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]

A usually sharp MC, Murs sounds conflicted throughout, a little too anxious to be loved by everyone. [Dec 2008, p.74]

An album of mostly pleasant contemporary pop. [#218, p.61]

Though you'd be justified in hanging this writer for conflating person and persona, you're asked to contemplate the uneasy positivity that chacterizes Paper Trail's three mot popular songs. [Dec 2008, p.74]

It’s hard to tell if there’s irony in all the anachronism but the record’s nostalgic to the point of kitsch aesthetic feels out of touch. [Apr 2020, p.67]

These are worn vintage sounds, but the songs here lack the choruses and hooks to invest them with fresh life, and Buttery's voice is forgettable. [Dec 2010, p.46]

Wong knows that to build up this depth of texture he has to restrict the harmonic content, but endless repetition of pentatonic scales played very fast by 100 Fender Tele-wielding Wong doppelgangers loses it lustre as a listening experience some considerable time before the 16th track reaches its conclusion. [Feb 2012, p.68]

The music is immaculately performed and produced, yet lacks the divine spark of inspiration that might elevate it above the status of demonstration reel. [Dec 2012, p.65]

The astounding pressure of emotional ambivalence in Herndon's 2012 debut Movement--what belonged where? with whose porous body should the listener identify?--is half lost on this EP, which feels too sketchy to develop their immanent tension. [Feb 2014, p.56]

There's a mismatch between sound and vision here that forestalls true wonder or joy. ... A little more concision and concentration throughout could have made Guild of the Asbestos Weaver more effective. [Sep 2019, p.62]

Alc has already produced better songs for the actual Ghostface. So it is unclear why this album--or the rapper who made it--needed to exist. [Jan 2013, p.79]

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

It's a tribute to Dilla's imagination that every track here has at least a spark of some interest, but ultimately Dillatronic is, like so many exhaustive archival box sets, a dry reminder that brilliance is usually the result of a drafting process. [Dec 2015, p.66]

With its introversion and focus upon the everyday in both subject matter and imagery, the appeal of Shedding Skin depends partly on your appetite for people watching. [Mar 2015, p.48]

It is a difficult task to understand just what the fuss is about. [#236, p.72]

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

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]

Let’s Start Here has a middlebrow sensibility, with plenty of grooves Calvin Harris would approve of. Its best moments come when he unleashes his oddball trill, an evocative sound that bland sentiments like “So surreal, the vibes I feel” can’t quite diminish. [Apr 2023, p.68]

He raps in a stereotypically ‘white’ voice shorn of regional inflections, and the contrast between his deadpan vocals and the beats ranges from startlingly imaginative (the hammering blapper “Fundrazors”) to anodyne (“Indifferent”). [Sep 2022, p.57]

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]

The music tends to come up short of its lofty goals, a fact made more frustrating in the moments that prove that they are capable. [Apr 2014, p.60]

Glasper is undoubtedly a class act, but the lacks the wildness a Madlib or a Flying Lotus might have brought to this project. [Jun 2016, p.54]

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]

The feeling of opiated depressive inertia that weighs it down is compounded by the sugary viscosity of Danger Mouse;s production. Yet it's these slower songs, shaped by Linkous's Country-inflected enervation and Danger Mouse's attention to sonic detail, that work best, while the more up tempo, rockier tracks come off as perfunctory. [Jul 2010, p.53]

As awkwardly beautiful as much of dark Comedy is, it's such a tricky album that it is a difficult to warm to. [Aug 2014, p.62]

Only one track matches the flaming cannonball energy of their single, "Politicians In My Eyes"; the herky-jerky "North Street," which is as much funk as punk. [May 2014, p.77]

There Is No Year is a mixed bag of disparate musical styles, played out as an intelligently composed accompaniment for Fisher’s complex political rhetoric. [Mar 2020, p.58]

The album doesn't wear so well over time. [Mar 2013, p.50]