The band’s template has barely changed over those years but that isn’t to suggest a lack of artistic growth. “How Deep It Goes”, the opening track from their tenth album Let It All In, is a prime example of their peculiar progression as it exudes the reassuring warmth of California songsmiths of yesteryear yet still somehow manages to wedge a wash of icy interplay between Huemann’s guitar and Matthew Pierce’s synths smack dab in the middle of the track. [May 2020, p.48]

More than the spiritual feel of Impulse! releases by Sanders or Coltrane, this music recalls the groove oriented work of Turrentine, Idris Muhammad and Grover Washington Jr for CTI and Kudu. It’s warm weather music, made to be played through speakers propped in open windows, facing the street. [Jul 2018, p.58]

It's elegant and pristine, a febrile flutter of rhythms, glinting sequences and pale, shimmering backdrops. [Jul 2014, p.51]

This recording attests to their powerful rock credentials. [#201, p.63]

Playing it, you're reminded anew of the restlessness and emotional range at the heart of Young's art. [Feb 2014, p.64]

Cross’s ability to get the job done with his stripped down trio is the real achievement here. [Mar 2019, p.65]

A slippery, shape-shifting quality is one of the great strengths of Amon Tobin's sixth album. Plainly put, Out From Out Where is impossible to pin down. [#226, p.67]

May be the year's most surprising pure pop pleasure--precisely because it's nothing like you'd expect a pop album to be. [#224, p.61]

Where NO was extreme in its attack, W opts to let the group dream, as a more acoustic angle is explored – with Wata’s ephemeral vocal being an ever present guiding spirit force that trails like incense smoke through the songs. Things eventually kick off, however, with “The Fallen”, a time-tested metal guitar dirge with an electronic sting in its tail that effortlessly reverts back to Boris at their amplifier worshipping best. [Feb 2022, p.58]

Every song on Fungus II aspires to soundtrack a twisted comic book or Hanna-Barbera cartoon about itself. Segall’s guitar and bass playing is wailing and distended while Chippendale lays down tight bursts of percussive fire. For the beetle-browed half hour this album lasts, these guys are here to party. [Apr 2020, p.63]

This is darkly delicious pop--with no smiling. [Mar 2019, p.64]

A return to form. ... If anything this album is neither nervous nor holding its nerve, but powerful, solid, the work of a group who know what it is they do and how best to play to their strengths. [Apr 2018, p.64]

An album both generous and balanced in its patient give and take, upbeat and open, full of enthusiasm and joy. [Nov 2017, p.67]

Almond – who recorded his vocals while recovering from Covid – sounds audibly frail at times. But this works in the album’s favour, working humanity into the glossiness. The most effective tracks are those with sparse backing, such as “Polaroid” and the drolly misanthropic “I’m Not A Friend Of God”. [May 2022, p.53]

The blithe ease with which it slips from unruly quasi-techno to Tony Conrad-like violin drone (“Pumpkin Attack On Mommy And Daddy”; “The Wrong Thing”) keeps this consistently diverting. [Mar 2019, p.62]

The album has almost Wagnerian scope and immersive power, and at just over 50 minutes it's well organised as a start-to-finish listen. [Mar 2011, p.50]

This intelligently compiled collection brings together the best (and sometime worst) of these mostly forgotten groups. [Aug 2016, p.66]

Celestite cannot simply be characterised as pastiche, however, as the Weaver brothers and Dunn have constructed dramatic instrumentals using the material of previous compositions, ensuring a thematic and sonic continuity with their own past. [Jul 2014, p.61]

Denzel’s flows are as hungry as ever, at times managing to channel the untamed spirit of DMX (see “Diet”) while Kenny’s production is the ideal mix of weighty drums and potent bass. It’s an energetic listen and one that can hopefully act as some sort of cure for Old Heads Syndrome – the belief that no one is making real hiphop anymore. [Apr 2020, p.68]

Surprisingly, it works and doesn’t come apart, punctuating a conceptually striking, musically flawed, but altogether enjoyable record. [May 2020, p.53]

An engaging, unpredictable album of Tortoise-like vibraphones, guitars, minimalist repetitions, wry syncopations, occasional duff notes and subtly daubed electronics. [#228, p.69]

Green commandeers her forces, keeps things simple, and makes irresistibly confident and sharp guitar pop. Addictive. [Aug 2021, p.65]

The Moths Are Real is a crisp and atmospheric set of idiosyncratic and finely crafted pop songs. [Mar 2013, p.60]

A minor pleasure of the album is the beautiful way it's edited together, a gently manipulated impression of random accidents. [Sep 2015, p.47]

[An] overstuffed sound hurricane. [#255, p.58]

Barry Walker’s softly rising and falling pedal steel melodies calcify the skeleton of “Memory Of Lunch”, while Patrick McDermott’s distorted guitar lines provide the flesh, shaping a harsher drone as a symbolic border between reality and dream. And while Roped In never renounces its cheerful perspective, the approaching darkness of his guitar overtones dispels childlike innocence. [Dec 2020, p.53]

On four extended tracks, Fennelly’s various keyboards (synthesizer, harmonium, piano) function as kind of bedrock that deftly accommodates a variety of tacks and textures from his partners. [Oct 2023, p.53]

There’s no stridency, special pleading or chewing of scenery, just gentle enactments. This is what folk music used to do before Volk became toxic. Malkmus represents his characters via traditional techniques. [May 2020, p.54]

A warm and thoughtful record. Sometimes the production is a bit light--the first half in particular suffers from a rather MOR unobtrusiveness. But Laveaux’s voice is a treasure, her guitar playing is fresh and prickly, and things get more tangled and interesting the further along we go. [Apr 2018, p.67]

With their reverent, celebratory tone, tracks like “Naked (You Enter & Leave This World With Nothing)”, “I Will Follow You For Life, Everywhere” and “We Must Grieve Together” speak to the music’s function as an integral part of a community’s healing process. Sung together in deep harmony and pulling their inspiration from a source too powerful and mysterious for words, fra fra’s funeral songs offer a glimpse into how the people of this particular corner of West Africa deal with the pain, uncertainty and finality of death. [Jun 2020, p.49]

Blue Songs nevertheless presents a level of poetic inventiveness that isn't easy to trace in the dance pantheon.

Thankfully, her second solo album Blueprint is not a punk revival record, but a great grab bag of tracks showing that Armendariz still has not only her patented hair-raising and blood-curdling shriek from the 70s, but a voice that can reference the evocative beauty found in the pipes of both Patti Smith and Judee Sill. [Jul 2018, p.59]

Still Brazy is thoroughly and unapologetically regional, but its thematic engines are universal. [Aug 2016, p.63]

As a superior melodic rapper, Open Mike Eagle seems to communicate with a kind of preternatural whimsy. Even when he sifts through his trauma, his voice serves as a velvet glove, keeping this 30 minute album from descending into painful self-pity. [Dec 2020, p.54]

Musically it’s a joyous triumph: vocally Estelle is utterly assured but naturally ebullient, the sound of someone totally at ease. [Nov 2018, p.68]

Heavy, expressive and uncompromising, both Wrecked and Analog Fluids Of Black Holes gesture at fresh, purposeful possibilities for noise and experimental music. [Nov 2019, p.49]

At times flush with the meditative air of Alice Coltrane, elsewhere like some whispered about 80s new age obscurity, this album both requires and justifies extensive attention. [Mar 2019, p.62]

It’s hard to believe this is the same band who bowed out with Ghost Stories. There they sounded uptight and reticent; here they are restless and free. The creative rebirth continues. Where to next? [May 2020, p.55]

Lala Belu is his first new recording for decades, and it lives up to the expectation generated by their live appearances. [Apr 2018, p.67]

Rather than concocting rich strata from the guitar of Reine Fiske or Johan Holmegard’s percussion, these pieces are mainly stripped back and sprightly, propelled by the dazzling vocals of Ejstes. ... Where previously these atonal chords and odd tempos would have been subsumed into the heavy mixture, they appear here open and light, forming something that’s less earthy and far more fantastical. [Nov 2022, p.60]

But if the technology has moved on, he’s moved with it, and the results are significantly more interesting than what he was up to in the 90s. It feels rural, but modern; rustic, but hardly an idyll; a feat of true uneasy listening. [May 2019, p.51]

Perhaps their most forceful to date. [May 2015, p.49]

An engrossing collection. [Aug 2016, p.63]

Raymond has learned the most important lesson of American primitive guitar: whatever your influences, they need to project a bit of your emotional life. This, as much as her robust tone and nimble picking, is what makes Raymond sound like a guitarist with staying power. [Dec 2020, p.56]

Heavy, expressive and uncompromising, both Wrecked and Analog Fluids Of Black Holes gesture at fresh, purposeful possibilities for noise and experimental music. [Nov 2019, p.49]

Science Fiction Dancehall Classics is a more than serviceable as an On-U sound primer, yet may throw even those who think they know the label. [Oct 2015, p.70]

The group's debut for Thurston Moore's imprint witnesses the coagulation of the four-piece into something more identifiable as an honest-to-badness rock group. [Nov 2008, p.68]

The ten laptop compositions of Platform are brilliant, thrilling articulations of many of her ideas. [May 2015, p.50]

He tears apart square wave synths into sharp, staccato blocks and spreads them across Insula, twisting alien 8-bit into different melodies and frequencies. [Jul 2018, p.60]

This is swirling, volatile music, awash with synths and scorched to a turn by Mulholland's guitar. [Aug 2016, p.62]

It's a much quieter album than its predecessor, more interested in fingering the tears and rips in its luxurious, ambient textures than Black Up's intergalactic boom-bap. It pulses and shimmers like light bouncing off gold, burnishing Palaceer's radiant visions. [Aug 2014, p.51]

Personal and political themes gestate within this gloss. They surface in full power on the giddy “Space Golf”, showering with sarcasm the absurd space escapism of xenophobic, misanthropic billionaires. [Dec 2020, p.62]

As a cranky comeback album, it's as welcome as the amped-up reprise of Dr Jacobi as podcast prophet on Twin Peaks: The return. [Nov 2017, p.67]

Some might find the shit-fi recording (albeit aided by a keen producer’s ear), the relentless bleakness, or Del Rio’s blackened vocals to be dealbreakers. But it’s undeniable that Raspberry Bulbs are not only unencumbered by constraints of genre, they’ve forged a sound unique to themselves. [Mar 2020, p.54]

This album eclipses their previous output and hits a consistent note of righteous force. [Jan 2008, p.69]

Tutti is a journey to the centre of the soul, but it is a kindly one, and Cosey is a most excellent guide. [Mar 2019, p.61]

But where Konoyo was a more visceral invocation of the electronic sublime, Anoyo stretches out and creates space for the reeds to be heard amid the splices, obstructions and reversals of the Los Angeles based producer’s typically stratified sonic design. [May 2019, p.67]

Their third album Horizon is mellifluous and pretty, with a rolling, tumbling quality that feels like a downhill race. [Jul 2019, p.57]

One moment she comes on like a pure music box turnaround MC, the next like a spitting cat, her delivery sits perfectly on the fucked up thud and South London hissing spherics conjured up in the mix. [Jul 2018, p.61]

There's some seriously accomplished musicianship here. [Aug 2014, p.55]

Translated lyrics illuminate and mystify in equal measure. [Oct 2017, p.67]

While not as suck your frozen heart out bleak as her last album, Abyss, Hiss Spun explores metal's darkness on a more intimate scale. [Nov 2017, p.67]

Distorted and wobbly piano samples summon up the spirit of 1990s rave, but in a quietly euphoric way. Harmonies occasionally jut out, seemingly more a product of chance than by design. [Oct 2017, p.49]

We Are Sent Here By History is a meditation on all of the war, death and resistance that has shaped the world we live in today. Whether or not we can use the lessons learned from that pain to create a future that is worth living is a question that remains unanswered. [Mar 2020, p.56]

An account of stifling domesticity plays out over a propulsive 4/4 rock beat and swirling woodwinds, which serve to evoke how, in spite of everything, she felt “electric, alive, spirited, fire and free”. .... Testament to the subterranean efforts to prevent this woman’s story from being forgotten. [Oct 2023, p.52]

Her most powerful album to date, both vivid and serene in its uncanny way of slowing the pace of time. [Mar 2019, p.61]

Listening with a heart opened with affection kindled by Mascis's warm and defeated drawl, there's much to engage the latent Dinosaur fan looking for a still moment. [Mar 2011, p.52]

The second CD is noisier at times, and more surprising overall, introducing new instruments to powerful effect. [May 2015, p.53]

Especially potent are moments in which Rundle’s velvety delivery overlaps with Bryan Funck’s bitter growls. Here, they find strength in one another and traverse a valley infested by guitar riffs dripping with filth, earthshaking tom hits and forlorn swirls of folk, leaving behind a harsh yet stunning trail of music. [Dec 2020, p.62]

Fohr’s music achieves ever greater levels of emotional richness while keeping a careful distance from the confessional. [Nov 2017, p.54]

With Drumm at the helm, the album resolves itself as a spooky and nuanced maelstrom. [Nov 2012, p.56]

It could all, of course, be unbearably mannered, but the duo's constant striving for layered perfection, contrasted with the very human qualities of the vocals, keep it grounded in some sort of feeling. [Sep 2008, p.61]

The result is an improbably appealing melange of hyperslick R&B and musoid avant-Metal, where mid-1080s Radio Top Shop melodies nestle in the artful embrace of surgically enhanced riffola and soaring, pitchwheel punishing minimoog solos. [Nov 2010, p.65]

All the sharp, cold ridges of the usual electronic sound palette are sheared off and smoothed down on this beguilingly gentle release. [#228, p.65]

The Sonics actually sound like they're back. [May 2015, p.53]

A roaring return to a full band sound featuring twin drums, electric bass and keyboards. The secret ingredient that makes it such a blast, though, is an unabashed injection of prog pomposity. [Nov 2018, p.62]

Modern production simply won’t allow for the kind of warm frictive depth in the low end or biteable chunkiness of beats those albums revelled in--but as a dazzling showcase for Bootsy’s still-ill skills it’s great, always problematising what could be politesse with the sheer deranged drive behind Bootsy’s shades, always plumbing for excess as a watchword. [Nov 2017, p.54]

When she laughs that she’s never read Robert Greene’s self-help manual 48 Laws, not only is she declaring her album a bullshit-free zone, she’s redefining priorities for 21st century grown-up rap. On this form you have to hope her approach prevails. [Nov 2017, p.70]

By zeroing in on the darkness at the heart of an economy demanding a constant turnover of novelty, they've made something deeply essential for the moment. [Nov 2012, p.57]

She extends her compositional technique, with added space, breath and timbre, into new dimensions. ... On Spirit Exit, Barbieri is closer than ever to club territory and the ecstatic. [Jul 2022, p.42

It Is What It Is is a fitting ethos for an artist whose genre-twisting tendrils have extended themselves into the highest reaches of the pop canopy, simultaneously flexing their deep funk and jazz roots. [May 2020, p.62]

In the best way, Barber and Pearson distil their knowledge and experimentation into something which sounds like the raw essence of a musical personality [Aug 2008]

There's a great danger in finding beauty in suffering, but this album takes that risk and reaps great dividends. [Mar 2011, p.54]

Tyondai Braxton’s own Telekinesis is a symphonic work that sounds like a lost sci-fi film soundtrack. It has the clustered, hovering awe of György Ligeti’s Atmosphères and the eerie arpeggiated angles of Herrmann soundtracks like Vertigo and The Day The Earth Stood Still. [Dec 2022, p.50]

The new Pusha T album is more assured and therefore effective than the last Clipse album, nowhere near the focused brilliance of their first two. All production is handled by Kanye West who’s likewise harking back to his glory days with assorted updates on his College Dropout sound. [Jul 2018, p.62]

This album explores that idea of opposites attracting and co-existing within one entity. It’s also a powerful, confident pop record tooled up to compete with the heaviest hitters (Paul White’s production is key, as it has been for Danny Brown and Charli XCX) while occupying its own uniquely ambivalent and querulous space. [Nov 2019, p.60]

A fitting tribute to one of the greatest collectives in music history and essential for anyone who has ever had their lives changed by Parliament/ Funkadelic. [Nov 2017, p.54]

One of the chief sources of the album's power is the value it assigns to the act of witnessing, of seeing and taking account of the most vulnerable. [Apr 2016, p.47]

This extended incubation period has paid dividends. [Nov 2010, p.65]

A series of hermetic, drifting analogue tracks sprawling over eight sides of vinyl. The occasional bizarre touches of the more conventional numbers show his techniques best. [May 2015, p.59]

Mechanics Of Domination is careful, elegant and cerebral but it is also quietly stirring. [Nov 2017, p.56]

Just as there's something inescapably seductive about fast cars in a nocturnal metropolis, there's something innately pleasurable about this Emeralds release. [Nov 2012, p.58]

IDLSIDGO is monumental in its willingness to just be a great rap album. [May 2015, p.59]

Merging a sophisticated rhythm dynamism, often with an almost gamelan aspect (“Two Flames Burn”) with a Laibachian apocalyptic proclamatory element and 90s crossover rave-electronic-industrial urgency, Disturbance may not be entirely different from what Test Dept were doing a long time ago, but, then again, nor is the political context in which they’re doing it. [Mar 2019, p.60]

Complex puzzles for nimble feet to crack, custom-built for dancing. [Apr 2015, p.52]

Hurley was simply ready to make a new record, which includes a cover of The Louvin Brothers’ gem “Alabama” and a remake of his gorgeous “Lush Green Trees”, and that’s what he did. It’s a gesture that shouldn’t be taken for granted. [Dec 2021, p.50]

The mainstreaming of yoga, mindfulness and other pursuits of spiritual enrichment in our digitally distracted, permanently anxious modern reality might have tipped the balance, as Laraaji pulls in listeners who aren’t necessarily collectors of forgotten, strange or otherwise outsider music. [Nov 2017, p.58]

This is von Hausswolff’s most open, personal and ultimately affirmative recording to date. [Mar 2018, p.48]