For the fourth album in a row, they've moved the goalposts, challenging themselves to apply their whooping idiosyncrasies to a new aesthetic framework. [Mar 2014, p.70]

Darkly entertaining, thoughtful and a little threatening, St. Vincent fizzes with enthusiasm and the uncontrollable strangeness of life. [Mar 2014, p.74]

The record's best moments are slow-mo funk cuts like "Laughter" and "Praise" where Jones' silky falsetto finds a sweet spot east of Prince and Earth Wind & Fire. [Mar 2014, p.78]

Cumulatively Morning Phase can feel too consistent in mood and pace. [Mar 2014, p.65]

Burn Your Fire for No Witness feels like a big step forward from its predecessor, Half Way Home. [Mar 2014, p.81]

This box set might test that familiarity [of the Beatles catalogue]. It's like returning home to find the furniture has been moved around, or thayt someone has built new rooms to put your stuff in. It's not that these are bad rooms--they're just not quite where you expect them to be, and certainly not how the architects conceived the building. [Mar 2014, p.90]

Ellis' purist, even traditionalist, voice is the perfect vessel for his sanguine portraits of ordinary people, battered and bruised but never without hope. [Mar 2014, p.72]

Persson shows she is still a dab hand at melodic indie-pop, as she tackles floundering relationships, failing memories and new horizons. [Mar 2014, p.82]

Illum Sphere has been well-placed to see how dubstep fragmented into house, garage, minimalism and avant-garde gestures, and he reflects all of these in his debut LP. [Mar 2014, p.78]

Finn's third solo album is a lush, multi-layered affair, making full use of its producer. [Mar 2014, p.76]

These 18 short tracks comprise a refreshingly un-self-conscious reinterpretation of lo-fi punk, '90s slacker rock, shoegaze an d bedroom electronica, but each one dodges categorisation. [Mar 2014, p.78]

These dead-earnest takes are suffused with existential melancholy, as the group's feathery vocals bring uplift to the heavy emotional burden of the songs. [Mar 2014, p.71]

There's very little quite like it, and it's much wilder than it first seems. [Mar 2014, p.77]

Cheatahs brings to mind the era's second-tier acts, such as Swervedriver and Drop Nineteens--faint praise, but praise all the same. [Mar 2014, p.73]

Immaculately crafted as ever, even if his enviable ability to pastiche everyone from Elvis to The Beach Boys ultimately obscures his own musical identity. [Mar 2014, p.75]

As a collection of friendly collisions, an impulsive document of how music can bring people together over musical and cultural boundaries, it's well worth the visit. [Feb 2014, p.79]

It's a most welcome trip back to what he does best. [Feb 2014, p.81]

This English-language version is a beautiful thing. [Dec 2013, p.63]

It all too often sounds like Metronomy's secret Hackney-themed indie project. [Mar 2014, p.78]

Tremendous stuff. [Mar 2014, p.83]

These are strong songs, only occasionally hampered by the over-ripe allegorical nonsense advertized in the album's title. [Mar 2014, p.85]

{The album] bears many of the assured and lyrically deft hallmarks of Basher's own work. [Mar 2014, p.79]

It's an album of disco torch songs with the usual glib lyrics about good times and sexy dancers replaced by light-hearted queer/feminist sloganeering. [Mar 2014, p.82]

A happy music that isn't bland; Held In Splendor makes that toughest of tricks sound easy. [Mar 2014, p.82]

Sumie blends Japanese and Scandinavian folk, singing crisply over repetitive acoustic guitar patterns. [Mar 2014, p.83]

A focus on electric violin adds a mildly jarring echo of Curved Air to the Canadians' seventh, but the apocalyptic "Austerity Blues" and wistful "Rains Thru The Roof At Thee Grande Ballroom" encompass their extremes of post-rock paranoia and Popol Vuh transcendence. [Mar 2014, p.83]

Infinite loops and surging crescendos constitute a psychedelic session more about melancholic beauty than foreboding. [Mar 2014, p.83]

This arrestingly adventurous debut is a densely layered mash-up of shudders and drones, narcotically twisted beats, gospel-infused vocals and surreal wordplay. [Mar 2014, p.85]