A dazzling set that even outstrips 2020’s Source, with the bearing of a modern classic. [Oct 2024, p.34]

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

The group confidently flits between low-key funk, lush symphonic Philly soul and the more punchy post-Motown dance grooves of Chairman Of The Board, the constant being Rowland's powerfully assured vocal delivery of his mea culpa confessionals. [Aug 2023, p.28]

This duo's songs are genetic pop mutations, scampering out of control. [Apr 2013, p.73]

A dazzling return. [Apr 2020, p.30]

A tightly visionary work addressing the isolation and mutilation of World War I soldiers; if it’s unforgiving and unflinching in focus, that’s needed, to give voice to such suffering. [Oct 2022, p.29]

Lyrically and vocally, Houck is as witty and insightful as the come, with that cacked voice making everything sound sacred or profound. [Mar 2024, p.33]

It's a fabulous collection. [Mar 2023, p.36]

Beautiful, weird and wasted, Songs For Judy never lets us forget it. [Jan 2019, p.28]

It's comforting and surprising, full of trad sounds electrified by the off-kilter vision of an artist whose recognition as one of Americana's finest voices is long overdue. [Feb 2016, p.67]

Bowie’s Berlin is more about a state of mind, a population and its thinking than an actual place. Brian Eno and his intellectual playfulness; Robert Fripp’s alien guitar; Tony Visconti’s embrace of meaningful technology. Between them they gave Bowie the materials to build a city larger and more magnificent than anywhere you could hope to find on a map. [Nov 2017, p.44]

In many ways, it’s everything you could want in a Spiritualized album. [Mar 2022, p.22]

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.

It's a great illustration of how the trio are even more than the sum of their considerable parts. [Jun 2023, p.25]

There's an urgency to The Leaf Library's latest that's unlike anything we've heard from them before. [May 2026, p.33]

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

Highlights--there are many. ... Masterful. [Jul 2018, p.28]

Her best in two decades. [Dec 2003, p.120]

More, and even better, of the same--one of the dead-cert Albums Of The Year. [Album of the Month, Apr 2005, p.96]

Even better [than Time Skiffs]: consistently inventive rather than merely quirky, it makes sincere effort to get to the emotional core of what they do. [Nov 2023, p.25]

These 16 ineluctably lovely songs are his most personally reflective for some time. they're also among his most structurally straightforward. [Sep 2025, p.33]

Hark! I Inside the Old Year Dying is a singular thing. [Aug 2023, p.18]

The scratchy lo-fi production doubles its mystery, resulting in an album of sensual pleasures and magical power. [Mar 2013, p.77]

This is Tinariwen as deep and darkly compelling as we've ever heard them. [Apr 2026, p.32]

Klaus Dinger’s Apache beat and Michael Rother’s steel reels of guitar still have elemental power. ... The National, and Stephen Morris (of New Order) and Gabe Gurnsey, acquit themselves adequately, but Neu!’s music is so singular, there’s next to no point trying to take the material on, even in tribute form. [Oct 2022, p.46]

A considerable advance on predecessor 604.... This is sublime, subtle, subversive stuff. [Dec 2002, p.150]

A brilliant fusion of no-wave disco, dub-punk, early Factory aesthetics and post-rock technique. [Dec 2002, p.134]

An album of beautiful songs that sound like something you might get from an unusually upbeat Leonard Cohen. [Nov 2024, p.43]

It’s just five tracks, barely half an hour of music, but worth the wait in gold. ... Particularly on the radiant “Make Lovely The Day”, where she’s accompanied simply by Steve Hackett’s fluttering acoustic guitar, it’s like hearing the greatest British singer of her generation for the very first time. [Jul 2022, p.33]

It's a vibrant set with a live feel, alternating between rowdy folk-rockers and some of Thompson's most poignant ballads. [Mar 2013, p.77]

Evokes Watt's early mentor Robert Wyatt at his most enthralling and adventurous. [Mar 2020, p.37]

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

Only a couple of tracks into Bonny Light Horseman’s third album, it’s clear this is something special. Beauty erupts from the vocal harmonies of Eric Johnson and Anais Mitchell, who lift the Technicolor folk-rock of “Lover Take It Easy” into something close to heaven. And then it keeps getting better. [Jun 2024, p.29]

Live At Goose Lake is messy, thrilling and utterly unhinged. In other words, it's The Stooges at their best. [Sep 2020, p.44]

A singular, rhapsodic triumph. [Apr 2007, p.94]

Another Spiritualized album. Another great Spiritualized album. [Oct 2003, p.120]

Divers feels like her most comfortable, charming album. [Nov 2015, p.80]

Primrose Green is disorientating, casting new light on modes you thought you knew well. [Apr 2015, p.65]

Dawson is able to soar gloriously over Circle’s layers of sound, while the group are stronger with his mighty voice and melodies elevating their tumult. The rest of us are just lucky to be able to dive into these seven songs, as heavy as Redwood trunks and as complex as cladoxylopsids. Cue thunderclap.

Does the reissue/repacking thing properly. Forty years after they kicked-off post-punk in a blaze of punk, funk and revolutionary praxis, Gang of Four bow out with a box that deserves a place in the history books. [Apr 2021, p.38]

Tip Of The Sphere represents McCombs' practised skill as a shaper of his own world, with pride in his craft, a deep respect for tradition and the drive to refresh it via his own, idiosyncratic iteration. [Mar 2019, p.18]

Live At The Fillmore 1997 stands as both an outstanding document of a great rock'n'roll band at full throttle - and as good a live album as has been made by anybody. [Jan 2023, p.32]

Few artists combine concepts of arcane and contemporary quite as atmospherically as New York's Odetta Hartman, who uses the banjo to provide melody and age but then embeds songs with dance beats and sound effects, before adding timeless jazz-folk vocals. [Sep 2018, p.30]

Kiwanuka is loaded with memorable songs, but the best way to experience them is by listening to the album from start to finish. [Nov 2019, p.26]

Super Furry Animals have just made perhaps the defining record of their career. [Sep 2005, p.100]

It's entirely addictive--one fix and you're hooked. [Jul 2018, p.36]

[An] exhilarating companion piece. [Nov 2020, p.49]

As a celebration of classic songcraft, it is as sincere as any of Dylan's many forays into traditional American roots idioms. [Mar 2015, p.65]

The title, which translates as “breeze”, is a neat metaphor for these eight tracks’ lightness of touch and calm enrichment, whether that’s shivering exquisitely in “Namopi” or tilting at Alice Coltrane’s Kirtan: Turiya Sings with “Rana”, the luminous and trippy, epic closer. [Review of the Year 2024, p.34]

A stunning record. [Aug 2023, p.23]

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

[The] now East Memphis-based artist comes off as an eloquent country/folk songsmith. [Feb 2017, p.26]

It is easy to make music that is difficult and it is easy to make music that is beautiful. But it is quite the trick to be both at the same time, and on Hey What, Low mark themselves out as masters of the art. [Oct 2021, p.16]

This is surely one of the most magical pop albums of 2003. [Sep 2003, p.112]

BRM's second is a dazzling stylistic display. [Oct 2021, p.25]

He tells a sad story but one enlivened by his skills as a guitarist, his expressiveness as a singer and his insights as a lyricist. ... Every song has at least one line that will stop you in your tracks, some songs two or three. [Nov 2021, p.18]

Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas' latest masterpiece is dense but unfathomably gorgeous. [Nov 2025, p.28]

This is hypnotic stuff. ... A record that feels genuinely transportive. [May 2023, p.30]

Nelson remains the supreme interpreter of American song, and age has wearied his fretboard fingers not even slightly. [May 2023, p.32]

There's a mystical bind to UFOF that grips the listener and never lets go. [Jun 2019, p.24]

This new mix gives Phil Lynott's poetic vocals more room to breathe but without diminishing the venom of a fiery foursome at their hard-riffing peak. [Mar 2023, p.50]

Inside there’s one masterpiece and three very fine records, all remastered. ... As on most of Hard Luck Stories, the remastering is barely noticeable, but the previously unreleased bonus tracks are more notable.

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]

Beautiful, meditative music. .... Although it does its job cinematically speaking, this is much more than just background music. [Review of the Year, p.24]

It's a modern masterclass in psych pop. [Feb 2024, p.31]

Benji is brutally sad, which may prove a deal-breaker for anyone who appreciated the comparatively light Among the Leaves, but it never feels gratuitous or exploitative. [Mar 2014, p.84]

Head Above The Water is a triumph of sensitivity, as Power's exquisite voice gives shape and contour to folk-centric songs that assimilates elements of country, jazz and experimental drone. [Jul 2020, p.33]

A record as sonically rich as it is lyrically bold. [Apr 2025, p.35]

A surreal, tender, revealing record. [Nov 2005, p.104]

The quartet concentrated on developing more pleasurable lines, and on well-structured songs rather than open-ended jamming. [Dec 2013, p.59]

It's romantic, it's exhilarating. [Jul 2020, p.26]

Restlessly inventive, Hot Chip also manage what many bedroom eclectics don't: crafting a genuinely organic, proper album, and the relaxed enthusiasm that drives this debut is absurdly infectious. [Jun 2004, p.94]

Musically, this is probably the richest collection of songs Vlautin has written.

This record’s peers might be Astral Weeks, Starsailor, Music For A New Society, New Skin For The Old Ceremony and, in particular, Mary Margaret O’Hara’s Miss America. She’s not out of place among these ghosts either. If you’ve ever been spellbound by those songs of love, loss, wonder and despair, you need to listen to Lisa O’Neill. [Mar 2023, p.24]

One of the most compelling albums Tyler has made. .... Time Indefinite seems to stare into the heart of what the country is tight now, in all its fragmented, polarised turmoil; the state of the nation in perfect sync with Tyler's own troubled state of mind. [May 2025, p.26]

This set of songs are Pollock’s richest and most melodic. Her dusky alto voice, once compared to Dusty Springfield, is weighty with newfound wisdom, ushering the listener to come closer where the subject matter shifts from the confessional to more straightforward narrative storytelling. [Nov 2025, p.30]

Porterfield has a way of entwining lyrical detail and broad sentiment that is compelling and original. [Sep 2012, p.76]

A remarkably cohesive and dynamic record that oozes flair, and feels like something of a hybrid between a solo offering and an ambitious group project. While it may escape easy categorisation, it’s unquestionably the most progressive and expansive record White Denim have made to date. [Review of the Year 2024, p.20]

If the music and lyrics are both impressive, though, it's the interaction between them that makes Stumpwork such a triumph. They work together and against each other, pushing and pulling, fighting arrhythmically or slipping into step as the moment demands. [Nov 2022, p.38]

They're now a glorious band. [Feb 2007, p.76]

The relative brevity of these four pieces permits an easier engagement with their approach, with the way these three remarkable musicians, while working at their own pace on every level, continue to explore a sound-world and a collective methodology entirely of their own conception. [Mar 2023, p.18]

Diehard Moggers fans may bemoan the omission of obscure personal faves, but the belters title is well-deserved. [Nov 2015, p.95]

It's a short, ineluctably lovely set, light, bright and often dizzyingly joyful, but also thrillingly unpredictable, with complex, jazzy arrangements against which Walker's phasing gently pushes and pulls. [May 2021, p.16]

LSD features some of Smith's finest writing. .... You couldn't ask for much better. [Nov 2025, p.31]

Jaw-dropping. [Jul 2003, p.136]

The album may be even bolder and more bracing than the theatrical experiment that preceded it. ... She sounds fearless in every sense of the word. [May 2023, p.20]

Iechyd Da feels a culmination of all he set out to do. It’s a record that beckons you over and invites you in, that rewards your faith and careful listening with moments of extraordinary beauty, unflinching honesty, a sonic exchange of love. [Review Of The Year 2023, p.16]

Weller's 12th solo album is characterised by cut-ups and sound collages, built around riffs and grooves. There are fadeouts and fade-ins mid-song, vocals come heavily treated, instruments are strafed with sound effects. Essentially, Weller is making a virtue of his processes. [Jun 2015, p.65]

The whole of American Head finds Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd examining the nature of family, love, death and nostalgia with a sincerity and tenderness that's been missed. [Sep 2020, p.29]

Unreleased mixes, instrumentals and PiL's semi-legendary 1979 concert at Manchester's Factory are worthy additions, stretching the dense, dubby miasma out for four hypnotic hours. [Dec 2016, p.51]

Here are profound expressions of timeless love, nostalgic memories of relationships past, reflections on fulfillment, grief, desire, belonging and habitual non-belonging. [Aug 2023, p.35]

Even by Head's own lofty standards, this represents a late-career masterpiece. [Jun 2022, p.29]

Avoiding sentimentality, this quality unexpectedly turns out to be vital to the album's success. [Nov 2022, p.18]

A beautiful record. [Mar 2003, p.100]

Instantly satisfying, but its charms and mysteries will resound for years. [Mar 2022, p.25]

Purple Mountains is an excellent return to form for Berman; a worthy next chapter for a songwriter who quit, many believed, in his prime. [Aug 2019, p.30]

A bewitching album. [Mar 2025, p.31]

With its scratch groove and percussive shuffle, "Back At The Start" is about as busy as they get, but it's a masterclass in the persuasive power of less is more. .... For the most part, Crown Of Roses succeeds via its concentrated hush, a rootless simmer that suggests the imminent arrival of a full storm. [Sep 2025, p.32]