M:FANS sounds way too much of its moment: it sounds just how you expect right now to sound. Worse, maybe: it actually sounds like a few years back. [Jan 2016, p.84]

Promise Of The Real can't match Crazy Horse's lumbering majesty, but their youthful energy and sweet harmonies are infectious. ... The attempts at collage are pretty corny, with crows, pigs and bees all wandering into the mix. [Aug 2016, p.58]

“Carapace” is one worth returning to, an agitated Pixies-style rocker that pogos up and down for three energetic minutes. Equally enjoyable is the kosmische inspired interplay wired into “Lurk Of The Worm”, together with the bolts of grunge that light up “Where Have You Been All My Life?”. Elsewhere some of Pollard’s songs can be compared to those of Peters Gabriel and Hammill, two distinct guiding voices who can occasionally be heard whispering in the hull of this inflated blimp of a record. [Mar 2019, p.52]

He's tightened his flow ever so slightly, but the brutal artlessness of his writing and character remains. [Jan 2012, p.69]

On tracks with genuine maverick talents like E-40, his fundamental lack of character appears (or disappears) in sharp relief. [Apr 2015, p.65]

The voice of singer Rolynne provides a fluency and depth missing elsewhere; her emotional precision and expression cut right through the ornament of this otherwise rather forgettable album. [Nov 2017, p.66]

Brooks builds eight neat instrumentals from gradually layer guitar, playing in a closed circle with himself, a dialogue that is sometimes affecting but more often banal. [Aug 2014, p.59]

Somebody’s Knocking is marginally more rockin’ than 2017’s uninspired Gargoyle – due to a slightly increased emphasis on guitar – but it doesn’t measure up to 2014’s Phantom Radio (or its EP companion No Bells On Sunday). [Oct 2019, p.63]

Aside from the odd flurry of inconsequential Afrobeat-inflected guitar, the style of Someday World is middlebrow session fare. [May 2014, p.61]

The too brief, purely instrumental “Sensational” is the best track, with suggestions of Weather Report’s jazz rock expansiveness. But the general impression is gimmicky and lightweight – effects without causes. [May 2020, p.66]

Sic Alp's latest might make for acceptable audio wallpaper--nice tunes and all, just ragged enough to contrive an illusion of edginess--but it crumbles under closer scrutiny. [Mar 2011, p.58]

It begins as quite a thrilling ride. But at this level of concentration, ten minutes feels like an hour; it soon becomes enervating. [#255, p.55]

Surrender To The Fantasy showcases the latest stage yet of their oddly trad transformation, the unkempt electric savagery of their past domesticated to the point of extinction. [Nov 2013, p.56]

The mirth on offer here is thin fare, for the most part. [May 2014, p.63]

Leaving Meaning has all of the reassuring turgidity and tortured self-importance devotees have come to expect plus a cast of name contributors (The Necks, Ben Frost, Baby Dee, Anna von Hausswolff among others) for that vital essence of “Well, if they’re working with him, he’s probably OK, right?” [Dec 2019, p.57]

The atmosphere is underwrought, miserable, monochrome. [Jun 2015, p.46]

It's hard not to feel that this dense conceptual flotsam is arranged around a lucuna. [May 2014, p.67]

An album remarkable only for just how bland it gets, despite every effort to the contrary. [Feb 2016, p.60]

Urstan can be seen as a remedial effort. [Apr 2012, p.58]

His latest disc is only occasionally compelling. [Jun 2015, p.50]

Celebrity guests or not, this is what Beans is--a densely indigestible acquired taste. [Apr 2011, p.70]

Apart from a few works for chamber instruments, which have a similar pleasing air of fakeness to Michael Nyman’s faux baroque cues for Peter Greenaway, these sketches all have uncertain origins and textures. [May 2020, p.66]

Guillermo Scott Heren's eight record as Prefuse 73 is oddly colourless (or should I just say boring) suite of compositional drifts. [Apr 2011, p.70]

He’s hung up on Jesus rather than pneumatic women. It’s hard to tell if that’s an improvement, but it doesn’t seem like a regression either. ... An album with zero fat, dense in at least three senses, two of them positive. [Dec 2019, p.60]

Not hating the LP, but not liking it much either, seeing it as a mid-level release covering all bases; political interludes, references to reparations and racism, interspersed with rap-frat boy antics. [Sep 2019, p.58]

Parallels frustrates as much as it entrances because it feels like a collection of separate tracks corralled together for expedience. [Sep 2017, p.53]

The music is gentle but ominous, and it’s hard to be sure which impression they want to linger. “Read The Room” and “Teleharmonic” are more conventional rock songs; the former in particular could have come off any 21st century Radiohead album. [Mar 2024, p.52]

Prophets Of Rage can’t help sounding a little male-menopausal even if lyrically the targets remain crucial and the trajectory remains ferocious thanks to the sheer undimmed timbre of Chuck’s meshrattling voice. [Sep 2017, p.55]

The momentum doesn't dip through the sunny but sinister celebration of "T-Shirt Weather In The Manor," Kano's rapid flow over electronic rowdiness on "new Banger" and the stunning dancefloor swagger of "3 Wheel Ups."... The album peters out after that. [Mar 2016, p.46]

Amalie Bruun (aka Myrkur) returns in feral form with a fresh set of frozen warnings and blackened ballads. ... On “Funeral” she teams up with Chelsea Wolfe for a duet that never quite gels and feels frustratingly half formed, while “Kætteren” confusingly slips a sliver of traditional Scandinavian folk music into the mix. Even worse is end track “Børnehjem” where demonic child whispering over Myrkur’s medieval monkish chant evokes Blair Witch memories and ultimately drags the whole album down. [Dec 2017, p.60]

The Saga Continues is a somewhat unwieldy collection of Wu offcuts with seemingly no concept. Less an album than a collection of outtakes. [Dec 2017, p.64]

Sandoval's overly stylised vocals really start to grate over the distance of a whole LP. [#213, p.65]

To run with the cinematic analogies, I'd suggest that Frost is the musical equivalent of Nicolas Winding Refn, all neon lit brutality and state of the art emptiness. [Oct 2017, p.52]

It's only when that rhythm programming is either stripped right back or broken apart that you get a sense of overabundant glee in playing with the blurts and splurts of the synth timbres, and this feels like more than the generic, albeit impeccably executed IDM record that the title rightly suggests. [Mar 2016, p.53]

he way the music suddenly jerks into life from stasis to movement is fine and the whole thing is beautiful and embracing and makes you think peaceful thoughts. By mid-afternoon though things get really ragged. ... Whatever made those earlier tracks sound so great is missing now. [Jan 2018, p.62]

This strained affair makes the party rocking simplicity of 2 Chainz or even LMFAO look absolutely artful. Brown's too smart to make music this dumb effectively. [Nov 2013, p.66]

When the beats are sparse he shines, but the album bloats in its middle with too many R&B assisted dramatic gestures and not enough dead eyed and cracked crack music. [Nov 2013, p.66]

There's no bullshit and no nonsense here, but listening to this album,, you might end up wishing that there was. [Dec 2011, p.68]

It's clear that Bell retains a sure grasp of form and dynamics. Hard to shake off, however, is the nagging feeling that you've heard all this before. [#236, p.62]

It's more letdown than meltdown, as veteran drummer Steve Reid runs out steam about halfway through disc two. [Dec 2011, p.70]

DeGraw's skill for mixing and matching swatches of sound is unparalleled, but without context it becomes much like choosing colours for your living room. [Dec 2013, p.48]

Get Lost is no worse (and no better) than 2010's Living With Yourself. [Oct 2011, p.56]

There is, in the end, something vaguely nauseating about a bunch of popular entertainers in middle age creating state-supported art inspired by the deaths of countless young men caused by an act of state-subsidised slaughter. [Jan 2015, p.61]

Wire’s music is characterised by unusual structures and perspectives, an approach largely absent from Mind Hive, the post-punk group’s 17th studio album. The most prominent themes here are political, with mixed results. [Mar 2020, p.57

Tracks like "Huis Clos"... can drag... And the garage rock of "(I Wanna Be) Waiting For My Plane" is an unwieldy cross between early Sonic Youth and Two Lone Swordsmen's axe-men incarnation. [#253, p.69]

Nick Talbot of Gravenhurst sings over roughly half the album, but his melodies are about as memorable as weak tea. [Mar 2013, p.64]

Tracks have potent moments, but they’re slapped together with little thought for overall flow. [Jun 2019, p.60]

It seems telling for an album about self-discovery that the most convincing tracks are those where he’s openly panicking over his identity rather than those where he’s found an uneasy peace. [Mar 2020, p.61]

For all of its constant activity, [the album] feels stale. It does next to nothing new to build on previous releases, and from song to song there's so little variation that its ultimate effect is numbing. [Feb 2016, p.50]

PC Music Volume 1 resembles the soundtrack to a posh private schooler's teen sleepover--glossy, giddy, sparkly and shallow. [Aug 2015, p.55]

What's lacking on Date Of Birth, though, is any sort of excitement. [#212, p.75]

If music is ever really going to change the world, it's going to need more vigour and vitality than this. [Jan 2014, p.66]

In truth most of it is middling stuff. [Oct 2011, p.62]

There's not much going on texturally. [Nov 2015, p.56]

Pablo grips your attention through an attraction-repulsion effect: the attraction largely pertaining to the sonics, the repulsion manifesting almost entirely in the lyrics. [Apr 2016, p.52]

Mess is more immediate than the past couple of albums, and in context, more baffling. [Mar 2014, p.63]

Rat Farm has only the occasional flash of brilliance. [Apr 2013, p.53]

There’s a lot to unpack, endless fun to be had cataloguing his references from Three 6 Mafia to Octavia Butler, his consummate brilliance as a wordsmith and architect of flow. ... But it gets monotonous quickly. [Nov 2019, p.52]

Phase One impresses more on first listen [than Phase Two].... But it wears thin quickly. [Feb 2016, p.54]

A fitful and languishing affair whose best moments will have you yearning for more, while the worst may leave some listeners wondering what they were doing here in the first place. [#248, p.59]

This particular experiment has left a formerly unpredictable group sounding as though they've been replaced by a bunch of tired retromaniacs. [Apr 2013, p.61]

[New Facts Emerge] finds the group in passable but not especially inspiring form. [Sep 2017, p.59]

When he muses on ideal love it comes off like How To Dress Well with a bit of a John Mayer wink--Vulnicura this ain’t. Longstreth is a talented producer and arranger and it shows here. ... Shame about the lyrics. [May 2017, p.59]

How you feel about the LP will reflect how far you’re into its comic meets splatter trick. It feels sketchy and underdeveloped to me. [Apr 2019, p.68]

Introspective, emotionally charged pieces such as “Father Time”, “We Cry Together” and “Savior” provide high – or jarring – points on the record, but elsewhere there are periods of lull absent on previous efforts. ... As sonically impressive as his latest album may be, his approach to the topics under discussion doesn’t feel sufficiently thought out. [Jul 2022, p.48]

The more they change, the more ADULT. sound the same: pared down electro pulses, synth jabs with industrial elbows, and Nicola Kuperus’s passive-aggressive post-Slits lilt. [May 2017, p.61]

This record has its moments, for instance the squarewave basslines and breakbeats of “Edelweiss” and the outro to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”. However, as is often the case with Laibach, the pervasive air of calculated irony prevents the album from passing from the ridiculous to the sublime, even when it all gets so silly that on paper it sounds like it should. [Dec 2018, p.52]

They're entering into new territory now and have yet to push as far out as they need to. [Nov 2016, p.62]

Rick Ross is pretty much incapable of going more than 30 seconds with out using the word boss--too bad, because Justice League turn out three monsterous cruisetime tracks toward the end. [June 2008, p.63]

In flashes it could be a parallel universe in which Mahavishnu Orchestra ended up inventing Japanese city pop: a luxuriously hi-tech vision of urban utopia. But just as often it has the futile atmosphere of those projects in which string quartets would perform Aphex Twin. [May 2017, p.61]

Fading out, they leave the impression of an album too ambitious for its own good, but offering moments of real awe. [Apr 2021, p.52]

There's nothing on their fourth album that couldn't have been recorded in the early to mid-1980s. [Sep 2010, p.50]

15 tracks of raspingly dry boilerplate hiphop, whose moods and references are pretty much (all) the Americans ones you'd expect. [Nov 2007, p.51]

Deprived of the rushing, crescendoless highs of Glass Swords, the tracks often seem to struggle to articulate their fascination, or to find satisfying structures. [Sep 2014, p.60]

He frequently seems bored with his own raps, rarely breaking his monotone and indifferently fluctuating between bragging about the quality of his weed and bragging about nothing. The record's saving grace comes with reemergence of producer Ski Beatz. [Sep 2010, p.68]

Ultimately only the title retains the tang of locality. [Nov 2016, p.73]

They sound somewhere between being tentative and caught in a frozen, allegorical state of sketchiness, turning the sleepy head of bedroom pop into a death's head. [Sep 2014, p.64]

The first part of this milary-concrete triptych is mostly vague interference and Radiophonic Workshop-style wibbling about that towards the end, has developed into discomforting BBC Ceefax music. The middle section is sonically richer... Part three is illbient comedown. [Jun 2013, p.51]

An album which largely plays assured and empty. Genesis is home to a few brilliant moments, however. [May 2016, p.49]

Some awful lyrical lapses scupper otherwise promising pieces. [#223, p.51]

Optical Delusion’s seven different guest vocalists yield wildly differing results, ranging from hits to misses. [Apr 2023, p.67]

“Dreamfear” sticks to the artist’s more conventional penchant for collage-style dance music. .... “Boy Sent From Above” is less convincing, clumsily layering Auto-Tuned vocals over the kind of schmaltzy synth one might hear in pop outfits like Yazoo. [Mar 2024, p.54]

As an album it’s almost entirely soporifically dull though beautifully appointed throughout (and it’s a joy to hear Beyoncé rapping) by some smart production from both main protagonists and some slick grooves from the Daptone band. [Aug 2018, p.68]

Tracks run the usual gamut, aggregating pop references and stylistic tropes from the entire history of hiphop, rock, punk, techno and their esoteric subgenres, and assembling them into a harrowing Frankenstein that’s more sardonic than revelatory. [Sep 2018, p.50]

As a pop album, Channel Pressure falls short, primarily because the songs simply aren't as good as their impeccable references demand. [Jun 20111, p.46]

Fans of Anderson's trademark spoken word phrasing, with pregnant pauses, raised eyebrows and question mark endings, won't be disappointed. [#211, p.52]

On earlier releases, the traces of anger, sorrow or despair rippling through the found voices seeded roaring rock improvisations that empathetically rooted and resisted the calamities visited upon them. But the improvising on [Skinny Fists] falls within beat parameters too tightly determined to generate any really useful dissonance. [#200, p.66]

A curious lack of urgency pervades. [Jun 2021, p.66]

Sounds at times as much like an audio documentary of Cameron's Britain as a collection of electronic songs. [Oct 2015, p.62]

Laced never stays still long enough to be pinned down. [Jun 2011, p.57]

His concerns are serious--consumerism, race, fame, relationships--but he rarely addresses them with the craft or focus they deserve. [Sep 2013, p.66]

The line-up sounds tantalisingly promising--but the hoped for bass-heavy meltdown never fully materialises. [Jun 2016, p.58]

The Redeemer, despite its pinpoint sonics, doesn't take the logical next step of offering a moment of reflection or clarity. [May 2013, p.50]

Shorn of its images, Carpenter’s score for David Gordon Green’s reboot of the Halloween franchise is oddly aimless. There’s the instant jolt of recognition: that simple piano phrase is resurrected, and given a steroidal boost, its famous 5/4 rhythm now underpinned with a sturdy kickdrum. But after that the music hardly seems to build in intensity, or riff off each other; there are certainly no new hooks or textures that sear the listening ear like the first. [Nov 2018, p.53]

Tricky's problem is that the future has caught up with him. [#233, p.71]

The sound is certainly has the depth and sheen you'd expect from Laswell. But what's missing is some of the edginess, invention and unpredictability that was Scratch's trademark. [Jun 2011, p.59]

Most of the songs here work in pairs, or groups of three, as if Elfman couldn’t decide where to finish an idea and instead offers a few variations on a theme, diluting the punch of each individual track. ... The best tracks here are the ones where Elfman acknowledges his own limits and fears, without hedging or flippancy. [Jul 2021, p.59]

The R&B tropes are part of a reassuring past, and the half-there vocals don't add enigma so much as leave the music unchallenged and stick in its old ways. [Oct 2013, p.47]