Glass Swords places him squarely out there on his own, programming the kind of computer-game fluoro-rave crunk that's easy to admire but hard to love. [Nov 2011, p.97]

The mechanised backbeat rarely strays too far from the dancefloor, but the ever-shifting textures keep it interesting. [Nov 2011, p.91]

The faux-naif schtick still grates somewhat, but there's also real substance, wit and heart here. [Nov 2011, p.91]

ADD is death mental headache. [Nov 2011, p.84]

Ice cool and white hot by turns, Emika is a singular and significant new voice at the interface between pop and dubstep. [Nov 2011, p.83]

This vaguely "concept" album comeback mostly consists of polished jazz-pop and coffee-table Americana with faint echoes of Steely Dan, Tom Waits and Prefab Sprout. [Nov 2011, p.83]

The results are impressive enough, though never totally successful in effecting seamless rapprochement between cultures. [Nov 2011, p.92]

The inclusio0n of a live concert DVD from 2005 add some roughness but no reason not to just go out and buy whichever Sting albums you already like. [Nov 2011, p.98]

Two decades on, it remains U2's brightest, darkest, finest hour. [Nov 2011, p.100]

The Smile Sessions fits into no present-day category, context or franchise. [Nov 2011, p.105]

Coracle is more about a kind of glittering ambiance, one forged in a liminal space between drone, electronic Krautrock and the heady shoegaze of Ulrich Schnauss. [Nov 2011, p.107]

This is one of those brakes-off country records you wish more people would have the guts to make. [Oct 2011, p.94]

It's all served with such a knowing grin that you can't help but love it. [Nov 2011, p.96]

This is a seriously dense and elaborate album. [Nov 2011, p.94]

Like all the best of heavy metal, effortless dumb good fun. [Nov 2011, p.89]

Odd missteps apart You Are All I see turns out to be one of the year's boldest, most beautiful debuts. [Nov 2011, p.81]

Compelling in its way, but a bit Isobel Campbell when it should be Joni Mitchell. [Nov 2011, p.81

An LP that's uncharacteristically respectful of the traditional country and hushed folk idioms that make it up. [Nov 2011, p.81]

It suggests that, far from being a cynical piece of auto-karaoke, the bulk of this album is motivated more by art than nostalgia. [Nov 2011, p.82]

Lenses Alien harnesses the singular vision of singer and guitarist Joseph D'Agostino to finely nuanced, feedback-soused art-rock. [Nov 2011, p.83]

It almost works. [Nov 2011, p.84]

The country double Ghost to a Ghost/Gutter Town, is the best and it's not un-experimental. [Nov 2011, p.84]

Magnificent. [Nov 2011, p.84]

The Trio's third album is similarly, unconventionally earnest, often doing for the New Romantics when Gayngs did for 10cc. [Nov 2011, p.84]

[It] sees her expanding her horizons with out scrimping on nuance or emotion. [Nov 2011, p.84]

Working In Tennessee resonates with much of the cool, complicated clarity of his very best work. [Nov 2011, p.85]

As you'd expect, his 12th album sounds wonderful. [Nov 2011, p.86]

The harmonies remain pretty, but the smoothness of those Nashville sidemen exposes the thinness of the songs. [Nov 2011, p.86]

His first album in 14 years sounds more like a Ronnie Barker pastiche, constantly playing for laughs and often reworking the calypso rhythms of "Annie I'm Not Your Daddy." [Nov 2011, p.89]

The music is tight and telepathic. [Nov 2011, p.90]

Small, but near-perfectly formed. [Nov 2011, p.90]

The results are pleasant enough but ultimately feel rather disjointed, as though this band has yet to settle into its own skin. [Nov 2011, p.91]

His songwriting style is pitched somewhere between Elvis Costello, Burt Bacharach and early Roddy Frame, displaying a knack for heart-tugging chord changes and delicately deployed Brazilian rhythms. [Nov 2011, p.91]

The result is a seductively melancholy and unashamedly serious album that claws insistently at the heartstrings. [Nov 2011, p.91]

The Hunter feels purposely immediate. [Nov 2011, p.93]

Get Lost marks him out as descendant of Manuel Gottsching and Vini Reilly, stringing pretty guitar motifs and quiet, whispered vocals into ringing loops. [Nov 2011, p.93]

Yorke aside, the attractions are few in Monkeytown. [Nov 2011, p.93]

A three-part instrumental piece, named "Heart: Attach," brings a pleasant filmic quality to an album that elsewhere trades a little too heavily on nostalgia. [Nov 2011, p.94]

It makes for a rambunctious rock'n'roll record. [Nov 2011, p.94]

It's this insistence on resolutely following her instincts that makes this record so lustily appealing from top to bottom. [Nov 2011, p.95]

It's essentially Clark in all his acoustic finery. [Nov 2011, p.96]

Ashes & Fire is an understated gem. [Nov 2011, p.96]

Self awareness and self-loss are finally balanced, especially on Portaling. [Nov 2011, p.97]

"SuperRandom" might be a better name. [Nov 2011, p.98]

High profile fans like Jeff Beck, Kid Rock and Warren Haynes help trombone shorty create what he calling "supafunk rock," a decidedly unsexy, sub-Chili Peppers amalgam with pointless horn riffs. [Nov 2011, p.98]

What's most intriguing is the way each artist gets in character. [Nov 2011, p.104]

It all sounds intensely personal and pleasingly remote. [Nov 2011, p.104]

These 19 tracks feel designed to float in a space between clear genre boundaries, somewhere purposefully undefined. [Nov 2011, p.106]

It's fiercer and denser than their 2009 debut. [Nov 2011, p.107]

More than a specific era, Real Estate conjure a sense of place and experience as vividly as any US indie film of the past five years. [Nov 2011, p.97]

It's stylistically impressive, but Worden only connects emotionally when she goes for simplicity. [Nov 2011, p.93]

After a moment of comparative restraint he returns with a double album so spectacularly grandiose you have to wear 3D specs to hear it properly. [Nov 2011, p.91]

That [the innocence of an idyllic childhood] was suddenly shattered when Lynne's father shot her mother and then himself, referenced with unsettling dispassion in "Heaven's Only Days Down The Road," renders the album's surrounding tender moments all the more heart-wrenching. [Nov 2011, p.91]

Too much of this lacks the urgent life of previous outings. [Nov 2011, p.89]

The cumulative effect of all this mid-tempo moodiness is that High Flying Birds feels awfully plodding. [Nov 2011, p.88]

There's no shortage of decent tunes. [Nov 2011, p.83]

A return to the coffee shops beckons. [Nov 2011, p.83]

Bad As Me is the sound of a supremely confident artist convening a raucous celebration of his own myth, and is multifariously marvellous. [Nov 2011, p.78]

It's far from perfect, but still one hell of a trip. [Oct 2011, p.89]

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]

The results are--as ever--compellingly inventive and seductively imagistic. [Oct 2011, p.100]

An epic study of sand and celluloid. [Oct 2011, p.98]

His strong, unfussy voice is endlessly empathetic and his guitar playing lithe and expressive. [Oct 2011, p.98]

They've really only got one trick. But it's a treat, all the same. [Oct 2011, p.98]

The wonder of it all lies not so much on the amount of ground she covers but the way she inhabits her material so convincingly. [Oct 2011, p.94]

There's little evidence [of reinvention] on a collection of soul-pop ballad s that sound like Jay Kay singing the James Blunt songbook. [Oct 2011, p.93]

This is folk music given the widescreen treatment and a crisp, modern sheen. [Oct 2011, p.91]

Although RTR are more than copyists, they cleave to a proven hybrid of speed metal, grungecore and emo. [Oct 2011, p.86]

Another triumph for the post-classical scene. [Oct 2011, p.81]

You may not be whistling these songs or dancing to them, but Biophilia's unsettling visions are compelling art. Oct 2011, p.92]

[It is] an eclectic patchwork of cinematic techno-rock and beat-heavy vocal tunes featuring stray members of the Chili Peppers, Warpaint and more. [Oct 2011, p.81]

Anderson's songs still find him leading a herd of misunderstood waifs but offer little to tempt the uninitiated. [Oct 2011, p.81]

Alas, too much of this heavily glossed and processed album lacks wit or passion. [Oct 2011, p.86]

Work is less dramatically monochrome than HTRK's debut, the Coil-like angst replaced with a more subtle existential uncertainty. [Oct 2011, p.89]

In their own way and in their own time, it's progress. [Oct 2011, p.95]

It's immaculately produced and performed, full of gorgeous vocal harmonies, extravagantly wafting flutes and often arresting melodies. But for some listeners it might be wither lacking in rawness or uncomfortably in thrall to the past. [Oct 2011, p.100]

When Nevermind rocks, it does so extremely. [Oct 2011, p.101]

It works best when her vocal is minimally adorned. [Oct 2011, p.105]

The sonic darings of his own recordings has clearly fueled the imaginations of The Cure's Robert Smith and Beck, although the likes of Snow Patrol and Beth Orton stay closer to the originals. [Oct 2011, p.102]

By attempting chillwave haze, Scando-Balearic sunlight, shoegaze and taut inoffensive grooves, Twin Sister are certainly en vogue, but also utterly inept. [Oct 2011, p.100]

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

While something could have been made of the contrast between Francis's keening howl and Paley's guttural slur, proceedings are let down by the songs. [Oct 2011, p.95]

He may not quite be the roaring pistolero of old, but mid-tempo songs like "Mockingbird Hill" and "The Highway Is My Home" are beautiful, time-ruffled distillations of border music, Tex-mex and desert rock. [Oct 2011, p.94]

It's familiar territory for the mercurial Jon Langford and company, perhaps punk's most persistent ideologues. [Oct 2011, p.93]

The primary revelation of Elsie is Fallon's voice. [Oct 2011, p.90]

A continuation of a grand tradition rather than a feeble descendant, Jones' custom tunings strike sourly sweet notes, occasionally--as on the title track--touching on raga modes. [Oct 2011, p.89]

The result is state-of-the-art pop played by a meat-and-potatoes indie band, and sounds a bit like the Stereo MCs. [Oct 2011, p.89]

Theirs remains a stubbornly extreme sound, although Celestial Lineage finds new ways to combine heaviness with solemn beauty. [Oct 2011, p.86]

On Heritage, [they're] jettisoning practically all trace of heavy whatsoever. [Oct 2011, p.86

Cropper stays fairly faithful to the originals. [Oct 2011, p.83]

Funky, funny, stately, strange, soulful and sensual, Floreat is a unique and unequivocal triumph. [Oct 2011, p.83]

While the album is packed with inventive moments, there's no more lacerating skronk, for a very good reason: the emotions the band is mirroring don't call for it. [Oct 2011, p.82]

For the most part, this is a bleak musical fable as disquieting as it is utterly compelling, as it races inexorably to its bloody conclusion. [Oct 2011, p.94]

If the aim was to out-bonkers Joanna Newsom and Kate Bush while creating a compelling album, Amos has more than succeeded. [Oct 2011, p.81]

Rock rears its head on "speed demon," but by that point, the riffs are drowned out by the sound of a joke having fatally gone too far. [Oct 2011, p.81]

After Ready For The Flood, Mockingbird time feels dense, and somewhat cluttered. [Oct 2011, p.85]

Velociraptor! makes good on the pair's loud-mouthed claims by stripping away previous excess. [Oct 2011, p.91]

While there is some noodling with electronica, it's the understated melodies that linger. [Oct 2011, p.93]