Gigi's Recovery fully achieves TMC's transformative purpose, its lyrics of unflinching self-scrutiny leading to side two's exhilarating Only Good Things and the thrillingly airborne climactic title track. [Feb 2023, p.82]

Time's Arrow is Ladytron's equivalent of Simple Minds' early-'80s heyday, where burnished synth-pop meets the hyperreality of travel. [Feb 2023, p.87]

The lack of solidity can make Mercy nebulous like any spirit photo, it sometimes takes work to find the shape, fill in detail. Yet slowly, its unfamiliarity coalesces into a cold beauty, memory acting as a spur, not a comfort blanket. [Feb 2023, p.85]

Repeat plays lay bare a record of rare ambition and thematic complexity. [Feb 2023, p.84]

The result is brooding, often humorous musing on life, joy, occasionally death. ... But it's tender love song Mary, with its meandering sax, that stops you. [Feb 2023, p.92]

While Long Live The Strange turns the outsiderism of Supergrass's Strange Ones into an anthem, with bonus chorale. The rest is more soul-searching, but with instrumental structuring and melodic grace of satisfying excellence. [Feb 2023, p.82]

The narrative lines are fractured, the satire removed; these songs play out like stress responses, fight-or-flight impulses, each one a little panic room. ... There’s not a lot of feeling OK on CACTI, but for once, it feels like exactly the right place for Billy Nomates. She’s brought herself, entirely. [Feb 2023, p.86]

The six lengthy meditations here refine the formula. [Jan 2023, p.84]

The finale to an exemplary act of curation. [Jan 2023, p.102]

It's Plain's elusive ruminations and off-balance poetics that resonate in ever more artful, affecting ways. [Feb 2023, p.88]

Muted, syncopated beats, ghostly pedal steel and icy Solina string machine conspire to create the effect of a slow-motion scene: unwanted debris blowing away in the wind, with our stronger and more resolved singer standing at the centre of the wreckage. Even amid the ashes of her past, it seems, Margo Price keeps burning ever more brightly. [Feb 2023, p.80]

Heaps more respect's due for the full-bloodedness of rippers like Frenzy, Modern Day Rip Iff and Neo Punk. ... Four-letter lyricism and dumb-ass riffing, however, leave you craving the substance of '16's Homme-guided Post Pop Depression. [Feb 2023, p.85]

The group demonstrate their vocal prowess on Hamba, a relentless dance groove featuring plaintive a cappella harmonies. [Dec 2022, p.89]

Songs decay, disappear, swell, mutate, Dalt's seductive, lonesome voice investing them with a sinuous, alien romanticism. [Feb 2023, p.87]

The sheer relentlessness dilutes that thrill factor, but there are shades, notably on the stately opener 2022 and the closing Sleep Cult. [Feb 2023, p.91]

She has found a new confidence in her sound. [Feb 2023, p.92]

Strings offers one of his most vulnerable vocal takes yet on John Deere Tractor, a tender note home to a country mom from a son stuck in and troubled by a city; it feels like a letter from the road, hungover and threadbare. And the playing is flawless and charged, from Cleveland’s steam-engine fiddle during Way Downtown to Rob McCoury’s edgy delicacy during Frosty Morn. [Jan 2023, p.85]

Her torch-song voice is often exposed by spare arrangements - a solemn piano or glowing embers of electric guitar - but songs also burst into euphoric life, like exorcisms. [Jan 2023, p.91]

Despite the band's commendably cyclonic hardcore punk energy, Premonition underscores the fact that White Lung are a vehicle with only one gear, and one that has now run out of road. [Jan 2023, p.88]

Barnes's first outing in seven years offers a timely blast of healing positivity, all but impossible to resist. [Jan 2023, p.84]

Stewart sets about pushing up the earth under these delicate folk orchestrations and prog madrigals with subversive skill. [Dec 2022, p.91]

Eight lengthy bouts of exquisite thrumming folk. [Jan 2023, p.86]

Effortlessly good fun. [Jan 2023, p.99]

Exhaustive box set. ... Very much like a portrait artist will make numerous sketches, so we see the evolution of these songs as Bowie rewrites lyrics, improves melodies, tweaks arrangements, each stage an improvement on the previous. [Jan 2023, p.94]

Warren's razor-sharp lyricism - and her ability to deliver hard truths and cold comforts s gracefully - ensure Lessons For Mutants is endlessly compelling. [Dec 2022, p.85]

Inessential recordings predating the Tuaregs' breakthrough by a decade. [Dec 2022, p.93]

This jazz grandee has nothing to prove, but his quest for a deeper understanding of the human spirit is encapsulated by Sacred Thread. [Dec 2022, p.87]

Tempus is overwhelming serene. [Dec 2022, p.89]