If at times things veer towards needy, the sum of the set is saved by how real it all feels. [Sep 2018, p.92]

The results make for a chilling and captivating experience, with the unexpected musical flourishes in stop-start songs. [Sep 2009, p.104]

The 22-track vinyl's an ace place for newcomers to get electrified. [Sep 2016, p.107]

The sound of a plan coming together - the novelty wearing off, but a different light switching on, all day long and beyond. [May 2022, p.88]

The Drones whip up a heady storm of garage-bred blues, post-punk intensity and Crazy Horse-style amp overload, in which they couch fevered narratives worthy of Nick Cave. [Nov 2006]

Random Access Memories manages to maintain a core of sense and sobriety. [Jul 2013, p.83]

Here lies much of the album's magic: whatever ornate turns the music takes, at its heart is the primal stuff of great rock'n'roll. But God, is it big. [Apr 2007, p.94]

The results here are extraordinary. [Jul 2015, p.88]

A masterpiece, exactly the sort of record that your average sentient pop genius should make in 2002. [May 2002, p.99]

Stick on the nine minutes of opener Lufuala Ndonga, turn the bottom end up and stand back. What happens next is unbelievable. [May 2005, p.98]

A record that feels warmer, wiser and less forced than any of his albums so far. [Jun 2022, p.88]

John's piano at the Festival Hall brought a stentorian new dimension to a sped-up Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going To Be A Long, Long Time) and the demos offer the sense of a band working out how to get the best from John's freewheeling melodies. In the end, they turned out to be just what was required. [May 2023, p.101]

Those who want their Emmylou full of sweet, sad longing will play a quarter of this album to death.... Elsewhere, there's righteous anger and an assertiveness and sexuality to the love songs. [Nov 2003, p.128]

The Roots have created another masterpiece. [Jan 2003, p.100]

Wolves can still rip jagged and vicious amid the befogged ambiance. [Nov 2011, p.95]

The centrifugal force is Rosali's calm, deep voice, belying her lyric's nervous energy and drama, balancing vulnerability with resilience. [May 2024, p.88]

At 16 tracks Bowler Hat Soup is possibly a little overlong but what is youth for if not indulging a wealth of ideas? [Dec 2013, p.87]

Cocoa Sugar is an audacious high-wire act which captures them at a potent peak. [Apr 2018, p.91]

For all its intimations of rootless drift, The Suburbs finds Arcade Fire back home, and so much happier for it. [Sep 20110, p.90]

Seb Rochford's drumming gives songs such as Kouma an unavoidably non-traditional kick, and the guitars (primarily by the singer herself) have a crunch missing from her early recordings. [May 2013, p.85]

In Colour really comes into its own when Jamie xx gets abstract and confounding; where his ability to conjure something wonderful from mosaic, non-linear paths is most evident. [Jul 2015, p.84]

A seamless, melodic blend of psychedelia and C&W... the songs and instrumentals here hang together beautifully. [Nov 2004, p.95]

Beam's evocation of elemental themes and dramas is too profound and affecting to deny. [Jan 2003, p.92]

There's all kinds of going back on Robbie Fulks' eleventh and maybe finest collection. [Oct 2013, p.95]

[Painted From Memory is] a beauty. ... [Taken From Life is] a treasure trove within a set that defines how well collaborations can work. [Apr 2023, p.94]

The vital spark that graced Fleet Foxes' debut is back. [Dec 2020, p.80]

So sweet is the harmonic construction that awareness of the ecclesiastical niceties of such as The Transfiguration... is incidental to falling under the divine spell. [May 2004, p.105]

Defiant cosmopolitanism doesn't come much more feisty, or compelling than this. [Sep 2007, p.104]

This reissued debut reminds, they were a band better informed--and more thrilling--than most. [Jan 2013, p.106]

These six albums attest to the depth of Fela discography, and to the diversity of his message. [Feb 2018, p.104]

Fade is a tease that she could do out-and-out pop if the mood were ever to take her, but there are too many strange and good ideas for anything quite so prosaic. [Oct 2023, p.81]

There's much more depth to the sequel. [Oct 2012, p.91]

Dracula simmers like The War On Drugs, and Calling Paul The Suffering has Latino touches, while Blue Rose dresses Greenwich Village rock in Fleetwood Mac silk. [May 2018, p.96]

A boldly fresh album that veers between lithe wit, sinister landscapes, big choruses and coolly adventurous instrumental arrangements. [Jul 2018, p.90]

The 2018 Beggars Banquet is classy slim-line history: clean, heavy vinyl with restored artwork (but no linernotes); a 12-inch platter with a mono mix of Sympathy; and a flexi-disc, originally included in the 1968 Japanese pressing of the LP. ... Sometimes, even in rock archaeology, the final result is all that matters. [Jan 2019, p.96]

The low-fidelity recordings add a refreshingly unpretentious, non-commercial realism. [Dec 2019, p.102]

The three October US shows, top-drawer soundboard recordings that have been around for years, are full of those supersonic instrumental flights that are so dependent on mood. [Mar 2020, p.1032]

Embryonic greatness, maybe, but still great. [Sep 2020, p.103]

They were recorded in different session over 16 years, though feel right at home with each other. [Feb 2021, p.85]

The resulting ruminations on loss prove both playful and deep. [Apr 2022, p.89]

His most satisfying outing in decades. [Apr 2023, p.85]

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

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

It's the "ballads," for want of a better term, that provide V's definitive highlights. [Oct 2017, p.89]

Life On Earth is a compassionate, humane record at a time when it can only be a gift. [Mar 2022, p.78]

A fabulous record, a baffling, joyful, touching, frustrating, silly, totally seductive album that you can lose yourself in for an hour, a day, a week. [Aug 2003, p.92]

Courageous, wilful, fractured and something of a triumph, 22, A Million will move you, though you may struggle to explain how, or why. [Nov 2016, p.87]

A jittery suite of clattering protest jams, further uplifted by the ferocious interplay between trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and alto saxophonist Keir Neuringer. [May 2020, p.95]

Pageant has aged well, with the bonus disc of Athens Demos confirming that much of the album's brilliance is down to band and producer making the most of slum resources.[Aug. 2011, p. 113]

It's a set packed with ideas and enthusiasm. [May 2006, p.105]

The seven songs--mostly lengthy, one epic--have (as expected) extraordinary guitar solos, fused vocal harmonies, sprightly old-time and brooding folk. [Oct 2015, p.93]

With an airy yet intimate mix from longtime engineer Bob Clearmountain, this 2-CD/4-LP package carries the requisite audio heft to compensate those who couldn't see Springsteen On Broadway in its natural habitat. [Feb 2019, p.82]

Abetted by producer Photay's sharp editing skills and tactile sound design, KALAK's wildly careening spirituals up the ante with missionary glee and emotional intelligence, Korwar tapping into the diversity of the Indian diaspora via some of his most captivating, immediate and inventive compositions to date. Not for the first time, he's raised the bar. [Dec 2022, p.88]

Of all her many guises [...] this may be her most powerful. [Feb. 2011, p. 94]

A fantastic consolidation of everything good about LCD. [Apr 2007, p.108]

Young Fathers remain a frequently forbidding proposition, and all the better for it. Thrillingly, it's still impossible to predict what we might hear next in any of their tracks. [Mar 2023, p.88]

A confident and substantial evolution of their sound. [Apr 2024, p.89]

The soundtrack to blissful bucolic afternoons threatened by the black clouds of the coming apocalypse. [Jul 2014, p.95]

The season's most deliriously funky beats. [Jun 2003, p.113]

This is a profoundly good record. [Nov 2001, p.102]

Genre-hopping in style with one-woman band Merrill Garbus. [July 2011, p. 114]

It's hard to imagine a record more original or full of life, from any artist of any age, emerging this year. It's that damn good. [Nov 2007, p.91]

Here's some blood and guts from Toronto in the prime-time 1970s. And it doesn't just sit there. [Jul 2022, p.101]

Sung with his steamrollered Mancunian vowels intact, Garvey's allusive, playful lyrics are as golden as those of your Bermans and Caves here, drawing on Wordsworth, but also name-checking Leo Sayer and The Jungle Book's affable bear, Baloo. [Apr 2024, p.82]

Remind Me Tomorrow feels full to the brim, flooded to the top with experimental colour and texture, drones and drums and synthesizers. [Feb 2019, p.85]

An ecstatic update on classic techno. [Apr 2023, p.86]

If you can get past the redundancy--and what a redundancy it is. [Jan 2016, p.106]

Welcome to Mali celebrates its artificiality, flaunts its illegitimacy and waggles its infidelities in your face. Amadou & Mariam have just damned authenticite to an eternity in caducite. [Dec 2008, p.98]

Natalie Prass's debut luxuriates in the same effortlessly timeless space as Rumer's Seasons Of My Life and I Am Shelby Lynne. [Feb 2015, p.94]

Simpson invests this bold, widescreen music with such heartfelt and real pathos and joy that it announces him as a major talent, and makes A Sailor’s Guide To Earth so rewarding.

Mirrored explodes with twisting grooves and obtuse angles. [Jun 2007, p.102]

For Sale ratchets up the band's ever-present anxiety with a dose of on-stage adrenaline to make this the Holy Grail 'Mats fans have hankered after for decades. [Nov 2017, p.109]

There's alot of her here, and the connections are all her own. [Jun 2014, p.89]

Warrants deep exploration. [Nov 2018, p.95]

Bon Iver's musical palette is a far broader, full blown band affair. [Jul 2011, p.98]

From the gentle breeze of the Tala Tannam to the howling gale of lead single Chismiten, the little clumps of ambient sound - village chatter, footsteps, maybe a cockerel - hold their ground against every new gust of virtuoso fretwork. [Jul 2021, p.89]

As confident a second statement as you could wish for, full of strong melodies, affecting lyrics, sharp playing, immense arrangements and sympathetic production. [Jun 2016, p.86]

BSP's sifts from poignant viola and tranquil vocals to foaming turbulence are perfect. [Jan 2014, p.104]

A surprisingly stark yet passionate affair, with just enough unorthodoxy to suggest that a multilayered musician lurks at its roots. [May 2015, p.94]

Wisely not handing over the reins completely to the makeover crew, the new Sangaré is not so very different from the old one--and when you have a voice like hers, it really doesn’t make a lot of difference what knobs are being twiddled in the studio. Sangaré rocks in her own way, and nothing is ever going to change that.

Nothing is off limits, the entire artistic palette is there to be used. And Diawara exploits that uniqueness with aplomb. [Jun 2018, p.92]

The case is made for this wilful outfit's prog-jazz with a hardcore punk heart. [Aug 2019, p.90]

The sprawl of her vision is impressive; the mystic excellence of its execution suggests she should make a habit of such recordings. [Sep 2020, p.88]

Her best songs - cinematic anthem Lost Woman's Prayer and highly charged Every Day In Faith - sound like well-established country classics. [Jan 2022, p.89]

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]

It'll be a bit much for the casual fan with no need for all those stereo/mono variations, but they do have at least a couple dozen other best-ofs to choose from. [Oct 2013, p.102]

This album feels personal, contemplative, yet thanks to Harris's blurred vocals, the meaning is never in focus, like notes sent back from the edge of a waking dream. [Oct 2021, p.96]

Hercules And Love Affair exist in that mighty unreal demimonde where dancing and art are not mutually exclusive. [Apr 2008, p.105]

He still sings very much from the heart, though, and the result is altogether awesome. [Apr 2013, p.94]

Walls is an essential slice of art-punk history. It's also a blistering good time. [Apr 2024, p.97]

What is missing is that impish, dangerous side, the famous contorted grin and all that it suggests: humour and horror, surprise and confrontation. [Nov 2014, p.89]

Nothing fundamental has changed, the attack is just more scrupulous. ... Hot Snakes' caustic, erudite commentary is more welcome than ever. [Apr 2018, p.88]

This is very much a thoughtful, interior record, with its own distinct character and an unsettling quality that gets under your skin. [Jan 2021, p.91]

Life Is People is superb. [Sep 2012, p.84]

The result is fittingly breathtaking, a singer destroying his own work, yet creating something more elegiac and profound in the process. [Aug 2016, p.90]

Toledo's ability to craft songs that swerve from fuzz-pop to jaded melancholia making him a cut above his underground contemporaries. [Jun 2016, p.92]

Regardless of how they're captured, these songs still have the capacity to enthrall. [Jan 2017, p.113]

Comprising mostly new material, the performances are frequently breathtaking. [Mar 2013, p.91]