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]