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]

It's frustrating, because behind the superficial surfaces, these songs can thrill. [No. 150, p.52]

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]

Some new ideas are welcome more than a decade into the Jersey outfit's career, but they could've been used to more exciting ends. [No. 150, p.59]

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]

Mozart's Mini-Mart is full of short, witty synth-pop songs such as "When You're Depressed." Think Magnetic Fields at their most ephemeral. [No. 150, p.53]

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