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

A gorgeous melding of taut psychedelics, hazy Americana and a drop of the dreamier fringes of Britpop. [Dec 2020, p.36]

If they're sometimes guilty of overdoing the chirpiness, their songwriting crafty is best served on the more subdued "Dearly Departed Friend" and "Sweet Amarillo." [Sep 2014, p.75]

ZW have sensibly resisted the urge to shape their sound for arenas, the gaseous disco of "Coming Up For Air" and the darkly glittering instrumental "Elusive" underlining the poignancy that was always their trump card. [Nov 2014, p.84]

Overlooking the rare lapse into anodyne mellowness, it would appear Evelyn's got his future-soul mojo back. [Nov 2013, p.75]

Today We're The Greatest boasts a gentler nature than Lost Friends. [May 2021, p.31]

He and the band skillfully avoid any notion of contrivance, instead bending these vintage styles to persuasive effect. [May 2020, p.28]

A substantial return to form. [Mar 2014, p.73]

As LaFarge tells it, Rhumba Country is partly the tunes he hummed to himself while reaping and sowing. Fine tunes they are as well. [May 2024, p.35]

Apache holds its focus on straight-ahead vintage soul-pop, blending mid-tempo workouts and big weepy ballads with swampy shuffling grooves. [Sep 2016, p.78]

Very much a reflective affair, rendered in warm acoustic folk tones and coloured by Mellotron strings and piano. [Dec 2025, p.33]

It's hard to deny the emotional weight and beauty of Polly's personal, if comparatively uncommercial, sixth album. [Jul 2004, p.108]

Passerby is an acoustic record of great subtlety and warmth, so much that it overcomes the chick-lit preciousness of Randell's lyrics. [Sep 2014, p.75]

For My Parents is an sentimental as it is majestic. [Oct 2012, p.84]

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

comforting reel-to-reel tap hiss haunts each track, and you imagine this will sound particularly good on vinyl. [Mar 2016, p.96]

Space Gun fizzes with an energy and seamless melody that recalls the band at their mid-'90s peak, and there's an intriguing assortment of songs to be found. [Apr 2018, p.27]

Sola can be detached but is at her best when she leans into the songs. [Feb 2024, p.35]

There is much to enjoy in The Past We Leave Behind's darker moments. [May 2015, p.78]

She's a brilliant reinterpreter and sounds far happier in Raitt territory than she ever did as a Morissette clone. [Feb 2003, p.84]

Lighght is a giddy rush where the 38-year-old's innocent pursuits and guilty pleasures collide head on. [Jun 2014, p.79]

As is usually the case with archival material of this kind, nothing here is any improvement on the finished product. These tracks are, however, humbling reminders that what we end up hearing as astonishing lightning-in-a-bottle transcendence is very often the result of repetitive, labour-intensive hackwork. [Aug 2024, p.46]

An irreverent and enjoyably silly listen. [Mar 2003, p.100]

It's an interesting academic exercise that has resulted in a gently beautiful and coherent recording. [Dec 2021, p.25]

It's '60s-soul funky rather than frenzied testifying. [Sep 2014, p.76]

There's still a preponderance of fuzzy guitars--notably on "Ching," where they almost overwhelm Lorena Quintanilla's vocals--but elsewhere, as on "It Must Be The Only Way," her dreamy vocals provide a welcome contrast to droning guitars. [Oct 2016, p.32]

Jeremy Gaudet's Jonathan Richman-esque speak-sung tones breathe life into protagonists widescreen-daydreaming their way out of drudgery. [Feb 2021, p.29]

Bid's songs are as dapper as ever, their concatenation of light-footed pop, bossa and la variete winsome and delightful. [Jun 2026, p.33]

There’s plenty for prog loyalists to appreciate in the knotty polyrhythms, hopscotching bass and divebombing guitar excursions of tracks such as “Harridan” and “Chimera’s Wreck”, but genre agnostics may find more inviting access points in the sumptuous stripes of rueful melody, nuggety riffs and widescreen pomp-rock dynamics that Wilson and friends create. [Jul 2022, p.31]

A little too polite in places, O'Donnell's piano-and-strings pastorals deepen in gravitas with repeat listens. [May 2020, p.31]

The songwriter digs into the sound of his intense inner voice here. [Jun 2020, p.33]

McGuire's experiments with more conventional structures and arrangements don't always come off--the chuntering drum machines can makes things feel a little brisk and muzaky--but when he hits the spot, track titles like "In Search Of The Miraculous" don't seem too far-fetched. [Mar 2014, p.78]

Pandemic restrictions demanded some creative rethinking for these seven tracks. ... Guitars are still central, however, whipping the Chameleons-like “Ricochet” along and performing as bedrock melodic clanging for the six-minute, Sisters-adjacent closer, “Tearing Up The Grass”. [Oct 2022, p.33]

It's an album that takes pleasure in its capacity to quietly, seductively surprise. [Aug 2018, p.28]

It's heavy R&B with a slight goth-punk vibe thanks to the pummelling rhythm section and Childish's dead pan vocals. [Jan 2026, p.31]

Songs such as "Don't Want Move" and "Making The Most of It" compellingly frame the narrative, while "First Drum Set" and "Teenage Sequencer" joyously chronicle his escape route out of the alienation. [Mar 2022, p.35]

An LP that's cluttered, incoherent and frequently quite brilliant. [Jul 2023, p.34]

Much of Deleter occupies latter-day Primal Scream/David Holmes territory, the kind of pleasantly anonymous groove-driven middle ground that wavers non-committally between inchoate anger and fuzzy euphoria. [Mar 2020, p.29]

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]

The results are terrific; which is odd. in a way, given the stark simplicity of Johnston's songwriting and BTS's reputation for angular and faceted. [May 2020, p.25]

The themes are invariably dark but there's always a groove. [May 2013, p.67]

An intoxicating, instrumental tribute to the wheezing Farfisa organ; propped up only by the clarinet and double bass. [Aug 2020, p.27]

Guests like Emiliana Torrini and Shinehead help make this that rarity: an electronic album with personality. [Dec 2002, p.133]

Electric guitars squall in the climax of "Gonna Be Good," setting up the cinematic strings of "Someone New." Thereafter, however, the muted acoustic arrangements convey little of the poignancy contained in Kelly's lyrics. [Feb 2013, p.74]

Daughters mixes history, fable and philosophical thought, with vocalist Horwood switching between euphoric and mournfully reflective. [Jul 2019, p.24]

Weirdly wonderful. [Jul 2015, p.78]

Wasner and bandmate Andy Stack wield sharp production touches, like the breaths that pan "On Luxury," although Tween can suffer from a slight surfeit of scale over melody. [Sep 2016, p.81]

The album tends toward generic, blocky sci-fi-tronic. [Sep 2013, p.90]

Channelling their individual talents for explorations of the sublime, they make effects-heavy and expansive dronescapes that upset “post-rock” assumptions while tilting obliquely at Alice Coltrane’s organ/synth works, Swans, Suicide and Scott Walker’s avant-gardism. [Nov 2024, p.43]

There was much more to Stapleton than the Music Row standards he'd been cranking out for others, and Vol. 2 further confirms this suspicion. Under his own name, and own steam, Stapleton cleaves closer to the outlaw ethos of Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams Jr and Johnny Paycheck. [Feb 2018, p.32]

Football Money packs a melodic punch. [Mar 2020, p.30]

Smith's lyrical flights of fancy come off somewhat top-heavy, but by and large such bookish pretentions feel like something to appreciate, not castigate. [Mar 2014, p.79]

No one seems to know quite how he does it, but Donovan keeps going, quietly, from strength to strength. [Jun 2018, p.27]

The overall mood is The Band given Taylor Swift's budget, on heartfelt and easily wounded love songs. [Sep 2014, p.78]

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

Damon Albarn and Portishead's Beth Gibbons drop by to provide some haunting counterpoint to DOOM's gruff verbal gymnastics. [Oct 2012, p.83]

He's added half a dozen of his own compositions in a similar style to this generous 16-track selection, which pays tribute to his jazz roots rather more successfully than his uneven homage to his R&B origins in September's Roll With The Punches. [Feb 2018, p.30]

Chief songwriter Craig Johnson is canny enough to avoid being backed into a corner, and adds additional colour such as electro-punk "Execution-Rise" and the intriguing "Torrment." [Jan 2018, p.18]

They produce big pop hooks via skewed My Bloody Valentine guitars more reminiscent of Giant Drag, but with the abrasiveness replaced by sugary harmonies. [May 2007, p.93]

It's fair to say that Mitchell rarely does the heavy lifting here. Her role onstage is a fluid one: muse-goddess, North Star, shredder, comic foil and sometimes singer. The playing by her fellow artists is stellar and the backing vocals, in particular, ooze class. [Aug 2023, p.22]

Witty like Loudon Wainwright, doleful like Jonathan Richman, Hamilton emerges as a distinct presence throughout, and it's this you warm to. [Dec 2006, p.102]

Classical-inflected electronica, with nary a chrome-plated breakbeat in sight. [Feb 2019, p.34]

It’s the pair’s 25-year relationship that most radiantly shines through here, adding a relaxed and comfortable tone, as though you’ve walked in on their private back porch session. [May 2021, p.23]

It's not all straight A's, but that hardly seems the point. This feels like a necessary act of burning and rebuilding. [May 2018, p.33]

Anxiety's blend of heaviness and gloss is unexpectedly affecting. [Apr 2013, p.67]

Here he's in lo-fi mode, growling in a soft tenor voice over joyously jagged acoustic guitar backing. [Jul 2025, p.33]

Of late, Cherry Red have rediscovered a role which had eluded them for years, as curators of scenes and scenes in-between. The material here doesn't do that reputation much harm, revealing a thin but potent seam of transitional, very hairy hard rock. [Sep 2016, p.95]

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

Ultimately it's all a matter of taste, but fans will lap this up. [Jan 2020, p.31]

For the most part, Milosh goes for mood over hooks, but the sultry "Helpless" seductively sports both. [Feb 2021, p.32]

Still Woman Enough may be sustained by her memories, but it's not overshadowed by them. [Apr 2021, p.22]

While the LP reaches its darkwave apotheosis with a Neubauten-like cover of The Cure’s “One Hundred Years”, glimmers of lightness and tenderness make for a surprisingly rich listening experience, one that’s closer in spirit to Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch than Xiu Xiu’s past provocations. [May 2021, p.35]

It is not the truly transcendent album some may have read in the runes, but it contains several hints that such greatness may, finally, be within his grasp once more.

Flashbacks to The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld and the KFL's Chill Out are inevitable, but there are woozy hints of early Black Dog on "C," too. [Mar 2015, p.77]

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

It's an upbeat trip down the boardwalk. [Jun 2019, p.30]

It could all feel a little too knowing were the songs not so exceptionally strong. [Apr 2015, p.73]

There's still a mumblecore sulkiness to Jordan's delivery that drags some songs down, but on tracks like the fingerpicking marvel "Let's Find Out" and "Deep Sea," she finds a distinctive voice all her own. [Aug 2018, p.33]

It largely manages to avoid vapid repetition and provides plenty of charm and promise for the future. [Sep 2017, p.37]

Another 21 songs of baffling titles, ingenuous melodies and charming amateurism. [Jul 2012, p.73]

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

Indie slackers Hooten Tennis Club demonstrate some unique charms on their debut album. [Oct 2015, p.77]

His wonky debut taps kosmische, post-punk and lo-fi electronic noise, but keeps its sights on the pop hook. [Sep 2014, p.79]

The samey pace and understated mood can drag, but Pena strikes gold with the light-touch dance-pop arrangements. [Oct 2012, p.81]

A bit of editing might not have gone astray, but it's hard to begrudge McCombs space to roam when his horizon is so impressively broad. [Nov 2013, p.75]

At its blissed-out best, as on "Saw You Twice" and "Feel So Right," her new direction conjures the kind of streetwise reverie rarely heard since the days of AR Kane and One Dove. [Feb 2018, p.28]

There are a few stumbles into the synth-pop abyss, but this material feels somehow less galling than examples from Western Europe or the USA, as though the evident excitement in exploring new technology gifts the songs a certain, welcome, naiveté. Even The Forest Hums really kicks into gear when we hit the Kyiv underground of the late ’80s and early ’90s. [Dec 2024, p.52]

Singing exclusively in Turkish, it's hard to judge her message, but her voice is a gloriously expressive instrument full of mystery. [Nov 2018, p.23]

In his own quiet way, Texas Piano Man finds Ellis maintaining a degree of reckless abandon in his creative life. [Mar 2019, p.26]

Familiar, but still freaky. [Jul 2021, p.34]

As with their prime influence PJ Harvey, they explore much beyond. [Feb 2014, p.80]

It's a guarded affair, drawing from the same muted palette of emotions throughout. [Mar 2013, p.73]

Lightly experimental and laced with playful wit, this is quality gear from a seasoned elder statesman. [Apr 2013, p.71]

This set offers up a dozen nuggets from the heyday of Nigeria Afropop, all previously unreleased outside West Africa. [Jun 2019, p.49]

The set never feels like adapted poetry. [Jun 2017, p.28]

It's still deeply strange. ... Crucial to its success is its keen rhythmic sense. [Oct 2021, p.25]

His choices suit not only his rich, resonant baritone but also rich Machin's soul-and-gospel-heavy treatments. [Jan 2022, p.24]

Tiden follows much the same formula [as 2011's Stunden] of Satie-esque piano sketches nestled in softly lapping rhythms, muted electro shadings and vaguely lysergic drones.