An album heavy on immersive ambience. However, as the title suggests, there’s plenty of static to be found too – along with touches of deconstructed techno. [Aug 2021, p.24]

After reaching for Bowie-esque grandeur on the opening "Song For Agnes," they lock into an INXS-style chromium-funk groove on "America's Cup" and reimagine The Clash as a synth-punk band on the speed-burner "Human Touch." [Nov 2021, p.32]

Slothrust demonstrate a melodic elegance that belies their grunge-punk roots. [Jan 2022, p.29]

Still groovy, but these voyagers might want to plot a new course. [Feb 2022, p.37]

The passion of a precarious life lived by a gospel of poetry and rock’n’roll is, though, undimmed, in music of acoustic intimacy, helped by Kieran Hebden’s spectral guitars and the Webb Sisters’ choral harmonies. [Feb 2022, p.29]

A take on "White Cat" from 2017's Plum is strung out to 20-odd minutes. ... Elsewhere they approach their back catalogue with a sense of blissed-out spaciousness. [Nov 2022, p.38]

While you'll find little direct trace of Odessey And Oracle here, or of course White's distinctive songwriting contributions, Blunstone's heartfelt interpretation of Argent's classicist craft does, though, endure. [May 2023, p.34]

Dreamer is irrefutably dreamy. ... Nonetheless, she strays into other early-to-mid-'90s styles. [Jun 2023, p.31]

The bewitching tone varies from languid to experimental. [Jun 2023, p.35]

In making work that continues to challenge oppressive systems and relay his tender feelings, it’s clear Nash is very much alive in the now. [Jun 2023, p.22]

Less effectively soothing than 2022's A Journey..., it's unconventionally beguiling, more ambient predecessor. [Dec 2023, p.34]

This sprawling set is a testament to his talents not just as multi-instrumentalist but as bandleader, a rapturous unwind through sprightly bouzouki-powered jazz, soulful strings and serene New Age. [Dec 2023, p.25]

Finds The Vaccines at their terse, nervy best. [Jan 2024, p.38]

Its themes are plainly evident in the earworm metal stomp of "Many Doors To Hell" and gothic menace of "Fingers In The Wounds", although more subdued (but equally sombre) hues inform the portentous, piano-led power ballad "Shadow Of The Gods". [Mar 2024, p.25]

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]

It’s a compelling set, from the menacing “Flowers Like The Rain” and quasi-hardcore of “Six Six Seven (Monsieur Faux Pas)” to the gluey, narcotised “Bring It On”. [Oct 2024, p.40]

Its songs were built from jams, which lends them a becoming looseness; they’re also rather more Western rock than global pop, and melancholia has made its mark on pastoral-folk opener “Brave Child Of A New World” and the Zombies-ish “Those Who Came Before”. [Dec 2024, p.31]

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

Poetic ruminations largely accompanied by sparse piano and string quartet ("Coming Home", "Time To Go"), with the occasional curious detour. [Jun 2025, p.39]

A deliciously bubbling cauldron seasoned with ladles of Scott Walker melodrama and a generously pinch of Bowie-inspired balladry. [May 2025, p.33]

Downey has the chops to convince as an alt.country diva if she can step beyond this pleasant ambling contentment into more trenchant and ambitious songwriting territory. [Nov 2025, p.31]

Momentum sags somewhat over its lengthy duration - but it also unquestionably features some of their finest, and funkiest, work to date. [Apr 2026, p.34]

There are some creative dead-ends, but there is enough here to warrant a reappraisal. [Jun 2013, p.94]

Ultimately, Cardinology serves as another minor indictment of Adams’ famously lackadaisical internal editor. Neveretheless, it is still, almost infuriatingly, a stretch better than most people at their best.

Ganglians take care to lace everything with bright, primary colour melodies, suggesting they might yet follow the likes of MGMT and Yeasayer into the mainstream. [Sep 2011, p.87]

Played loud, King Night is a widescreen hallucinogen. [Oct 2010, p.104]

It's this pretence of overbearing world dominance which is realised on Thing. [May 2010, p.108]

If there's a whiff of C86-styled whimsy in this debut, then its savvy more than compensates. [Sep 2011, p.89]

It's a delightfully messy set of junkyard bubblegum garage, with Spencer squeezing out a series of choppy grooves while howling largely meaningless slogans against a backdrop of feedback and fuzz. [Dec 2018, p.33]

New Fragility is emotionally fraught but musically generous. [Mar 2021, p.28]

Things become more perverse with the corroded exotica of "Deer Ron" and "Leyline Ogres," though her weirdness is most becoming. [Jan 2018, p.29]

Pandemic restrictions demanded some creative rethinking for these seven tracks. ... Guitars are still central, however, whipping the Chameleons-like “Ricochet” along and performing as bedrock melodic clanging for the six-minute, Sisters-adjacent closer, “Tearing Up The Grass”. [Oct 2022, p.33]

Bitter but sweet enough. [Dec 2013, p.71]

Songs come bathed in sparkling synths and warming strings, but melodies are unpredictable and unsettling, bearing repeat listens. [Jan 2022, p.29]

The graceful arrangements of Owen Pallett and the pristine production of Mark Lawson, both best known for their Arcade Fire connections, ensure that the results are lovely, while the gorgeous purity of Bulat's voice glides elegantly above it all. [Mar 2022, p.25]

If El Camino was the Keys' catchiest album. Turn Blue turns out to be their sneakiest, subtlest and most seductive. [Jun 2014, p.65]

Slasher House is not so different to the last Animal Collective album, 2012's bristly Centipede Hz. [May 2014, p.69]

This time he's crafted a more parent-friendly brand of earnest pop that isn't quite as irritating, but is sadly no more engaging. [Aug 2009, p.101]

Despite its meaty themes Our Inventions feels rather slight. [May 2010, p.94]

It's hard to conceive of a more thrillingly romantic record than this. [Feb 2012, p.85]

An album that feels charged by forward momentum while also embracing the comforting pulse of a locked groove. [Jul 2022, p.31]

Her solo works have generally furnished her extraordinary voice with more obviously congruent vehicles, and Age Of Apathy is no exception. [Feb 2022, p.34]

The setting may have changed, the soundtrack is boosted and richer, grimier yet cleaner, but Skinner's predicaments remain the same. [May 2006, p.110]

There's a swaggering big-band reading of "Just One Of Those Things" and a clever soul-jazz recasting of Rhianna's "Don't Stop The Music", but otherwise Cullum has morphed into a kind of Britpop Randy Newman, which suits him well on the excellent "I'm All Over It". [Dec 2009, p. 87]

A collection of balmy disco that call to mind some tropical union between Arthur Russell and Prince. [Sep 2011, p.81]

Realism is conceptually closer to "69 Love Songs" than anything he's done since, opting for a "variety folk" sound somewhere between Kurt Weill and Sufjan Stevens, but its ratio of heart-felt-to-hokey is out of whack. [Feb 2010, p.93]

Takes his lush, orchestrated pop to staggering new heights. [Nov 2003, p.124]

It's a sometime magnificent beast of superior psychedelia. [Jul 2013, p.76]

A spare and seductively lonesome pooling of bluesy folk and electronics that eschews "folktronica" and nods to Martyn, Hollis, Crosby and Jason Molina. [Sep 2021, p.25]

[The] second album painstakingly recreates the sounds and melodies of peak-era My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, The Jesus And Mary Chain and Joy Division with a slavish devotion that borders on the obsessive-compulsive. [Dec 2012, p.77]

Possibly [his] best album. [Jun 2007, p.84]

The industrial grind of single 'Into A Swan,' glammed-up trashiness of 'About To Happen' and sinister alienation of 'Loveless' prove she's still the uncompromising outsider at heart.

This terrific record is the first on her own Everso imprint and seems to finds her more settled. [Oct 2010, p.89]

It packs plenty of the expected, full-throttle thrills, but there's more interesting, atypical action on winding, low-slung jam "The Sky Is A Neighborhood" and the six-minutes-plus of "Sunday Rain." [Nov 2017, p.26]

This is a wilful and lovably eccentric second album from a band who've had a sniff of being pop stars and decided they'd much rather be weird and esoteric, thanks all the same.

He sounds distant during "Shy Eyes'" woozy synth-funk, while "Over Your Shoulder" seems to connect his own separation and his mother's divorce in a resolute folk-pop ballad. [Aug 2024, p.31]

The stream of banjo, fiddle, bones and spoons rolls on agreeably, marred only by a tendency to tweeness. [Apr 2012, p.73]

The addition of EDM and hip-hop elements to the arsenal have a reinvigorating effect. [Dec 2016, p.37]

The RAA's narratives are as expansive as the prarie where singer-songwriter and guitarist Nils Edenloff grew up, but they're also full of resonnant, intimate detail. [Aug 2010, p.94]

Mixed, but mostly positive results. [Jan 2016, p.73]

His most towering achievement to date. [Aug 2003, p.114]

Anyone partial to the distinct strain of English folk from yesteryear, namely the sylvan otherness of Trees or dawn-of-the-70s Fairport, will find plenty to toast in the music of Wolf People. [Jun 2013, p.81]

This off-piste project has turned into a far more substantial, fully realised undertaking. [Jul 2017, p.24]

It's hard to take it quite as seriously as it seems to take itself, although there are certainly stirring moments. [Aug 2019, p.32]

It's U2's least immediate album--but there's something about it that suggests it may be one of their most enduring.

Nothings Gonna Change shimmers in spare arrangements, ghostly keyboards, textured horns, and, occasionally, a talking-style vocal style borrowed from Springsteen's Nebraska. [May 2012, p.72]

His 16th full-length recording is by some distance, Springsteen's weirdest, and most constantly startling to date. [Mar 2009, p.76]

Olympia could do with a little more of that future-facing yearning, the contemporary spirit that crackled through the remixes, to remind us of times when Ferry seemed as much a figure from our future as from our recent past. [Nov 2010, p.85]

A succinct pastiche of junglist, breakbeat and chill-out fare. [Sep 2016, p.75]

It's manically busy, demanding you strain to find the tune beneath layers of mellotrons, flutes and timpani. [Jul 2010, p.115]

It strips out their usual psychedelic sprawl, leaving something leaner and more insistent, if no less Technicolor and joyously hypnotic. [Nov 2014, p.80]

Decidedly shy of office-party pumpers, the avuncular pair decorate Snow Globe with originals and standards. [Dec 2013, p.67]

Business as unusual for Twig. [Oct 2015, p.83]

Something Dirty captures guitarist Jean Herve Peron and drummer Werner"Zappi" Diermaier plus Bad Seeds James Johnston and the artist Geraldine Swayne-- continually to shape-shift around the margins of rock. [Feb 2011, p.84]

On their third album, this Brighton via London quintet seem to have finally harnessed their Krautrock pulses, shoegazy guitars and MBV distortion to some decent songs. [Dec 2016, p.38]

The debut LP by Elias Bender Ronnenfelt's new project feels more daring still. [May 2015, p.77]

[Drummer Dave Lombardo's] return hasn't complicated Slayer's brutal, single-minded aesthetic, but it has stoked the hellfire that merely sputtered on God Hates Us All. [Sep 2006, p.97]

There will doubtless be more varied shades on future records, but for now, this pensive debut gives notice of a fine new talent. [Apr 2012, p.80]

A terrific package. [Jul 2012, p.71]

This fourth album owes obvious debts to classical cerebral dream pop. [May 2015, p.83]

Their naggingly overused Farfisa is balanced by otherwise beautifully layered, complex arrangements of trombone, electronics and harmony vox. [Apr 2006, p.118]

You're left wondering quite what point she's trying to make. [Nov 2004, p.122]

The fact that Feathers never really goes anywhere is beside the point. [May 2005, p.106]

With a new album of the less pop material from these same sessions due later this year, let's hope for some new mutations.

Singing in a voice roughly as big as the Saskatchewan plains, the cattle rancher writes lyrics full of violence, darkness and death. [Oct 2020, p.39]

There are no giant leaps here, it’s very much Interpol as you know them, but there’s plenty of micro evolutions, impressive production and subtle tweaks to make this a welcome addition to their catalogue. [Aug 2022, p.28]

When it's not straining for Significance, though, Viva La Vida is often rather lovely.

A mostly successful fusion of sonic and sartorial elegance. [May 2011, p.82]

As devil worshiping goes, this is pretty funky stuff, with a tight and bouncy tone throughout. [Mar 2017, p.35]

With Drew at the helm, however, it becomes a messier, less wholesome affair, seductively so on 'Lucky Ones' and 'Frightening Lives,' which scamper toward some grubby euphoria like a hal-cut Arcade Fire. [Oct 2007, p.87]

Hailing from the wrong coast, the Charleston, South Carolina-based Explorers Club have done the near-impossible, turning an obsession with everything Beach Boys into an utterly beguiling pop album. [June 2008, p.88

This is full-bodied, tuneful and surprisingly friendly, with vocalist Kuperus toning down the swivel-eyed hysteria for some Siouxsie-styled elegance. [Aug 2013, p.65]

All the elements are there, but somehow 5:55 doesn't gel as it should. [Oct 2006, p.124]

Youngs' atonal yelpings and the bizarre tangents his big guitar shapes take won't be to the tastes of those who like their music a tad less askew--but acclimatise yourself to Young's off-kilter take and there are some rewards here. [Aug 2011, p.107]

The occasional sense of a well-won formula being diligently followed is counter-balanced by the committed performances and a sufficiency of hooks. [Jul 2012, p.77]

It is not the truly transcendent album some may have read in the runes, but it contains several hints that such greatness may, finally, be within his grasp once more.

The resulting jams throw up a wonderful ragbag of styles, the highlight being a tribal drum stomp called "Metal." [May 2015, p.83]

Weird--but in a generally good way. [Feb 2016, p.75]