While I’m not sure Veckatimest is the huge improvement on Yellow House that some blogs claim it to be, it’s unquestionably a lovely record and it deserves to be heard on land, sea, indoors and out.

What felt like daydream ideas in maturation then have been shaped into trly rounded songs now.[ Jul 2018, p.30]

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]

It’s a fantastic album, containing poppy firecrackers like “Jackie Down The Line” and moments of timeless, mature lament such as “The Couple Across the Way”. [May 2022, p.28]

This new 23-track compilation, cherry-picking the back catalogue from 1989's "Box Elder" through to 1999's "Terror Twilight," might help resolve the band's final enigma. [Apr 2010, p.102]

Still, as a whole, Bitte Orca feels nothing less than a modern equivalent to Talking Heads' Fear Of Music or Scritti's Cupid & Psyche 85 –art-rock with intellectual rigour, borderless curiosity, and no fear of the mainstream. Pop, by any other name.

A finely crafted record, whose artfulness is mediated by informality. [Oct 2014, p.69]

There is zero sense on Amadjar that this band in any way playing to an international audience; on the contrary, this music feels hermetic in its focus, guitars picking out bluesy motifs, voices rising together in mournful chorus, all tethered by a simple drum rhythm that approximates the lollop of a camel making its way across the dunes. [Oct 2019, p.32]

In this live setting, fascinatingly, the brutality to which the songs are subjected only serves to underscore their poignancy. [Dec 2005, p.100]

Great by Smith's standards. Practically genius by everybody else's. [Feb 2004, p.74]

It's a departure from previous Lanegan solo LPs... This time, Lanegan is looser, open to both experimentation and, once more, full-on rock. [Sep 2004, p.96]

Classic Objects is, on its face, Jenny Hval's most straightforward work: her songs flirt with conventional verse-chorus structure, her lyrics are clear nd direct, drawn from life. Closer listening, though, reveals Hval interrogating those experiences. [Apr 2022, p.29]

It's a record that manages to sound deeply affectionate without being sentimental. [Jun 2013, p.70]

The album's musical tone is well judged, with Hiatt equally versed in flinty roots-rock and urban country songs. [May 2020, p.26]

He's unafraid to risk sentimentality in his quest for real feeling. At the end of a vexed, troubled third album, it feels like a hard-earned affirmation of his roots, people and community he's still a part of and still committed to. [Mar 2025, p.30]

More mellifluous than menacing despite its formidable display of power, Life Metal may be the richest work in the band's 21-year-mission to reconfigure Tony Iommi-worthy riffage into a soundtrack for mindful meditation. [May 2019, p.34]

On The Spur, Shelley captures the ache and the sweetness, the loss and the love, the coming and going of it all, with greater scale and skill than ever before.

This is also a brave, compelling record that stands shoulder to shoulder with the Manics’ best.

Best of all, perhaps, the skill and imagination she displays in her arrangements suggest that there's a lot of scope for adventure in the future of a musician who found her groove but seems unlikely to get stuck in it. [Nov 2017, p.34]

Phosphorescent has followed 2010's country-rock homage Here's To Taking It easy with an equally magnificent beast, mixing country jams with claustrophobic electronica and mournful Mariachi horns to create a beautiful but discomforting album. [Apr 2013, p.74]

Sounding like a highly-evolved amalgam of their entire output--with added surprises--the beauty of this 12th album lies in its head-spinning diversity. [Oct 2006, p.134]

They sound not beaten but energised by the spectre of society's destruction, off the chain and high on a cocktail of primal garage punk, astral jazz, pitch-black blues and psych ragas both damned and divine. [Nov 2015, p.77]

It was a landmark in prog rock. [Dec 2016, p.47]

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]

The routine comparisons with Terry Riley/Steve Reich/Michael Nyman all apply, but there's something more mystical and elemental at work, too, with echoes of the Third Ear Band and Comus. [Oct 2018, p.27]

Striking enough on their own merits, free of embellishments, all the more powerful for the immediacy of the moment. Simplicity is the key here. [Jan 2020, p.26]

There are many timeless, brilliant moments. [Mar 2020, p.45]

A set of well-crafted songs that resemble PJ Harvey's collaborations with John Parish, but which mainly recall various stages of David Bowie's career. [Oct 2020, p.29]

A 75-minute intuitively guided rhythmic meditation, all five musicians playing from deep inside the music. [May 2021, p.30]

72 minutes of creeping contemplation and subdued drama. [Jul 2021, p.31]

Terrific collection. [Mar 2022, p.49]

It’s the Phenomenal Handclap Band’s Daniel Collás, as producer, who brings Jackson’s long-lost creations to life. The eight tracks here, written during the Scott-Heron era, re-emerge more relevant than ever, courtesy of a strong backing band. [Jul 2022, p.26]

Noel Gallagher, who has been writing with Weller since 22 Dreams, co-pens one of the best songs he’s put his name to in a while: a stomping piece of glammy punk called “Jumble Queen”. .... Elsewhere, Weller’s own songs are also beautifully enhanced by other collaborators. [Jul 2024, p.24]

It is noticeably better – cleaner, heavier, less muddy and filled with audacious surprises on headphones. Yet there’s no disguising the curiously wayward nature of these compositions. .... The full, six-disc boxset is an impressive package, drawing together vocal-less backing tracks, scrappy but revealing early demos and some superb 1973 BBC sessions. [Dec 2024, p.53]

Total Dive is once again remarkably cohesive. .... There’s a dramatic urgency to a lot of this music that’s sometimes distantly reminiscent of the REM of, say, “Begin The Begin”, or the wild upheavals of “Just A Touch” from Life’s Rich Pageant, perhaps the dark churn of Document’s “Oddfellows 501”. [May 2026, p.20]

The sextet's second effort is both an expression of their anarcho-punk fury and a declarartion of straight-edge commitment, but it's also a radical redrawing of hardcore's boundaries, that reanimates the genre with an aggressively intelligent jolt. [Nov 2008, p.96]

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]

Tomberlin's second long-player seems to semi-consciously urge you to move along – nothing to hear here. Yet it creates its own slow-burning allure on repeated listens. [Jun 2022, p.34]

The Airing Of Grievances is one of the smartest, most joyous records in an age, channelling the spirit of other too-clever-by-half suburban punks from The Replacements to Nirvana and adding a dash of felllow New Jerseyite Bruce Springsteen's eye for detail. [MAr 2009, p.87]

Intermittently funny and never depressing, this confirms him among America's greats. [May 2005, p.108]

In short, it needs a rigorous editor. [Feb 2005, p.94]

Spare, beautiful, outstanding. [Jul 2003, p.128]

An album that pores over the passing and the past with such defiant, deadpan nobility. [Feb 2012, p.78]

As always they are best when singing of brief encounters and regret. [Jun 2023, p.36]

Finn’s writing is sharper than ever, the various narratives driven less by the wordy exposition of yore than acute observation, devastating detail, by turns exclamatory, epigrammatic and grainily authentic.

Much here, like the outstanding "Silhouettes (I, II & III)," sits elegantly in a progressive tradition that draws on Teo Macero's collage work on In A Silent Way, David Axelrod's string arrangements, and Four Tet's own "Thirtysixtwentyfive." [Dec 2015, p.71]

These compositions are crammed with imaginative flourishes. [Jul 2025, p.33]

As ever, Case finds room for expansive manoeuvres in the gap between her lusty, orthodox pop choruses and droll, deadpan voice. Still a singer-songwriter like no other. [Jul 2018, p.24]

Margaret's melodies are often submerged, but her approach is not entirely ambient. [Aug 2023, p.34]

Overall, it's a long, strange ride, and Joshua judges ruefully. [May 2017, p.18]

Two Hands is more grounded [than U.F.O.F.]. ... The music is also rawer and more immediate. [Nov 2019, p.22]

For the 56 minutes that "Ys" lasts, all the doubts evaporate. Every elaboration has a purpose, every labyrinthine melodic detour feels necessary rather than contrived. Tempting as it is to fixate on the gilded reputations of her associates, this is unequivocally Newsom’s album.

He's made one of the great albums of modern Americana, and one suspects that a reluctant star is born.

Askew's voice and tiple remain distinctively sui generis, as does the air of fairytale enchantment about his songs of children's dream, birds and fishes, city streetlife, blue-eyed babies and brown-eyed boys. [Oct 2013, p.61]

Richter's own work sits as comfortably alongside these as Schubert and Rachmaninov, and there are further contributions from Low and Rachels, as well as Bach, and, inevitably, Steve Reich. [Oct 2017, p.52]

Most impressive is Peel's ability to take the source material and make it her own. [May 2021, p.31]

An occasional change of pace might be welcome, but the craftsmanship is beyond reproach; swings, yes, but those roundabouts. [May 2021, p.24]

Bursting with raw energy and renewed vigour. [Feb 2023, p.25]

Lanois, along with other western guests, fits organically into Tinariwen's desert blues. The collaborations help even the most furious lyrics slip down nicely. [Jun 2023, p.30]

Home Video is Dacus at her most autobiographical and lyrically direct. [Jul 2021, p.28]

It's an album of rich multifaceted complexity that showcases what a truly inimitable artist Björk is. [Nov 2022, p.24]

Her new album whizzes by in a 28-minute blur of finger-tapped melodies, lopsided time signatures and arrangements that, on tracks like "earth Eater" and "Believing IS Seeing", whip from jazz to glitter to metal with neck-snapping precision. [Dec 2023, p.36]

A truly exhilarating 50 minutes of music. [Dec 2003, p.122]

June has given us an album that is powerfully, elegantly subversive. [April 2021, p.20]

Her interest in medieval and early music offers her compositions both a somnolent beauty and a melancholy grasp of simple, slow melody that's refined and tender. ... They're stunning. [Nov 2018, p.27]

["Cheyenne" is] keenly observed and beautifully realised, which goes for most everything on Interstate Gospel. [Jan 2019, p.20]

This collects all that, plus demos and live tracks, into a demonstration of how a fabulously obscure Glasgow indie group became one of the most influential of their time. [Jun 2009, p.105]

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]

Landfall is an electro-acoustic patchwork of mostly short, mournful, quietly lovely mood pieces. [Mar 2018, p.22]

With Dave Cobb's production reinforcing their boisterous dynamism, Volunteer surveys the sacrifices Old Crow make for their music, the camaraderie of the bandmates and heroes at the expense of the stability of family and home. [May 2018, p.29]

This is familiar YLT, but that's certainly not a complaint. ... Even with two-thirds of the band in their mid-sixties, a childlike quality remains. [Mar 2023, p.36]

[A] ravishing debut album. [Sep 2015, p.73]

Love In Exile stands as a worthy summation of the trio's alchemical live shows. But there's enough here to dangle the promise that this trio formation could run and run, and this remarkable collaboration is hopefully just the beginning. [May 2023, p.33]

A blissful affair. [Apr 2023, p.25]

The mood is pained, the production suitably spare, pushing the singer's understated lyricism to the fore. [Jan 2017, p.28]

The remastered Nebraska album and Springsteen’s stately live performance – accompanied by Dylan sideman Larry Campbell and his own Charlie Giordano – complete the story, but the magic comes with the first two discs. They reveal that Nebraska would have been an incredible album if the electric versions of “Atlantic City”, “Johnny 99” and “Downbound Train” were included, but it wouldn’t be Nebraska. [Dec 2025, p.42]

Feels like the moment where the pair's music pulls into focus. [Jul 2018, p.37]

He returns in double-quick time with more selections from his 80-song lockdown splurge, but this time in a gentler, almost uplifting mood. .... Radical optimism rather suits him. [Jul 2024, p.31]

This is a record that has both groove and bite. [Feb 2026, p.37]

New Bermuda offers a tumultuous post metal that on passages of "Baby Blue" and "Brought To The Water," remind one more of the ethereal wandering of shoegaze. [Nov 2015, p.73]

Bright, socially and emotionally engaged, justifiably righteous in places, and not quite the right sort of fun for the New York scenesters. [Oct 2002, p.104]

The Harrow and the Harvest is kin to not dissimilar works by Uncle Earl, Crooked Still, Kate Fagan, even Steve Earle's rumbustious bluegrass outing with Del McCoury--and blessed by the insuperable advantage of Welch's voice. [Jul 2011, p.74]

What becomes clearest from listening to Live At The 12 Bar is the way Jansch's playing manifests a very particular physicality, working to its own internal logic, voice, and six strings running in refined tandem. [Sep 2015, p.92]

Chorus shows that they are more than worthy of re-examination. [Jan 2016, p.91]

Proves that even when their studio work was in the doldrums, REM were never less than a compelling live band. [Dec 2018, p.47]

Every song here is a miniature gem of its kind. [Nov 2019, p.22]

The whole thing underlines how productive McCartney was during this period. [Sep 2020, p.48]

Cuttin' Grass Vol 1 is Simpson's warmest, most life-affirming record by a country mile. [Jan 2021, p.26]

I Don't Live Here Anymore delivers even more of their characteristic questing wallop. [Nov 2021, p.22]

Her candid, self-interrogating lyrics and glassy, soulful voice take centrestage. [Oct 2022, p.29]

A super-sophisticated set of soul-jazz covers of songs. [May 2023, p.38]

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]

At the peak moments of High Violet, The National are magnificent. [Jun 2010, p.78]

She crafts tightly coiled rock epics with just a few elements, sounding like The Strokes one minute, Liz Phair the next. [Apr 2019, p.39]

As ever, Simon's work is a strange mix of easy and uneasy listening--it's balm, but it leaves an itch. [May 2011, p.74]

This collection is ample testament to one of the last great English avant-pop careers. [Mar 2012, p.84]

Hawley resurrects ghosts of music past and breathes new, poignant life into their forms. [Oct 2005, p.110]

It is without question a wintering record, but out of this muted musical landscape songs of great and complex beauty emerge. [Mar 2021, p.34]