Warmer and more upbeat than One Day, Another Day hangs around just long enough to make an impact. [Sep 2024, p.32]

A confident advance on 2012's Rhythm And Repose. [Oct 2015, p.77]

“Son” and “Chernye Tsvety” feel a mite glossier than their earlier records, which had a smudged and lo-fi feel that gave them the quality of samizdat recordings. Still present and correct, though, is a sense of dislocation and alienation that’s positively Kafkaesque. [Oct 2024, p.37]

Another Country largely continues the same unashamedly nostalgic tone [of 2013's Time] [Dec 2015, p.79]

Pernice's stately tastefulness, acoustic guitar studded with slide and steel, offers honed adult reflection, not excess. [Apr 2026, p.36]

The early-’60s soul-jazz strut belies the emotional purpose of career-spanning songs. Van’s voice and heart are unaccustomedly youthful and light seeking a West Country grail in “Avalon Of The Heart”. [Oct 2024, p.40]

The vibe is smart, slightly soiled. [Apr 2018, p.28]

It ["Hurtin' Or Healed"] is one of many moments on the record with a reflectively slow and gentle pace. But there are also subtle dynamic shifts and spikes throughout. [Nov 2023, p.32]

[An] ambitious, stylish left-turn. [Feb 2014, p.72]

The music here remains identifiably and intrinsically Wire. [Jun 2016, p.82]

Their UPS lies in their assured threading of post-war archive material from StudioCanal, the BFI and old propaganda reels through Avalanches-style musical collages, [Jul 2013, p.80]

The Hanging Valley blends whooshing motorik drums, a lyrical archness reminiscent of Wire, and a love for repetition that borders on the pathological. [Sep 2016, p.71]

There's vulnerability in Chapman's lazily charming voice. [Sep 2015, p.78]

Gibb's mixture of gay and Christian imagery is potent, and his vision of music as a grand communal experience is backed up by some memorable tunes. [Apr 2003, p.112]

Full of surprising songs with some cracking tunes that step far outside the punk-funk-grunge-metal formula of the Chili Peppers. [Mar 2004, p.99]

Choruses are big, lyrics purposes stripped, side and Hammond summoning rock's halcyon days. [Jun 2026, p.30]

It won't cure humanity's ills, but it does a fine job of rejuvenating a band entering its third decade. [Mar 2018, p.22]

The best thing about Coming Out Of The Fog, then, is that it's charged with possibility--paradoxically, by stripping Heumann's songs back to their core, simplifying and reducing, he's opened up a space in which the group could really ride into the sun. [Feb 2013, p.72]

The 73-year-old [is] in fine voice. [Aug 2014, p.71]

Eighteen Hours of Static is a brutish rocker with its eyes in the gutter, reminiscent of The Jesus Lizard and Minor Threat in its scabrous mid-pace grind and occasional lurch up to hardcore speed. [Feb 2014, p.71]

What Peace lack in originality, they make up for in charm. [Mar 2015, p.80]

Bowlcut romantics will swoon for twinkly samba "Saveoursmiles" and "Love Me 'Til My Heart Stops" on his 10th LP, but as wistfulness gives way to despondency on "Rust" and an anguished take on West Side Story's "Somewhere," Stewart's idiosyncratic path feels like an increasingly lonely one. [Jul 2017, p.25]

Recording session helmed by Spoon drummer Jim Eno drew the band out of their comfort zone, with generally positive results. [May 2013, p.65]

"Time" hits hardest, a righteous prayer riding on Stax brass and gospel harmonies toward safe harbour. [Oct 2025, p.28]

They run out of steam completely towards the end.... But there's still plenty here to justify giving up your heart to that simple chord all over again. [Sep 2003, p.110]

The fatalistic and darkening Gothic moods bring out some of the shiniest elements of his prodigious talent and imagination. [Aug 2013, p.67]

A gleaming set of R&B, pop, bedroom soul and even reggae. [Sep 2005, p.112]

The pair unleash a succession of hallucinatory soundscapes that feel hermetically sealed yet confrontational, as if daring us to fire up a fat blunt and allow this sleek beast to burrow into our frontal lobes. [Oct 2013, p.71]

Though not as daring as the Pole's free-jazz output, this gilded modular synthesis is a safe and satisfying listen that pushes him into another realm. [Mar 2020, p.37]

The 76-year-old virtuoso is at his most poignantly expressive on the album's inward-turned, stripped-back blues ballads. [Jul 2022, p.34]

Sea Island feels comfortable, perhaps a little overly so, though there are plenty of lovely moments. [Jan 2015, p.74]

Cupid Deluxe is a more mature and collaborative affair that sees Hynes marinate his songs in an early-'90s soul-funk fusion that foregrounds groove over melody. [Dec 2013, p.65]

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

Deptford Goth's ghost R&B keens admiringly in the direction of Bon Iver and Active Child. [Apr 2013, p.69]

This follow-up to last year's impressive debut, Dear, is no less musically intense or lyrically unflinching, but now Henson's quavering anxiety has flesh on its bones. [Mar 2013, p.]

Mood-wise it's their bleakest yet. [Mar 2003, p.112]

It's chaotic then, but it's also packed with charm. [Jul 2013, p.83]

A crawling, paranoiac jazz-funk odyssey. It might be the best of these Dwyer & Co records to date. [Feb 2022, p.28]

It's a warm, modestly confident record with elegant touches, and one that spits out occasional sparks, too. [Sep 2023, p.27]

Songs move at a satisfying clip, with modal harmonies and woody violin scrapes creating a misty, pensive atmosphere in which their analytical tales of fleeting urban encounters feel like ancient fables. [Mar 2018, p.31]

It's aggressively zen numbers such as "Enter Exit" and "Water" that finally succeed in dragging you up to that higher plain. [May 2020, p.23]

This score for the new Hawkings biopic is an effective series of piano-based miniatures sweetened with strings and harp. [Feb 2015, p.79]

While the straight guitar-janglers sometimes border on generic, the eerie psych-rock incantation "Red Virginia Creeper" and the clanging, reverb-drenched barbs of "Charm And Tedium" prove more rewarding. [Jun 2020, p.29]

Her flow has a bratty edge and unhurried, authoritative core, capable of Philly soul sweetness on “Lo Rain”, or riding low, squelching beats on “IDGAF”. ... Meanwhile, “Let Me Be Great” isa pan-African firework display celebrating her rooted rebirth. [Oct 2022, p.34]

Album highlight “Understood” sounds particularly Young-like here too, but elsewhere Martsch sounds confident in his own skin, merging interlocking layered guitars, subtle melodic touches and licks that veer from crunchy to blissed out. [Oct 2022, p.26]

Enderness is more of a brooding country-soul set, with the emphasis on soul. It's also more abstract. [Jun 2019, p.24]

A truly futuristic slice of R&B. [Jun 2017, p.30]

A less full-tilt affair than their first effort... but no less fun. [Jul 2004, p.95]

The Streets' Original Pirate Material crossbred with The Fall's Grotesque, it's nasty and brutish, but mercifully short. [Jun 2014, p.83]

The result is something abrasive but controlled. [Jul 2013, p.83]

This is a coherent set of transformative reveries by an older, less angry man. [Jan 2022, p.31]

After a strong start, though, her sixth album sags in the middle with a run of ho-hum numbers, until Welch summons the elements again with the orchestral flourish of "You Can't Have It All". [Review of the Year 2025, p.24]

Total 15 initially feels a bit slight. The second disc more than makes up for this though. [Sep 2015, p.83]

Although less immediately catchy, Celebration Castle... soon warms up. [Jul 2005, p.94]

A suite unreliably narrated by a character named Miami. ... The album is a wittily wrought soundtrack of his delusions. [Dec 2017, p.25]

Frequently appealing. [Nov 2005, p.103]

The likes of "Hard To Beat" and "Cash Machine" jack not just the offbeat skank and dubby bass of The Specials but some of their creeping dread and downbeat humanity as well. [Aug 2005, p.92]

Cast in pale sunlight with a touch of frost and Darby's fragile, close-mic'ed voice their focus, these 13 unflinching songs call to mind "Some Velvet Morning" and "fade Into You". [May 2026, p.29]

Violence, guilt, betrayal and despair assail singer-lyricist James Graham's protagonists, while Andy MacFarlane marshals something miasmic, sometimes glistening synth glides and doleful guitars, suggesting Johnny Marr's wilder Smiths experiments. [Feb 2019, p.37]

Love Hates lacks some of the naive charm of their debut and a couple of attempts at Garbage-style industrial pop set the album off on the wrong foot. But the all-or-nothing passion that courses through "The Breath Of Light" and "For The Wild" is quite something. [Feb 2019, p.29]

Whether flirting with doo wop, mixing psych and a cappella gospel or channeling John Cage via TV On The Radio it charms at every turn. [Jan 2015, p.74]

The heart-tugging moments play to that devastatingly effective Appalachian-style yodel in Bulat's voice. [May 2020, p.25]

Some of these pieces are more like performance art works than songs. [Feb 2015, p.83]

The meanings might be obscure, but Chiaroscuro is still deluxe cinematic pop by hugely accomplished composer-producers. [Feb 2014, p.76]

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

When You're Ready is a sharply confident debut, as Tuttle proves an expressive vocalist and an idiosyncratic songwriter. [May 2019, p.37]

The droll self-awareness and blunt strum of their songs may have you thinking of The Go-Betweens, but it's more a general stylistic flourish that has The Goon Sax coming across as classic Brisbane pop. [May 2016, p.74]

Cold but somehow comforting. [Jun 2019, p.27]

It's like walking through smoke and mirrors towards an utterly empty dancefloor, a kind of nightmare inversion of TNGHT's rave exuberance. [Apr 2014, p.73]

Malin would've been wise to trim the 13 songs down to 10, thus eliminating the soggy middle of this otherwise crisp platter. [Apr 2015, p.80]

The 64-year-old artist time-travels to her formative years, bringing unexpected twists to 10 radio hits. [Aug 2019, p.31]

Banks is an earnest singer with an ear for complex anthems--she's at her best when letting big emotions rip. [Oct 2014, p.67]

Another blast of super-slick soul. [Aug 2005, p.102]

All round, it's more than the sum of its parts, if not quite the event that is clearly hope for. [Feb 2017, p.40]

A remarkably evolved variety of break-up album, one whose match of melodicism and bruised romanticism makes it somehow suggestive of Lou Reed's Berlin as rewritten by Paul Simon. [Feb 2020, p.33]

Most of the artists here, among them Moby, Miike Snow and Cibo Matto, find rich source material at the melodic end of her catalogue. [Mar 2016, p.77]

A paucity of strong tunes remains his Achilles heel, but no-one else does wasted decadence with such persuasive panache. [Feb 2015, p.80]

For all its easy charms, Triplicate labours its point to the brink of overkill. After five albums' worth of croon toons, this feels like a fat full stop on a fascinating chapter. [May 2017, p.22]

With its wild swings between pummelling dirges and more symphonic exercises in doom-mongering, seventh album, The Gospel, evokes the more artistically ambitious but no less menacing likes of Killing Joke and Swans. [Apr 2016, p.69]

Oddly, this works a treat. [Feb 2014, p.77]

The default setting is dancefloor hedonism with an air of wistful nostalgia. Best of all are the two Bernard Butler co-writes, “Glitter Ball” and “Home”, which sound like Saint Etienne at their most ecstatic. [Sep 2022, p.21]

It's weird and enticing, hypnotic and jarring. In a word: it's Chasny. [Sep 2021, p.33]

Strangely compelling. [Oct 2003, p.124]

Yes, it's an unchallenging and even deeply conservative record. But its class is positively aristocratic. [Mar 2004, p.99]

Deerhoof's skittish collages always, miraculously, have a pop logic to them, and their desire to show that experimental music can be playful rather than forbidding is often heroic. [Jul 2004, p.102]

While her new, synth-led turn can feel a little awkward - the keyboards on "Guardian Angel" overwhelm the tenderness of the song - there are moments, such as the sparks of synth noise on "Hum Menina", that fire her folk songs into another dimension. [Mar 2022, p.28]

The tense chemistry has been, to some degree, recaptured. [Oct 2014, p.68]

Snatches of flute, sax, and female vocal harmony vocals add sympathetic colour to these sad yet inquisitive songs. [Oct 2012, p.83]

Black Cherry this ain't, then. As a companion piece to its genius predecessor, though, Supernature iis planty to be going on with. [Sep 2005, p.108]

A fairly respectable blend of new and reworked older material, deconstructing vintage 1970s tracks like "Mr. Bassie" into airy melodica ripples and sinewy basslines. [May 2022, p.23]

There is an innocent, infectious charm and an impressively meticulous attention to detail on stand-out hypnagogic inner-space journeys like “Emotion Engine”, “Forever Chemicals” and “Post-Truth”. [Review of the Year 2024, p.37]

An occasional change of pace might be welcome, but the craftsmanship is beyond reproach; swings, yes, but those roundabouts. [May 2021, p.24]

A power-pop potpourri that falls between the Beatlesque formalism of Cotton Mather and the eruptive emotionality of Car Seat Headrest. [Mar 2019, p.34]

The sound remains satisfyingly Stax/Volt-centric yet also full of left-field touches. [May 2019, p.35]

Intriguing album. ... Lyrically, the prevailing atmosphere is reflective. [Jun 2017, p.28]

It broadly succeeds because her songs - worked on with R&B guv'nor Jai Paul and her father Pino, a seasoned session player, and siblings Rocco and Giancarla - are elegantly poised. [Apr 2024, p.38]

Phillips has released a dozen solo albums characterised by a vivid lyricism and a rootsy, melodic sensibility, paired with the ability to throw in an unconventional chord so the song never goes quite where you expect. Those qualities are as strong as ever on In The Hour Of Dust. [Oct 2025, p.31]

There’s avintage, spooked quality to the dreamlike “Woke Up And No Feet” and “What Doesn’t Work What Does” as she layers and edits her vocals, filling in gaps with piano and guitar, to create ahighly alluring portrait. [Jun 2024, p.30]