025, p.28]

Producer Ross Orton helps sharpen their attack, and the quartet are at their very best on "White Rooms And People's" fierce synth-funk, the Suicide-like "Tomorrow" and the thudding grooves of Valleys." [Nov 2020, p.37]

Her interest in medieval and early music offers her compositions both a somnolent beauty and a melancholy grasp of simple, slow melody that's refined and tender. ... They're stunning. [Nov 2018, p.27]

Villagers' sleeve is telling: a pile of disparate old junk that somehow sites together as a piece. The remarkable thing is that this album achieves that so spectacularly. [Jul 2023, p.16]

A complete rethink has resulted in the most uninhibited and visceral album of her career. [Jun 2014, p.78]

This official release has been ably remixed by Bob Pridden, a roadie at the Fillmore back in ’68. ... Everything is delivered with the muscular sincerity that made The Who such a compelling and memorable live act.

The music here swells, surges and rages without ever losing the vulnerability at its core. [May 2024, p.31]

Harris makes the most of the means available to her and allows her songs to land the way they need to land. [Nov 2021, p.34]

Each song is so confident and perfectly formed, unravelling with cascading flurries. Orcutt is so confident and comfortable in his own skin that he has become a maser oif phrasing and economy. [Jun 2023, p.35]

There's a real effort to forge beauty out of chaos without losing any of the chaos. [Album of the Month, Jan 2006, p.100]

Throughout Taylor and Ralston draw from astral jazz, Alice Coltrane's meditation music and the expansive orchestral funk of David Axelrod to create something uniquely emotive over four lengthy and very different tracks. [Aug 2022, p.31]

They're rich articulations of home, longing and identity, the denuded production allowing a shivering vulnerability to pierce their core. [May 2019, p.32]

Bold, brilliant and experimental. [Apr 2024, p.34]

Their best for a while. ... An extended, uncharacteristically rocking release. [Nov 2018, p.34]

Throughout all nine songs, Glenn-Copeland's voice seems to exist on the eternal plane, powerful and vulnerable in equal measure, an elder sharing his knowledge in stirring sonic form. [Sep 2023, p.26]

Pinning this endlessly complex songwriter’s work down to a single tagline or meaning is unwise. His songs are not always easy, they’re not always straightforward, but 10 albums in, they’re mounting up to create one of the most impressive bodies of work of the century so far. [Sep 2022, p.16]

The reassuringly lo-fi results might not be drastically different to UMO's previous three records, but the execution is certainly impressive. [May 2018, p.37]

Some of Feist's most affecting and exhilarating music to date. [Jun 2017, p.16]

Epic in scale, World Boogie Is Coming is an extraordinary amalgam of envelope-pushing studio manipulation and DNA-fuelled deep gut grooves. [Dec 2013, p.71]

A beautiful record. [Nov 2003, p.122]

An extraordinarily, beautiful, haunting piece of music. [Dec 2018, p.25]

It can take its place alongside Live At Leeds, Rock Of Ages and Wilco's more recent Kicking Television as a live classic. [Nov 2006, p.104]

This set is a good primer for Cooder’s soundtrack work.

It's a telling indication of the degree of daring and sophistication at hand that artistic gestures which might have seemed contrived or ill-conceived in other contexts--like say, transforming Nirvana's "In Bloom" into a majestic country-souul ballad worthy of Charley Pride-yield some of the most startling results. [May 2016, p.63]

A mouth-watering feast of beats and grooves... as welcome as anything he's done. [Apr 2005, p.100]

This companion volume of archives gives us an opportunity to hear the roads not taken, the hesitations, to feel the jeopardy at each artistic crossroads and experience the risk and wonder of the journey anew. Across seven hours, six discs and 98 tracks, this is an astonishing bounty. [Nov 2024, p.44]

Copper Blue combined Hüsker Dü's passionate intensity with a new, steely pop resolve.

Hoodoo is spellbinding stuff, a new high mark in a delightful late-career renaissance. [Oct 2013, p.64]

It's a extended mediation on the expat experience, with yearningly hymnal renditions. [May 2021, p.27]