This music never lacks for deep roots into Allen's background with Fela's Afrika 70, but it is also fresh in conception and execution. [Oct 2014, p.50]

At times 50 swerves near to MOR Americana, but Chapman’s guitar playing, the bedding of every track, bristling with thorns, won’t let it. [Jan 2017, p.61]

The songwriting is strong.

Sonic Youth have made a joyful return to their No Wave hardcore rock roots with a vibrating set of muscular songs which glide effortlessly from Gooey power pop to full on guitarmageddon meltdown, skulled out psychedelia and beyond. [#220, p.53]

It fizzles out in places – there's none of the languor of previous work nor the melancholy that collaborator Jeremy Greenspan perfected in Junior Boys – but at its best this is aural champagne, chill, crisp and delectable. [Aug 2020, p.66]

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]

Much like Mantronix, Injury Reserve’s strengths lie in their overall freshness, and the way they play with and reinforce hiphop’s borders. Phoenix is full of post-genre dynamics. ... Phoenix is a punch-drunk affair that finds Injury Reserve hurtling forward with a determined anguish. [Oct 2021, p.49]

The Elephant Man’s Bones is no disappointment – the factors that have cultivated reverence are displayed in full force, with Marciano’s pen game as sharp as ever and The Alchemist’s production showing no sign of peaking. [Jan 2023, p.68]

Paste is Moin at their strongest, at once familiar and strangely new. [Dec 2022, p.57]

What stands out across Rather Ripped are the remarkable melodic turns throughout. [#268, p.63]

Desertshore is less a report than a dramatisation, an upending of their defiantly aura-less usurping of traditional performance modes in favour of a theatricality that feels more selfconsciously like a big event than the DIY/samizdat style of old.... [The Final Report] fares a little better, though again, it's a shame XTG have framed it in the form of a report.[Dec 2012, p.69]

Blank Project sounds like an empowered foundation stone for her next steps. [Feb 2014, p.44]

If there’s a heaven for a gangsta, Eazy-E is smirking down on South Central serene and secure that G Perico is doing immaculate justice to his legacy. [Mar 2018, p.61]

Barry Walker’s softly rising and falling pedal steel melodies calcify the skeleton of “Memory Of Lunch”, while Patrick McDermott’s distorted guitar lines provide the flesh, shaping a harsher drone as a symbolic border between reality and dream. And while Roped In never renounces its cheerful perspective, the approaching darkness of his guitar overtones dispels childlike innocence. [Dec 2020, p.53]

It’s the input of guest musicians and co-producer Dave Harrington that draws the best out of the material. [Sep 2022, p.46]

While the title Shebang has percussive compactness, the music on Ambarchi’s latest release, which is scintillating from the outset and exhilarating through and through, stretches out and expands across four continuous yet distinct sections. When the music fades away, after 35 minutes, the urge to hear it again straight away is simply irresistible. [Oct 2022, p.38]

To Those of Earth & Other Worlds miss some of the cosmic darkness of Sun Ra. Instead it's a fulsome celebration of the most joyous heights of his work. [Nov 2015, p.66]

The tracks likewise evoke the futuristic and the arcane, but the brute force with they are delivered makes them some of the unit’s most exhilarating work to date. [Oct 2022, p.40]

The album’s stylistic breadth and the cinematic sweep of its production add up to a more polished version of the anthemic, collaborative sound cultivated on the tour, heard on his 2020 Live At Le Guess Who? 2018 album. [Aug 2023, p.51]

In the past this rage was intrinsic, wounds covered with cheery sugar, but now there is emotional distance at the core of Heavy Light, filled with others’ voices. Whether or not a deliberate choice, through this transformation the album loses some of its potency and ability to affect. [Jun 2020, p.59]

Locked in sequences and formulae, there is a rich depth to the spectrum of sounds. [Jan 2021, p.69]

One has to look back to the golden age of the West African guitar bands to find this level of complexity executed with such brazen confidence and ability. [May 2015, p.59]

What unites them through the funk of “Zipper”, the smooth, slightly cheesy pop of “Hottie” and the sudden bursts of metallic dissonance on “Sister/Nation” is a sense of hiphop starting over, moving beyond iconography and iconoclasm into a world where they have absolute freedom to make shit up as they go along. [Feb 2018, p.46]

Band Red suggests they have reached meltdown and anybody encountering their post-punk roar would be advised to stand well back. [#243, p.74]

There's at once a sense that Venice is weightier and more purposeful than its predecessor. [#243, p.56]

Juggles multiple ideas of modernism with unusual grace and success. [#234, p.53]

The music resonates with a clarity Treanor had not yet achieved in the past, where the glassy shards of “ATAXIA A2” meet the staggered modulations and condensed hi-hats of “ATAXIA D1”, and ultimately reveal a unique and unexpected humanity. [Apr 2019, p.64]

One of his purely enjoyable recordings. [Sep 2010, p.68]

The result is one of the year's most thought-provoking electronic works. [Nov 2016, p.56]

Her voice is low and dragging, richly witch-like and wise. A selection of one-off recordings and “orphans”, Quieter is loose and beautiful, sludgy but solid. [Aug 2018, p.52]

He has a fascinating rhythmic sense, phrasing almost like a man who is writing down his words as he sings them, which gives the record a strong sense of immediacy and almost improvised spontaneity. And yet the accompaniments are more elegantly constructed than that implies, a beguiling mixture of harmonic squidge and tight metrical control. [Apr 2019, p.57]

While Gunn gets in some liquid licks, they’re brief asides, never trips that’ll take you somewhere on their own, and they’re often folded into gleaming layers of keyboards and harp. While the drums occupy considerable sonic space, they are frustratingly unemphatic. ... He has never sung better. However, every time he solos, one wishes he’d keep going a bit longer. Here’s hoping that Gunn can figure out how to showcase his voice without doing so at the expense of his instrumental gifts. [Sep 2021, p.52]

Kate NV’s sense of play works at a deep grammatical level, particularly in her witty inversions of scale. Small sounds, squeaks, blips and twinkles are inflated into starring roles; boices are shrunk to decorative background shimmers. As with The Pastels, Haruomi Hosono or Pierre Bastien, WOW reminds you that playtime deserves serious attention. [Apr 2023, p.67]

Honor Found In Decay is a solid Neurosis album, but it doesn't find them doing anything new. [Nov 2012, p.63]

Better, Perhaps, to hear How To Dress Well as the latest in a lineage of lo-fi bedroom songwriting dating back to Sebadoh and Smog in the early 1990s, via Alexis Taylor, Antony Hegarty, Jamie Lidell even, and perhaps as far back as Green Gartside, and his would be soul diva falsetto. [Mar 2011, p.50]

Through poetry, wordplay and a sonic palette that seamlessly bridges the human and the mechanical, IRISIRI positions itself at a nexus of sonic and conceptual ambiguity, weaving openended narratives with a logic that eludes straightforward interpretation and exudes genuine wonder and fascination. [Jul 2018, p.45]

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]

A great part of the pleasure of Banga is revelling in the medium conveying the message. For the most part, the album is a smooth listen, its revelation couch within relaxed AOR-ish arrangements. [Jul 2012, p.64]

The album exhibits two players of formidable range and ability. [Apr 2015, p.60]

If there's one negative to this compilation m it's that Ghetto house is best heard in a fast and furious mix where the one trick pony tracks don't wear out their welcome and the salty language loses all meaning and becomes nothing by pure sound at high speed. Here, however, the focus is on individual tracks with no mixing. [Jan 2014, p.75]

The tempo is seldom above a crawl, and Toure's guitar weaves a crackling bed of thorns that even the typically crystalline over-production can't completely smooth out. [Mar 2015, p.59]

All told, there are some beautiful moments on this record, as well as a sense that the gap between what Fennelly wants his music to be and what he is able to accomplish is gradually narrowing. [Jun 2018, p.62]

Benin stalwarts including Black Santiago, The Picoby Band and El Rego Et Ses Commandos all deliver, while Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou get an outing on the atmospheric, if understated “Idavi” and the boogie funk of “Moulon Devla”. Les Sympathetics De Porto Novo’s set opener “A Min We Vo Nou We” is all ragged fuzz guitar and lifted JB licks, lit from within by the incendiary urgency of the Benin sound. [Jun 2018, p.69]

With this stripped-back suite, HTRK demonstrate such alchemy – achieving dramatic tension and emotive resonance from skeletal means. [Oct 2021, p.49]

Heavy Pendulum sees the group return with one of the most accomplished releases in their decades-long career, while Scofield’s songwriting spirit is kept alive. [Jun 2022, p.46]

A set of songs syruped in late 1960s and early 70s pop and rock nostalgia, yet still manage to sound unique. [Sep 2023, p.64]

In truth, every twist and turn, every tempo change on Siberia is evidence of the group's unabated thirst for adventure. [Oct 2013, p.55]

With Bajascillators the group have achieved master mood shift status, producing a work that is simultaneously dreamy and psychedelically transportive. [Oct 2022, p.38]

While not as suck your frozen heart out bleak as her last album, Abyss, Hiss Spun explores metal's darkness on a more intimate scale. [Nov 2017, p.67]

With its crashing together of narcotic pop, serialism and motorik rock, Find Me Finding You is in a similar mould to Sadier’s compatriot Pierre Henry’s concrète pop nugget Psyche Rock. Or, closer to home, Stereolab. [Apr 2017, p.55]

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

There’s so much going on in these dense constructions, you’re likely to hear new layers and combinations with each spin. [Oct 2022, p.46]

If Lightning Bolt works best live, Wonderful Rainbow loses nothing of the duo's spontaneous wallop. [#230, p.56]

The pairing of contemporary classical with electronic music is a concept that could easily--and often does--go wrong. At times Shelley’s On Zenn-La feels like it’s about to do just that, but this very awareness of historical context makes it a worthy tribute to its hallowed predecessors. [Oct 2018, p.51]

The album is strong in the style, but offers no real surprises, with the familiar mixture of clacking Tuareg rhythm and scorched Sahelian riffing best illustrated here by the fiercely motorik “War Toyed”. [Apr 2017, p.63]

Lala Belu is his first new recording for decades, and it lives up to the expectation generated by their live appearances. [Apr 2018, p.67]

There's less sense of puzzle and struggle than we're used to with Aphex Twin... but Chosen Lords is certainly meticulous and absorbing. [#266, p.51]

A necessary record, and a thoroughly compelling one. [Jul 2023, p.51]

Granted, Flow's torrent of words is Thirlwell's familiar angsty blurt of near operatic proportions, but closer attention reveals his skill as an arranger, producer and rhythm sampler is now verging on the monumental. [#208, p.57]

[A] finely crafted and very songwriterly affair (with echoes of Talk Talk, The Auteurs and Roy Harper). [Jan 2017, p.74]

It’s a bold, defining album from the UK techno producer that will undoubtedly fulfill her wish to flip people’s perceptions. [Jul 2017, p.52]

For all its kinkiness Green Twins is indubitably an R&B record (tracks like “Cuffed” and “JP” really can’t be described as anything else) and an exceptional one at that. [Jul 2017, p.52]

This is von Hausswolff’s most open, personal and ultimately affirmative recording to date. [Mar 2018, p.48]

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]

It blends jazz, funk, dub and electronic sounds into a seamless, at times psychedelic whole. [Nov 2019, p.66]

Denzel’s flows are as hungry as ever, at times managing to channel the untamed spirit of DMX (see “Diet”) while Kenny’s production is the ideal mix of weighty drums and potent bass. It’s an energetic listen and one that can hopefully act as some sort of cure for Old Heads Syndrome – the belief that no one is making real hiphop anymore. [Apr 2020, p.68]

Book is likewise packed with songs that take a few listens to click. Flansburgh remains an acute observer of humanity’s pettiest manipulations as well as a shit hot guitarist; Linnell still has one of the most weirdly soulful voices in rock and a feel for poignant absurdity. [Jan 2022, p.72]

He remains a fascinating and fearless artist. But one can’t help but miss the outre experiments of Terror Management, where he bombed away over noise rock flurries and sepulchral beat loops alike. [May 2022, p.54]

There’s a mite more polish on Reason To Smile than some might favour. But there’s also a rich seam of dark humour and rage worthy of Kendrick Lamar or Silent Eclipse. [Jun 2022, p.62]

Pink Dolphins kicks off with four relatively short tracks (between three and eight minutes – I did say relatively) that demonstrate the evolution of an Anteloper sound. [Jul 2022, p.42]

Big | Brave roars into action with the immense “Carriers, Farriers And Knaves” and proceeds through five subsequent tracks whose heaviness is substantially derived from a keen sense of texture – abetted and encouraged by producer Seth Manchester – and the anguished wail of guitarist/vocalist Robin Wattie. [Apr 2023, p.64]

A welcome return from Baxter Dury, as he turns his gaze to the past to offer up a typically wry dissection of his upbringing and his formative years. [Aug 2023, p.50]

There’s a strongly conceived sense of contrast and drama to “Sorcerer” and "Copter," the latter transforming from overwrought mid-80s action show theme to a slick and drugged R&B jam. [Oct 2016, p.63]

It’s hard to know exactly what he’s singing about much of the time, but Dawson’s ardour for the sound of language is irresistible. ... The Ruby Cord is Dawson’s most accessible album yet, but as elaborate as his futuristic visions may be, they remind us of the mess we’re all in the middle of right now. [Dec 2022, p.52]

The tracks don’t so much develop as flow--and don’t so much flow as slide slowly, tidally, from one pole to another. Those poles are, to put it crudely, a smooth Badalamenti-like gloom and a more polyphonic, Vangelis-style choral sound. [Dec 2016, p.69]

Darran Cunningham's most immediate and body-rocking record to date. [May 2017, p.44]

The deep funk veteran garlands Black Thought’s words with a heavy bottom, making for an experience that’s less psychedelic and decorative than Cheat Codes. Although Black Thought doesn’t stray from the tendencies that distinguish his solo material from his work with The Roots. [Apr 2023, p.68]

Slightly rawer and more aggressive than the duo’s last couple, Fearn’s productions cleave towards the minimal and raw, stripped right back to choppy beats and lurking bass. ... Success has not diminished Williamson’s need to grind an axe, which may not be pretty or noble, but is at least honest and undeniably consistent with what came before. [Apr 2023, p.60]

Paternoster locks in with bassist Mike Abbate and drummer Jarrett Dougherty for 34 minutes of joyous thump with no filler in sight. A tough but open-hearted and ultimately life-affirming rock record. [Apr 2023, p.64]

It might take you a few cuts to pick up on the gagaku thing. [Oct 2018, p.54]

This is an overgrown jungle of music; ideas bury one another, making it all the more striking when a pure, clean line manages to weave its way through the tangle and rise, like a flower turning to face the sun. [Mar 2024., p.46]

Haino’s signature detonations and Yacyshyn’s punctuation leapfrog each other, creating a Möbius strip of energy that escalates freely without falling--a tightrope walk that American Dollar Bill has been building towards all along. [Mar 2018, p.48]

Herbert still seems like the same oddball he ever was. But the first half of Scale underlines how much fun there is to be had in playing the misfit. [#268, p.56]

Thankfully, her second solo album Blueprint is not a punk revival record, but a great grab bag of tracks showing that Armendariz still has not only her patented hair-raising and blood-curdling shriek from the 70s, but a voice that can reference the evocative beauty found in the pipes of both Patti Smith and Judee Sill. [Jul 2018, p.59]

Kaani is a tireless surging wave of uplifting music. [Sep 2013, p.65]

This is darkly delicious pop--with no smiling. [Mar 2019, p.64]

The 27th OSEES album is their most synthheavy yet, but those Blurt-like grooves are still in place and the songwriting is still tight as a gnat’s chuff on a record that in typical Osees style ranges all over the shop from new wave to skronk to punk to disco. [Oct 2023, p.56]

The mix between organic and technological sonics, including the harmonious tones of Williams's own voice, makes for a mesmerising debut. [Sep 2016, p.59]

Most tracks feature piano and vocals in a mix of essentialised South African stylings. A highlight is the simple, lilting hymn “Nomayoyo”, with Ntuli’s gentle, breathy vocals. “Lihlanzekile” is a quietly rolling piece of melancholia. [Dec 2023, p.58]

The ten laptop compositions of Platform are brilliant, thrilling articulations of many of her ideas. [May 2015, p.50]

Things improve markedly when he plays to his strengths with the nuanced narrative of “A Boy Is A Gun”, but ultimately such moments [are] hard to hear over the pitiable “Puppet” and “Earfquake”, functional pop wisely rejected by Justin Bieber and Rihanna. When the narrative sags and his mind seems to wander, it just isn’t enough, no matter how stylish the trimmings. [Aug 2019, p.68]

Punish, Honey is also a diverse and sonically surprising work, infectiously odd and encouragingly bold. [Oct 2014, p.63]

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

EBM equals R Plus Seven. [Sep 2013, p.49]

In spite of daft moments, the chilly shimmer of Push The Sky Away works its magic. [Feb 2013, p.45]

Throw in an evocative, anthemically chanted lyrical snapshot, some cryptic tales and a blues rock cover and almost every successful Fall trick familiar from the last two decades is also deployed. All of which amounts to a vital late period masterpice. [June 2008, p.47]

If it was possible to see the debut Carbeth as a local gem of modest proportions, it's hard to receive The Constant Pageant as anything other than a finished masterpiece, with four or five songs that have longevity written in and the rest of them as musically sharp as they're lyrically alert. [May 2011, p.56]

It's a much quieter album than its predecessor, more interested in fingering the tears and rips in its luxurious, ambient textures than Black Up's intergalactic boom-bap. It pulses and shimmers like light bouncing off gold, burnishing Palaceer's radiant visions. [Aug 2014, p.51]