It's an album that unfurls like a flag on a battlefield, glorious, tattered, defiant, full of big choruses, vaulting harmonies, a brazenly windswept sound. The guitars couldn't be louder, bolder, more heroically deployed. [Nov 2023, p.28]

The set ebbs and flows, Cave alternating between charming and cajoling, vulnerable and scathing. [Jan 2026, p.24]

It's this mix of songwriting voices as well as the tight thematic concept of The Dirty South that makes this such a strong LP, and the new songs don't diminish that. [Jul 2023, p.44]

The first disc of 4CD retrospective of their early mid-90s work is an embarrassment of riches. [Feb 2012, p.84]

Songwriting of the highest calibre. [Sep 2003, p.104]

You don't expect progression from such evident classicists, but there's a new clarity, poise and refinement. [Apr 2004, p.107]

32 years on from Swans' formation, Michael Gira is not only still moving forward, but making some of the albums of his career. [Jun 2014, p.81]

Sweeping strings and sparse piano merge deftly with Jordan’s melancholic voice on “Light Blue”, while the fingerpicked “c. et al.” is bare-bones heartache wrapped up in tender beauty. [Dec 2021, p.33]

An album that's both sad and angry, thoughtful and impassioned, and desperate for America to escape its chequered past. [Nov 2016, p.18]

A wealth of new material for diehard fans. [Aug 2017, p.46]

Their heaviest to date. [Nov 2005, p.108]

It's been a gradual recalibration and Songs For Our Daughter ruffles more of Marling's characteristic composure: she's feeling the breeze, focused, pressing keenly forward. [Jun 2020, p.24]

In the jigsaw puzzle that is Bob Dylan, The Whitmark Demos are crucial pieces, and it's easy to get lost in the depths, the sheer audacity and beauty, of this music. [Nov 2010, p.107]

Divers feels like her most comfortable, charming album. [Nov 2015, p.80]

A classic of modern psychedelia. [Jun 2005, p.113]

The band hits an altogether richer seam on the Fleet Foxes-like “Mine Forever” and the vast sweep of the string-laden title track, rooted in the lost highway myth but sounding more akin to classic Walker Brothers. [Jul 2021, p.30]

A celebration of the inherent power of community and music’s ability to connect and resonate through the ages, created by someone fast becoming one of the most important young voices in modern American folk music. [Oct 2022, p.18]

Like any new city, this album may take some getting used to--there's beauty everywhere, but the streets are far from a neat grid. But as you walk them, Holter's genius as a sonic town planner reveals itself. [Sep 2013, p.96]

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]

There's a lighter, more hopeful bent to the musical settings, which perfectly balance the more dissonant leanings of The King Of Limbs with a sumptuousness and gentleness they've rarely sought since OK Computer. [Aug 2016, p.81]

The music here swells, surges and rages without ever losing the vulnerability at its core. [May 2024, p.31]

Lives Outgrown is a quite different prospect to Gibbons' previous work - more intimate, more personal, coloured by the grief and goodbyes se has weathered in recent years. But it is still possible to find a thread that runs from here to Out Of Season, and back to Portishead. [Jun 2024, p.23]

It's a bravura fusion of dense-art metal/pop and strutting baroque disco. [Nov 2017, p.36]

Waxahatchee's vision is clearer on Saint Cloud. [May 2020, p.34]

All are very good indeed.

An even more ambitious conceptual album that finds her sharing her insecurities, praising her heroes and going on a fairytale voyage over 19 tracks. [Oct 2021, p.30]

There are surprises everywhere. While "R&B" and "Nearly Daffodils" are sprightly, irreverent post-punk, the influence of Black Country, Nee Road nd Radiohead are evident on the complex, proggy title track and the diverse, hushed final third of the album. Lily Fontaine's lyrics, to are deep and funny. [Apr 2024, p.32]

The result is a record that confirms … Phenomenal Nature was no fluke. This is the sound of Jenkins hitting her stride – less disembodied than its predecessor, more grounded, its tone ranging from the easy warmth of Tom Petty to the steady discernment of Aimee Mann, via a little Laurie Anderson. [Jul 2024, p.28]