If the duo seem unfocused, their adventurous variety is beguiling. [Dec 2020, p.29]

What You Gonna Do When the Grid Goes Down? is no return to the glory days, it is a credible reprise of their old-school rolling and one-two punch, spiked with heavy psychedelic guitar. [Dec 2020, p.36]

It's lo-fi ambience sometimes sound submerged, suiting a report from deep in life's wreckage. [Dec 2020, p.35]

Throughout, she pulls no punches, her razor-sharp lyrics demonstrating a singular wit and vulnerability. [Dec 2020, p.35]

Electric guitars crackle at the edge of the mix like Caribbean lightning, Jay Gonzalez's "Oliver's Army" piano glittering in the gathering storm. "Tough To Go" is from the Memphis sessions. Doom-laden drumbeats, gloomy organ and blasts of wracked guitars punctuate a song about disenchantment, lost opportunities, stacked odds. [Dec 2020, p.32]

Fear Of Death plays mortality for dark laughs, while The Lemon Twigs and Foxygen's Jonathan Rado help Heidecker to whip up a note-perfect Randy Newman sound. [Dec 2020, p.30]

All in all, it’s a beautiful record – and one that bears repeated plays. I’ve been playing it for around 10 days now, mostly on headphones, and it’s still revealing new details with each listen.

It's at times crushingly heavy, but there's a cerebral knottiness to the arrangements, and Chino Moreno's vocal boasts a windswept melancholy harking back to the new romantics. [Dec 2020, p.29]

Songs about divorce, disillusionment and middle-aged spread combine vintage singer-songwriter styles with languidly funky scribbles of guitar. [Dec 2020, p.27]

An album of their most beautiful tracks. [Dec 2020, p.27]

Delicate, desert-baked confessionals a plenty. [Nov 2020, p.33]

It is arguably, the Replacements album that best balances the tension between the snotty punk rockers they began as, and the crossover success they were terrified of becoming ... [The included demos and mixes] will find favour with adherents of the rougher, readier Replacements, who around now were struggling with whether or not to blossom into something bigger. [Nov 2020, p.52]

An album filled with soft, tender indie-folk. [Nov 2020, p.29]

Her fourth sees her exploring darker, richer tones, drawing herself up to mythic height as she conjures a fiery, fantastical rebirth. [Nov 2020, p.29]

Healy's songs have always been suffused with nostalgia; now, far removed from those innocent days, the poignant pull is overwhelming. [Nov 2020, p.37]

A mesmerising slowdive into the sonic depths. [Nov 2020, p.31]

The Toronto band maintain a formidable degree of power and velocity throughout their fourth album, yet songs like "The Mirror" and "Framed By The Comet's Tail" are well-served by their willingness to ease up on the gas pedal. [Nov 2020, p.33]

herring's poetic analysis of a recent break-up makes it all a compelling listen. [Nov 2020, p.29]

Musically it's more grounded, though, if still diverse. [Nov 2020, p.27]

Several songs that aim for Springsteenian grandeur but land nearer to John Mellencamp before he dropped the Cougar. Thankfully, Goldsmith's level of craft elsewhere means there's still plenty here to savour. [Nov 2020, p.29]

Their latest brings welcome variations in tone and tempo. [Nov 2020, p.29]

[An] exhilarating companion piece. [Nov 2020, p.49]

Flitting from sublime to the ridiculous, from the personal to the universal, and from a time before people to a time long after them, it's a mess, but a glorious one all the same. [Nov 2020, p.30]

Producer Ross Orton helps sharpen their attack, and the quartet are at their very best on "White Rooms And People's" fierce synth-funk, the Suicide-like "Tomorrow" and the thudding grooves of Valleys." [Nov 2020, p.37]

Though less avidly adventurous than his band's recent outings (or his own past activities with EL VY), the music here may be stronger for it. [Nov 2020, p.27]

Shiver sometimes feels like a glitchcore sound collage, where ambient passages are ruptured by harsh beats and clamorous noise. [Nov 2020, p.31]

Much of New York still resonates over 30 years on. ... The new remaster is crisp - it's hard to mess with the original's direct, unadorned musicianship. ... What this second disc [of live tracks] demonstrates is the quality of Reed's New York band. [Nov 2020, p.44]

Patti Smith's bewitching poetry readings make this an experience that demands full attention. [Oct 2020, p.36]