Perhaps some of the head-scratching freshness of Burgess-Olson’s early material has been lost--but with her gear-led, no-fuss production sensibility, she slots in perfectly on Ninja Tune’s Technicolour imprint alongside prolific mavericks like Hieroglyphic Being and Legowelt. [Jul 2017, p.59]

Mechanics Of Domination is careful, elegant and cerebral but it is also quietly stirring. [Nov 2017, p.56]

Devour is unwaveringly formless; drills, drones and hysterical screeches become food for trauma. It’s frightening, at many points torturous, but not without emotional weight. The record mirrors what oppression really looks, sounds and feels like – no pool parties, ice tea, sunglasses and shiny colour palettes, just untamed agony, screaming and pain. [Sep 2019, p.60]

Mozart’s Mini Mart, his first LP since On The Hot Dog Streets (2012), is militant and magnificent--as oddsome as dress wearing-era Kevin Rowland, as socially astute as Sleaford Mods, as mythomaniacal as Kanye West.

For those looking to block out the outside world and escape into something soothing and sublime, Past Life Regression will most certainly do the trick. [Jul 2022, p.56]

More impressive is how well he and his production circle weave their microfibre soul samples as to draw perpetual tension out of complete simplicity. [Nov 2012, p.73]

Significant Changes is a brilliant album that merges Jayda’s parallel worlds. [Apr 2019, p.65]

Music for Shut-Ins is valuable for the manner in which it acknowledges the true masters while still allowing room for non-canonical influences, expanding rather than replacing or limiting possibilities. [Jan 2014, p.64]

It seems an easy listen at first, but the scale is daunting. [Feb 2014, p.53]

This is music for pleasure now. [Mar 2016, p.49]

Holtkamp and Anderegg have arrived at a strain of wide-eyed Americana with roots in the ashen wastes of the Pennsylvania landscape. [Feb 2013, p.58]

The pop craftsmanship on display throughout Pangs is just the thing to make vinegary dregs go down easy. [Mar 2017, p.53]

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]

Impressively raucous. [#240, p.68]

This is artfully bracing listening. [Sep 2008, p.55]

What's Your Sign is a brash, vigorous session that maintains discipline and freedom in equal measure. [Jan 2017, p.74]

The precision and control and grand guignol gothery are all still in place – but there’s also surprise (check the startlingly clean and gorgeous nine minute odyssey of “They Move Below”) and a palpable energy the band haven’t shown in years. [May 2022, p.55]

The songs with less specific and less contemporary references hit harder. [Jul 2016, p.46]

London based trio The Comet Is Coming unleash their finest yet, letting rave electronics, jazz funk and a dancefloor directed low end meet and mingle and mash, again suffusing everything with a positivist but markedly apocalyptic mysticism. [Jan 2020, p.71]

Music that feels lived in and vivid, instilled with notes that roam between lives of people on the fringes while finding magic in the mundane. [Jun 2020, p.59]

It’s less focused, more instinctive in its approach to collaboration; the boundaries it sets for itself are less rigid. This meandering work is vastly more accessible than most of Moor Mother’s catalogue, but no less cerebral and impressive. [Aug 2022, p.52]

It’s hard to believe this is the same band who bowed out with Ghost Stories. There they sounded uptight and reticent; here they are restless and free. The creative rebirth continues. Where to next? [May 2020, p.55]

Filled with ghosts; confessions; jokes; an abundance of Jay-Z features and a prodigal son offering explanations for his disappearance and return. [May 2020, p.65]

Accelerator captures a confused, jokey arc of the duo's trajectory that hasn't aged well in the 14 years since its release. [Dec 2012, p.70]

Despite being busy, Miri isn’t crowded. Kouyate has returned to a more acoustic sound after the electrified Ba Power, and his ngoni structures the songs with clarity and poise. [Apr 2019, p.68]

The music on Old Star is not black metal, stylistically speaking, but it nonetheless telegraphs Darkthrone’s cackling, sardonic grimness so as to transpose a blackened atmosphere into speed metal riff salad, epic/trad doom and frequent moments that call up Celtic Frost’s hallowed splicing of iron and velvet. [Aug 2019, p.64]

He introduces a dirty P-funk bassline to an endless whorl of hi-hats and swelling chords on “Ocean 1”, sounding tougher and sexier than ever, and the album’s middle section lays out long, uninterrupted trails of conga drums and Latin jazz piano, reaching a radiant crescendo on the title track. [Sep 2020, p.62]

An album as complex as this encourages listeners to reflect on themselves. [May 2021, p.46]

At least the fusion here doesn’t have the overly respectful politeness of similar multinational projects, with the guitar noise and roaring likembes providing aural grit. By the middle of the record, though, the shorter studio tracks shine with low-key brilliance. [May 2022, p.44]

There's a great danger in finding beauty in suffering, but this album takes that risk and reaps great dividends. [Mar 2011, p.54]

There are no radical leaps forward from the previous album, but that matters not a jot. The soil in this territory is rich, the flora is fragrant, and the echoes of the past harmonise together like happy memories. [Dec 2017, p.51]

Nikki Nack is a terrific album with charm and invention to spare. [Jun 2014, p.58]

The result lack some of the swarming, piercing detail and vertiginous shifts that give so much drama to late Scott. At the same time, it mostly does away with that haunts latter-day songs. [Oct 2014, p.51]

Idiology refuses to cohere so completely that it plays out as part of Mouse On Mars's very approach; the duo hop from style to style, treating them like so many stepping stones to no destination in particular. [#206, p.72]

It’s the confidence and clarity of Dalt’s vision that makes this album a charming, compelling listen. In its best moments, it’s strange and familiar at once, like a weird, beautiful dream. [Nov 2022, p.59]

Age Of is arguably Lopatin’s best album to date. He achieves exactly what he sets out to. [Jul 2018, p.55]

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]

For whatever accessibility that might be lost in the decision to eschew English lyrics is balanced by a fresh emotional immediacy. Arrangements are sparse and pristine, each sound serving a purpose. ... An album that witnesses Deerhoof at their most vulnerable and volatile. [Apr 2023, p.52]

We Are King is a lush, dynamic, and expertly crafted album that constructs a unique soundworld. [May 2016, p.50]

If the album feels a little like it’s beginning to run out of ideas by the end of its 45 minutes, the audacity of its central aesthetic propels it to some dizzying heights along the way. [Oct 2018, p.62]

Their current incarnation has an almost puppyish energy and optimism which makes the album's 34-minutes seem even shorter and more repeatable. [Sep 2015, p.54]

It carries with it the expressivity of darker electronic take on popular forms, and exchanges the cliches of this UK habit for new and complex alien intimacies. [Oct 2015, p.49]

It's the generous flow of rapt, wistful melody that makes Severant such an appealing prospect. [Nov 2011, p.72]

Distorted and wobbly piano samples summon up the spirit of 1990s rave, but in a quietly euphoric way. Harmonies occasionally jut out, seemingly more a product of chance than by design. [Oct 2017, p.49]

The music is a fluid mix of acoustic instruments and studio slickness, all recorded under lockdown conditions but mixed seamlessly, and while the lyrics are earnest, the songs are joyous, not sombre. [Jul 2021, p.60]

Something In The Room She Moves feels impossible to completely pin down. [May 2024, p.52]

With each successive listen, more detail – in the organ arrangements, the vocal compositions and their harmonic interplay – is revealed. [Aug 2021, p.72]

At over 22 minutes, it’s ["The Offender"] one of two side-long pieces and could just as easily have gone on for an hour, or all night. ... The short pieces are just as good as the long ones. [Nov 2021, p.52]

With Primrose Green, Walker is in a larger collective setting and it works in his favour. A mixed bag of Chicago musicians concoct a pleasant, hazy feel to the proceedings. [Mar 2015, p.54]

Danger Mouse constructs decorative, melodic beats that don’t really bang, resulting in a hazy, slightly funky and psychedelic quality reminiscent of late 1960s pop. ... It’s frustrating to see him [Black Thought] shut off that aspect of his creativity in favour of “bars as hard as Angola’s”. ... Cheat Codes is compelling enough, but one wonders where it’s all going. [Sep 2022, p.42]

It’s heavyweight stuff delivered with a beautiful lightness of touch. [Nov 2022, p.73]

His drumming combines an organic sense of living pulse, but preserves a precision and sparseness that pulls it back to the rock-tick of motorik. [Apr 2015, p.63]

While lightness and a wondrous sense of possibility colour the album, there’s also depth. Every track is made of layers of glimmering melodies that collide in dissonance and fade away in consonance. [Aug 2022, p.58]

America’s National Parks is as consistent musically as it is conceptually diverse. What appear on first listen to be reserved essays on grand topics are steadily revealed to be eloquent statements of a mature and unified vision, realised with collective mastery. [Dec 2016, p.64]

It’s wild, almost bacchanalian, Ambarchi leading everyone to shared euphoric experience with his guitar--then it’s over, and everything dissolves rapidly into a dazed silence [Nov 2016, p.57]

There's a lingering sense of calculation to their weirdness, the feeling that this is someone's specific idea of what next-level hiphop is supposed to sound like and not the type of batshit creativity bursts that can lead to truly transcendent experimental hiphop.

Bowles still makes his most emotionally compelling statements with his banjo. [Sep 2016, p.46]

For this album to be worthwhile, Hampson has to do more than revisit his old, gold moments. At the same time, this incarnation of Loop functions partly as a reassessment of what made the sound they landed on so glorious in the first place. Both notions can coexist, and for the most part they do, with loud, laudable abandon. [Mar 2022, p.48]

On XXX his own aesthetic seems fully formed. [Oct 2011, p.65]

If Boy falters, it's toward the end, where out of three softer focused tracks, only "Danceland" charms its way into the memory. [Mar 2014, p.53]

There Is A Place flirts with pastiche, but it’s hard not to be swept along by its uplifting grooves. [Dec 2018, p.52]

Held up against the 6Music conveyor belt of sprechgesang wannabes, however, the group’s debut album resembles both a nod to the past and an accomplished piece of work in the context of now. [Jul 2023, p.52]

The About Group, which included Hayward and Alexis Taylor from Hot Chip, tried with some degree of success to square the circle of song and free improvisation, but Abstract Concrete’s embellished structures feel more natural and no less imaginative. [Dec 2023, p.43]

By unplugging the effects and simply playing, they sound re-energized. [Oct 2011, p.61]

Their pop is the sharpest it’s ever been. [Dec 2019, p.53]

LV's South African explorations sound fresh in the current vogue for Footwork and trap rap references. [Sep 2012, p.73]

What is most striking about Why Do The Heathen Rage?, Which reworks Black metal songs as electro, house and techno, is how intelligently respectful it is. [Jun 2014, p.55]

While I'm A Dreamer looks back the best part of a century, sepia cover photo and all, it never simply lapses into pastiche. [Nov 2013, p.54]

If there’s a criticism, the album is a bit samey: virtuoso drum intro, declamatory trumpet, modest group support. The formula becomes ever more predictable with each return, but Allen and Masekela are irresistibly listenable almost irrespective of what they are playing and Rejoice is a very special opportunity to hear two masters who’ve orbited at a distance coming together. [Apr 2020, p.48]

Reset is bright and cheerful, drenched in supersaturated colour and psychedelic sunshine. Most impressive is the way the music explicitly draws from the past without slipping into pastiche or retro-nostalgic recreation. [Sep 2022, p.48]

Delicacy replaces density here, but his capacity to unnerve remains on these sedately mournful chamber pieces. [#231, p.74]

In Black & Gold has a poise, purpose and maturity not heard before. [Apr 2015, p.63]

The sonic immensity and detail of the album, an extended paean to the power of the imagination, with the feel of a dark fairy tale, rivals the most ostentatious of Bob Ezrin's productions for Alice Cooper, Kiss and Lou Reed. [Dec 2015, p.50]

On The Gospel, they're at their weirdest and best. [Feb 2016, p.48]

No One Deserves Happiness alternates between bleak and industrialised grindcore and a powerful poetic presence that effectively conveys a sense of loss. [Apr 2016, p.46]

Every beat is a slow motion epic, every hook aches with promethazine exhaustion transcended through force of will. [Sep 2017, p.62]

Exorcism addresses a similarly uncomfortable subject, her sexual assault in 2016 and what it means to be a survivor of trauma. That Wilson can turn such trauma into vibrant, addictive pop music is testament to her abilities within strict limitations--the entirety of Exorcism was crafted on a Prophet 6 synthesizer--but Exorcism is unafraid not just of its subject matter but of occupying an intrinsically ambiguous place for the listener. [May 2018, p.59]

It’s something like Noname if she had a backstory closer to The Game. And just when it almost veers too close into Soulquarian-lite territory, Boogie drops “Self Destruction”, a vocally agile self-examination that reminds you why his contract was picked up by Eminem. [Mar 2019, p.65]

The album finds different creative forms in convergence. Efdemin uses the album format to combine audio storytelling with ambient and drone based compositions that tell their own stories. [Apr 2019, p.65]

The first three Meters albums are their best by far, but every disc in this box is overflowing with addictive, brilliant funk. [Feb 2020, p.64]

An album of big hooks of which “Golden Brown” is perhaps sharpest with its promise “The boys are back in town”. [Jun 2020, p.62]

The album suffers a little from its 14 song duration. The Mael wit works best when it’s tightly presented. [Jul 2020, p.52]

Audet’s obfuscatory impulses only make the album more compelling. [Feb 2021, p.58]

She extends her compositional technique, with added space, breath and timbre, into new dimensions. ... On Spirit Exit, Barbieri is closer than ever to club territory and the ecstatic. [Jul 2022, p.42

The large number of guest rappers (seven in all) makes the album sound like the voice of a rage-filled community rather than just one person’s desperate cries, magnifying its impact. [Feb 2023, p.44]

The Icelandic icon moves ever closer to the Platonic ideal of what it means to be Bjork. [Dec 2017, p.50]

Three years in the making, Dawson’s follow-up ditches the formula entirely, transporting the listener to the AngloSaxon kingdom of Bryneich. ... The big question is how seriously to take all the antique stuff. [Jul 2017, p.50]

Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is a sublimely reflective slice of nostalgia with none of the comfort or security that term implies--it’s a both hysterically funny and sharply political skewering of the games nostalgic reverie can play on people, and a people’s consciousness. [Oct 2017, p.67]

There’s one serious misfire, a skit where Crazy Titch reassures us that everyone in his prison block agrees you’re never “too gang to listen Stormzy”, but mostly his wariness lends the album a series of unresolved tensions more perfectly poised than any other grime album to date. [May 2017, p.55]

There’s a sweetness, and an earnestness, driving these ecstatic breakbeat rave confections (you can hear the influence of Drew’s hardcore-heavy record collection too). In someone else’s hands that mood could feel forced, or just plain naff, but Resonant Body never does – if your hairs don’t stand on end for the daft euphoria of “Spin Girl, Let’s Activate” or the raw junglism of “Ecstatic Beat”, it’s about time you got off the dancefloor. [Oct 2019, p.64]

Lennox is an innovator and a stylist, impossible to accurately imitate or easily dismiss. [Feb 2015, p.50]

Although the album is ostensibly live, the natural effects Galás can create in her voice places the album in an uncomfortably solitary place, as if the audience has been struck dumb, the piano close, Galás herself able to fly like a spirit to any point within the church’s space. [Apr 2017, p.53]

Cross’s ability to get the job done with his stripped down trio is the real achievement here. [Mar 2019, p.65]

It’s invigorating and a ton of fun. [Sep 2018, p.63]

On top of the crisp, sympathetic playing, the songwriting and vocals stand out with tunes that could have come straight from the Treasure Isle songbook. [Sep 2016, p.59]

Like most Aphex Twin releases Collapse contains moments of queasy brilliance. [Oct 2018, p.48]

It’s not just that this set feels way more focused and streamlined than the debut; the band have also been sharpened up by incessant live work to the point where Lally and Canty are murderously diamond-tight, and Pirog is flat-out incredible, encouraged by the sheer precision of what backs him to fly into some gloriously discordant fuzzed-up psych and post-punk abrasion. [Nov 2019, p.56]

There are moments when the structure of this album fails to centre itself, and it is easy to get lost in the finer details of the arrangements. ... It is clear from Love Streams, with its increased manipulation of vocals and wider palette, that he is becoming braver. [Apr 2016, p.51]