Rare, Forever's prevailing mood is sensuous and luxurious. [May 2021, p.88]

The free-est, fun-est, most psychedelic Villagers record so far. [Sep 2021, p.76]

This is not only Horace Andy's best album in 40 years, but it is also a work of lasting power. [May 2022, p.84]

With its own low-key sparkle Archangel Hill stands testament to a musical third act every bit as engaging as anything that went before. [Jun 2023, p.91]

Familiar elements (Nancy Wang's cheerleading vocals, sparse instrumentation colliding, lyrical misanthropy) are present and correct, but everything is bolder and deeper. [June 2010, p. 93]

Snares feels more like No Age's greatest hits than their fifth album. [Feb 2018, p.95]

It's Beach House's grandest vision yet. [Mar 2022, p.83]

A poignant tribute. [Jan 2020, p.84]

Their most ruthlessly focused. [Nov 2020, p.88]

The source isn't always apparent, as Loscil and English's manipulations drift closer to the ambient techno of Gas. [Mar 2023, p.91]

The Hex expands brilliantly in a musical vision that had lain mostly dormant. [Dec 2018, p.90]

With its 10 tracks and 24-minute running time, this unexpected sequel--its sleeve nodding playfully to Dr Dre's 2001-might look like a small-scale musical property, but once inside, it's a mansion. [Sep 2021, p.84]

Decidedly bolder than 2016's Ellipsis, it is an album that revels in subverting expectations. [Jun 2020, p.88]

This is an album that seduces as readily as it challenges. [Sep 2015, p.88]

Boone's rich, Rickie Lee Jones-meets-Chrissie Hynde voice is the careworn bedrock upon which these bruised, dynamics-rich songs depend. [Feb 2019, p.92]

Elbow reflect an unruly world here, but if they sometimes lose faith, they never lose heart. [Nov 2019, p.87]

Rhys’s melodies stay with you, and his wordplay is as pleasingly idiosyncratic as ever. [Feb 2024, p.89]

It's over in a flash, an exhilarating fairground ride you won't want to disembark. [Mar 2024, p.88]

Sleigh Bells offer a thrilling ride. [Sep 2010, p.104]

Getting back in touch with his anger hasn't come at the cost of Mould's innate tunefulness. [Oct 2020, p.86]

Constant Bop is even more eclectic [than White Denim's music]. [Jun 2015, p.87]

Full and lush, yet somehow homey and direct. [May 2003, p.97]

Although Evening... has this unexpected core of angry commitment, she's still slick with Californian cruisers. [Nov 2003, p.123]

Beautifully recorded, this is intimate seduction for voice, elegant finger-picked guitar and not much else. [May 2004, p.93]

Vincent's voice is so unusual and beguiling, it almost detracts from the lyrics, but they eventually punch through. ... Vincent and Another Sky enthrall. [Sep 2020, p.88]

They might shake, they might tremble, but The National remain a safe pair of hands. [Jun 2013, p.86]

Lynn still sounds full of the life-force; more engaged and effervescent than many stars half her age. [Apr 2016, p.88]

Now 25 and treading Nirvana/Hole-influenced terrain better suited to the bleed and luster of these uncensored songs of self-empowerment, she has found her perfect skin. [May 2023, p.94]

Hval deals in big cerebral questions, but these songs--intimate, intricately fleshed out--have roots in both body and mind. [Oct 2019, p.86]

Rendered with a delicate, impressionistic touch, Phasor's dreamlike entreaties cut far deeper than predecessor Far In's lockdown ruminations. [Mar 2024, p.90]

Her characters will wander through your imagination for days after the record's stopped spinning. [Nov 2016, p.86]

Ire Works is a thrillingly hostile racket containing 13 wild bursts. [Dec 2007, p.110]

Vibrant and uninhibited, dotted with rule-bending twists, Mood Valiant is the sound of summer. [Aug 2021, p.88]

While the album's nine, wordless pieces for mournfully beautiful cello and shifting ambient atmospheres may not always conjure seismic volatility, there is certainly an underlying tension close to the surface of swooning opener Hellebore. [Jan 2016, p.96]

A masterclass in sound design, Bolted creeps up slowly then engulfs you. [Dec 2023, p.91]

A heady, volatile brew that, in these emboldened settings, have the makings of anthems. [Jun 2017, p.92]

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]

Her ability to dominate a room with minimal musical movement is astonishing; this record lowers the temperature, heightens the sense, slows down life, frame by frame. [Mar 2024, p.85]

The result is mesmerising--one lone, moving meditation on love and England and murderous empire. [Jul 2019, p.86]

A remarkable comeback. [Jun 2004, p.106]

A best possible blend of odd and good. [Dec 2017, p.96]

Even though her dreamscapes are surreal, there are moments that jolt. [Sep 2019, p.90]

An uncomfortable listen, especially the Big Star's Third-esque When I Think Of You, but also an album imbued with acceptance and dignity. [Nov 2019, p.93]

[The new songs] have a compression and pop playfulness often lacking from his albums, yet still manages to address the complex "every feeling" emotions of high school students. [May 2020, p.91]

There's so much going on that each sitting reveals new nuances and added twists of slender wonder. [Jul 2020, p.82]

Like a wonderous and very clever piece of musical brain onomatopoeia. [Aug 2023, p.84]

Never less than fresh-sounding and curious. [Jun 2005, p.110]

Hval's most rounded missive to date unsettles. [Oct 2016, p.98]

Every bit as chaotically charming as its predecessor. [Nov 2005, p.108]

It's an absorbing listen. [Nov 2019, p.108

If the album has a fault, it's in sequencing, with some of stronger moments low in the pecking order. [May 2015, p.99]

Songs hang in the air, implying rather than asserting uncanny dimensions. Dylan’s voice, again, is quite beautiful, with a control and nuance so many thought he’d lost. [Jul 2023, p.97]

The musical and emotional ground covered here is remarkable, evidence of an artist who can locate joy inside pain, and whose adventurous, modernist, fearful funk can be movingly expressive. [May 2020, p.88]

Wyatt's keening, unaffected, peculiarly comforting voice is the uniquely compelling common denominator. [Dec 2014, p.110]

It's the garlanded ritual folk of Kan Me ("May Song"), however, that underlines this is a record of changing seasons and transitional states. Accept the offer of tea but prepare to lose days in the process. [Aug 2022, p.90]

This is an odyssey both emotional and educational. [Jan 2015, p.108]

A tear-stained, yet tasteful, requiem. [Feb 2006, p.93]

Bruce Springsteen began making this album in 2010--like golden reflections late in the day, it's been worth the wait. [Aug 2019, p.88]

The stated modus operandi--everybody is leading and following--results in some fascinating new angles and delicious surprises on familiar material. [Apr 2011, p.107]

Nasty, brutish, short, and wholly compelling, Yeezus begs only one question: where next? [Sep 2013, p.89]

It's as complete as any Floyd completist could hope for. [Apr 2012, p.101]

It's never morbid, but mortality is a running theme. [Jun 2018, p.91]

A keeper. ... This is still a terrific entry point into a band who repay obsession. [Oct 2018, p.87]

They really do sound like a band more than a group. [Jun 2019, p.92]

It's the emotional, cathartic journey of the chief protagonist that captivates the most. [Oct 2023, p.86]

Ten is a classic of the grunge era, its super-sized anthems and introspective pieces powered by Eddie Vedder, a Jim Morrision for the plaid shirt brigade. [Apr 2009, p.116]

Instead of meeting fire with ire, there's an attempt to provide calm, clarity, a space to contemplate what really matters. [Feb 2020, p.93]

Ultimately, the record triumphs via Rolling Blackouts; deep inhabitation of their music, ans the space of its creation. [Jul 2018, p.92]

Gibbons rises to the occasion. [May 2019, p.89]

Very sweet debut, a mostly acoustic affair. [Sep 2020, p.93]

Over and over again, Pratt hovers on the brink of revelation, yet Quiet Signs puts down a code, that, brilliantly, it's not quite possible to break. [Mar 2019, p.89]

Uninhibited where "()" felt constipated. [Oct 2005, p.99]

Cronin delvers timeless, classic pop that evades cliches. [Jun 2013, p.86]

Melt!, a twisted dancefloor lament for the polar ice caps, is a reminder of Owen's ability to mine techno gold. But the highlight is Corner Of My Sky, a memorable collaboration with compatriot John Cale. [Jun 2020, p.91]

Blood Money makes for an extravagant headphone experience if you're in the right frame of mind. If not, its clatter and blare and nihilism will genuinely jangle your nerves. [Co-Album Of The Month (with 'Alice'), May 2002, p.94]

A magnificent record. [Jan 2004, p.104]

A tremendous (and timely) distraction from the bad news from the desert this year. [May 2013, p.85]

Waking The Dreaming Body is both welcoming comfort and a surprising joy. [Apr 2021, p.82]

A new depth to her prickly but previously sometimes brattish lyrics, a grown-up album by a real grown-up who knows how to sugar-coat a pill for mass consumption. [Oct 2013, p.95]

[It] was mind-bending in its day and remains so now. [May 2006, p.122]

The debut solo album is as ornate as 2009's Veckatimest, with Rossen now playing almost all the buccaneering acoustic guitars, cascading piano lines, cellos and woodwinds himself. [May 2022, p.94]

[A] dark and glorious vision, reinterpreting Nashville country-soul hits from the '60s and '70s. [Jul 2016, p.97]

This superb second album does indeed make a dramatic leap forward. [Mar 2014, p.90]

A more intimate dimension to this incisive chronicler of beleaguered times. [May 2022, p.88]

Capturing his bad life choices, regrets and hopes at their most immediate. [Aug 2021, p.84]

A potpourri of country, rock, bluegrass and folk, the constant being top-shelf picking and soaring harmonies. [Nov 2022, p.93]

Meticulously constructed, yet with melodies and rhythms born out of improvisation, it's an album of two halves, moving from euphoric collapse to an uncertain contentment. [Jun 2018, p.89]

Halo digs deep into the unknown and bring back unexpected brilliance. [Jun 2017, p.93]

A lot happens on Eleven Eleven -- all of it good. [Sept. 2011, p. 106]

[Hank Cochran's] proven an inspirational figure for honky tonk star Johnson, who's managed to rope in half of Nashville for this revamp of Cochran's songbook. [Feb 2013, p.90]

[Sleep] have customarily not rushed into nailing The Sciences, nor departed from their rubric of burroughsian ganja mythspinning, set to eardrum-busting, down-tuned slo-mo jams. [Jul 2018, p.88]

Anima is his third solo album, outside of soundtracks, and it's his richest. [Sep 2019, p.87]

As well as blending linguistic elegance and musical levity, Sparkle Hard affirms Stephen Malkmus's increasingly contemplative approach. [Jun 2018, p.94]

A fine, off-beat listen. [Jan 2006, p.124]

It's sonically deeper and more emotionally engaging, from start to finish, than any previous SOK release. [Jun 2021, p.83]

Mimicking the band's whole existence, it flickers between light and shade, its clouds fast-moving, sunshine blotted out before it breaks through. [Apr 2018, p.88]

[A] disarming, relatable debut. [Mar 2017, p.97]

Stark, resolute songs. [Apr 2022, p.85]