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

May just be the most concise and potent distillation of Thompson's art to date. [Album of the Month, Sep 2005, p.98]

A downbeat, solipsistic but utterly beautiful amalgam of mood-altering substances and 1980s alt.rock. [Mar 2006, p.100]

There's lots to admire in this wry, beautifully finger-picked set. [Feb 2014, p.71]

He writes about his rock'n'roll background, but embraces a more straightforward twang that's both poignant and boisterous. [Sep 2018, p.32]

Frances The Mute smells like another concept album, is far too long and so pretentious as to be farcial. Amazingly, it's also mighty entertaining. [Mar 2005, p.91]

This underrated band progressively unleash waves of measured ferocity over he turbine drumming of Brandon Young toward payoffs that are staggering in their intensity. [Oct 2014, p.71]

Dedekind Cut is playful and emotionally varied, allowing for moments of rapture and joyful release amid the brooding, quasi-industrial hum. This tips over into sentimentality on the rippling strings and splashing water FX of Tahoe's tittle track, but the album remains an intriguing hybrid of Arca's fleshy rumble and the KLF's Chill Out. [Mar 2018, p.25]

It's still excruciatingly fey in places, but then you know what to expect by now. [Nov 2010, p.81]

Magnificent Fiend is both indebted to the past and utterly timeless, wild but controlled, chin-stroking clever and head-shaking dumb, referential without being reverential. [May 2008, p.88]

It is Lanegan's most accessible to date. [Mar 2012, p.83]

Apocalypse is a wild thing which dances from one side of that line [between brilliant and bizarre] to the other with never-less-than-compelling abandon. [May 2011, p.89]

For the most part, there's nothing wrong with the lyrics. "Do Unto Others" is a fine secular hymn, while "January Song" has some smart digs at the Tea Party, but, in both cases, the voice never convinces. [Apr 2013, p.80]

Acid Tongue is imperfect, but nevertheless slightly more than halfway to astounding.

These tracks feel less like performances than private reveries on which the listener eavesdrops. [Aug 2006, p.108]

The longer cuts like "Les Echos", "Ann" and "crooked Teeth" are most compelling, with loops projecting through the air and clashing like streamlined silver darts. [Dec 2022, p.32]

Dissonance and propulsion remain watchwords. [Nov 2014, p.78]

Hardly Electronic comprises 14 impeccably jangling, harmonic pastiches of Bacharach, McCartney and Free Design, with only Sasha Bell's sardonic vocals striking a welcome sour note. [Aug 2018, p.27]

The result is one of his most varied but distinct albums. [May 2020, p.35]

Previous weighty concepts have been scrapped in favour of intense focus. [Jul 2019, p.37]

The bleak piano ballad "Hello I'm Right Here," the suicidal "Hold My breath Until I Die" and the slow-burning synth-pop of "We Don't Have Fun When We're Together Anymore" all find curious joy in pain. [Nov 2019, p.33]

"It's A Common Life" is haunted by the ghost of Snapper, a sort of Antipodean Suicide, while the likes of "I Had The Starring Role" and "What Gets Me By" recall the prettier moments of Straitjacket Fits and Bailter Space. [Sep 2013, p.95]

Crowded House’s eighth studio release ticks all the expected boxes. Pitch-perfect harmonies and inventive chord sequences abound. .... Where it falls short, perhaps, is the absence of the full-blooded radio-friendly hits of old, although the shuffling “All That I Can Ever Own” is a close cousin to 1993’s “Distant Sun”. [Jun 2024, p.32]

It's a shouty, attitudinal set that connects Ke$ha to Britney Spears and Cyndi Lauper. [Feb 2015, p.75]

Vent and Nunez revel in their experiments like science nerds let loose in the lab. [Jul 2006, p.111]

Its vision of pop is deeply hermetic, caught between quiet pastoral rapture and urban resignation, Cracknell's voice a siren of sweetened melancholy. [Jul 2015, p.73]

While the LP reaches its darkwave apotheosis with a Neubauten-like cover of The Cure’s “One Hundred Years”, glimmers of lightness and tenderness make for a surprisingly rich listening experience, one that’s closer in spirit to Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch than Xiu Xiu’s past provocations. [May 2021, p.35]

Sober and joyful. [Sep 2018, p.29]