Shorn of vocals, Xen suffer the same fate as much beloved contemporary beat music, which is a kind of dazzling monotony. [Nov 2014, p.63]

Keith's industry gripes are implicit from his two decade career as the Absurd Outside Rapper--so it's a shame he feels the need to come so blunt. [Dec 2008, p.74]

Far from being some utopian unity of the opposites her work has summoned – beyond binaries – she’s still clearly experimenting and sometimes failing. [Aug 2020, p.48]

Musically the project is weighed down by Haigh’s hugely uninteresting and one-dimensional piano playing. ... Haigh’s ear for electronic texture does do some of the heavy lifting for which his piano playing is not equipped. [Feb 2020, p.47]

Ashin, in giving so much of himself away, leaves little scope for the kind of mystery that might enable his musical settings to transcend their functional pop status. [Feb 2013, p.60]

His arch over-emoting robs his songs of any sense of genuine feeling. [Feb 2013, p.60]

Its balance of electronic, acoustic and vocal elements, while initially impressive, is soon revealed to be a product of the lack of any forceful musical or textual elements at all. [Feb 2013, p.60]

There are occasions when vocal inadequacy can be more emotionally fetching than full-throated virtuosity.... This, however, is not one of them. [#239, p.57]

As per usual after listening to an Oh Sees release, I’m impressed by the execution but left cold and hollow by their studious style. [Oct 2020, p.59]

I’m always holding out hope for more of the genius heard on Doris but it’s unfortunately absent on Feet Of Clay. [Jan 2020, p.74]

Things heat up a bit on “Misanthrope Gets Lunch” and “Oblivion Sigil”, when the shrill bursts from Kyp Malone’s synthesizer and Marcos Rodriguez’s guitar face off against one another like Irmin Schmidt and Michael Karoli of Can did on Delay 1968, but sadly, those are the only flashes of excitement to be found on the release. [Oct 2020, p.59]

Some of street rap's brightest new talents appear--Chief Keef, Young Thug, Rich Homie Quan--and wear their Gucci Mane influence proudly, each in their own distinctively warped ways and yet all brimming with exactly the joy that their progenitor has generally lost to age. [Jul 2013, p.68]

The mish-mash of styles wouldn't be an issue if it sounded like Pateras and Patton were surrendering to something other than themselves, but what comes across instead is a desire to demonstrate mastery. [Jan 2015, p.70]

["f=(2.5)"] has a nice queasy seasick vibe, but feels over-egged, with too many ideas thrown at it too quickly. Other tracks repeat this formula with diminishing returns and cut 'n' paste fatigue sets in.... "f=(2.6)" is a lot more fun. [Oct 2015, p.48]

The tracks are curiously undramatic, punching elements in and out like a demonstration reel. [Mar 2013, p.54].

Every knot has been planed away. It's hushed, wistful, 'cool,' acoustic, sweetly dolorous and subtly well crafted... and dull as corrective footnotes in a treatise on ditchwater. [#228, p.54]

The Body’s central drive focuses on heaviness, both as a sonic and emotional motif, and while their creative apex I Shall Die Here demonstrates a logical conclusion of the former, I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer sees the band explore dramatic terror, to limited success. [Jul 2018, p.44]

It's not completely pants, but not great either. [Jul 2011, p.44]

Stripped of the visuals, the seemingly endless succession of minor variations (75 tracks between the two collections) on the same sets of glossy and pleasant synth arpeggios can be at once bitty and overwhelming. [Oct 2016, p.63]

This is pleasant but forgettable music, dissolving the instant it hits the eardrum. [Jul 2023, p.52]

Half of the songs here are as good as the highs of the first two albums.... Much of the rest is the victim of Madlib's infuriating tendency to leave things in fragments. [Jun 2013, p.54]

On his fourth album, he seems to be wrestling with how to modernise his signature blues and roots foundation without minimising its traditional elements. Parts that would work better with stripped down production are overproduced with the layering of background vocals, keyboards and added sound effects, making the music too rich for the message. [Jul 2018, p.48]

On paper, it's a strange fit. On record, too. [Jul 2013, p.52]

The conceptual core of Vessel’s third album is rather ambiguous. Queen Of Golden Dogs follows a loose narrative of self-discovery and transformation and a couple of queer literary and surreal visual art references. ... Musically, Queen Of Golden Dogs is similarly vague and amorphous. [Dec 2018, p.58]

Stripped of the visuals, the seemingly endless succession of minor variations (75 tracks between the two collections) on the same sets of glossy and pleasant synth arpeggios can be at once bitty and overwhelming. [Oct 2016, p.63]

The music still nods to Broadcast in its gothic otherness, and the basic format of analogue synth driving the bass, drums and vocals is unchanged. But the sound is more structured, more--gasp!--song-like. Unfortunately the production is imbalanced, rough and thin. [Dec 2018, p.59]

H-p1 is a slightly more adventurous outing than usual, due to the recruitment of synth player Shazzula, but the additional textures, pleasing as they are, fail to revolutionize what is essentially record collection rock. [Jul 2011, p.58]

Singer's Grave feels like an exercise, something which never be said for the work released under the Palace banner in the 1990s. [Nov 2014, p.72]

Nepenthe pushes the formula to [a] breaking point, where emotional manipulation crosses over into cloying, calculated and claustrophobic. [Aug 2013, p.53]

The impression left by The Hums's buzzing, keys-assisted pseudo-punk is that of a heavier Clinic or even Scottish also-rans Magoo. [Nov 2014, p.72]

Nehru is essentially indistinguishable from any number of bedroom rappers clogging Soundcloud with their freestyles to Doom's decade old Special Herbs instrumentals. [Nov 2014, p.76]

Sadly much of Music Is A Hungry Ghost is marred by a pebbledash of clicks and glitches -- that already overused signifier of au courant production. [#207, p.87]

As a prank or a statement, Expekoration is a particularly lazy one. [Dec 2010, p.50]

It all makes for an album which is strangely boring; the baroque detailing becomes an inaudiable blur. [Dec 2008, p.65]

If narcoleptically bland neo-soul is your bag, you’re in luck. A parade of guest singers and rappers do nothing to inject any interest. [Sep 2023, p.69]

Fay aficionados may be unsettled that our man seems to have been kidnapped by aliens and reprogrammed as a frail new age gospel singer. Eccentricity is kept to a minimum, as thin songwriting is padded out by repetitive chanting of a chorus's final line. [May 2015, p.49]

The epic slog of Culture II offers up more than 20 courses of candyfloss, toffee apple and burnt syrup in lieu of any real variety. [Apr 2018, p.68]

Hayward sounds bored, Coxon throws out Clapton-ish licks, and Taylor's milk-and-water vocals make him sound like the younger brother of The Beautiful South's Paul Heaton. Only Thomas seems willing to inject any imagination into the songs. [Apr 2011, p.52]

There's little to set the sombre half-tones of the Cave and Seed world alight with suspicous glimmers. [#228, p.59]

Throughout this solo effort--his fourth, for what it's worth--Callahan mumbles ever onward like a charmless, tranquillised version of Giant Sand's Howe Gelb. [Apr 2011, p.55]

Pleasant, yes, but not much more.... Too many of these 'songs' snap off at around the three or four minute mark, just as they start to get interesting.... It sounds consistently half-there. [#208, p.52]

If the Wu-Tang Clan's A Better Tomorrow was a shoddy attempt at cinematic audio in a Hollywood blockbuster sense, this is the arthouse variety show alternative with caricature Ghost as compere. [Sep 2015, p.57]

It all sounds very loose and off the cuff, but any positive sense of spontaneity is sabotaged by a delivery so careless it borders on the sloppy. [#229, p.68]

This may be the first solo Eno work that is entirely without interest. It is bafflingly below par. [Dec 2010, p.45]

PSB celebrate an idea of fusty Britishness but lack the imagination, intelligence or inclination to interrogate it or in fact add anything at all to the discourse. [May 2013, p.59]

[Tipsy] painstakingly process small episodes of manufactured excess and thoughtless musical effect into tracks evoking the giddy pleasures to be found in running your favourite party tapes at the wrong speed. [#206, p.81]

Given the sprawling length, naturally it's not devoid of a few stray gems and curiosities. [Oct 2011, p.60]

This trio are rarely an ecstatic proposition, preferring the slow burn to the white flame, but in truth there's little heat here at all. [Aug 2015, p.54]

Sadly their rather airless space rock doesn't really lift off beyond a certain Ambient politeness. [#244, p.66]

Despite the bloodlettting and reckless spending, Future just sounds bored. And occasionally lazy. [Apr 2016, p.50]

The track ["Power Circle"] and the entire album seems to lose its air after he [Gunplay] makes his exit. [Aug 2012, p.59]

Even in the midst of the fairly wretched Phase Two there are gems but you sure have to dig for them. [Feb 2016, p.54]

Pop itself is not a problem, it's just that in Tarwater's take on it nagging tunes and interesting textures are in short supply. [#253, p.65]

Not enough of Drukqs confidently breaks new ground, and too often James falls back on the all too familiar dysfunctional jitterbeat which has typified Aphex output since 1996's Richard D James album. [#212, p.55]

Preparations is a tediously uneven listen that drags on despite its 31 minutes running time. [Oct 2007, p. 63]

There is no shortage of bad ideas on the second installment.... But this ugliness is anchored by a series of largely curatorial successes. [May 2013, p.68]

Another slapdash cash-in from masked rap's last bastion. [Sep 2012, p.60]

The rest of the album makes the distance between now and (Berlin) then of "Where Are We Now?" painfully evident, a pain heightened by Visconti's failure to convert this collection of session muso workouts into anything memorable. [May 2013, p.55]

Sadly it feels like the gestation period has robbed Joker's music of some of its immediacy. [Nov 2011, p.72]

Much of the album's faults are down to Smith. Rather than steering the collective ship, his voice, slurred to the point of incomprehensibility, barely connects with the others. [Dec 2014, p.48]

Almost without exception, these 11 tracks lurch along at a donkey's pace that seems designed to signify grace and dignity, while the crystal cave reverb applied with such liberality by Randall Dunn, producer of choice for the likes of Sunn 0))), Wolves In The Throne Room and Earth, seems after the nth track to cloak a more profound problem, which is that much of the material on Strangers is thin pickings. [Jun 2016, p.54]

It's just a coarser, clumsier version of the updated industrial bashing of their last album, without the dreamy coronae of guitar.[Jun 2016, p.60]

Somewhere in Asphalt For Eden is buried beautiful music. [Jun 2016, p.62]

There is a resounding thinness to Purple Naked Ladies and its finest moments sound like a collection of scratch tracks from a lost Erykah Badu/Neptunes session circa 1998. [Mar 2012, p.54]

New material is conspicuous by its absence, and several shambolic passages indicate that the band barely managed to rehearse, let alone write songs. [Jul 2017, p.58]

He telegraphs all too simplistic rhymes schemes and rarely offers subject matter beyond deeply cliched braggadocio. He's rapping like he doesn't want to be there. [Oct 2010, p.67]

The music veers between between a kind of funk slop with trippy organ squelches and good ol' fashioned rawk with biblical overtones, It feels a little like drowning in a bath of Jack Daniels, but not in a good way. [Sep 2010, p.53]

Explicit references to surrealism and Japanese ambient, alongside DJ Screw and Jodorowsky, read as clumsy and uncritical homages to tired tropes and cliches, which ultimately serve a tactless and indulgent end. [Nov 2018, p.63]

It pains me to think they’d record something so vacant and unneeded. Maybe 30 years ago this would have been a different album. But here and now, Two To One is a case of too little, too late. [Jan 21, p.82]

There's being reflective and then there's navel-gazing, and unfortunately Alopecia is too frequently guilty of the latter to really engage either the mind or heart. [Apr 2008, p.66]

A sense of cluelessness pervades these songs, as though constructed without considering why or for whom they were intended. [Jun 2014, p.51]

Songs like "Brainfreeze" and "The Red Wing" plod more than march, piling on so many competing keyboard layers that the melody blots itself out. Others seem oddly unfinished. Only the two closing ten minute tracks evoke the classic Fuck Buttons widescreen neon pomp. [Jul 2013, p.56]

A Better Tomorrow feels trapped by history, an impotent reflection versus a proposed resurrection. [Jan 2015, p.65]

Still sounds like the work of someone desperate to gain the approval of the Drag City clique. [#215, p.69]

Chosen topics prove less crucial than his relentlessly tedious delivery. [Feb 2018, p.51]

The next person who decides to write a book on Miles Davis, or agrees to play him in a movie, will find this set invaluable. But for the casual Davis fan, it’s bound to be a bore and a chore. [Nov 2016, p.76]

He's frozen in time, still rapping in an emaciated wheeze and overemphasizing his emotionless and cringe-inducing wordplay. [Aug 2011, p.69]

MBM's wholehearted embracing of the familiar is stronger than ever, erasing any freshness or innovation, and cancelling out all distinguishing features. [#226, p.72]

Without the strength of material to prompt the question of whether Byrne should be taken at face value or not, the songs on Look Into The Eyeball simply glide by unobtrusively, and Byrne's romantic sentiments start to sound like Paul McCartney at his blandest. [#208, p.53]

[By "We Dream Free"] it all starts to loosen up and swing a bit more. But even here it ends up treading water. [#269, p.42]

A collection of slow, moody pieces whose unexceptional nature is made more frustrating by the occasional flashes of inspiration. [#206, p.77]

Uncomfortable deliery and thin lyrical content suggest that utilising vocals isn't their strong suit. [#223, p.69]

Finding Iggy as confused as ever, Beat 'Em up ranks alongside New Values and Blah, Blah, Blah as yet another missed opportunity. (#209, p.60)

Intermittently pretty, massively inconsequential. [#215, p.69]

Most of the vocals elsewhere are unintelligible, blurred between endless layers of patchworked echolalia or overlaid with metal grid sheen and a mesh of hissing and crunching, skittering beats far removed from any sense of body based, physically entrained rhythm. But ultimately it’s just a shonkier version of the cut-ups and vocal splices Herndon’s been working with since her 2014 12" Chorus. [May 2019, p.52]

His cartoonish vocals remain charmless, his lyrics as tediously self-referential as ever. [Oct 2017, p.57]

"Miss Lucifer"... [is] the first of many tracks on Evil Heat that cross rock 'n' roll and electro, only to get Sigue Sigue Sputnik. [#223, p.61]

Mosaic Thump lives up to its name only too well, displaying a fragmentary mess of rhyming schemes, contributing artists and leaden beats. [#199, p.45]

More than a covers album, this is a cathartic reminder of pop’s revolutionary power. [Oct 2021, p.55]

What might have been an interesting exploration of Industrial Lite Pop gets spoiled time and again by badly rewired breakbeats and fussy electronic background chatter. [#201, p.66]

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's faceless, airbrushed production takes you back to the dead days of 1970s AOR radio. [#220, p.66]

Only after wading through the swamp to the final three tracks do we get anything approaching sincerity, albeit of a cloying kind. [Oct 2007, p.55]

A series of one-dimensional tracks, produced by Dean Hurley, that at their best sound like a karaoke outsider artist running though some vocal exercises. [Aug 2013, p.54]

A deliriously infantile playhouse of sound. [May 2016, p.51]

A dull, clunky, unjustifiably smug AOR rock album: no more, no less. [#243, p.71]