It's when Slowthai turns the lens inward on the soulful "NHS" and loved-up "Feel Away" - featuring James Blake and Mount Kimbie - that he proves himself something of an original. [Mar 2021, p.37]

Night Surfer is a swashbuckling set of blasted guitars and rootsy grooves. [Dec 2014, p.80]

The alleged political subtext is pretty opaque, while the rich sonic mix strays into tasteful inertia in places, but the prevailing mood is eclectic and energised. [Mar 2017, p.37]

A set of abstractions that are essentially pop in nature, rather than avant-garde. The seduce from the start. [Feb 2016, p.84]

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]

The trio deliver devotional, soulful, throat-reddening gospel on Move Upstairs, where the odd rough note only adds to the one-take authenticity. [Jul 2017, p.26]

You can almost hear doors swinging shut in monastic apartments, as he abandons his perfectionist MO to grapple with faith and loss over mangled voice demos and musique concréte sheets of rain. [Oct 2022, p.36]

Her piano work enviably deft, she still opts for just guitar and brass on the title track, but "paradise" offers the easy-going charms of early Diana Ross, while producer Leon Michels helps lighten the mood further on "Running", adding sax and drums. [Apr 2024, p.35]

The results are startling, setting Womacks's distinctive voice against stark electro backings and thunderous beats. [Jul 2012, p.75]

A couple thin tracks aside, Exile is a richly layered sonic feast slathered in alluringly discordant noises. [Sep 2017, p.26]

While groups like Thee Silver Mt Zion and Godspeed You! Black Emperor overegg everything, Moss works a far more thoughtful, nuanced seam. [Jul 2017, p.34]

The textures are deliberately synthesised, but the songs themselves couldn't be realer. [Oct 2018, p.34]

Chrissie Hynde's worldly ache elevates any lyric, here drawing worthy partners for a set of duets. Spare arrangements coloured by organ and pedal steel mid-tempo, statically framing the singers. [Dec 2025, p.31]

Metz, whose fusion of sludgy guitar tone, boiled-down hardcore attitude and smartly sardonic lyricism, if not quite outright throwback, certainly has the quality of a studious tribute. [Oct 2017, p.32]

Theirs is a shambolic but tuneful take on glam and punk, one in which everyone sings and spunky attitude is more important than production polish. [Aug 2017, p.38]

Even if Lahs isn't quite the album Allah-Las believed they were making, it's still a minor marvel. [Nov 2019, p.21]

Further evidence of his dazzling wordplay. [May 2005, p.103]

One of the missed opportunities of Cass Country is that it isn't especially revelatory about Henley, as a man in late-middle-age taking stock of his life. As a country album, it is perhaps a little too neat, a little too polished. [Nov 2015, p.68]

Fans of Fad Gadget and Add N To (X) take note. [Nov 2005, p.108]

Margo's curled-lip rock sneer and urgent folk purity stay sides of the same coolly distanced conviction. [Apr 2022, p.26]

They've yet to match the live genius of the [Arcade] Fire, but their album's got much more life than their static stage shows. [Aug 2006, p.95]

Idiosyncratic to the last. [May 2026, p.29]

We find their extreme metal interspersed with more reflective moments. [Dec 2014, p.80]

Suitably laid back and gently psychedelic, unhurried guitars wringing through the breeze, harmonies washed in from The Notorious Bryd Brothers. [Sep 2023, p.32]

Burch's sings sound familiar, but her lyrics cut straight through the warmth and sweetness with frank reflection on relationships and, on "Asking 4 A Friend," scoring drugs. [May 2018, p.26]

By the end of the album, you crave some drama, what you're left with is actually pretty serene. [Apr 2015, p.69]

Konoyo draws inspiration from Tokyo Gaksu, players of gagaku, a Japaneses classical music. You can discern this in the gentle drones and fluting of the opening "This Life," but it's soon all transformed by the producer--as it is on the fizzing "Keyed Out" or the lovely "Mother Earth Phase"--to the subordinate role in Hecker's rather more epic sonic drama. [Nov 2018, p.30]

Prove[s] Haas has more to offer than ear-crunching cacophony. [Sep 2005, p.105]

Lyrical references to stargazing, sprawling jasmine and the passage of time paint a picture of the infinite, and our small place in it, that is heightened by the band's soaring melodies. [Mar 2021, p.39]

More often Big Music reanimates the band's founding spirit of adventure. [Dec 2014, p.80]

A welcome return. [Apr 2021, p.27]

What lingers is that vivid voice. [Jun 2021, p.25]

You could say this kind of record - produced by Dan Auerbach, who's also on guitar duty, for his own label - that plays to a revered, even fetishised aesthetic. ... With a band of experienced session hands. ... [Finley's] mastery is proven. [Jun 2021, p.25]

At times the pace crawls, but James' supple, intimate vocals are engaging, and the sonic palette shimmers inventively. [Mar 2013, p.73]

It's a wild ride, by turns embracing and disorienting, its tracks ranging from brief instrumental stings to stately arias, though the highlights are the moments when Longstreth's pop sensibility is most audible. [Apr 2025, p.35]

Not for the first time, their presentation is inspired but the material can fall a little flat. [Jun 2017, p.37]

Things Happen That Way isn’t an exemplar of his style, nor (clearly) is it a late-career blooming, but it is a richly resonant farewell from a maverick veteran. [Oct 2022, p.32]

The fruits of his change of mind are bittersweet and eloquent alt.pop songs that recall Bon Iver. [May 2016, p.82]

Another fiercely fashionable and languidly ambitious collective. [Apr 2002, p.108]

The results are inevitably polished - but, crucially, never overly so. [Sep 2025, p.28]

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

Grae cruises eloquently over booming, soul-sampling backdrops that recall Jay-Z's recent triumphs. [Dec 2004, p.150]

Shlon is in some senses a return to his roots, combining the lush Arabic romance poetry of collaborator Moussa al Mardoud with Hasan Alo's techno arrangements. [Jan 2020, p.28]

At 32 minutes, the album doesn't hang about, but offers in that time Shellac's signature intensity and repetition. [Dec 2014, p.80]

Broke is an pleasant surprise. [Feb 2015, p.73]

Muse are so bursting with energy and ideas, even their joke songs are stadium-sized barnstormers. [Oct 2022, p.33]

18 tracks--and stylistically it's disparate, but that's the point. It's a one-time postcard. An advert for uninhibited experimentation. [Aug 2019, p.25]

Campbell respects the original material's emotional temperature but glams it up with fizzing synths, strobe-light bass and woozy rhythms. [Sep 2025, p.27]

Included here are three variants on tracks Lynch used in Twin Peaks Series 3, plus another 18 instrumentals whose translucent synths and pent-up melodrama slot very much into the show's aesthetic. [Sep 2018, p.29]

Their most collaborative but also most pointedly personal, reckoning with loss, queerness and self-actualisation through music that is as adventurous as it is immediate. [Dec 2021, p.27]

Jazz remains the root of his sound, with Washington’s saxophone as bold and vibrant as ever. But the grand orchestral sweep of albums past is pared back, replaced by adeeper engagement with hip-hop, funk and soul. [May 2024, p.41]

The Quebecois duo channel Suicide's proto-punk minimalism on the charming, drum Machine-driven "L'ile Aux Bleuets" and take rhythmic cues from Stereolab on English language ode to simpler times "Parc De Beauvoir" - while album standout "Le Fei" is four minutes of giddy, childlike joy. [Jul 2024, p.31]

His gentle voice sits amid occasionally baroque arrangements, the simplicity of which ensure his more complex songwriting skills remain accessible. [Feb 2005, p.76]

Meditative, agitative and seductive throughout. [May 2019, p.32]

There's nothing in here not to love. [Jun 2018, p.30]

With Nashville stalwart Tony Brown co-producing, she flexes both empathy and interpretive might. [Jun 2016, p.75]

Rancid's "Olympia, WA" sounds like an Americana roadtrip rebel anthem with Old Crow Medicine Show's Ketch Secor in the passenger seat; Harry Styles' "Sunflower, Vol. 6" gets redone as acoustic lovestruck magic. [Oct 2020, p.39]

Allways is as mercurial as it is highly listenable. [Nov 2018, p.26]

The album is less of an indignant affair than you might expect. [Sep 2006, p.84]

As usual where Cheap Trick are concerned, the fast ones are much better than the slow ones. [May 2021, p.24]

Sympathetic rock collaborators have written fine new Mavis albums in her spirit, and her gigs are exhilarating revival meetings for her friend Martin Luther King's mission. Focusing on those new songs, these 79th-birthday recordings don't quite capture that fervour. [Mar 2019, p. 34]

It all adds up to an album that is pleasantly quirky rather than revealing. [Jan 2014, p.71]

Their best work moves beyond pastiche into broader sonic terrain. [Feb 2015, p.82]

Donnelly's unselfconscious voice recalls Kate Nash and Lily Allen, but she both angrier and less suited to straight-up pop. [Apr 2019, p.28]

It's haunting, purgatory stuff. [May 2025, p.39]

The Great Learning Orchestra approach Ono's instruction pieces with integrity and wit. [May 2025, p.35]

While the warm melodicism of "Dime Amiga" and the soulful "Ando Con Miedo" respectively suggest Gruff Rhys and Panda Bear as kindred spirits, folk rhythms define the exuberant centrepeiece, "La Lucia". [Aug 2025, p.39]

Weird details stud essentially conventional songs by a band who sound energised, and in many ways The Coral's true kin. [Apr 2024, p.31]

The lyrics can be trite, but the guitar is accomplished, and the title fits. [Aug 2016, p.71]

"Shock Out" and "Money Machine" are straightforward exercises in the sort of hellfire dancehall The Bug does so well, but there's a restraint here too, best seen in the haunted heartbroken "War." [Sep 2018, p.35]

In The Blue Light might thus be a rather tardy, and expensive, way of going with his initial instincts. [Oct 2018, p.22]

The fastidiously rehearsed dementia is better sustained than on Your New Favourite Band. [Aug 2004, p.91]

At best, Hissing Fauna... posits its creator as the missing link between Hot Chip and Morrissey. [Mar 2007, p.88]

Fragmented and diffuse, Wyatt's second official album is occasionally guilty of being merely decorative. [Dec 2014, p.81]

Nothing Important offers more of idiosyncratic "ritual community music," as he calls it. [Feb 2015, p.75]

They've unleashed the rock monster within. [Feb 2015, p.87]

It's never a challenging listen, evoking distant, blinking skyscrapers, buzzing streetlights and echoes of the previous night's warehouse rave. [Mar 2015, p.78]

Kuti plots a way forward with the high-energy "Shotan" and "Corruption Na Stealing", his message ultimately uplifting. [May 2025, p.32]

There's a comfort, a natural ease, to Black Lips's Apocalypse Love that could never be mistaken for laziness. [Dec 2022, p.25]

A clutch of the group's best songs are strangely omitted from the setlist, while slower numbers like "Beneath Wild Wings" tend to expose a lack of subtlety. But at full pelt, Howlin Rain are a match for anyone. [May 2014, p.76]

There's no cathartic yelling, but feelings are certainly to the fore in eight tracks that features violin, clarinet, lap steel and piano, with a guest spot (on "Just") from ambient psychedelicist M Sage. [Dec 2025, p.36]

Spend The Night emerges as the dumb-riffed album Courtney Love tried to make with Celebrity Skin. [May 2003, p.94]

An explicitly confessional record attempting to make sense of, and give vent to, a degree of personal turbulence. [Jan 2026, p.25]

[A] solid offering in a drizzle of bleeps. [Oct 2014, p.79]

Her reinterpretations restore some of the post-punk edge to a band long overshadowed by its frontman's solo hubris. [Dec 2019, p.29]

An album of gently textured art pop, the lightness of her voice and almost ethereal sounds in direct contrast to the diaristic darkness of lyrics that explore raw, familial emotions. [Mar 2026, p.29]

The new takes largely work well, underscoring the compositional strength of the original songs. [Jul 2021, p.31]

Clark turns in one continuous lachrymose piece that ebbs and flows with sinuous grace and is edgy enough to intrigue Hollywood. [May 2016, p.71]

Chords is a stark, minimal listen--but one that rewards patience. [Jul 2019, p.24]

It is readymade for a kegger; the problem is, on this, their third LP, they have yet to shape their influences into a sound they can call their own. [Oct 2012, p.77]

As a whole, West of Eden is extravagant and ridiculous, but it embraces its own erraticism. [Mar 2020, p.29]

The quality varies but certainly hits the mark here and there. [Dec 2014, p.81]

Kozelek's latest aims for a similar kind of dolorous charm, plus Spanish guitar, and often succeeds. [Feb 2015, p.80]

Sirens may be the most acutely personal and deeply unnerving music Kevin Martin has ever made. [Jul 2019, p.30]

This is an album that twitchily turns away from a pat genre tag. [May 2014, p.81]

A resounding success. [Jun 2003, p.92]

SOPHIE effortlessly crosses detailed, quartz-like avant-garde production with pop's unapologetic, dizzying sugar rush. [Sep 2018, p.39]

While "Choir In The Wires" showcases Watson's forte for lustrous, wide-scope chamber pop, more characteristic is the gentle hush of "House On Fire". [Nov 2025, p.39]