A joy in itself, but watching the accompanying film to experience the full audio-visual wallop is a must. [Feb 2014, p.113]

A beautiful album that nudges a classic past into a brave future. [Jul 2016, p.109]

Hedben crafts the best album of his career. [Dec 2017, p.112]

An ideal Fall primer for the uninitiated. [Mar 2018, p.117]

This is an epic musical journey. [Nov 2013, p.120]

Hercules And Love Affair are at their best when they cut loose and damn the consequences. [Apr 2008, p.110]

Syro is an album that instantly connects. [Nov 2014, p.109]

This is a winner from start to finish. [May 2018, p.111]

Those same giddy vocals, rusticated, old-timey arrangements and lyrics combine childlike reverie with an ancient sense of wisdom and dread make it equally magical and rewarding. [mar 2012, p.106]

An awe-inspiring experience. [Sep 2012, p.100]

A Circle Without Having To Curve is a billowing transmission from some gigantic sullen hulk. Elsewhere texture, hiss and layered voices head into abstraction, but if you think he's afraid of revealing himself, the voice and guitar reprise Contain (Cedar Version) ends the album with a sweet re-entry to the daylight. [Aug 2016, p.110]

Sampha's lyrics are clever and his voice so inherently likeable that it works. [Apr 2017, p.116]

Unabashed whimsy merges seamlessly with melodious garage rock. [Jul 2003, p.100]

Aurally, Super Furry Animals are evolving into a hybrid of Blur and The Cardiacs. (Drawing) Rings Around The World, Shoot Doris Day and Presidential Suite are excellent, most of the remainder pass muster, but there's nothing to change anyone's world.

A leftfield classic. [Oct 2003, p.100]

Six albums in, Baxter Dury has realised a sound and lyrical approach that is unmistakably his alone. [May 2020, p.101]

The tension between invigorating, often exhilarating joyful music and disconcertingly bleak subject matter may be one hardwired into hip-hop tradition, but J Hus's innovative, genre-defying style and evocative, elliptical lyrics prove it can still be an intoxicating combination. [Apr 2020, p.107]

The electro-inspired beats and declamatory rhymes are just as uncompromising and unorthodox as before. [Oct 2013, p.107]

Cut, copy and paste this definitive record into your world. [Jul 2005, p.115]

On his impressive second album, the LA-born R&B auteur offers fresh options for mainstream urban pop. [Jan 2013, p.110]

Once I Was An Eagle is entirely Laura Marling's trip--beautiful, heartfelt, searching, sublime, and thrillingly open-ended. [Jun 2013, p.92]

A poignant revisiting of Whitsun Dance catches the profound power of this richly arranged album. [Aug 2020, p.105]

A record whose card-shuffling diversity proves to be its ace. [Oct 2019, p.113]

A wild indulgence, of course, and a big investment of time, but like 1999's 69 Love Songs, well worth it. [Apr 2017, p.115]

Washington's gift for euphonic arrangements and eagerness to explore new forms is evident throughout. [Summer 2018, p.115]

Deerhunter might be fascinated by the vanishing tricks people play, but Halcyon Digest is a thing of unmistakable substance. [Nov. 2010, p. 113]

An appropriately violent swansong, then. [Dec 2016, p.106]

Each of these fine songs could be sung by a blowsy, bruised Blanch DeBois. [Aug 2015, p.109]

Such moments of wry genius make a very special record. [Oct 2003, p.104]

Her voice is versatile, the beats delicioiusly languid, but it's the songwriting that shines. [Oct 2004, p.129]

Get To Leave and Paradise Here Abouts unite Gelb's notoriously scattered logic into music showcasing an immense generosity of spirit and poetic warmth. [May 2006, p.124]

While the new incarnation of the band has made two strong albums, LXXX shows off what really was their last splash. It was one hell of a cannonball. [May 2013, p.115]

Jaar has struck gold here. [Apr 2011, p.104]

At a safe distance from Britpop's glare, Midlife justly represents Blur as national treasures, as emotionally rich and hungry for progress as ardiohead, only catchier. [Aug 2009, p.116]

By striving to find romance and poetry in grim times, Fontaines D.C. have made a record to fall in love with. [May 2019, p.113]

The key is that Murphy, unlike his peers and the bands he's produced, is more interested in excellence than cool. [Feb 2005, p.96]

There's a crystal-clear production and a return to his most precious musical touchstones. [Jul 2017, p.115]

It makes a great introduction to an oft-overlooked band. [May 2011, p.133]

However much they conjure up campfire laments, you're rarely more than a few minutes from kick-ass riffs and percussive abandon. [Mar 2017, p.115]

This is the sound of Low finding extremity in a new, thrilling way. [Oct 2018, p.112]

Brave and ambitious. [Jul 2005, p.122]

There's almost too much bubbling up in their heads. [May 2020, p.109]

He may have followed the aspiring bedroom producer's now-established route from blog favourite to remixer (for Yeah Yeah Yeahs), but the solo debut of Dayve Hawk, former frontman for post-punks Hail Social, is anything but predictable. [Jan 2010, p. 122]

Fans of experimetal electronica will be [happy], though Radiohead devotees should exercise caution. [Jun 2010, p.124]

A band with swagger once again. [Jan 2013, p.109]

Shields is part spiralling indie rock, part wistful '60s pop. [Oct 2012, p.102]

Frustratingly uneven. [Jun 2012, p.118]

The work of a man kitted out with a full array of emotional surveillance equipment, its expansive space-rock and cosmic lyrics zooming in and out on humanity in all its rich chaos. [Jun 2020, p.92]

Her voice is magnetic enough to tilt the Earth's axis, the grooves so deep and plush that they could upholster a Cadillac. [Apr 2020, p.109]

Uncanny. [Sep 2014, p.108]

It's some indication of Feast of Wire's accomplished evocation of Arizona's old weirdness that it makes you want to go to Tucson. [Mar 2003, p.104]

From Coldcut to DJ Shadow, every rap-era cut-up maestro owes a debt to Steven Stein. [Nov 2008, p.129]

An exuberant debut. [Aug 2004, p.110]

Smart, affecting and rich in melody, Krystal reveals Maltese to be very much the full ticket. [Jan 2020, p.110]

[Locked Down] offers a vivid reminder as to why his myth has endured for so long. No one else comes close to sounding like this. [May 2012, p.96]

They don't quite escape the shadow of Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Mogwai, but there's something rather joyous about this unadorned rock dynamic. [Jan 2004, p.114]

[Her] final LP gives as much pleasure as her 2002 breakthrough. [Jan 2018, p.110]

There is no doubt that his songwriting chops just keep on getting better.

A self-contained gem. [Jul 2005, p.112]

With Amidon's intimate, unshowy voice inderpinned nu melodic, folky guitars, minimal electronics and elegant strings of post-classical arranger Nico Mulhy, its ability to beguile is considerable. [May 2010, p. 112]

Brush off the buzzing novelty, though, and there is much to admire. [Nov 2013, p.118]

The work of a richly creative entity still in the ascendant, those with a mind to will drink deep. [Mar 2014, p.116]

The reverse-order approach does remind you that he has sustained startlingly well, and perhaps as importantly, that he's still in the game. [Jan 2015, p.135]

The result is uniformly deft, sumptuous and moving. [Apr 2018, p.110]

It's a journey that's wildly eclectic, hard to endure through every tangled turn, but impossible not to love. [Jan 2019, p.117]

While partly rooted in grief, the songs here see magic in the mundane, the music's dreamy qualities fracturing into hallucinatory passages of cut-up vocals. [Dec 2019, p.109]

A mind-bogglingly diverse four-hour-plus odyssey. ... A stand-alone single-disc sampler featuring 10 DRIFT highlights ranks as Underworld's finest long-player since 1999's Beaucoup Fish. [Dec 2019, p.114]

Direct, alert, questing, it's a record that powerfully refuses to settle down. [Summer 2020, p.107]

His originality peaked in '74, but for groovy, tuneful pizazz, Wings Of Love takes it even higher. [Jun 2013, p.115]

Their sonic ingenuity enhances even the most basic garage-rock templates. [Sep 2001, p.122]

His voice remains charming, devilish-yet-wise, and his delivery as beguiling as ever. [Nov 2014, p.109]

[The Mavericks'] sound refreshed, recharged and better than ever. [Feb 2013, p.106]

An album that advances the sound of LCD Soundsystem and more than justifies their return, while retaining all that was brilliant about them in the first place. [Oct 2017, p.98]

Little Sparrow mixes its trad tendencies with tunes, lovely instruments, and best of all, Parton's personality.

The songs here are rougher, louder, and often more exciting than their "official" versions. [Nov 2000, p.123]

Poignant beyond words... but never mawkish. [Dec 2003, p.140]

Some of the shorter tracks feel like distractions, but when the fragile mixture of field recordings, samples from radio broadcasts and twanging folk instruments comes into focus, the results are quietly fascinating. [Dec 2003, p.120]

Part Sly Stone, part raving Baptist minister, Cee-Lo proves he's every bit as exceptional as his neighbours. [May 2004, p.100]

Chai specialise in indie-pop confections, but lean in close and you're swept into an anarchic whirlwind. [May 2019, p.108]

It's a sensational return. [Sep 2017, p.115]

Toronto six-piece deliver a killer concept album. [July 2011, p. 113]

Nothing here is essential, but there will always be enough completeist to warrent airing of Dylan's old laundry. [Nov 2008, p.127]

It's a record for dusk, for dawn, and for all of the dark corners in which you might find yourself in between. [Apr 2014, p.109]

It's another masterwork from a group of no peers. [Sep 2020, p.113]

Inventive and technical, it's death metal with a brain. [Jul 2012, p.102]

This a rare and colourful leap forward. [May 2013, p.102]

It's fortunate that the warmly accessible Way Out Weather, which showcases his melodious, improvising guitar, exists in less esoteric numbers [than his limited released vinyl albums]. [Nov 2014, p.112]

The obscurity of some of what's here might seem almost comical, but the love that has gone into the whole package couches most of the tracks in a sense of lost treasure. [Mar 2018, p.116]

What on paper sounds like an awkward hotch-potch, actually makes for an hugely enticing, fluid record.

This is a sheer visceral delight. [May 2002, p.124]

The Convincer slots in smoothly behind 1998's Dig My Mood. [Oct 2001, p.126]

This is a very impressive, ambitious debut. [Oct 2014, p.113]

The result might be a different kind of journey, complete with detours and dead-ends, but its as compelling as any he's taken so far. [Jun 2016, p.111]

Poison Season sounds like a restless musical intellect stretching out with new confidence. [Oct 2015, p.106]

Given time and a little effort, [his songs] begin to cast their own rewarding chamber-pop spell. [Mar 2005, p.98]

Less dazzling than Silent Shout, but The knife still create a world like no one else's. [May 2013, p.105]

The follow-up reins in some of the chaos and the songs are stronger for it. [Nov 2015, p.115]

Knock Knock is a visionary blend of minimal techno and armchair psychedelia, jammed with canny features. [Jun 2018, p.117]