His music, which radiates humour, tenderness, frustration and audacity, remains seductively mysterious. [Dec 2018, p.54]

For music built around the shrouding and decay of its composer’s bodily presence, Thresholder feels curiously non-corporeal. In large part that’s attributable to the purity of Craig’s voice. ... But elsewhere--when melting between the tremulous organ tones of “And Therefore The Moonlight” or forming grainy cirrus wisps in “Sfumato”--Craig sounds as though he’s already shed his physical shell and ascended into the cosmos. [Dec 2018, p.46]

Cocoon Crush is, partly, the album that you’d imagine Future Sound Of London’s Lifeforms might have become if they’d had a million times the processing power at their disposal. Poised and composed. [Dec 2018, p.45]

While Lattimore is willing to put her instrument through some effects, she never subdues its essential character. Its inherent lightness gives records that bear her name a yielding quality that contrasts with the stark clarity of Baird’s solo work, let alone the body blows delivered by her combo Heron Oblivion. [Dec 2018, p.44]

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]

Choirboys sing the poems of Nils Christian Moe-Repstad over Eivind Aarset’s guitar, but as with the more expansive orchestral passages, it can come across as earnestly ecclesiastical. The most affecting pieces are those where Henriksen and Bang strip it down, such as on “The Swans Bend Their Necks Backward To See God”, where pitched down trumpet lows like foghorns over the Humber valley. [Nov 2018, p.68]

Hoffmeier’s fourth solo album The Drought sees her graduating from the Copenhagen based label Posh Isolation to PAN to deliver her strongest statement yet. [Nov 2018, p.62]

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]

A record that is often overwhelming, at times breathtaking. [Nov 2018, p.55]

Berry consequently embellishes and embroiders these reassuring moments of collective memory, bringing out in each of his cover versions some surprising hidden detail. [Nov 2018, p.50]

Universal Beings is heady and refined. [Nov 2018, p.58]

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]

The initial impression given by Death Valley Girls’ third album is of a hypertypical Los Angeles band: kinda punky, kinda raucous, but wholly beholden to the rock canon, in the style of past-decade LA outfits like The Icarus Line and The Warlocks. Multiple spins of Darkness Rains don’t refute this, but do reveal an undeniable spirit and likeable energy. [Nov 2018, p.65]

Who Do You Love? may be a tacit admission by Norway’s Årabrot that they can push that sound no further. There’s an unlikely, boisterously garage rock vibe to much of this record, albeit larded with gothic drama by Kjetil Nernes’s vocal approach. [Nov 2018, p.65]

The biggest problem with Noname’s Room 25 is that the opening two tracks, adding up to barely four minutes of music, are just too damn good. ... The rest is merely exceptional. Essential. [Nov 2018, p.68]

The tracklisting is divided between acknowledged classics and ephemera. There are extended remixes, demos and live tracks, but only a couple of genuinely illuminating items, and more often in theory than practice. [Nov 2018, p.72]

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]

The album deftly balances expansive environments with a singular vocal intimacy. [Nov 2018, p.51]

It's a well-worn concept, but one which Gorgun works through with curiosity and clarity of purpose. [Oct 2018, p.61]

If there’s fun in her music, it’s somewhere between the anaesthetising effect of especially her more electric noises and the ecstatic release in her vocal, both too honest to be anything else but awkward. Fundamentally sociopathic. [Nov 2018, p.55]

Their newest struts and froths like the wild-eyed offspring of Deerhoof and Thundercat, raised in the swamps on little but No New York and toadstools. At turns, it’s impossibly upbeat--something like a Martian single parent’s go-to motivational album--and spasmodically funky, in the best tradition of Bernie Worrell-era Talking Heads, flipped on 45. [Nov 2018, p.54]

It's not so much a return to first principals as a 3D reboot of the homicidal stoner aesthetic established between 1991-1995 with Cypress Hill, Black Sunday and Temples Of Boom. [Nov 2018, p.52]

This is actually a joyful, bouncing album. [Oct 2018, p.68]

A strong late career release. [Oct 2018, p.63]

Another Life captures the ecstacy and catharsis of bodies exchanging sweat and petrol, crushing each other in unison. [Oct 2018, p.48]

Having already worked with the likes of William Basinski and Herndon, remixing for Björk and Max Richter, Jlin is taking the innovative spirit of a regional Chicago born style to the institutional stage of the creative establishment. Applying that to a project with a choreographer like McGregor is an experiment in combining the best of both worlds. [Oct 2018, p.55]

Not a satisfying record, nor a fully rounded one, but one that suggests so much future exploration. [Oct 2018, p.56]

Love In Shadow, Sumac’s fourth studio album in three years, features four songs occupying a side of vinyl each and brushes territory you’d hardly associate with its members’ other projects. [Oct 2018, p.62]