The post-punkish synth-funk of "Pagliaccio" and the "Unchained Melody"-referencing 6/8-time epic "Saviour Self" adds variety, but beneath the sonic modernism lies an artist rather too eager to be Hot Chip's more earnest little brother. [Sep 2013, p.85]

Showing off a musical muscularity built up from three years on the road. [Feb 2020, p.35]

There's plenty here for fans of both gutbucket blues and the rampaging over genres and moods that long characterised The Residents. [Sep 2020, p.35]

He sings in a hushed, fragile whisper that is a;most unbearably personal. [Mar 2021, p.35]

Opens with three tracks that feature his street set-up and have the sparse rawness of Lomax’s 1930s Mississippi Delta recordings. The other eight tracks were recorded in a studio with a full band and bounce and ricochet with the joyous energy of the Bhundu Boys at their most exuberant. [Mar 2022, p.29]

That he can still write a timeless folk-rock melody is evident in songs such as "That Day Must Surely Come" and "After The Harvest", but the contemporary pop orthodoxy of the arrangements and production is disheartening. [Jan 2025, p.35]

This is best thought of as ‘country soul’. Isbell’s words, in style and content, are old-school tears-in-the-beer laments, deftly lightened by exquisite deadpan payoffs.

Bingham's steak-potatoes-and whiskey voice hardly makes for a smooth listen, but he pours plenty of passion and desperate visions into his ragged working-class grooves. [Oct 2012, p.73]

A rum selection of Zoom collaborations with everyone from Dua Lipa to Lil Nas X, that old keenness is still there, though only on "It's a Sin," his Brits team-up with Olly Alexander. [Dec 2021, p.29]

These are brilliant songs; but they simply reminds us of too many others who got there first. [Mar 2011, p.100]

This follow-up feels almost like business as usual. Luckily, there are a clutch of standout songs. [May 2016, p.75]

Only the urgent title song stands out amid nursery-rhyme emotions. [Jun 2005, p.110]

There's a twisted melancholy to vocalist Brooks Nielsen's lyrics on this third album. [May 2013, p.71]

Gulp's debut Season Sun is spooked set of crepuscular pop, a Moogie wonderland furnished with some very good songs. [Aug 2014, p.73]

Sadly, he doesn't have the material to match his delivery. [Jul 2019, p.27]

Combined with the rich warm production, this results in a debut of largely seamless retro classic pop-rock. [Sep 2019, p.29]

Retro-futurism at its best. [Feb 2020, p.35]

Many of FoW's reserves outclass others' first team. [Aug 2005, p.115]

The remainder of In Limbo colonises the liminal space between harmony pop and spacecraft noise with giddy style. [Oct 2012, p.86]

Sparse, literate... and full of killer tunes. [Sep 2005, p.105]

The boundary-trampling spirit that makes their music stretch out almost infinitely live remains barely tapped. What keeps The Zutons special is singer David McCabe's lyrics. [May 2006, p.108]

Ballads like "Chill In The Air" and "Burden" have a stately gait, but Lee is more engaging when he turns playful huckster. [Jan 2014, p.75]

Simultaneously stupid and very smart. [Jul 2018, p.30]

It's like walking through smoke and mirrors towards an utterly empty dancefloor, a kind of nightmare inversion of TNGHT's rave exuberance. [Apr 2014, p.73]

"Give Me Love" and "Last Time" may articulate different relationship stages, but are euphoric in their own ways. [Sep 2017, p.35]

While it might have played better in 2003, it's a welcome return regardless. [Jun 2017, p.23]

It's less gonzoid than previous efforts and more effective for that. [Mar 2007, p.79]

Lean Forward occasionally falters toward generic Southern rock, but contains its share of gems. [Nov 2009, p.81]

Woozy psych-folk remains her default setting, but there’s a fresh sense of experimentation at play here. [Jun 2022, p.26]

For all its excursions into dancehall and fado, it's no advance on 2014's Rebel Heart: there's a sense of chasing trends. [Aug 2019, p.32]

Simple, unforced piano ballads sit besides florid pop singles. [Nov 2016, p.37]

Saturdays=Youth is embarrassingly earnest. [May 2008, p.102]

By now the patience of even their most ardent fans must be wearing thin

Amounts to a consolidation rather than a progression. [Jun 2005, p.97]

A spring creeps into the step of "Sunday Afternoon" and "Telephone," providing a welcome break in the weather from a band who conform a little too readily to Henry Ford's dictum of having any colour you like so ling as it's black. [Oct 2010, p.87]

Elastic raps from Q-Tip and Spank Rock, plus some ballsy vocals at last from Rose Elinir Dougall, save the venture from total ignominy. [Oct 2010, p.105]

Royal Trux's '80s junk aesthetic has since been appropriated by James Ferraro et al, but Herrema does it with a sneer that's hard to resist. [Feb 2012, p.81]

He signs off with a collection of mostly familiar songs, including three others by Webb, Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice It's All Right," Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'" and a sublime version of the Dickey Lee heartbreaker "She Thinks I Still Care." [Aug 2017, p.15]

Repeated plays reveal little charm and less real humour. [Aug 2003, p.97]

[A] promising, flawed debut. [Apr 2004, p.110]

As ambitious and compelling as psych-tinged pop gets. [Nov 2004, p.122]

Demolition is further proof that his creative instinct is still intact. [Album of the Month, Oct 2002, p.100]

Laudable, but overreaching. [Nov 2006, p.130]

This is regal, majestic pop music played with a roundheaded bluntness. Off with their heads indeed.

The Bees have a nose for sniffing out fine pop melodies. [Apr 2007, p.93]

The results sound like an update of the kind of AOR racket Pat Benatar and Heart were making in the '80s. [Nov 2007, p.116]

Scialfa's third is the most complete and satisfying of her career, the lyrical candor matched by the open-ended optimism of the band which weaves doo wop, gospel and rockabilly influences into a convincing whole. [Oct 2007, p.102]

The long-running project of Pall Jenkins and Tobias Nathaniel, also of venerable indie-rockers Three Mile Pilot, BHP peddle a slo-mo country gloom, songs of heartbreak and religious dread conducted at a desultory limp. [Dec 2009, p. 85]

A record that achieves a great deal with only a few raw materials. [Jun 2015, p.73]

[He] appears to relish the chance to have some fun and revist classic Dr Feelgood licks. [Jul 2018, p.30]

Strongly evokes a member of Foo Fighters attempting a modern Americana album, and as such is largely a punky take on the stomping arena country of Brad Paisley. [Aug 2019, p.36]

Yes, it is formative, but it is never amaturish, and where Grizzly Bear's fully symphonic songs can, at their worst, feel somewhat glutinous, the tracks of Archive 2003-2006 combine a lean feel and try-anything ambition that's well worthy of investigation. [Aug 2010, p.90]

Technically, he shows himself to be a better singer than we might have predicted from those early lo-fi recordings, but it all tastes a little sweet. [Oct 2015, p.71]

The tunes remain no more exotic than a British cottage pie, and all the meat and potatoes that entails. [Feb 2011, p.79]

They have produced a cohesive work that marries gauzy dreampop with more robust indie-rock. [Dec 2012, p.77]

In a genus so often characterised by grandiloquent gesturing, this is drama of the pensive and underplayed kind. [Jun 2013, p.74]

Antarctica is leaner then Flat Worms, and if the tunes don't hit quite as hard, then at least the smart lyrics are easier to catch. [Jun 2020, p.29]

It's a wild ride and brilliantly sequenced. [Jul 2020, p.30]

As always, you know what you're getting -- and you get that they're knowing. [Feb 2024, p.27]

Too often the slick production feels overwrought like a bad Cure facsimile and the songs struggle to breathe, though the murkiness at least conveys the sense of doomed romance. [Apr 2026, p.26]

Monuments To An Elegy constitutes an unexpected return to form. [Jan 2015, p.66]

B'Day sounds oddly de-energised. [Nov 2006, p.100]

The best tracks put a unique stamp on these improbable hybrids. [Sep 2012, p.75]

The sound is monumental, the lyrics discursive. [Feb 2015, p.87]

Snaxx is more informal collection of sample-based miniatures that sound like the architectural blueprints for larger hip-hop epics. [Aug 2019, p.32]

Narcissistic (“Black Hole Baby”, a montage of radio praise and day-in-the-life mission statement), earnest (“crushed.zip”, an anxiety-fuelled showcase for singer Orono’s sugary-sad voice) and deeply weird. [Aug 2022, p.33]

The Atmosphere is intimidating and nervy--a far cry from cosy campfire kumbayas. [Feb 2011, p.94]

While these 12 songs shake no foundations, they hold their own. [Sep 2019, p.34]

Tricky is back with his best album in at least a decade.

Evangelicals sing of skeletons, snowflakes and things that go bump in the night with witty samples and imaginative arrangements. [Mar 2008, p.87]

A series of disconnected ideas rather than one concentrated work. [Oct 2018, p.24]

Within And Without charts a familiar shimmery beachscape between Julee Cruise and Lynchpop, early OMD and Slowdive. A couple tracks emerge from the haze. [Aug 2011, p.89]

His first solo outing has enabled Ben Gibbard to try on new stylistic contexts as if they were outfits. [Dec 2012, p.71]

This delightfully unlikely collaboration is as much fun to listen to as you suspect it was to make. [Apr 2020, p.26]

A mildly Enya-fied take on the kind of astringent orchestral punk pumped out by Montreal's Constellation label, it has its moments. [Mar 2016, p.77]

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

A typically excellent set of unusual songs. [May 2016, p.82]

Adios expands on 2014's The No-Hit Wonder by incorporating heaps of soul, a pinch of sprightly folk and swampy blues. [May 2017, p.25]

Maybe Earth isn't packed with abstract intricacies to pore over like most of the other records he's been involved with, but it is fundamentally honest to its creator. [May 2020, p.24]

It's nimble stuff, but the most moving contribution comes from the late Buck Ownes. [Jan 2008, p.104]

The band’s decision to keep things on more orthodox tap seems to have been accomplished at the expense of some of their spirit.

The band generally favour simplicity and great hooks on this fine second album. [Mar 2015, p.84]

Curdled cuts of lover's R&B are oddly beguiling, but best are the dancier cuts like "Warlord," a blissful excursion in strobing percussion and luxurious, frothy synths. [May 2011, p.88]

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

Despite the air of contemplation, there's plenty of energy. [Sep 2004, p.98]

What Labyrinthes lacks in instant anthems, it makes up for in rich melodies, grand orchestration, and blooming arrangements, that stop short of bombast. [Jun 2009, p.92]

It's disappointing that nothing else on the record even enters the same solar system [as "1 Thing"]. [Aug 2005, p.92]

Too many songs like "Spiral" lapse into mere pleasantness, but the clockwork body music of tracks like "Middle" and "Lady Luck" is compelling. [Jun 2011, p.86]

It's fitting that this debut contains at least half a dozen exquiste songs that could work in any idiom. [Feb 2008, p.80]

A grown-up record that hints at a more excitable wayward past. [May 2009, p.91]

HudMo has toned down the high contrast and adopted a softer, soul/R&B-pop style. [Jul 2015, p.77]

The glossy production and soaring choruses make it as resolutely user-friendly as her previous albums. [Sep 2012, p.81]

Snoop's patter soon descends into G-funk pastiche and cretinous misogyny. [Feb 2007, p.85]

If he sometimes misfires... K-OS at least has inventiveness in his sights. [May 2007, p.96]

Like Tragedy & Geometry, it's awash in vintage synthesised sounds with which fans of Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel will be familiar, but remains considerably more concise than this (and its predecessor) suggests. [Jan 2013, p.77]

Revisits the kind of understated, politically slanted synth-pop that defined the Minnesota band's last two Trump-haunted albums. Nut Leaneagh also digs deeper on more hopeful, personal ruminations. [Mar 2020, p.35]

If anything, Damage And Joy underscores the Mary Chain's strengths. [Apr 2017, p.36]

There are very few other albums this year with as much force, verve, and sheer musical imagination as That Lucky Old Sun. [Sep 2008, p.84]