What lingers longest on this remarkable record is an uplifting sense of resilience. [Jun 2018, p.26]

Diawara's voice is a supple and enchanting instruments, and her accomplices (in particular kora player Sidiki Diabate) sublime. [Jul 2018, p.27]

A stunning journey through self-discovery and rebirth, which showcases lyrical storytelling that's vivid in its precision and touching in its emotional resonance. [Jun 2019, p.37]

Along with her interest in free jazz and expressive, improvisatory styles of music, it’s possible to see these seven songs as a type of painting with sound, a messy, wild process of distillation and curation, until only sparse daubs of bright colour remain on the canvas. Limited elements, but a giant impact. It’s been worth the wait.

"Things You Learn The Hard Way" is a droll litany of wry advice evocative of Jason Isbell's "Outfit", and "Hometown Here" and "Let 'Em Burn" display a commendable facility for the deftly sketched potted soap opera. [Feb 2022, p.34]

Coombes' fourth is cultivated and considered, its detailed arrangements illuminated by Ian Davenport's muscular productiom. [Feb 2023, p.23]

The Hypnogogue is like every other Church album, and nothing quite like any of them; both statements are intended as compliments. [Apr 2023, p.26]

O’Rourke mastered, and in some cases remastered, all the music and it sounds appropriately fantastic. .... There’s a real narrative sense that their story has come full circle, but naturally it’s presented in this abstracted way, intentionally sequenced to feel like a film presenting flashbacks, in Grubbs’ view. [Jun 2024, p.40]

While the album is rooted in Ennio Morricone’s dusty spaghetti western soundtracks and Daniel Lanois’ high-lonesome ambient, songs like the spacy “El Fantasma” and the kaleidoscopic title track ground their psychedelic drift in the intense chemistry between the two brothers and the way they play off each other supernaturally. [Jun 2024, p.33]

Yet really immerse yourself in the thing, and these seven extended pieces become lighter, transcendent, strangely accessible. [Oct 2024, p.33]

Vivid and unsettling [Dec 2025, p.33]

Aided by sympathetic vocalists, Wasylyk consolidates a multi-instrumentalist's multiple interests - from New Classical to lounge jazz to lo-fi-pop - into a coherent style. [Apr 2026, p.37]

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

Some of their most startling material has always been found down the back of the sofa, among such relatively unconsidered trifles as "In The Back Of My Mind" and "Angel Come Home." [Oct 2013, p.82]

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]

This is inventive harkening, not witless revivalism. [Apr 2008, p.90]

The seamlessly authentic sound fit his raw and lusty vocalising, and the impressively tailored swagger 'n swing og his band, to a tee. [Mar 2013, p.73]

While there's nothing as pop as "Windowlicker" here, it's still thrilling to hear him romp deliriously through all manner of styles in the key of Apex for the bulk of these dozen tracks. [Nov 2014, p.71]

The breadth, scope and sheer suppleness of black SUMMERS'night makes one wish Maxwell worked a whole lot faster. [Sep 2016, p.76]

The death of beloved bandmate Carey Lander in 2015 seems to have inspired the freshest, blithest song's [Tracyanne Campbell's] written. [Jul 2018, p.34]

A remarkable, genre-defying album. [Mar 2012, p.86]

Eerily beautiful record. [Jan 2021, p.30]

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.

There's an addictive, hypnagogic quality to this ghostly combination of ambient noise, treated vocals and bursts if static. [Aug 2016, p.73]

His latest fizzes with energy and smarts, and sees him letting his imagination off the leash to irresistible effect. [Jul 2016, p.70]

Some stunning inventive improvisation, with pianist Danilo Perez sounding like 10 excited monkeys jumping up and down on the keys. In a good way. [Mar 2013, p.76]

Both Crutchfield sisters sound more comfortable in their own skin, more confident in their lyrics and vocals, as though bringing all those years apart to bear on the sessions. [Review of the Year 2025, p.20]

If the relationship to the original often seems tenuous, there's nothing abstract here: each note wrings something potent and direct from its origin. [Nov 2013, p.76]

Despite moments of discordance, as on "Narkopop 1," Gas continues to provide, for the most part, analgesic relief. [Jun 2017, p.30]

The film blurs lines between horror and ink-black comedy, and Krlic's score, texturally vast, moodily versatile and unnerving without being bombastic, moving deftly with it as one. [Oct 2019, p.29]

In Ze's hands Tropicalia is still a potent, living artistic force. [Jul 2006, p.118]

This is one glorious murk. [May 2003, p.91]

A riveting debut packed with ideas and invention. [Jul 2003, p.126]

Dury seems to have found a tone and groove that he's both relishing and flourishing in. [Apr 2020, p.27]

CDs 3 and 4 offer Infidels tracks blessedly stripped of producer Mark Knopfler's digital trickery and overdubs. ... With deft elimination of Arthur Baker's era-specific production effects, "I Remember You" becomes a ravishing thing, the gospel lilt of "Emotionally Yours" a gorgeous highlight. [Nov 2021, p.40]

The pair's Run The Jewels hits hard but has brains to spare. [Sep 2013, p.87]

It’s an album that is as broken as it is beautiful, a balance that Elverum appears to be gleefully embracing. [Dec 2024, p.28]

Minimum Maximum is the sound of Kraftwerk shedding all previous skins and staking their claim on the now. [Jul 2005, p.106]

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]

It's as touching, beautiful and dark as any of Collins' records, and even pushes her sound into new territories. 65 years into her recording career, that modern approach to folk music is still yielding treasures. [Sep 2020, p.24]

The results are funkier than anything Byrne or Eno might have imagined almost 40 years ago. [Jul 2018, p.30]

The Foos album closest to Nirvana. [Aug 2023, p.29]

An even richer reward for admirers--since he's never written with such frankness. [Apr 2017, p.32]

Promises is an impressive collision of talents, and sublimely lovely in places, but also frustratingly slight. A minor addition to the canon of its two main authors, it earns the double-edged compliment of all half-great albums: it leaves you craving more. [May 2021, p.30]

An album of incredible acoustic maximalism and conspiratorially whispered melodrama - enjoys the theatrics of its acidity. [May 2026, p.33]

This is the rare jazz record that feels equipped to venture outside the genre's familiar borders and engage with the wider world. [Jul 2018, p.29]

A rather lovely record...Fully audible at last, Cox's downcast lyrics invest these hazy tunes with gripping poignancy. [Oct 2010, p.90]

Funky, funny, stately, strange, soulful and sensual, Floreat is a unique and unequivocal triumph. [Oct 2011, p.83]

It's not only Jones' most absorbing album since 1997's beats-drenched Ghostyhead, but a record that crowns her career, not as an end but as a culmination. [Jul 2015, p.85]

Her darkest effort yet, a harowing chronicle of a woman barely keeping herself together. It's also her liveliest effort yet--not to mention her most confidently diverse. [Jul 2016, p.71]

It's one of those records that is somewhat sui generis, and yet with an appeal that is universal and accessible at the same time. [Apr 2018, p.33]

Songs crisp as winter sunlight. [Feb 2023, p.36]

He’s a figure of Springstonian heft in his native Australia. Fever Longing Still, his first album of new material this decade, further demonstrates that the rest of the world’s obdurate indifference is entirely its own loss. [Dec 2024, p.36]

There are ambiguities and contradictions, ecstatic visions and crises of faith. And a quest, not for some imagined grail, but for earthly and private resolutions. All fixed to music of the exquisite variety, from radiant acoustic studies to billowing symphonic pop. [Dec 2024, p.24]

While diligently pursuing McCaslin's own vision, this could be an extra disc on Bowie's I Can't Give Everything Away boxset, breathing the same excited, expanding air. [Nov 2025, p.35]

They're diminished by trying to touch too many bases, often lapsing into sub-Oasis stodge. [Oct 2003, p.114]

Feels freshly ironic and original. [Apr 2006, p.98]

Price's excellent debut wastes absolutely no energy trying to address her place in the country-music ecosystem, and gets right to telling us who she is, rather than who she ain't.... Her voice is the record's real star: controlled, infectious, and rich with enviable natural twang. [Apr 2016, p.63]

Luxury Problems is distinguished by the piercing vocals of Stott's former piano teacher, Alison Skidmore; looped, layered and heavily reverbed, they coil elegantly around Stott's brutalist constructions. [Jan 2013, p.83]

The clutch of pre-album demos on LP3 of the boxset reveal how tightly plotted her vignettes were before The Breeders even entered the studio.... The post-Last Splash EPs are manna from heaven for college rock connoisseurs.... The only black mark against LSXX is that the brighter, re-recorded single versions of “Divine Hammer” and “Saints” serve to make the album originals sound a little underpowered.

Jaar, the son of conceptual artist Alfredo Jaar, can weave a heady spell, presenting himself somewhere between David Byrne and Ricardo Villalobos. [Jun 2011, p.85]

Commissioned by Nike as an exercise mix for iPods, this euphoric, largely electronic set finds Murphy adapting DJ dynamics for the running machine.

What's in here finds the band inventive, unfailingly tuneful, and, rather belying the title, mellowing magnificently with age. [Aug 2009, p.87]

The album maintains its hallucinatory aura throughout; it’s a dazzling aural anime from a wildly original artist. [Oct 2022, p.29]

Musically, it's not exactly mould-shattering, a blend of surf and chirpy indie rock. They're at their most effective when they deliberately fray the edges. [May 2019, p.29]

It's like the best music of the '70s compressed under '80s new wave dynamics. [Feb 2005, p.74]

A Kind Revolution shows that Weller's Indian summer of creativity--one that started with 2008's 22 Dreams--shows no sign of ending. [Jun 2017, p.20]

A 25-track bonus disc of rarities makes this a feast for Barlow heads. [May 2011, p.94]

The few weak moments on their third album stray into rambling hippy-busker terrain. But standout tracks, like the fuzzy0warm collective singalong "Friendship (is a Small Boat in a Storm)" and Right Off The Back," sound like relics of some lost jam session between Curtis Mayfield and Carlos Santana. [Apr 2017, p.25]

Sensibly sequenced to feature the biggest hits at the top of the order and end with the newest single, "Devotion". The latter matches their standards for sparkling, dancefloor-friendly synth-pop with underlying notes of melancholy and wry humour. [Oct 2025, p.43]

It's the haunted croak of the band's main singers, Ibrahim and Abdallah, that are the main draw: the sound of heartbroken gangleader, the world-weary soldier, bravado replaced by tenderness. It's a sound that suits them perfectly. [Mar 2017, p.22]

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]

Her elegantly emotive voice locates the dark matter in these songs about the complexities of love, lighten by sweet melodies and a stirring concoction of pop-country and honky-tonk. [Dec 2015, p.75]

There is an unassuming brilliance to much that they do and, as ever, We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River is a-bristle with finely-tooled detai.

This 3CD/5LP set ably performs the mixed blessing of making you feel that you are there, and annoyed that you weren't. [Feb 2016, p.74]

The septuagenarian may not possess the range he once had, but Bell's voice wears the years gracefully. [Aug 2016, p.71]

Fans of Steve Reich - an admirer of Perich's 2009 1-Bit Symphony, whose release required listeners to plug headphones into a CD case - will revel in his latest, as will those who've tired of "New Classical's" limited palette. [Jan 2021, p.31]

First Farewell is wistful as well as smart and engaged. [May 2021, p.32]

For all the record’s sonic invention, though, its Sangaré’s voice that commands attention, a rich, textured instrument that has only grown more nuanced and subtle with age. [May 2022, p.34]

All are rapturous in their repetition and irresistibly otherworldly. [Apr 2023, p.29]

They're both incredibly deft players, executing taut riffs with obvious charisma. [May 2023, p.35]

Mehldau brings the influence front and centre, with bittersweet, often lovely arrangements of even the darkest moments in the Smith songbook. [Sep 2025, p.33]

consider this the handiwork of a special group of musicians who know the value of what they've inherited, yet have made an album that feels avidly and thrillingly contemporary. [Jan 2026, p.28]

Raven is her triumphant move forward, 15 tracks of sensual R&B with a subtle strength at their core, wrapped in vaporous synths and variously edged with UK garage, '80s R&B and techno. [Mar 2023, p.29]

On No Name, he’s done something special on his own terms, delighted and surprised his audience, and provided one of the great rock moments of the year. [Oct 2024, p.30]

Sheff's novelistic lyrics and the dextrous blend of country, folk and nervy indie-rock suggest a band approaching the peak of their powers. [Aug 2005, p.87]

Upgraded in every sense: songs with deeper meanings, mountainous crescendos and choruses to communitise large crowds. [May 2020, p.32]

On this mostly splendid debut, meanwhile, Hawk actually fuses two of his previous recording identities bridging the shiny electronic of his Weird Tapes alter ego with the hazy lo-fi psychedelia of its "feminine" mirror image, Memory Cassette. [Jan 2010, p. 116]

Woozy, off-track beats blend with video game blips and organic strings, harp and sax, while a cameo from Thom Yorke is woven neatly into this lush, psychedelic fabric. [Jun 2010, p.86]

Age seems to have deepened his poetic faculties, these rootsy narratives scarred by experience, but all the richer for it. Crowell's best since The Houston Kid. [Apr 2017, p.26]

The best parts of An American Treasure are the snapshots of a less self-straitened Petty. [Nov 2018, p.48]

These 13 richly expansive, tender-hearted songs also map the in-between places, questioning what living means now, in the face of an apparent apocalypse, [Jun 2026, p.27]

If their painstaking studiocraft has in the past seemed over-refined or even fussy, here they've discovered a new wildness, a liberating sense of drama. [Oct 2012, p.70]

Separated from its era and the defensiveness which spawned it, Ram sounds great. [Jun 2012, p.96]

This record - Cocker's finest work since This Is Hardcore, maybe - marks the arrival of an adventurous collective who might just be getting warmed up. [Aug 2020, p.26]

What their debut lacks in innovation it makes up for with emotional eloquence. [Nov 2014, p.76]

It is a fitting tribute and resounding success. [Jan 2016, p.81]

Modern Studies' Emily Scott, Rob St John and their cohorts once again supplement their brackish folk with tape loops, harmonium, a Mellotron and more to create songs both ancient and modern. [Jun 2018, p.30]