He’s got a trippy sense of humour (sampling a bong hit on “MORBUD4ME”), but there’s a pervasive melancholy running songs like “In The Clear” and “Gild The Lily”, as though what he leaves behind is just as important as what he discovers on that endless highway. [Jan 2024, p.40]

The early-’60s soul-jazz strut belies the emotional purpose of career-spanning songs. Van’s voice and heart are unaccustomedly youthful and light seeking a West Country grail in “Avalon Of The Heart”. [Oct 2024, p.40]

A remarkably cohesive and dynamic record that oozes flair, and feels like something of a hybrid between a solo offering and an ambitious group project. While it may escape easy categorisation, it’s unquestionably the most progressive and expansive record White Denim have made to date. [Review of the Year 2024, p.20]

While the music has incorporated a more expansive but similarly idiosyncratic palette. Fripp-esque sustain, synths and drum machines colour a beautifully constructed record that brings to mind Aztec Camera’s High Land, Hard Rain or Scritti Politti’s Songs To Remember. [Nov 2024, p.40]

In Dreams picks up the thread they’ve been weaving since their 2018 comeback, not too different from their ’90s form: shimmering, chipped guitars; resigned, mumbling vocals; a vague sense of astral longing. [Dec 2024, p.35]

Tuttle takes the krautrock flavours even further, with hypnotic Tangerine Dream-ish accents cohering around Michael’s manic melodies. It ends up sounding like nothing else in either Chapman or Tuttle’s respective oeuvres – and there’s where the magic lies. [Sep 2024, p.34]

There are ambiguities and contradictions, ecstatic visions and crises of faith. And a quest, not for some imagined grail, but for earthly and private resolutions. All fixed to music of the exquisite variety, from radiant acoustic studies to billowing symphonic pop. [Dec 2024, p.24]

He’s a figure of Springstonian heft in his native Australia. Fever Longing Still, his first album of new material this decade, further demonstrates that the rest of the world’s obdurate indifference is entirely its own loss. [Dec 2024, p.36]

“Flowers For The Unsung” teases out some quietly pretty melodies. However, the freeform avant approach of the album is not always an easy ride; the wildly experimental playing makes it a constantly surprising listen but often one that is very heavy, dense and a little overwhelming. [Review of the Year 2024, p.28]

Even if the orchestrations on their first album together are more sentimental than cinematic, father and son harmonise gloriously, finding new emotions within 20th-century standards. [Review of the Year 2024, p.31]

There’s determined strumming amid “Daily Ritual”’s Americana and “Mother Natures Scorn”’s a muscular if unplugged Mazzy Star, but the title track’s almost as ethereal as its title, while “Delilah”’s waltzing, sepia psych exploits John Barry’s Midnight Cowboy theme. [Review of the Year 2024, p.35]

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]

A previously unreleased version of Dylan’s “She Belongs To Me” mesmerisingly set to the narcotic pulse of The Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties”, a take on country tearjerker “Oh Lonesome Me”, weirdly reminiscent of Leonard Cohen. .... The set ends with Ferry’s first new song in a decade ["Star"]. .... Its smouldering brilliance sounds less a postscript to everything it follows than a new beginning, Ferry nearing 80, still alert to the sound of tomorrow calling. [Dec 2024, p.90]

Freshness shines through on this vivacious eight-track recording of 17 songs, here reproduced in flawless quality – all analogue, promises Young, who mixed the record with Stills. It sounds like a dream. [Dec 2024, p.47]

This new pin-sharp remaster of Talking Heads: 77 emphasises the freshness of the whole endeavour. .... But the real find of this Super Deluxe Edition, and the main justification for its existence, is a previously unreleased live set, forged in the white heat of CBGB on October 10, 1977. Taped a month or so before the performance featured on Side One of The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads, it underlines what an incredible live band Talking Heads were from the get-go. [Dec 2024, p.44]

The final 25-minute-long “Fünf” is most thrilling, revealing what “Animal Waves” could have been had they not been drifting in different directions in the studio. [Dec 2024, p.47]

Created in a similar manner [to 2023's Curyman], Curyman II is every bit its equal. If anything, Verocai’s arrangements feel more baked-in this time, shaping the melodies and hugging Rogê’s playfully darting tenor and fragile falsetto. [Dec 2024, p.30]

Ballads Of Harry Houdini brandishes a sharper focus than many of its predecessors, with “Barfighter” and “Devil Tongue” bristling with tension and those signature guitar lines that move like wreaths of smoke. [Review of the Year 2024, p.34]

The early US albums are particularly punchy, while Beatles ’65 makes an interesting counterpoint to its corresponding European release Beatles For Sale, and this version of A Hard Day’s Night includes four George Martin instrumentals. [Review of the Year 2024, p.43]

This LP could serve as a document of an improvising four-piece at its best. [Review of the Year 2024, p.32]

Now in her seventies, her voice is deeper than it once was, but it remains an instrument of impressive power. [Review of the Year 2024, p.27]

Arnold sings the heart out of her own standards – “(If You Think You’re) Groovy”, “Angel Of The Morning” and a triumphant “The First Cut Is The Deepest”. No “Tin Soldier”, though. [Review of the Year 2024, p.27]

Woof has to be one of the weirdest debut albums of the year, a record that throws everything at the wall in the conviction that some of it will stick and so what if it doesn’t. [Nov 2024, p.34]

This is another set of brilliant, beautiful, occasionally frustrating songs themed around ideas of ending and death. [Review of the Year 2024, p.24]

It might seem late in the day to be claiming they’ve hit their stride, but Too Cold To Hold is the sound of a differently aspected and ultimately more satisfying Warmduscher. [Dec 2024, p.39]

This new 2024 remix by Paul Hicks and Dhani Harrison brings the album into greater relief when compared to previous releases: the orchestral arrangements are brought out of the murk, Harrison’s vocals are clearer and sharper, and the album’s peculiar air of dry, ascetic starkness is increased. .... Rather than being driven by a holier-than-thou smugness, this is an album whose wracked, painful honesty and sense of deep disappointment rivals that of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. [Review of the Year 2024, p.42]

The fuzz-furred riffs of “Edin” and “Sicarus” are infectiously sharp, backed up by satisfyingly heavy rhythmic ballast, and Corgan’s voice, often underrated, is stronger since the strangulated edges loosened with age. [Review of the Year 2024, p.35]

Though producer David Holmes’ disco rhythm tracks sometimes mask it, Come Ahead now addresses addiction and injustice in expansive stanzas. [Review of the Year 2024, p.35]