Spalding has always been a prodigious talent, but it's by adopting the uninhibited persona of Emily that the 31 year old singer and bassist has found a truly distinctive voice. [Jun 2016, p.56]

Shygirl represents the very best of avant leaning contemporary UK pop on this generous seven track EP without a single dull moment. [Jan 2021, p.85]

The energy is impressive and it's hard to find technical fault but the stagnation is undeniable. [May 2012, p.73]

It was recorded the same year and it is a fierce final epistle. [Aug 2017, p.52]

Eton Alive is but another visceral and impetuous take on a grim political reality. [Mar 2019, p.58]

Cabral’s vocals, typically hushed, make Mazy Fly feel like a shared secret, its own world, and it’s thrilling to enter. [Apr 2019, p.62]

Thanks to Muldrow, these compositions now bump and swing to the blues of the day. [Sep 2020, p.47]

If takes on his own catalogue feel lazy on paper, it’d need a heart of stone to resist something like 1977’s “Materialist” which in this version is probably the dubbiest and most typically Sherwood moment on here. Most importantly, perhaps, that voice has lost none of its storied opulence. [Apr 2022, p.42]

Archangel Hill is a great album. As dearly as I love her early work, there’s something about Collins’s sound here that feels just right. [Jul 2023, p.50]

The album demonstrates control at every point, moving effortlessly between elegant restraint and a precise, brutal pummelling that sounds like a battering ram smashing through a door. [Sep 2020, p.48]

Thrilling even as it plumbs the depths of anguish. [Aug 2021, p.52]

Although this record is Rhys’s most polished to date, he does squeeze in moments of strangeness – subtle and paired down, bubbling beneath lush production and melodic arrangements. [Mar 2024, p.52]

You are reminded that yes, this has all been done before, but Out Hud get by with the wistful innocence of well-intentioned brainiacs. [#225, p.71]

Contrasting epic, experimental freakouts with concise chamber music, 5 is a diverse album, full of gems bleeding with icy brilliance. [#235, p.69]

There’s a beguiling modesty to tracks such as “Fire” and “4th Dimension”, while Yasiin Bey’s understated sprechgesang advising “Kids see ghosts sometimes” on the title track feels plausible, immanent, urgent. [Aug 2018, p.63]

With his best record in years, Gibbs gets a bump stock boost from Kenny Beats (03 Greedo, Key!), a former EDM DJ turned grimiest white boy rap producer since Alchemist. This is Gibbs being Gibbs. [Sep 2018, p.66]

It’s dense and esoteric, but gorgeous. [Oct 2019, p.55]

Dust floats along meditatively, and is Halo’s warmest and most familial record to date. [Jul 2017, p.52]

A captivating fourth album from the Richmond, Virginia outfit that casts a woeful eye over Trump’s America. [Jun 2019, p.56]

This decidedly literate songcraft has a range of ancestors, including Talking Heads, Sparks and David Grubbs, but three albums along, The Books are nailing down a distinctive soundworld of their own. [#254, p.54]

An air of devotion does indeed hover over this music, filtering through the stately intonation of Anima Brass and the a cappella singing of The Macadam Ensemble, as well as the quiet concentration of Malone’s own playing. Yet it emanates not from the rarefied air of religious sentiment, but from the composer’s passionate dedication to sound itself, and her respect for its potential capacity to realise, as the title of the concluding piece puts it, “The Unification Of Inner & Outer Life”. [Mar 2024, p.50]

Krlic combines a flexible approach with an impressive deftness of touch, and Excavation sees him feeling out new ways through the shadows. [Apr 2013, p.50]

The album glows white-hot with fury and energy, familiar yet fresh. [#243, p.66]

Throughout the album, multiple vocal lines with different rhythms and lyrics are frequently layered atop each other, lending to a dense, teeming maximalism. This tendency makes the moments of relative spaciousness, like the synth-laden and futuristic “Coming Back (From The Distance Between The Spaces Of Time)”, feel all the more boundless. [Oct 2018, p.49]

Where Inter Arma employ Cascadian elements and bottomheavy tonalities in order to plumb the depths of the soul, Full Of Hell express the desire to not simply ponder life’s futility but to actively resist those feelings. [Jun 2019, p.56]

It joins Titanic and Big Thief’s UFOF (members of Big Thief are present) as one of 2019’s leftfield pop gems, a record created with no detectable consciousness of a wider scene but with a bedroom-wide sense of possibility. [Jul 2019, p.52]

This wonderful music is most certainly bleeding freely from somewhere deep inside Jenny Hval. [Nov 2016, p.58]

The musical quality is high, and it’s unusual among the saxophonist’s post-1959 studio recordings in reprising earlier compositions – he mostly featured new material. Coltrane’s rather unvarying dynamic level makes him a less effective film composer than his former employer Miles Davis, with his dramatic mastery – but Trane can’t be blamed for not fitting his music to the action, given that he had little idea what that would be. [Nov 2019, p.69]