A suite unreliably narrated by a character named Miami. ... The album is a wittily wrought soundtrack of his delusions. [Dec 2017, p.25]

Frequently appealing. [Nov 2005, p.103]

The likes of "Hard To Beat" and "Cash Machine" jack not just the offbeat skank and dubby bass of The Specials but some of their creeping dread and downbeat humanity as well. [Aug 2005, p.92]

Cast in pale sunlight with a touch of frost and Darby's fragile, close-mic'ed voice their focus, these 13 unflinching songs call to mind "Some Velvet Morning" and "fade Into You". [May 2026, p.29]

Violence, guilt, betrayal and despair assail singer-lyricist James Graham's protagonists, while Andy MacFarlane marshals something miasmic, sometimes glistening synth glides and doleful guitars, suggesting Johnny Marr's wilder Smiths experiments. [Feb 2019, p.37]

Love Hates lacks some of the naive charm of their debut and a couple of attempts at Garbage-style industrial pop set the album off on the wrong foot. But the all-or-nothing passion that courses through "The Breath Of Light" and "For The Wild" is quite something. [Feb 2019, p.29]

Whether flirting with doo wop, mixing psych and a cappella gospel or channeling John Cage via TV On The Radio it charms at every turn. [Jan 2015, p.74]

The heart-tugging moments play to that devastatingly effective Appalachian-style yodel in Bulat's voice. [May 2020, p.25]

Some of these pieces are more like performance art works than songs. [Feb 2015, p.83]

The meanings might be obscure, but Chiaroscuro is still deluxe cinematic pop by hugely accomplished composer-producers. [Feb 2014, p.76]

This is a much more expansive and impressive affair [than his 2022 debut]. [Feb 2025, p.39]

When You're Ready is a sharply confident debut, as Tuttle proves an expressive vocalist and an idiosyncratic songwriter. [May 2019, p.37]

The droll self-awareness and blunt strum of their songs may have you thinking of The Go-Betweens, but it's more a general stylistic flourish that has The Goon Sax coming across as classic Brisbane pop. [May 2016, p.74]

Cold but somehow comforting. [Jun 2019, p.27]

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]

Malin would've been wise to trim the 13 songs down to 10, thus eliminating the soggy middle of this otherwise crisp platter. [Apr 2015, p.80]

The 64-year-old artist time-travels to her formative years, bringing unexpected twists to 10 radio hits. [Aug 2019, p.31]

Banks is an earnest singer with an ear for complex anthems--she's at her best when letting big emotions rip. [Oct 2014, p.67]

Another blast of super-slick soul. [Aug 2005, p.102]

All round, it's more than the sum of its parts, if not quite the event that is clearly hope for. [Feb 2017, p.40]

A remarkably evolved variety of break-up album, one whose match of melodicism and bruised romanticism makes it somehow suggestive of Lou Reed's Berlin as rewritten by Paul Simon. [Feb 2020, p.33]

Most of the artists here, among them Moby, Miike Snow and Cibo Matto, find rich source material at the melodic end of her catalogue. [Mar 2016, p.77]

A paucity of strong tunes remains his Achilles heel, but no-one else does wasted decadence with such persuasive panache. [Feb 2015, p.80]

For all its easy charms, Triplicate labours its point to the brink of overkill. After five albums' worth of croon toons, this feels like a fat full stop on a fascinating chapter. [May 2017, p.22]

With its wild swings between pummelling dirges and more symphonic exercises in doom-mongering, seventh album, The Gospel, evokes the more artistically ambitious but no less menacing likes of Killing Joke and Swans. [Apr 2016, p.69]

Oddly, this works a treat. [Feb 2014, p.77]

The default setting is dancefloor hedonism with an air of wistful nostalgia. Best of all are the two Bernard Butler co-writes, “Glitter Ball” and “Home”, which sound like Saint Etienne at their most ecstatic. [Sep 2022, p.21]

It's weird and enticing, hypnotic and jarring. In a word: it's Chasny. [Sep 2021, p.33]