Linderman's triumph is more sophisticated than a simple contrast. The Ravishing music is studded with jazz details - the impressionistic gusts of saxophone and flute; Linderman's own clangorous guitar overdubs - that add a neurotic edge to the proceedings. The words, meanwhile, luxuriate in the prettiness of our world. [Mar 2021, p.80]

Fed is something of a lost classic. [Sep 2008, p.123]

Valerie June's siren-like vocal delivery [is] both beautiful and tempting. [Apr 2017, p.98]

Chris is an imposing structure, one likely to dominate 2018's skyline. There are, however, still heights left to hit. [Oct 2018, p.89]

With its measured banjo pecks and perfect shadow bv's, courtesy of rising Southern rock talent MJ Lenderman, Right Back to It's simple classicism seem to explore over sensitivity, while Crowbar, possessed of a lovely, Peter Buck-ish jangle, also stands out. [Apr 2024, p.91]

A sensitive, sure-footed triumph. [Jan 2017, p.99]

Tender dream-pop which is simulataneously familiar and novel. [Aug 2004, p.96]

Mvula is a gifted arranger with a distinctive cri de coeur, and this is where she soars. [Aug 2021, p.83]

All credit to Knowles, though, whose vision is so cohesive that the 19 short tracks feel like one long, utterly immersive piece. [Jun 2019, p.86]

It's a hyper-vivid and intensely musical affair that takes us deep inside Apple's skittish, fretful mind. [Jul 2012, p.82]

By far the most streamlined and purposeful Animal Collective record. [Jan 2008, p.98]

If modern folk music needs its own OK Computer, its own The Dark Side Of The Moon, or indeed its own F#A#∞, this may well be it. [Apr 2023, p.80]

All the elements which made its predecessor so great are here, but in excelsis, and occasionally excess. [Sep 2002, p.95]

Producer Dan Carey brings cohesion to the multiplicity. ... An absolute tonic.[Jun 2021, p.86]

What's truly remarkable about the interplay, however, is the way the two seemlessly bridge the gulf between their cultures. [Mar 2010, p.93]

The pair's musical chemistry is a potent one. [May 2021, p.78]

After 20 years, Fuzzy Logic still hasn't stopped making sense. [Jan 2017, p.110]

The stark beats are the best Hugo and Williams have built in years. But its themes--dealing, girls--require more lyrical innovation to compel. [Feb 2007, p.105]

This exhaustive reissue includes his [Bob Stinson] final contributions, though the real gold comes in their studio sessions with Jim Dickinson. [Nov 2020, p.95]

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

With a gift for creating memorable melodies allied with a strong storytelling narrative, he comes across like a sophisticated jazz version of Bill Withers. [Apr 2012, p.94]

Luminous and alive, Dear Scott is just what Mick does: Head music, straight from the heart. [Jun 2022, p.82]

It's a thematically and musically complex record that encourages wonderment. [Jun 2023, p.92]

It's difficult to detach this record from the harrowing specificity of its backstory, yet Riderless Horse never makes you feel like an intruder. That's testament, after 12 long years, to Natasia's skills, the undimmed songwriter able to transform all the pain and horror into something indelibly beautiful. [Aug 2022, p.88]

They've upped their game. [Jun 2020, p.87]

This compelling, enlightening aural history gives [lesser-known artists] a worthy platform. [Jun 2016, p.102]

Interspersed with scored interludes and fragments of poetry read by Jessica Griffin of Would-Be-Goods, the effect is one of benign diffusion, the hazy avenues of MacLean's impressionistic lyrics running through the music as if the songs themselves now inhabit that hypnopompic state of consciousness where the centre cannot hold. [Aug 2023, p.86]

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

Its such an embarrassment of riches it actually seems preposterous that everything here was produced in just four years. [Dec 2008, p.118]

Music ripe for reappraisal. [Nov 2022, p.98]

These former young lions are well on their way to becoming venerated old masters. [Nov 2022, p.91]

Hearing this in its entirety 45 years on, it really is up there with Young's greats. [Oct 2023, p.97]

Ozarker is both sentimental and hard-nosed, nostalgic about a past without ignoring the modern world's gritty reality. [Dec 2023, p.93]

Reorderd, with three more excellent songs, copious sleevenotes, and some remixing and updated vocals that never detract from the authenticity of the project. [Aug 2023, p.93]

The balance between Joe's resigned words and uplifting melodies remains sublime. [Aug 2003, p.100]

It sears through the essence of what makes this band special, the brave voice and ebullient delivery of singer-songwriter-guitarist James Mercer. [Apr 2004, p.98]

Given its length, trying to tackle To Be Kind n one sitting might feel like the musical equivalent of scaling Everest, but with so many dizzying peaks along the way the effort is well rewarded. [Jun 2014, p.90]

Despite the turmoil these songs describe, a flash of Elliott Smith-style emotional acuity every few seconds, musically Valentine tells a different story. Building on the confidence of 2018 debut Lush. [Nov 2021, p.87]

This is a protest album and a damn good one. [Nov 2016, p.93]

This is a completist's delight in drab artwork. [Sep 2017, p.100]

Lightning Bolt consistently sound like no one else. [Dec 2005, p.105]

Indelible, compulsive, flecked with genuine brillance throughout, it's as good as any of the acknowledged clasics from the Clan's '93-96 peak. [Nov 2009, p.95]

The album appears as a warm, welcoming pool, soaking its balms, and its messages, deep into our bones. [Jun 2020, p.84]

It's when everything begins to fan out like a peacock's tail at the height of courting season that you're reminded just why Newsom is a 21st century one-off. [Nov 2015, p.84]

The music - a little Lumineers, a little Fleet Foxes - stands up for itself. [Jul 2021, p.88]

Still ethereal and episodic, it's less sequestered, more outgoing [than Ekstasis], with an influx of strings and brass bringing warmth to concoctions of stunning invention and variety. [Sep 2013, p.94]

Bad As me is alive with some of his greatest yet. [Nov 2011, p.90]

All told, another luxurious wallow in art and agitation. [Jul 2016, p.98]

Dark, intense and utterly compelling record. [Nov 2017, p.98]

A thick braid of an album, each song a bundle of strands interweaving with next. [May 2020, p.94]

Malone excels himself with the brassy pop of 'Lover's Day' and 'Golden Age.' [Oct 2008, p.112]

A triumph of psychedelic melody, drone and eerie groove. [Jul 2006, p.104]

It's an adrenalin rush to experience rather than listen to, and the 11 tracks are over too soon. [Nov 2020, p.81]

Barnett doesn't quite equal this deadpan reportage [as Avant Gardener on 2013's A Sea of Split Peas] but navigates similar terrain in charming style. [Apr 2015, p.88]

The unlikely MC tag team's incontestable third rages hard over bass-driven beats positively thrumming with vitality. [Apr 2017, p.95]

A claustrophobic, mesmeric soundscape akin to My Bloody Valentine and Spacemen 3's early work. [Apr 2003, p.114]

Stories is a leaner, less experimental-sounding record than 1998's Is This Desire, its chips stacked on visceral power and vitalising vocals.

These are out-of-reach glimpses of environmental paradise; hazy, transient, atomised, and, like the technological future they presaged, their expiration in-built. [Mar 2019, p.105]

Big Time doesn't feel like a definitive transformation - it's still tender and unfurled in places - but it does have a new clarity, a sense of masks peeling away, veils dropped. [Jul 2022, p.84]

Fans disappointed at the resolutely unexpanded LPs should be aware; the upgrade makes revisiting them a supreme enjoyment anyway. [Nov 2011, p.110]

It's obvious that the Chicago-born, multi-instrumentalist bluesman is about to add yet another Blues Music Award nomination to his already impressive tally. [May 2017, p.96]

It's a wonderful listen, and the joy in creation that is obvious in these 15 tracks, is nearly enough to wipe out the sadness of his loss. Nearly. [Aug 2019, p.102]

A suite of songs involving a character returning from a near-death experience, it works just as well without the plot. Still, there are twists and turns aplenty. [Jan 2021, p.91]

While Mollestad is at her most formal, this album's power and deep cultural roots bring a resonance akin to that of the work of Nordheim. [Jan 2022, p.88]

Any sense that the listener is being short-changed is blown away by the sheer quality of the writing and production on offer. [Dec 2022, p.84]

Hawk's stentorian baritone croon is almost irony free and his freewheeling songs blossom because of it. [Mar 2023, p.93]

With these songs, though, Cilker is building a beautiful place of her own. [Oct 2023, p.86]

Reminiscent of early Nathaniel Rateliff and John Moreland, and prime John Prine, there's no reason here to doubt Martin might one day eclipse them all. [Dec 2023, p.88]

Pyramids’ borrowing of Chuck D’s mantra “I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin’” is emblematic of his still-abrasive mood, whether dissecting the prison system’s failures on A Bigger Picture Called Free or unleashing his most heartfelt rallying cry on the thrilling Robert Glasper-produced, Stevie Wonder-starring title track.

What Now is no less discursive, plundering so many styles that it might instead be called What Next. But working with co-producer Shawn Everett in a series of top-tier Nashville hubs, Howard makes it cohere not only through the prayer bowls that clang and drone between tracks but also through the way she captures the wild vacillations of falling in and out of something that’s possibly good and potentially terrible. [Mar 2024, p.84]

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

A record you don't want to turn your back on in any way. [May 2019, p.93]

While the comparisons to Springsteen's Nebraska and Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator) are obvious, they don't do justice to Jurado's wholly original craft. [Jun 2003, p.98]

Newcomers won't fail to be charmed by an album that channels all four Velvets albums at different moments, in the process of locating YLT's own unique voice. [Feb 2015, p.102]

Twigs plants words with tenacious deliberation and care, but sometimes the result is over-studied, a gentle industrial emo. [Dec 2019, p.93]

Ultimately, what redeems Letter To You from notions of idealised nostalgia is the rigour of its performances, particularly those of Springsteen himself, who for the second successive album is in the singing form of his life. [Dec 2020, p.78]

What makes The Complete BBC Sessions so compelling is that it's mostly work-in-process, and Zeppelin veer played a song the same way twice. [Oct 2016, p.107]

A nearly flawless set of left-field folk. [Jun 2004, p.106]

A gorgeous reverie. [Sep 2001, p.99]

As ever, his chord changes and arrangements betray an inventiveness seemingly borne of brilliant instinct. [Nov 2004, p.92]

Kala is where the album explodes into life. [Jun 2015, p.93]

Both artistically and in terms of a new business model, In Rainbows is a necesary masterstroke. [Dec 2007, p.96]

In all, a cherishable tribute to the vitality of the right-on gospel group whose strides into soul still echo today. [Mar 2020, p.103]

Hey Panda may seem whimsical at first, but its depth is all the grander for the work it takes to mine its many gems. [May 2024, p.84]

[They] have made an evolutionary leap in rock. [Jun 2005, p.108]

This small brick of a box set housing 22 Isley Brothers albums, many of them essential to any soul-funk library, astonishingly does not include something like a dozen tracks that any sane person would suggest were key to the band's story. This is not a complaint, merely a fact to illustrate the broad sweep of their career. [Sep 2015, p.104]

It's all tinged with, real communicable melancholy. [Nov 2012, p.85]

Beautifully arranged, its four pieces amplifiy Sunn O)))'s signature drone rumble. [Jun 2009, p.96]

Jamie is a giant leap forward: a testimony of liberation, creatively uncompromising but just as accessible as Howard's old music. [Oct 2019, p.80]

This is resilient, tough, exultant music that just didn't push thorough a t the time. [Sep 2011, p.113]

A richer feast, from more humble ingredients, could scarcely be imagined. [May 2012, p.82]

Its 10 fuzzy, through-the-bottom-of-a-whiskey-glass intimacy, with Anthony's acoustic guitar and rich baritone voice conveying songs of existential wonder and lament. [Feb 2013, p.93]

The dark matter of his fall that holds The Graceless Age together is formidable stuff. [Jun 2013, p.85]

Fantastic stuff. [Feb 2014, p.102]

Lavishness their deep influences merits. ... Endless Indian summer. [Feb 2020, p.107]

There's often an old-world gravitas and a contemporary lightness of touch at play simultaneously, the tangible lineage of these story-rich, often long-form songs reaching deep within you. [Nov 2022, p.89]

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

songdreaming is by no means perfect; Lee’s version of Black Dog And Sheep Crook comes on a little too much like Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, and his Anglicisation of Robert Burns ballad Aye Walking Oh feels a bit unnecessary. However, Lee does unaffected loveliness very well (case in point: the closing Sweet Girl McRee), and his intense empathy – for the bees, the trees, the birdies and his fellow man – shines through. [Apr 2024, p.80]