There's no showboating and every classically nuanced arpeggio oozes with an elegant, crystalline beauty. [Apr 2021, p.32]

It's an elegant yet earthy hybrid of jazz, UK soul and highlife. [Mar 2021, p.35]

This scintillating set pulls and pushes extant studio ideas into wonderfully weird new shapes. [Apr 2021, p.32]

Still Woman Enough may be sustained by her memories, but it's not overshadowed by them. [Apr 2021, p.22]

A record that is dreamy and introspective yet teeming with ambition. [Apr 2021, p.37]

Tracks such as "Chester" ad "Moody" deliver more than mere retro pastiche, adding dreampop haze and lightly glitched effects to the nostalgic signifiers, bathing featherlight sunset reveries in a more contemporary vaporware glow. [Apr 2021, p.25]

Quiet Life enabled Japan to get from B to C, and from D to E, and from there to wherever they went next. ... A third disc, recorded live at Japan's Budokan, captures the band at full tilt. [Apr 2021, p.45]

The album successfully tackles the spectrum of human emotions experienced after trauma. [Apr 2021, p.23]

June has given us an album that is powerfully, elegantly subversive. [April 2021, p.20]

The result is a deeply humane record, perhaps the most vivid in Johnson's long career. [Apr 2021, p.29]

On The Cinder Grove he has a simple, yet profoundly effective modus operandi - setting streams of notes afloat and listening for the way their resonances commingle with strings and piano. [Mar 2021, p.31]

The title of her new album describes its woozy pull. [Mar 2021, p.39]

A fabulous treat it is too. [Apr 2021, p.37]

[The title track's] foreboding gothic folk finds equally despondent bedfellows in the more musically upbeat "Judgement Day" and the bucolic jangle of "Each Manner of Man." [Apr 2021, p.34]

Feels like the first step in a viable third chapter for a band that has rediscovered its identity. [Apr 2021, p.30]

A comeback album that feels vital rather than forced. [Apr 2021, p.25]

They range from isolated fragments to several absorbing takes of a song - "Went To See The Gypsy" - on its way to near-greatness. [Apr 2021, p.42]

Devotees of the 2000-era indie-pop of the Clientele and Marry's former employers in Camera Obscura will be charmed by the pretty likes of "Julie: and "Gold & Lips," though Banane Bleu could've benefited from more darker hes that enriched Fleurs Du Mal. [Apr 2021, p.29]

It features a stellar setlist built around tracks from that album, liberally peppered with Horse classics and deep cuts. In all this, the Horse prove themselves dependably elastic. [Apr 2021, p.49]

The constant frenzied back and forth between power-pop hooks and furious noise, while fun, begins to feel a little repetitive. [Apr 2021, p.27]

Departures from the mean include jazzier ventures with Ren Harvieu and octogenarian soul singer Ural Thomas, plus forays into baroque-pop balladry that get the best out of Laura Groves and Marissa Nadler. [Apr 2021, p.30]

Parenthood proves just another phase in Maximo Park's stubborn stand for empathy and learning through rock'n'roll. [Apr 2021, p.32]

Packing 14 tracks into 38 minutes, it's very much a sprint, the breathlessness part of its impact, despite this intensity, mainman Jack McEwan steers SHYGA!... clear of excess and keeps his ear on melody throughout. [Apr 2021, p.34]

Returns to the more familiar detuned space of their debut LP Taste, thundercloud guitar squall and all. [Apr 2021, p.34]

For intimacy and authenticity, less musical architecture often proves better. [Apr 2021, p.35]

This subtle score to Italo Calvino's 1972 experimental novel still boasts quietly echoing melodies on "The Divided City" and on "Desires Are already Memories," hazy Stars Of The Lids atmospherics, but an underlying tension threatens "Every Solstice And Equinox's" tranquil air and "Total Perspective Vortex's" climax is terrifying. [Apr 2021, p.37]

The cumulative effect is melancholy, generally compelling and often beautiful, a haunted dancehall of memory and loss. [Apr 2021, p.25]

Sparke emphasises the intimacy and immediacy of her performances on this debut, which sounds like you've walked into her rehearsal space. [Feb 2021, p.35]