With BRMC, the curtains match the drapes in terms of words and music. [No. 150, p.51]

It includes four instrumentals that feel wide open without sacrificing the band's essential heaviness. [No. 150, p.51]

The band's riffs and solos topple like old growth redwoods unmoored by a mudslide, and when Haino drops his mic to join the fray on guitar and electronics, the collapse is complete. [No. 150, p.56]

Semicircle touches on elements of the socially aware and a-woke with old-fashioned message-driven songs. [No. 150, p.56]

11 somber-yet-empathetic songs on Rifles & Rosary Beads. [No. 150, p.56]

When they open up and truly let go, they achieve states of near euphoria and joyous magnificence. [No. 150, p.56]

The dominant strain is melodically powerful modern jazz where "Mvt.-1" and "Mvt.-III" are the triumphant highlights with joyous Paper Chase and Jittery Peanuts reference points. [No. 150, p.55]

It's not as fun as [1999's Play], but the broad outlines comes from a similar Play-book, with Moby talk/sung vocals amid coos and hums of female singers. ... It's an inviting album but it's bleak. [No. 150, p.56]

Freedom's Goblin has hooks and strong songwriting, and the quality is more consistent than Segall's norm. [No. 150, p.55]

Musically, it's another melodic goldmine and their most vigorous, least fussy work in ages. [No. 150, p.57]

I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life is merely very good. [No. 150, p.55]

Ewan Pearson's productions certainly bang, shimmer and simmer resplendently as called for-- but these are hardly the pro forma femmepowerment anthems it might suggest. [No. 150, p.59]

Another routinely enchanting, brilliantly exceptional, standard-issue stunner from Hoboken, N.J.'s finest. [No. 150, p.62]

Felt delivers in established structural ways while giving the songs frequent jolts to the system--either overall or in precision-chosen moments. [No. 150, p.55]

A layered-yet-vintage, warm, highly analog sound ensued. [No. 150, p.57]

Wait For Love is a beautiful consideration of what comes next. [No. 150, p.55]

Historian is another triumph. [No. 150, p.51]

One of the most powerful and overtly political albums he's ever made. [No. 150, p.55]

What is by some distance the weirdest, wildest White we've yet encountered on record. [No. 150, p.60]

Wilson is brilliant and creative yet hindered by his own expansive eclecticism and purple prose. [No. 150, p.61]

Theoretically, this shouldn't work, but it does in spades. And its constant motion is terribly addicting and moving. [No. 150, p.61]

When their voices blend, moving from two-part to three-part harmonies, the music really takes off. [No. 150, p.55]

Even second-tier tunes (by comparison)--like the silly "I Love Kangaroos"--are indelible. [No. 150, p.54]

He's most successful when stripping down his lyrical ideas and melodic underpinnings to their simplest expressions, in a live-in-the-studio trio format. [No. 150, p.55]

Buffalo Tom provides a warm blanket on a cold, dark night of the soul. [No. 150, p.51]

What a glorious sound it is--the highs and lows (sonically and emotionally) are crisper and better defined. [No. 150, p.50]

On Lost At Last, Vol. 1, he trusted in the spontaneous nature of creation, letting the songs dictate the direction the arrangements take. Eighteen players joined him in the studio, but they remain in the background, mixed down to add subtle, almost invisible nuance to these bleak songs of heartache and dejection. [No. 149, p.59]

The Moon And The Village is another subtle charmer. [No. 149, p.57]