A sparkling set that traces a number of lines through Haiti's musical patrimony. [Mar 2014, p.66]

What drives each track home is the tight focus of the playing, riffs and ideas, each one the clockwork fuse on a ticking time bomb. [Oct 2015, p.60]

In many ways this is his finest outing since The Boatman's Call. [#247, p.55]

This could have been camp on a Himalayan scale. Its strength is that it's anything but. [#255, p.51]

It evokes so many emotions in a single track, and wrestling with its bittersweetness affects you in the gut. [Apr 2012, p.67]

Adrianne Lenker’s songwriting and vocals have never been more inclusive yet forebodingly sui generis, sealing that simultaneous conviviality and strangeness that makes Big Thief’s music so addictive, and the band have got tighter and warmer from the years of touring that preceded the album’s creation. [Mar 2022, p.42]

A thrilling affair. [#252, p.63]

The songwriting and lyricism are strong, but her storied voice elevates the album and invests it with a depth and serenity that few can match. [Jan 2019, p.64]

This is still a grand, holistic statement, superbly structured in its 38 minutes of ebb and flow. [Nov 2014, p.66]

The parsimoniously arranged, mostly acoustic sound of the record enhances its projection of intimacy. ... Callahan doesn’t entirely give up his old taste for blankly delivered disturbance; his memory of childbirth includes the blood. But he’s never sounded so open or so genuinely happy. [Jul 2019, p.48]

Pacific Ocean Blue has aged well, considered over 30 years later. [July 2008, p.46]

Riveting. .... The lucidity behind every message on My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross is arresting, as it is drawing from a well of pure emotion that can be comprehended in full. [Jul 2023, p.48]

Marks a radical departure in its scope and overall sound.... Unwound have reinvented their music as Progressive hardcore, framing abstract conceits in rock solid structures. This brave, ambitious record retains its edge in a blur of invention. [#206, p.76]

Female defiance and desire in a glossy, dystopic package. [Jan 2018, p.77]

Gabriel’s not trying to be clever here, he’s being sincere. And because I favour savoury over sweet, I can strongly recommend the Dark-Side Mix which has more room to breathe, a fatter bottom end and weirder edges all round. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.84]

Production wise, [Have] You In Wilderness is a touch too diaphanous and gauzy, a few tracks in, you start craving something solid to hold on to amid the clouds of billowing strings.... It's a testament to Holter's songwriting ability that this doesn't fatally mar the album, but it would be appreciated if her future work demonstrated a greater sense of its own physicality. [Oct 2015, p.54]

She mostly succeeds at marrying that [transcendent black pop] to a sound that’s broader and more accessible than anything she’s put out to date. [Jul 2018, p.53]

Fetch sinks below the high water level of conscious synapses firing to collapse perceptions of time and warm the sheets of the subconscious. [Aug 2012, p.48]

Across the album woodwinds and brass establish the atmosphere, allowing Callahan to revisit some darker parts of himself with the safety of knowing that everything will be fine. [Dec 2022, p.64]

Ultimately, these elements mostly serve to contextualize some beautifully conceived programmed music within an edgier club culture. [Jul 2012, p.62]

Throughout In These Times McCraven displays a preternatural ability at composing outside of 4/4 time, his oddly metred pieces built upon ear-catching melodies and dynamic rhythmic interplay. ... In These Times encompasses the fire and natural eclecticism found in the best contemporary jazz.

It is a fine, unnerving album. [Mar 2016, p.45]

MBV is a successful return. [Mar 2013, p.49]

Circle’s ability to fuse distant or disparate modes and styles is part of what makes their music so compelling. Where attention might before have been generated out of the way it all fitted together, the tension here is more about viscerality, more about the vocal and guitars tearing through your body than seeping into your brain. [Sep 2017, p.48]

When she laughs that she’s never read Robert Greene’s self-help manual 48 Laws, not only is she declaring her album a bullshit-free zone, she’s redefining priorities for 21st century grown-up rap. On this form you have to hope her approach prevails. [Nov 2017, p.70]

It’s a joyful noise, for sure. [Oct 2023, p.50]

The sum is Ocean’s most thorough reading of his world to date. [Oct 2016, p.65]

Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! sees Cave at his wittiest and most relaxed, though perhaps also most detatched. [Apr 2008, p.53]