ZW have sensibly resisted the urge to shape their sound for arenas, the gaseous disco of "Coming Up For Air" and the darkly glittering instrumental "Elusive" underlining the poignancy that was always their trump card. [Nov 2014, p.84]

Overlooking the rare lapse into anodyne mellowness, it would appear Evelyn's got his future-soul mojo back. [Nov 2013, p.75]

Today We're The Greatest boasts a gentler nature than Lost Friends. [May 2021, p.31]

He and the band skillfully avoid any notion of contrivance, instead bending these vintage styles to persuasive effect. [May 2020, p.28]

A substantial return to form. [Mar 2014, p.73]

As LaFarge tells it, Rhumba Country is partly the tunes he hummed to himself while reaping and sowing. Fine tunes they are as well. [May 2024, p.35]

Apache holds its focus on straight-ahead vintage soul-pop, blending mid-tempo workouts and big weepy ballads with swampy shuffling grooves. [Sep 2016, p.78]

Very much a reflective affair, rendered in warm acoustic folk tones and coloured by Mellotron strings and piano. [Dec 2025, p.33]

It's hard to deny the emotional weight and beauty of Polly's personal, if comparatively uncommercial, sixth album. [Jul 2004, p.108]

Passerby is an acoustic record of great subtlety and warmth, so much that it overcomes the chick-lit preciousness of Randell's lyrics. [Sep 2014, p.75]

For My Parents is an sentimental as it is majestic. [Oct 2012, p.84]

Impressively, the lustrous-voiced Reid has changed tracks without derailing the train. [Feb 2025, p.39]

comforting reel-to-reel tap hiss haunts each track, and you imagine this will sound particularly good on vinyl. [Mar 2016, p.96]

Space Gun fizzes with an energy and seamless melody that recalls the band at their mid-'90s peak, and there's an intriguing assortment of songs to be found. [Apr 2018, p.27]

Sola can be detached but is at her best when she leans into the songs. [Feb 2024, p.35]

There is much to enjoy in The Past We Leave Behind's darker moments. [May 2015, p.78]

She's a brilliant reinterpreter and sounds far happier in Raitt territory than she ever did as a Morissette clone. [Feb 2003, p.84]

Lighght is a giddy rush where the 38-year-old's innocent pursuits and guilty pleasures collide head on. [Jun 2014, p.79]

As is usually the case with archival material of this kind, nothing here is any improvement on the finished product. These tracks are, however, humbling reminders that what we end up hearing as astonishing lightning-in-a-bottle transcendence is very often the result of repetitive, labour-intensive hackwork. [Aug 2024, p.46]

An irreverent and enjoyably silly listen. [Mar 2003, p.100]

It's an interesting academic exercise that has resulted in a gently beautiful and coherent recording. [Dec 2021, p.25]

It's '60s-soul funky rather than frenzied testifying. [Sep 2014, p.76]

There's still a preponderance of fuzzy guitars--notably on "Ching," where they almost overwhelm Lorena Quintanilla's vocals--but elsewhere, as on "It Must Be The Only Way," her dreamy vocals provide a welcome contrast to droning guitars. [Oct 2016, p.32]

Jeremy Gaudet's Jonathan Richman-esque speak-sung tones breathe life into protagonists widescreen-daydreaming their way out of drudgery. [Feb 2021, p.29]

Bid's songs are as dapper as ever, their concatenation of light-footed pop, bossa and la variete winsome and delightful. [Jun 2026, p.33]

There’s plenty for prog loyalists to appreciate in the knotty polyrhythms, hopscotching bass and divebombing guitar excursions of tracks such as “Harridan” and “Chimera’s Wreck”, but genre agnostics may find more inviting access points in the sumptuous stripes of rueful melody, nuggety riffs and widescreen pomp-rock dynamics that Wilson and friends create. [Jul 2022, p.31]

A little too polite in places, O'Donnell's piano-and-strings pastorals deepen in gravitas with repeat listens. [May 2020, p.31]

The songwriter digs into the sound of his intense inner voice here. [Jun 2020, p.33]