Fear Trending is a fully realised album which stands equal to anything this consistently inventive band have done thus far. [Feb 2015, p.82]

What most surprising is the diversity here--the sense of direction is not pressing, but ultimately there's plenty to revisit. [Nov 2010, p.94]

Thrillingly perma-bored, sarcastic and suffused with the stench of inadequately ventilated student accommodation. [May 2018, p.28]

Aside from the roistering music, what makes this ultimately so appealing is they way McCaughey and Wynn universalise their subject.

Hadsel sounds both ethereal and earthly. [Dec 2023, p.27]

This follow-up to their 2014 debut blends antique-sounding folk tracks with glossier electronic numbers including "Die Young," which cocoons premature death in pretty harmonies, and "Kick Jump Twist," about the quest for instant fame. [Jun 2017, p.38]

The brilliant "Oya" places the sisters' voices front and centre, swinging from Bjork-like vocal gymnastics into a Yoruban spiritual. Elsewhere, Russell winds the pair's cajon and Bata beats into wonky boom-clap rhythms that smartly complement the romantic "ghosts" or "Think Of You." [Apr 2015, p.77]

Bittersweet melancholy is rarely more refined. [Nov 2022, p.38]

The highlights are "TH", "RL", "KTYWS" and "WAL", which all dig deep into Quincy Jones=style late-70s boogie and disco: a riot of rubbery, pitchwheel-assisted synth basslines, smart horn stabs and Cleo Sol's flirtatious, harmony-laden vocals. [Aug 2025, p.37]

The arrangements... are ambitious and richly textured, producing work that rewards repeated listening. [Jan 2003, p.117]

Another relaxed but enigmatic foray into modernist roots territory to stand alongside records by Gillian Welch, Laura Veirs, Sparklehorse and Bonnie "Prince" Billy. [Jun 2004, p.98]

It's breadth is pleasing, aiming for something more hooky than Factory Floor's typical brief. [Sep 2018, p.30]

What's surprising is how structured it is, even if little will have been recognisable to devotees. The pleasures lie not only in lengthy stretches where they lock together instinctively. ... It's also in the tension leading to these moments. [Jan 2022, p.38]

Country Funk unearths further lesser-known practitioners of this mythical genre. [Sep 2012, p.101]

This is much more of an Esperanza Spalding album than a Milton Nascimento one. But what Spalding has been able to do successfully is subsume herself into the world that Nascimento has created over the last 50 years – a dreamlike realm of folkloric myth, plugged into nature’s heartbeat. [Aug 2024, p.28]

While never musically abrasive, [it] is riddled with enough trademark lyrical barbs and sung with sufficient Eartha Kitt-ish snarl that the listening is never too easy. [Nov 2006, p.134]

Dulli remains a restless and unpredictable frontman, constantly distorting his voice from a soaring falsetto into a bellowing bass, as though he's just getting started. [Mar 2020, p.27]

[It] strikes a finer balance between ['Year Of Meteors'] and the magic folk realism of her earlier work. [Apr 2007, p.116]

Cut The World blow Hegarty's songs to grander scales. [Sep 2012, p.73]

Radiohead have made their most well-behaved, classically structured album since "OK Computer."

Old Punch Card is surprising and, at points, quite brilliant--it'll make your ears double-take. [Nov 2010, p.97]

While "Symmetry" and "Say Hello" seem destined for pole positions on motivational playlists, such displays of ebullience are well balanced with evidence of Wye Oak's more melancholy side. [May 2018, p.37]

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]

The group conjure a brilliantly ludicrous trash-pop poetry, hymning girls with gammy eyes on night buses--all much more seedily evocative and enjoyable than erstwhile Yummy Fur comrades, Franz Ferdinand. [May 2009, p.77]

Over the course of 80 compelling minutes they roam laggardly through rural post-rock, prog, folk, ambient and doom metal pastures without ever trying your patience. [May 2009, p.80]

The music is strikingly minimal throughout, the emphasis is firmly on The Word and the Beastie Boys have plenty left to say. [Jul 2004, p.108]

So, no startling change of pace, direction or feel, then. Instead, what Tindersticks sound like on this subtly strong album is a band with restored self-belief, again loving doing what they do better than anyone else.

As the title wryly suggests, they work as an ambient field, though the pairing of soft-chiming strings and vaporous synth drone in "Mossy Stump" makes it a standout. [Sep 2025, p.31]