Seun Kuti leaves no doubt as to who wears the crown on six songs that exude enormous confidence. [Oct 2024, p.37]

While nowadays one might be tempted instead to call this ‘post-jazz’. Nonetheless, perhaps the best way to think of Butterss’ work is as simply ‘jazz plus’. It’s suitably inclusive and ultimately most reflective of her sweeping ambitions. [Nov 2024, p.32]

With synths foregrounded for their texture and percussion a feature, they’ve shifted orientation without losing their identity. [Nov 2024, p.34]

The darkness of his vision remains unmatched. [Oct 2024, p.36]

While the songs sometimes get swallowed up in the maelstrom, Ackermann’s unit proves more than capable of manifesting a sort of grotty malevolence rarely heard since Killing Joke’s imperial phase. [Nov 2024, p.41]

Frequently offers moments of joy. A wider range of live musicians – harp, clarinet, violin, vocal ensemble – give songs like “Collect Color” and “Big Dipper” room to breathe and lend sparser, more electronic-based tracks like “Violetlight” and “Heartwood” a sense of intimacy by comparison. [Nov 2024, p.37]

It’s material that’s fascinating just as much for what it tells us about pop culture as it does Lou Reed, from a time where pop and rock hadn’t become overly codified and nobody exactly knew what music teenagers would fall for. [Nov 2024, p.55]

Tracks like “Our Hometown Boy” and “Chrome Mess” stand out, all high-chiming happy-sad harmonies and fuzzed-up bubblegum psych-pop jangle, but a richly flavoured, wonky-fringed, charmingly sloppy-slouchy mood shapes the whole album. [Nov 2024, p.37]

Combines Richard’s quietly soulful voice with sparse soundscapes in even more affecting style. [Nov 2024, p.41]

Doubling down on the Deadhead-to-Lagos sound of “Frisco Beaver” may mean fewer surprises but the band’s loyal herd will no doubt savour the greater prominence of keyboard-driven freakouts and the greater fullness of grooves like the one that powers the mighty “Ouroboros”. [Nov 2024, p.36]

Their first LP is an imaginative amalgam of electronic pop, avant noise, psych-folk, freeform jazz and kosmische on a panoramic scale, which both delights and surprises. [Oct 2024, p.37]

So full of imagination and life-enhancing radiance that you could wallow in their fragrance all day. [Nov 2024, p.43]

This companion volume of archives gives us an opportunity to hear the roads not taken, the hesitations, to feel the jeopardy at each artistic crossroads and experience the risk and wonder of the journey anew. Across seven hours, six discs and 98 tracks, this is an astonishing bounty. [Nov 2024, p.44]

The band shift tempos and settings constantly, veering into the space rock of Tangerine Dream and the kosmische jams of Can. In these juxtapositions between styles, Blood Incantation find an operatic drama as big as all outer space. [Oct 2024, p.33]

He writes evocatively about his home state of Texas, which lends these songs a vivid backdrop. [Nov 2024, p.31]

With the band showing no loss of force or focus, the latest is another essential if discomfiting listen. [Nov 2024, p.36]

Honey finds Snaith embrace sampling and AI vocal processing to refine a sound that pops with possibility. [Nov 2024, p.34]

The outpouring of creativity is exciting: but where this clearing-out of the songwriting archives leaves The Smile now is anyone’s guess.

While Jack McNeill’s woodwind accompaniment lends “In The Green Chapel” and “As” a bucolic atmosphere with an edge of ever-present threat. Meanwhile, snatches of Macfarlane’s elegant words add further intrigue to a wonderfully original piece of work. [Oct 2024, p.43]

It’s an incredible, accomplished confection, kept on track by Greep’s way with a tune and the grotesquery of his ear-catching lyrics. [Nov 2024, p.36]

Whether her anguish is existential or emotional is uncertain, but the song’s downbeat nature makes it an unusual album exit. What is abundantly clear is that Bock’s creative star is very much with her. [Nov 2024, p.38]

Moonchild Sanelly guest on “Streets Is Calling”, woozy dub soundscapes accompany “The Traveller”, Afrobeat and Afro-Cuban rhythms collide on “Shaking Body”, and the sense of jazz as a hybrid, liberating form is unselfconsciously embraced. [Oct 2024, p.33]

It leaps between the glitch-hop of “Bezerk” to the android hymn “Don’t Go”; from the thumpy funk of “In My Head” to the pulsating UK garage of “Something”. It also employs some audacious samples, like the drumless samba that backs “Walk In The Park”, or the Cuban rumba groove under the vaporous soul of “Mood To Make Love”. But it’s unified by Lowe’s soft, supple voice and a quiet air of hope, warmth and radiance. [Nov 2024, p.40]

It may surprise some, and disappoint others, but this is a record that ultimately finds Sparhawk turning pain into a kind of spiritual beauty. In that, it continues his work of over three decades, from the spectral I Could Live In Hope right up to the imploded noise of Hey What. [Sep 2024, p.22]

There’s the customary minor-key acoustic lilt played out at a range of tempos somewhere between rumba and reggae, served with the occasional light garnish of bleeps. Far from being a problem, that’s almost certainly the way Chao’s fans like it. [Oct 2024, p.35]

Thurston Moore’s ninth solo album might begin with a weirdly angular nursery rhyme set to sparse plucked strings but he’s soon bending his guitar into all sorts of freaky shapes on an album that stands among his best solo works. [Oct 2024, p.37]

Finds his laconic voice soundings more Lou Reed-like than ever. The songs, though, are classic Wynn, all psych and jangle. [Sep 2024, p.39]

It can be quite hard to pin down what they’re trying to do. This makes Orchestra Hits curious, even if their mining of goth and the ’80s, with its attendant melodrama and gestural angst, isn’t always successful. [Oct 2024, p.41]

Their pop songs always leave traces in the memory, but the real gems occur when they take it slow and low. [Nov 2024, p.43]

With Wasser’s careworn voice centre-stage and basic parts recorded live with her simpático band, there’s a new simplicity, swing and airy languor in play on these 12 eloquent, soul-pop songs. [Oct 2024, p.37]

Five Dice, All Threes sounds like they’ve caught up with themselves: even if Bright Eyes are struggling to scrape together optimism about the future, there is every reason why their fans should. [Nov 2024, p.30]

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

The irresistible “It’s Mine Now” cheats tragedy by taking ownership; “Siren Song” finds its folkloric sea legs after flailing; “Grand Final” grabs the moment with jubilant pop panache. [Oct 2024, p.40]

It’s all interestingly varied stuff, although the chopping and changing of styles makes it hard to get a handle on who The Voidz really want to be. [Oct 2024, p.33]

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 are thrills aplenty, particularly the raging “Broken Boys” and surprisingly Gary Numan-esque “Moth To The Flame”, but despite the mournful “I Belong To”’s validation and redemptive closer “Sunrise”, the mood’s still frequently dark. [Nov 2024, p.43]

It’s a vibrant and genre-spanning collection, from the stripped-back piano house of opener “Wanna” via the UK garage flavour of “Waited All Night” (featuring xx bandmates Romy and Oliver Sim). Elsewhere, there are touches of R&B, disco, pop and electro-funk as the record unfurls with all the grace and flow of a masterful DJ set. [Oct 2024, p.43]

The many versions of that song [Ballad Of A Thin Man] sprinkled throughout the discs illustrate the fluctuations of interpretation, form and commitment that were a feature of Dylan’s first tour in eight years, unremarked at the time but now on full view. [Nov 2024, p.48]

While the recitation by guest Moor Mother lends form and force to “Our Mother’s Lights” and Fujita’s saxophonist father adds Jan Garbarek-like lines to three other tracks, the album is otherwise distinguished by the music’s shimmering beauty and other sounds that glide overhead like the birds evoked by the title. [Sep 2024, p.33]

As Shirt progresses, grungey riffs begin to cut through on “Itch” and the White Stripes-y chorus of “Rag”. Elsewhere, his slacker songcraft commands evermore empathy as “Voices In My Head” employs a neat acoustic motif and “Music” offers a piano-led lullaby to close a short, deceptively sweet affair. [Oct 2024, p.41]

It’s all strong enough to hopefully attract listeners beyond Tindersticks’ hardy fanbase. [Oct 2024, p.43]

Pure electronica, like the understated “Only Silent Words” and viscous “A Time Mirror (Biophony)”, is appealingly reflective too, but often one yearns for the unexpected, which “A Colour Field (Holocene)”’s slowly developing melody and a series of “Life Study” vignettes fortunately provide. [Oct 2024, p.41]

This Is BASIC plays as galvanising and gleeful, not only to audience effect but clearly for its makers, too. In all of that, it’s anything but. [Oct 2024, p.32]

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

For all the dark corners of her ever-changing self she avidly explores, the intrinsic brightness and irrepressible energies in her songwriting continue to enrich the experience of accompanying her. [Sep 2024, p.31]

Pure pleasure with an experimental edge. [Oct 2024, p.34]

Whatever the provenance of these songs, Indoor Safari is marvellous, by any reasonable critical metric a glorious confection. [Sep 2024, p.26]

While a little lacking in variation, it’s a most welcome return for a band who have come out of retirement but still know how to land a punch. [Sep 2024, p.36]

The band's deepest and most accomplished effort yet. [Oct 2024, p.40]

The Odeon version is everything you remember, played out in a lunar glow, Young and Frank Sampedro’s guitars like burning rivers flowing into each other, Neil’s guitar emerging from the maelstrom like something blown by a solar wind, at the time unlike anything you’d heard. .... Of the unreleased songs on these discs, it’s not hard to see why some of them have never found a home. [Oct 2024, p.44]

“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]

It comes from a place of vulnerability, but speaks the language of strength and self-belief, with enough to share around. [Oct 2024, p.38]

On this ninth album of originals, Rev frontman Jonathan Donahue elects to vocalise in a soft whisper rather than his characteristic starry-eyed warble. It works best when their chamber-pop soundbaths are punctuated by rhythmic hooks and ear-catching lines. [Sep 2024, p.37]

The fourth album by childhood friends Carlotta Cosials and Ana Perrote is a masterclass in simple but devastatingly effective melodies. [Oct 2024, p.36]

Generally things are slower and less musically direct, and so you have an amalgamation of alt.rock, leftfield folk, pop, jazz and touches of electronica. However, while stylistically varied, it can feel a little lacking in variety and dynamism at times, as it very much sits in mid-tempo mode for much of the 12 tracks, the sprightly pop of their early period rarely appearing. Johnson feels nicely in sync with his band though, who possess both precision and personality in their playing. [Oct 2024, p.42]

Manning Fireworks, his third studio album and maybe his best, sounds like the Drive-By Truckers backing Vic Chesnutt. [Sep 2024, p.36]

Hang In There With Me radiates everything great about Rigby’s trademark Phil Ochs-y folk-punk, and the spectacular “Dylan In Dubuque” is a droll, defiant promise of more where it came from. [Sep 2024, p.39]

The opening, “Sky Hooks” is beguiling, too, while “Hooked Paw” amps up the dub and woozy quotients to unique effect. [Sep 2024, p.39]

Enumclaw’s second album further confirms the impression of a group combining most of the virtues of The Replacements at their snottiest and Violent Femmes at their most confrontationally awkward. [Sep 2024, p.30]

He’s on top form for the slow-burning, “Wish You Were Here”-ish title track and the wonderfully dreamy “Sings”. .... A hidden gem is the bonus track “Yes, I Have Ghosts”, a harp-led Celtic waltz that’s as affecting as anything in Gilmour’s canon. [Oct 2024, p.34]

Talkie Talkie benefits from a sharpening of focus even if the instrumental foursome remain determined to recombine such normally disparate elements as sun-scorched psych, Caribbean rhythms, Turkish disco and the kind of rock bravura rarely captured outside of an ’80s movie soundtrack. [Oct 2024, p.31]

Anderson's admiration and affection for this feminist icon is such that you come away from Amelia with a greater respect for those who keep on taking risks. [Sep 2024, p.28]

This is deluxe lava-lamp music, pleasantly pretty at worst, hypnotically beautiful at best. [Sep 2024, p.33]

Woodland is ultimately about these two people, these two voices, and these two guitars. Never is it more moving than when there are simply playing together the way they might at home, blurring the line of who is singing lead on “Howdy Howdy” or who is picking which note on “The Bells & The Birds”. Adding new flourishes to their core sound, Woodland is a beautiful addition to their catalogue. [Oct 2024, p.63]

Reunited with his band, orchestrated and multiplied, Cave surfs a swelling tide of preposterous proportions. He is the wild god, a wearied charismatic presence, flitting between the songs. Nobody else sounds like this. [Oct 2024, p.26]

Though the more sweeping likes of “Black Heart” evoke the menace and grandeur of Angelo Badalamenti’s scores for David Lynch, there’s an appealing degree of rattle, clatter and noodling elsewhere as Wallumrød and Silvola commune with the spirits of Harry Partch and Charles Mingus. [Oct 2024, p.41]

Squint hard and it could be Beck’s Midnite Vultures run through a flanger pedal and recorded on a Maxell C60, but that’s no bad thing. [Oct 2024, p.34]

There’s a suitably euphoric rush to tracks such as “Sun Come Up” and “Golden Hour” as McAlmont’s vocals soar gloriously over Dickson’s layered synths, the banging dance rhythms and surging choruses evoking Ibiza rather than California, Faithless rather than The Beach Boys. [Aug 2024, p.35]

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]

It feels as though the band have carved out a new sonic space for them to operate in while still retaining their own identity. [Sep 2024, p.32]

Running the gamut from freakbeat to post-Sabbath blues rock to dark prog invention. [Sep 2024, p.50]

Ian Gillan doesn’t attempt as many sky-scraping howls as he once did but still delivers characteristically rascal-ish lyrics such as “Lazy Sod” and “A Bit On The Side” with swagger and relish. [Aug 2024, p.32]

The chugging arrangements are often overwrought, and the lyrics slightly too pleased with themselves, but Hawk's lusty baritone croons lend passion and swagger to salacious funk-pop confessional "Big Cat Tattoos" and the sardonic, self-lacerating "Questionable Hit". [Sep 2024, p.33]

Dwyer's unique hiccupping rhythm continues to dominate, ensuring the band are distinctively Osees, but this is the group's most experimental and unusual record for a few years. [Sep 2024, p.37]

This is much more of an Esperanza Spalding album than a Milton Nascimento one. But what Spalding has been able to do successfully is subsume herself into the world that Nascimento has created over the last 50 years – a dreamlike realm of folkloric myth, plugged into nature’s heartbeat. [Aug 2024, p.28]

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

KGLW now take their foot off the gas via this countrified, ’70s rock’n’roll set with a warm, relaxed air. [Sep 2024, p. 37]

It’s a decent primer on the culture, but the real treasures are the deep cuts, namely some radical dub remixes of punk also-rans (Generation X’s “Wild Dub”, Angelic Upstarts’ “Different Dub”) and a string of projects from Dennis ‘Blackbeard’ Bovell, including the gloomy skank of 4th Street Orchestra’s “Za-Lon” and Matumbi’s sunny, horn-powered “Point Of View”. [Aug 2024, p.53]

It’s their most reflective and measured set yet, a record of personal experiences with broad-spectrum resonance for our peculiar times, still charged with the thrill of creativity. [Aug 2024, p.33]

For all Metheny’s experiments with electronics, or the orchestral sweep of albums such as 2020’s Dream Box, these solo pieces on baritone string guitar contain his essence of mellow melodicism and romance. [Aug 2024, p.38]

On first listen, Cellophane Memories sounds reliably Lynchian in its hypnagogic moans, bluesy torch songs and voluptuous slow-motion noir-scapes. But it also pushes beyond these familiar tropes, notably by layering, intertwining and tape-reversing Zucht’s sultry mezzo-soprano vocals on deliciously weird stand-outs. [Sep 2024, p.29]

Makes good on the promise of 2022's Big Love Blanket by finetuning their melodic instincts without sacrificing the anything-goes chaos that makes them such a thrilling proposition. [Sep 2024, p.37]

There are further pointers to the record serving as a noisy epilogue, its energy and venom a reminder of when they, and their devoted following, were much younger souls. [Sep 2024, p.39]

There are several lengthy, furious, deliberately alienating diatribes from the Jamaican feminist poet Staceyann Chin, whole sections in French and Steve Reich-style phase-shifting sound collages. All of this does a slight disservice to some excellent songs. [Sep 2024, p.37]

Birds & Beasts is nothing if not vivid – a summoning of the mythical American landscapes that kept pilgrims heading west. Despite its antecedents, the album is rarely conventional. [Aug 2024, p.41]

Tight but loose, Are Possible sits nicely alongside other hypnotic, folksy acts like 75 Dollar Bill and Natural Information Society. [Sep 2024, p.29]

A 3LP set captures Sunday’s entire show, and there’s a shorter ‘best of both nights’ version – which surprisingly, but perhaps thankfully, skips “Country House” – but there’s no questioning the band’s enduring energy and charismatic chemistry, whether emphasising “Under The Westway”’s Bowie fixations or “The Narcissist”’s unforgettable hooks. [Sep 2024, p.29]

There’s a sometimes bipolar feel to the 10 original tracks, particularly the first half, before the four singles crash in to save the day. .... Sleevenotes, memorabilia, alternate takes, B-sides and demos galore, although vibrant live cuts such as a 1979 tear through “Message In A Bottle” offer the most value beyond curiosity.

At times they sound as if they are seeking to recreate The Clash, before suddenly erupting into jagged film-score strings (“Blue Kite”). [Aug 2024, p.32]

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]

“The Wraith Behind Our Eyes” sounds like the kind of thing Ian Dury might have come up with if he’d been raised in sunny California, while the New Age jazz flourishes of tracks like “Threaded Dances” hit home what a unique concoction of flavours and sounds Izenberg has put together here. [Aug 2024, p.35]

Songs still betray their freestyle origins in what is Wand’s most exploratory album to date, from the disquieting “JJ” to the seven-minute churn of “High Time”. [Aug 2024, p.40]

Down-home majesty. [Sep 2024, p.29]

While about as niche as it gets, this is a strangely endearing and subtly beguiling album that does much more than just send you to sleep. [Sep 2024, p.29]

It’s all impossibly good, from the walloping riff that drives opener “Reason To Hide” through hardcore thrasher “La Plage”, the grunge-pop of “Here It Comes” and the jazz-dub title track, right up to the steadily building whirlwind of ominous closer “Gunboats”. [Aug 2024, p.39]

The core trio of Chris Gunst, Brent Rademaker and Farmer Dave Scher, plus various friends, excel on the breezy optimism of “Falling Forever”, while the mellow vibes of “Faded Glory” recall Teenage Fanclub at their sunniest. [Aug 2024, p.31]

Justin Moore’s “Here Comes My Girl” and Brothers Osborne’s “I Won’t Back Down” both sound like expensive karaoke. The best tracks take more than a few liberties with the source material. [Jul 2024, p.41]

He may not offer many surprises – those Beatle-esque inclinations remain ubiquitous – but he does pull in some impressive guests. [Aug 2024, p.35]