This nearly flawless collection is simply the next step in the Baroness saga, and it's a beautiful one.

The criticisms are minor--a couple of tracks slide back into familiar Americana, but even then there's no sense of the band coasting.

Despite these weaker moments of Is Your Love Big Enough?, it's La Havas' gorgeous voice and gifted string fingers that'll make the biggest impressions. This might not be a home run straight out of the gate, but it's an extremely promising first swing of the bat.

Ahmed has pulled together a supporting cast with sufficient cutting edge that it comparatively endangers the razorblade impact of his original compositions.

Confess is an easy record to listen to and love.

Spirit Fiction is jazz the way it's supposed to be: cool, chaotic, and unassuming. It's good music for the sake of good music.

An impressive document of a band in full Krautrock-psychedelia-horrorprog flow.

Cohen is clearly making the music he wants in the way he wants, but Milk Maid are releasing it into a world containing countless similar items old and new. [That have been influenced by 90's American lo-fi]. This needn't necessarily matter, but for many might mean the difference between a diverting record and an essential one.

Aesop Rock shows an accomplished ability to join the unflinchingly candid with the unfalteringly compelling.

She places faith in unremitting earnestness. It's often affecting, and draws you in at times, but somewhat smothering in its unrelenting glumness. There's also a paucity of fresh melodies here. This profoundly personal album is unlikely to woo passers-by, but loyal, long-time admirers will adore it.

Intensely individual without being overly self-indulgent, TOTEM offers an at-times madcap, at others beautiful but always-rewarding insight into Ryat's mystical and eccentric world.

The result is an album that is far less-crowded than previous works and one that, on the whole, feels suitably bucolic.

[Welcome to the Fishbowl] is aimed squarely at the mainstream. These songs are genetically engineered to be both supremely catchy and intensely wet.

She's created a sound that's gritty and determined to avoid clichés.

While lyrical simplicity is welcomed when attached to music that dazzles, here it regularly sounds predictable.

Visions of Trees are enjoying themselves, which is evident throughout this atmospheric and surprisingly tight album.

Linkin Park will always be a compelling and watchable entity. But Living Things doesn't deliver music as interesting or as arresting as what immediately preceded it. Which comes as both a surprise and, more importantly, a shame.

With six-minute songs in which to stretch out, they continue to weave surprising musical strands into an agreeably amorphous whole.

Fortune is never terrible. It just feels cripplingly pointless.

The first half of Trespassing offers a smorgasbord of succulent up-tempo pop. There are a couple of derivative cuts, but the highlights are tasty enough to compensate.... The album's second half is less entertaining.

Gojira is one of the finest bands of our generation, and with L'Enfant Sauvage they've created another album to suit such a reputation.

Rispah is brilliant enough for the listening public to find it naturally, in their own time.

His relaxed intonation shows a talent that doesn't need to be stretched to the limit to produce its best work.

Subversion of the most intelligent, insidious, inventive kind.

This is dark, feverish garage rock as it's meant to be played.

Similarly reissued in expanded form it presents proof that, even on sunnier days, Mould still had angst to burn.

Otherwise every passing second is a vocal battle against a declining attention span, like a clicked finger in the face, forever.

It's a sturdy set of mostly new material mixing Afrobeat and funk with traditional influences.