Matangi is her most exhilarating and mulch-faceted album. [Jan 2014, p.75]

They're the true inheritors of the psychic disconnect and crude abstraction that marks out those early Royal Trux albums: less Stones, more stoned. [Jan 2014, p.75]

Ballads like "Chill In The Air" and "Burden" have a stately gait, but Lee is more engaging when he turns playful huckster. [Jan 2014, p.75]

[The single "If You Didn't See Me (Then You Weren't On The Dancefloor)"] is sumptuous, sad and beautiful, as is the res of the album. [Jan 2014, p.73]

Static's production is bright and punchy, which has the unintended effect of sabotaging softer moments. [Jan 2014, p.73]

Though their ongoing debt to the Krautrock canon remains evident, their stoner brew is now heavily spiced with influences drawn from Afrobeat, funk and space-rock. [Jan 2014, p.72]

Articulate, emotional and primed for the dancefloor. [Jan 2014, p.71]

Some delectable details pop up early on, like the swirling organ that shape-shifts "Thirsty Man," but the nearly unrelieved combination of Early's tang and the Cripple Creek cadences grows wearisome by the LP's second half. [Jan 2014, p.71]

The songs on You Were Right are orthodox but unusually clever, evocative of fellow wry strummers such as Nick Lowe and Old 97's' Rhett Miller. [Jan 2014, p.71]

It all adds up to an album that is pleasantly quirky rather than revealing. [Jan 2014, p.71]

More than standing as a document of a particular time and place, it makes not having been there feel like a real loss. [Jan 2014, p.68]

Askew's voice and tiple remain distinctively sui generis, as does the air of fairytale enchantment about his songs of children's dream, birds and fishes, city streetlife, blue-eyed babies and brown-eyed boys. [Oct 2013, p.61]

The thing with the L-event EP is that across four tracks, there isn't the room afforded on their best LPs for something resembling accessibility. [Nov-Dec 2013, p.100]

Decidedly shy of office-party pumpers, the avuncular pair decorate Snow Globe with originals and standards. [Dec 2013, p.67]

Volume 2 contains more talk than its predecessor, and by linking the 39 songs on these two discs with snippets of dialogue, the compilers attempt to replicate the mood and flow of those shows, showing us how the group broke through the barriers of formality hitherto erected between performers and audience. [Dec 2013, p.77]

A stripped-down production adds intimacy, though Hersh's voice isn't quite as strong as it once was. [Dec 2013, p.74]

Here he bends the two impulses on a dark, pulsating album that sits alongside other neo-industrial work from Raime and the Haxan Cloak. [Dec 2013, p.74]

The synths and drum machines that supplant those albums' painstaking arrangements highlight robust songwriting underpinning standout "The Place I Live," while new vocal counter-melodies lift Elverum's "O Superman" choir out of the murk. [Dec 2013, p.70]

These 11 tracks, recorded at various locations, also confirm he's more than a neo-classical specialist. [Dec 2013, p.68]

Her most orthodox album, perhaps, and by some distance her best. [Dec 2013, p.68]

Not an easy listen, but an accomplished one. [Dec 2013, p.67]

Cupid Deluxe is a more mature and collaborative affair that sees Hynes marinate his songs in an early-'90s soul-funk fusion that foregrounds groove over melody. [Dec 2013, p.65]

The period-perfect production is a little Dukes Of Stratosphear, though as with Partridge and co, the songs are so well crafted as to avoid any sense of prissy homage. [Nov 2013, p.79]

Most convincing are versions of Xiu Xiu's thunderously anthemic "I Luv The Valley OH," Clinic's irrepressible "Tomorrow," and intimate wordiness of David Thomas Broughton's "Ambiguity." Coldplay's "Hurts Like Heaven," however cannot shake off its provenance. [Dec 2013, p.72]

San Fermin proves Ludwig-Leone to be a fantastically ambitious songwriter on the way to finding a voice of his own. [Oct 2013, p.74]

The music does not so much take off as forever taxi toward the boundary fence. [Dec 2013, p.70]

This LP is their most uncompromising yet. [Dec 2013, p.74]

If there’s any justice, Mug Museum should break Le Bon out of her current cult status. [Dec 2013]