While the brilliant closing Murder Of Sunrise delivers a suspenseful 18 minutes of menace via shimmering cymbals, speaker hum and fathoms-deep bass lines. There's beauty here too. [Jun 2024, p.86]

Yet for all the luxuriant, Gong-like dreaminess of I Surrender or Imagine An Orchestra, sudden beats and vocal hooks make Delight more unpredictable odyssey than easy float downstream. [May 2024, p.89]

Nonetheless shows the duo pulling themselves up to full songwriting height, not just forging on, but flourishing. [Jun 2024, p.87]

You might assume, given the title, that beam's seventh full-length album as iron & Wine is lightweight and whimsical. Actually it's pretty magnificent. [Jun 2024, p.84]

There's an undeniable zip to these. [Jun 2024, p.82]

Ultimately, this is a work of lush, immersive harmonic beauty and escape. [Jun 2024, p.86]

The saturnine wavs of As Above Perhaps So Below suggest the torpor induced by the titular barbiturate, while We Were Vaporised proffers further subterranean tectonics offset by cosmic keyboard drifts that might have been plucked, like much here, from an art-house sci-fi movie score. [Jun 2024, p.91]

Y'Y shows his fluid piano technique - a hard to quantify mix of Monk, Ibrahim, Corea and Shipp - let loose on looping patterns that trace ever more surprising arcs and mood variations. [Jun 2024, p.88]

There's taut New Wave (Tiny Moves; Jesus Is Dead), but mainly moody electronic balladry (think Streets Of Philadelphia), with Del Rey turning up to fulfil the intend of her one repeated line ("I'll make it darker") on Alma Mater. [Jun 2024, p.82]

A clearly cathartic album that further proves Annie Clark to be a brilliant and multifaceted musical force. [Jun 2024, p.83]

A few sag under the weight of brooding brass and strings - Lookout For Hope, Doom - but others soar - Beautiful Dreamer, Electricity, We Shall Overcome. Ultimately it's a winner. [Jun 2024, p.91]

The other Side [is] probably the most honest reflection of himself he's ever made. [Jun 2024, p.87]

A suite of songs that are more reflective than self-pitying, and unlike her last, beats-free album, often grounded by solid grooves that allow her bewitching melodies to soar. [May 2024, p.85]

Here they're presented as a crisp, razor-edged groove unit, with not a milligram of flab aboard. either instrumentally or melodically. [May 2024, p.84]

That Dark Matter succeeds so well is due to the and focusing their creative energy, just as Watt's sonic Nutribullet technique condense PJ's core rumble into punchy blasts. [May 2024, p.82]

Fabulously serious work. [May 2024, p.91]

This edge, this acknowledgment of the stakes at play behind her messages of faith, pushes these songs past any risk of empty sentimentalism, and makes Sun Without The Heat truly uplifting. [May 2024, p.87]

They're more straightforward than they've ever been. .... They're not slackening. [May 2024, p.86]

What might be their best yet. All the various elements of Joe's songs are here. [May 2024, p.88]

A delicate, inward-facing set. [May 2024, p.80]

A masterfully subtle follow-up to 2018's Down The Road Wherever. [May 2024, p.85]

Three albums in, and King is still full of surprises. [May 2024, p.82]

Parr's front porch vocals and mesmerising guitar pickings mingle with mouth harp, backing vocals, piano, electric guitar and fiddle on an album full of wonder and love for the unloved. He really should invite friends round more often. [May 2024, p.91]

What might be a bleak set of songs about fragile ecosystems and unsustainable lives is saved from desperation by the warmth of the instrumentation – strings, synths, piano – and the watchful humanity of the lyrics. [May 2024, p.84]

While his mentor and grandfather RL's original form was violent and nihilist, Burnside's is just as fierce. [May 2024, p.88]

Love In Constant Spectacle is watchful rather than showy, its songs not boxing up one simple mood at a time but sitting with their uncertainty. Nuance might be going out of fashion in the world outside, but in here, Weaver speaks it fluently. [May 2024, p.83]

Only God Was Above Us feels like a record made by a band once more comfortable in their skins. [May 2024, p.86]

Doherty's songwriting rises to the occasion. [Apr 2024, p.88]