It's an absolute belter if you like your R'n'B raw, red-blooded and defiantly vintage. [Mar 2016, p.75]

Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance feels like a creative rebirth for a band who were beginning to feel like nothing more than the day job. [Feb 2015, p.70]

A powerful and accomplished album. [Feb 2014, p.78]

Subtract [a couple of stinkers] and you have something of a minor masterpiece--and easily Weller’s finest solo album to date.

Even when the mood turns slow and swampy on "Chain Of Keys" and "River Anacostia," the intensity never wavers. [May 2016, p.74]

At Saint Thomas The Apostle Harlem proves she's become just as expressive as a pianist as she is with her bloodcurdling wails. [May 2017, p.30]

Together they make smart but unstudied pop music, as invigoratingly weird as it is instantly winning, stuffed with gleefully incompatible styles and with a broad emotional range. [Oct 2022, p.31]

The only danger of such an exercise being the risk of tarnishing the legend. But there's no problem here. [dec 2008, p.100]

Fizzing creativity is audible across the whole record. [Aug 2021, p.35]

No Sad Songs is close to their masterpiece, each song lovingly rendered, drenched in harmonic rainfall, corralled with sympathetic, gentle arrangements, each song poetic. [May 2015, p.76]

An album of wistful majesty. [Jul 2019, p.30]

Warm Heart Of Africa works best when Radioclit subtly build on the rhythms of Mwamwaya's native kwassa kwassa. [Oct 2009, p.119]

Black Encyclopedia... is less abrasive but no less urgently meaningful [than 2016's Fetish Bones], a fusion of experimental hip-hop, soul, poetry and jazz-etched beatscapes that ebbs and flows around the concept of an Afrofuturist universe. [Oct 2021, p.29]

A sweltering sun-baked quality. Lyrically, meanwhile, the concept--of discomfort with technology--comes a little more into focus here. [Aug 2017, p.31]

Undeniably, they are a dance band first and foremost, but fans of Tinariwen will find plenty to love in raw soulful numbers like "Koana" and Farila." [Jun 2015, p.83]

Pohorylle is classic Americana - mostly carried by piano, guitar and strings - awash with gracem wisdom and allusive wordplay. [Dec 2021, p.26]

Glacial electronic-first compositions like "Vessel" ape the atmospheric intensity of Julia Holter, but even in her exile, Ballentine finds something pretty to latch onto in every song. [Review of the Year 2025, p.28]

West's rhymes are wry, witty, warm and unswervingly self-aware. [May 2004, p.106]

Brun continues to confound expectations on a set of sonically adventurous songs. [Oct 2015, p.73]

Explores themes of mental derailment and the black arts against a backdrop of the heaviest psychobilly, grunge-metal and stoner rock. [Nov 2004, p.106]

Opulent, perverse and reassuringly other-worldly. [Oct 2019, p.30]

It’s a decent primer on the culture, but the real treasures are the deep cuts, namely some radical dub remixes of punk also-rans (Generation X’s “Wild Dub”, Angelic Upstarts’ “Different Dub”) and a string of projects from Dennis ‘Blackbeard’ Bovell, including the gloomy skank of 4th Street Orchestra’s “Za-Lon” and Matumbi’s sunny, horn-powered “Point Of View”. [Aug 2024, p.53]

Six albums in and The Icarus Line remain terrifying, riding a tsunami of malevolent noise, sweat and havoc while producing some of the most intense and exceptional rock music around. [Oct 2013, p.70]

Seun Kuti leaves no doubt as to who wears the crown on six songs that exude enormous confidence. [Oct 2024, p.37]

[It] sees them break out of the subculture in spectacular style. [Nov 2006, p.123]

As devil worshiping goes, this is pretty funky stuff, with a tight and bouncy tone throughout. [Mar 2017, p.35]

If these [tracks] feel like throwbacks, they're no more so than Norah Jones' best work, and there's nonetheless something timeless about the breezy "While You Were Sleeping" and, with its chugging guitars, "Lovesick". [Oct 2023, p.29]

Canada's Quin twins fairly blaze through The Con's 14 compact, supercharged tracks. [Oct 2007, p.109]