It's those who deviate furthest from Fela's template who reap the greatest rewards. [Dec 2013, p.71]

Lost On The River is an album of good, sometimes excellent songs with a unique creation story which, in the end, adds little substance to the narrative of perhaps the most mythologised recordings in musical history. As footnotes go, however, it's an entertaining, energised and often fascinating one. [Dec 2014, p.64]

While the sugary highs could give Van Dyke Parks an ice cream headache, it's hard to resist a work so clearly besotted with the power of music. [Oct 2015, p.78]

Beginners is sweet and sorrowful with a writerly eye. [Sep 2020, p.31]

Their mission sounds increasingly convincing. [May 2007, p.87]

Hushed and humble, it's dominated by her Stina Nordenstam vocal style. [Jul 2019, p.30]

Youth Novels attampts to repeat the trick [the single 'Little Bit'] 13 more times, with varying degrees of sucess. [July 2008, p.103]

The suspicion remains, though that heavy cosmic rock is probably the best vehicle for his apocalyptic romances. [Jun 2009, p.99]

Brakes sound like The Jesus & Mary Chain with Tourette's. [Aug 2005, p.102]

In places it's impressively monolithic. [Feb 2011, p.82]

A newly acquired taste for Gilbert O'Sullivan-style upright piano puts the accent on cheeky fun on his ninth solo album. [Dec 2013, p.66]

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

Everything flows and nothing jars, but Craft's soft voice and often orthodox songcraft makes Blood Moon merely pretty rather than stunning. [Jul 2016, p.73]

With only three of the eight songs clocking in at under five minutes, things can get a little ponderous, but clearly, our expectations are of little concern. [Aug 2019, p.29]

If you want epic, check out the eight-minute sprawl of 'Mary Is Mary.' For a bit more raw noise terror, try the speed-rush of 'Tattoo.' [Nov 2009, p.117]

The first µ-Ziq album in six years feels largely insulated from modern tends, with occasional contemporary touches leaking in. [Aug 2013, p.73]

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]

Once again ably embracing a broad range, from the knelling, Marty Robbins-ish "Death Of Bill Bailey" to the string-drenched Billy Sherrill-style ballad "This Crazy Life" to "Jamestown Ferry". [Apr 2025, p.28]

There's a kind of redemptive comfort even in the album's bleakest moments. [Sep 2006, p.91]

Forever Turned Around hovers in a midrange that's objectively nice, but lacks the vigour required of something memorable. [Oct 2019, p.39]

Fusing dub, psychedelic funk, prog, art rock and roots reggae with their native mbaqanga and township blues, they've fashioned a fresh (Afro) funky debut, politicized not sollely by colour, but also by their genre-bending vision. [Dec 2009, p. 87]

The album seems designed to be experienced immersively in the solitude of a dark room. [Feb 2013, p.78]

Its muted feel is accented by folk-blues tones that rarely break out of a shuffle, enlivened only by some buzzing electric guitar cameos by guests including Johnny Depp and Bob Mould. [Mar 2015, p.84]

Lyrically, Richards sometimes relies too heavily on the Random Stones Lyric Generator. But Richards has always worn his humour and his soul well, and these qualities are sympathetically served here. [Oct 2015, p.70]

It's a record this restless artist can settle into and build on as he continues to mature, because it solves his chronic problems while presenting huim with a newfound sweet spot. [Jul 2014, p.82]

As a whole, 4everevolution lacks the decisive sonic focus his fierce and funny lyrical barbs deserve. [Oct 2011, p.98]

These are glistening sonic fancies picked out in neon and Day-Glo. [May 2011, p.79]

Darkside opens up on Nothing with a playfully weird set of baroque pop that takes in bluesy '70s skanking and cavernous grooves. [Mar 2025, p.31]

EXPO grooves, booms and unspools in ways all its own. [Mar 2026, p.37]

A groovy, engaging listen. [Mar 2016, p.83]

His blurry lullabies, full of crimson moons and devils' wings, carry a Biblical sense of foreboding and disquiet, somewhere between J Tillman and a more whiskery Neal Casal. [Dec 2009, p. 106]

Love Yes is a dazzling electronic set that throbs with energy and emits a sensual glow befitting its focus on love, desire and sexuality. [Mar 2016, p.81]

As good a record, in fact, as anything this gifted polymath has ever released. [Feb 2004, p.82]

Musically, it predictably alternates between relentless, driving guitars and agonisingly slow dirges, but Bazan's gift lies in lyrics. [Oct 2002, p.112]

Slower than slow, softer than soft, the songs acquire an accumulative resonance. [Dec 2001, p.116]

It's exuberant dorkiness, as well as fluidity of playing, that makes !!! stand out. [Jul 2004, p.106]

For better or worse, no-one else is making records quite like this. [May 2016, p.82]

He's honest about uncertainties both personal and political. [Nov 2021, p.25]

Foster's processed vocals roam the album's glossy surfaces and robotic grooves, evoking Prince and Daft Punk, while the widescreen title track and the trippy "Glitchzig" sound like outtakes from the Tron soundtrack. [Sep 2024, p.32]

Phased guitars recall that past's sweetest '60s spot as lyrics touch on wider, cosmic delay. The epic "Might As Well Ne Me, Florinda" is the best of two Robert Hunter co-writes. [Apr 2026, p.33]

More organic and less electronic... but... still thrillingly left-field. [Jun 2006, p.106]

If there's any justice, the stadiums of tomorrow await them. [Apr 2006, p.105]

The mourning is palpable, but only on a few tracks is it tuned into art. [Jun 2016, p.71]

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]

What could be esoteric electronica is lifted by Davis' creamy, often harmonised baritone voice. [Sep 2015, p.72]

It's just a lovely collection of songs, in which the serenity of voice and understatement of band create a humane intimacy rather than anything more mystical. [Oct 2016, p.32]

Twice as long as the band's debut, it's also more than doubly assured. [June 2008, p.99]

A band that long ago perfected their sound, such collaborations rather suit them. [Apr 2013, p.68]

It's a little hard to digest in one sitting, recalling the more outre moments from Linda Perhacs, the Cocteau Twins, or Kate Bush's Aerial. But individual moments are quietly compelling. [Jun 2016, p.81]

There are times when the playing of the session band is slick to the point of blandness, and the production (by Davies and Ray Kennedy) is crisply tasteful when the songs cry out for dissonance.... But when it works, it works.

Icily brilliant. [Mar 2018, p.32]

Anyone who's still mourning the passing of Emeralds should shack up with these druids. [Aug 2013, p.68]

It's a sumptuous set-piece, nine tracks of oceanic expansiveness that shift in dynamics and mood. [Sep 2016, p.69]

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

May just be the most concise and potent distillation of Thompson's art to date. [Album of the Month, Sep 2005, p.98]

A downbeat, solipsistic but utterly beautiful amalgam of mood-altering substances and 1980s alt.rock. [Mar 2006, p.100]

There's lots to admire in this wry, beautifully finger-picked set. [Feb 2014, p.71]

He writes about his rock'n'roll background, but embraces a more straightforward twang that's both poignant and boisterous. [Sep 2018, p.32]

Frances The Mute smells like another concept album, is far too long and so pretentious as to be farcial. Amazingly, it's also mighty entertaining. [Mar 2005, p.91]

This underrated band progressively unleash waves of measured ferocity over he turbine drumming of Brandon Young toward payoffs that are staggering in their intensity. [Oct 2014, p.71]

Dedekind Cut is playful and emotionally varied, allowing for moments of rapture and joyful release amid the brooding, quasi-industrial hum. This tips over into sentimentality on the rippling strings and splashing water FX of Tahoe's tittle track, but the album remains an intriguing hybrid of Arca's fleshy rumble and the KLF's Chill Out. [Mar 2018, p.25]

It's still excruciatingly fey in places, but then you know what to expect by now. [Nov 2010, p.81]

Magnificent Fiend is both indebted to the past and utterly timeless, wild but controlled, chin-stroking clever and head-shaking dumb, referential without being reverential. [May 2008, p.88]

It is Lanegan's most accessible to date. [Mar 2012, p.83]

Apocalypse is a wild thing which dances from one side of that line [between brilliant and bizarre] to the other with never-less-than-compelling abandon. [May 2011, p.89]

For the most part, there's nothing wrong with the lyrics. "Do Unto Others" is a fine secular hymn, while "January Song" has some smart digs at the Tea Party, but, in both cases, the voice never convinces. [Apr 2013, p.80]

Acid Tongue is imperfect, but nevertheless slightly more than halfway to astounding.

These tracks feel less like performances than private reveries on which the listener eavesdrops. [Aug 2006, p.108]

The longer cuts like "Les Echos", "Ann" and "crooked Teeth" are most compelling, with loops projecting through the air and clashing like streamlined silver darts. [Dec 2022, p.32]

Dissonance and propulsion remain watchwords. [Nov 2014, p.78]

Hardly Electronic comprises 14 impeccably jangling, harmonic pastiches of Bacharach, McCartney and Free Design, with only Sasha Bell's sardonic vocals striking a welcome sour note. [Aug 2018, p.27]

The result is one of his most varied but distinct albums. [May 2020, p.35]

Previous weighty concepts have been scrapped in favour of intense focus. [Jul 2019, p.37]

The bleak piano ballad "Hello I'm Right Here," the suicidal "Hold My breath Until I Die" and the slow-burning synth-pop of "We Don't Have Fun When We're Together Anymore" all find curious joy in pain. [Nov 2019, p.33]

"It's A Common Life" is haunted by the ghost of Snapper, a sort of Antipodean Suicide, while the likes of "I Had The Starring Role" and "What Gets Me By" recall the prettier moments of Straitjacket Fits and Bailter Space. [Sep 2013, p.95]

Crowded House’s eighth studio release ticks all the expected boxes. Pitch-perfect harmonies and inventive chord sequences abound. .... Where it falls short, perhaps, is the absence of the full-blooded radio-friendly hits of old, although the shuffling “All That I Can Ever Own” is a close cousin to 1993’s “Distant Sun”. [Jun 2024, p.32]

It's a shouty, attitudinal set that connects Ke$ha to Britney Spears and Cyndi Lauper. [Feb 2015, p.75]

Vent and Nunez revel in their experiments like science nerds let loose in the lab. [Jul 2006, p.111]

Its vision of pop is deeply hermetic, caught between quiet pastoral rapture and urban resignation, Cracknell's voice a siren of sweetened melancholy. [Jul 2015, p.73]

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]

Sober and joyful. [Sep 2018, p.29]

Molina's downhome style and tender vocals coalesce with Johnson's frugger voice on minor marvels like "Almost Let You In" and "Twenty Cycles To The Ground", while the tidal hum and strum of "Now, Divide" is moodily unusual. [Dec 2009, p. 103]

The sumptuous Sea Lion sees him exploring similar territory to the Elephant 6 collective, adding notes of African highlife, Polynesian folk, Disney soundtracks and (briefly) '80s synth pop, to joyous and naively charming effect. [Apr 2008, p.99]

It works because Souleyman has never been a purist, instead perfecting a kind of global fusion that is slamming and mesmeric rather than naff. [Aug 2015, p.80]

Levi's eclectic debut strikes a winning balance between electro-glitch cacophony and shouty grrrl-pop. [Mar 2009, p.92]

You wish Neil and Chris had hooked up with a younger, switched-on, even more sympathetic producer. [Jun 2006, p.110]

It's the most potent sound to come out of South Africa since DJ Mujava's '08 left-field hit on Warp with "Township Funk." [Apr 2012, p.82]

Think Veronica Falls meet Arthur Russell, and investigate further. [Apr 2012, p.83]

Skewed hip hop soundscapes with hints of slinky R&B that could even be described as DJ-friendly. [Jul 2003, p.124]

Possibly a grower, this album is certainly better than anything Macca's done for some while. [Jan 2002, p.131]

It's not amazing... but it's great. [Jan 2004, p.106]

The best thing to come out of Sweden for a while... apart from porn. [Jul 2004, p.95]

It's mostly beautiful, and very civilised. [Oct 2008, p.81]

Singer Orlando Weeks' new themes of intimacy and dependence, add emotional scope to a band blossoming from their spindly beginnings into a meaty prospect capable of doing goth XTC, jolly Joy Divisiion, and sword-dancing Strokes. [Jun 2009, p.92]

For the Black Crowes, this is an inspired move, maximising their virtues (virtuosity, passion, guilelessness) and minimising their principal flaw (the fact that it all starts to feel a bit silly if you stop to think about it).

Wildlife rocks like rock still truly matter and isn't just so much mp3 content.

While these are thrillingly alive with Scott's undaunted belief in rock's majestic possibilities, he reminds himself to have fun as well. [Oct 2011, p.105]

Howard Devoto's arch art-rockers deliver a fresh set of oddball studies. [Dec 2011, p.90]