While these dozen faithfully and fabulously Soft Cell-ish songs do not stint on paranoid foreboding, they are buoyed by an undimmed pop instinct and Almond’s waspish wit. [Apr 2022, p.35]

Brimming with visceral rock'n'soul that channels the spirit of The Replacements, The E Street Band and Alabama Shakes, and mixes them into an irresistibly tasty gumbo. [Jan 2016, p.77]

Klaxons bristle with energy and ideas. [Feb 2007, p.77]

If you've ever swooned for the fading-light pastorals of Billie Ray Martin's 4 Ambient Tales, or the elliptical whispers of Stina Nordenstam, this album will feel very comfortable indeed. [Jan 2025, p.40]

Compared with the highly structured Ghosteen (a double album meditation on grief and spirituality, complete with intermission), Carnage is a more concise though no less ordered record. Much as the Bad Seeds’ songs now push into oceanic drift, Cave’s narratives move between worlds fictional and not, the horrific and the consoling. [Mar 2021, p.20]

A sugary feast for the senses. [May 2008, p.98]

Divided into meditation, lamentation, revelation, celebration, incantation, it is by turns curious, brittle, exquisite, and surely among the most accomplished and beautiful records of Stevens’ career. [Jul 2021, p.34]

The core sound is instrumental motorik rock with sweet licks. [Sep 2022, p.24]

A certain crispness is now prevalent, along with expanded horizons. [May 2016, p.82]

They manage to retain the gravel in their throat while subtly expanding their sound on this fifth album. [Jun 2020, p.33]

Records as bright and occasionally beautiful as Years Of Refusal make us forgive Morrissey (the artist) even his most juvenile foibles.

The blend of Owen Brinley's choirboy vocals and a raft of prog-tinged riffs is a source of promise, magic and drama. [Mar 2009, p.87]

Luther and Cody Dickinson strip it back on Prayer For Prayer, recording in a half-dozen American cities and viscerally capturing the widespread unease. [Jul 2017, p.35]

Like Bread produced by The Neptunes. [Jul 2004, p.110]

Frog Eyes' fifth album has been three years in the making and is every bit as much of an epic as its acclaimed predecessor "Tears Of The Valedictorian." [May 2010, p.90]

The album's eight supple, textured tunes suggest Cornelius stripped of his art-jazz awkwardness, or even the molten sugar rush of My Bloody Valentine slowed to a beatific calm. [Nov 2002, p.128]

These four compositions are not without precedent, but all push at conventions of melody, space, tonality, rhythm and timbre. [Jul 2011, p.90]

This unheard set, captured at Athens venue The Mad Hatter in 1983, shortly before the band's dissolution, confirms their two fine studio albums were no fluke. [Sep 2016, p.93]

Ana Kravanja, Iztok Koren and Samo Kutin plays sympathetically, but they're also careful enough not to homogenise, each voice finding its own space in which to speak. [Dec 2025, p.36]

Another superb venture. [Jan 2005, p.121]

Hebden's skill is to weave such ethnographic curiosities into the fabric of his own luminous electronica without it feeling like a dry curatorial exercise. [Dec 2017, p.27]

It's a deeply ambitious debut offering. Musically, it ducks and weaves like the shape-shifters that populate its world. [Feb 2021, p.30]

A mighty blend of doomy, Jansch-ish meander and sepulchral drones. [Jul 2006, p.92]

Sergio Mendes meets Sparks then plunders Charles Mingus? Could be. [Aug 2006, p.95]

A dozen young singers from Guinea, Ivory Coast, Benin, Algeria and beyond [lend] a youthfully purposive and fearless energy to songs about misogyny, sexual identity, force marriage and FGM. [Mar 2020, p.30]

The result is akin to walking in the woods alone at midnight--both spooky and compelling. [Nov 2006, p.104]

Parts of Myth Takes [are] as close to commercial... as !!! can get without combusting. [Apr 2007, p.92]

On his third LP he sounds closer to Smog's Bill Callahan, his forlorn baritone suffused with a world-weariness that suggests a singer twice his age and experience. [Feb 2016, p.77]