Heart’s Ease picks up directly from where Lodestar left off. The lightness of touch of that earlier album, the delicate and sparse instrumental backing, so unobtrusive it enables rather than dominates, and her knack of filleting songs down to their bony essence, are all elements Collins pursues further here. [Aug 2020, p.52]

This album is a stunning, multivalent piece of artistry that hits an anxious and weary world like a light-bearing gift. Remain In Light is one of the most fascinating albums in rock history, and Angélique Kidjo may have just released the definitive version. [Aug 2018, p.56]

Bird Machine is not a revelation, but it can be a joy. [Oct 2023, p.54]

Promises doesn’t always come across like a true meeting of equals. Laswell used the saxophonist as a plug-in element in the late 90s, Michael Mantler’s Jazz Composer’s Orchestra did the same on 1968’s Communications, and there’s a bit of that feel here. A player with as unique and instantly recognisable a voice as Sanders always risks becoming a gimmick, but his performance here is stunningly beautiful, and the album would be unimaginable without him. [Apr 2021, p.57]

More than the spiritual feel of Impulse! releases by Sanders or Coltrane, this music recalls the groove oriented work of Turrentine, Idris Muhammad and Grover Washington Jr for CTI and Kudu. It’s warm weather music, made to be played through speakers propped in open windows, facing the street. [Jul 2018, p.58]

Complex puzzles for nimble feet to crack, custom-built for dancing. [Apr 2015, p.52]

A warm and thoughtful record. Sometimes the production is a bit light--the first half in particular suffers from a rather MOR unobtrusiveness. But Laveaux’s voice is a treasure, her guitar playing is fresh and prickly, and things get more tangled and interesting the further along we go. [Apr 2018, p.67]

It manages to evoke both void and overload simultaneously, and feels by turns oppressively dense and light as a feather. [Dec 2012, p.74]

The Patience is a little less introverted [than 2021's Elephant In The Room], looking beyond the shutters of lockdown, and feels like Jenkins is maturing into an artist who is aware of how his frustrations need to breathe, wait (hence the title) and take time to coalesce. It’s his best music since his early mixtapes, and certainly his best official album since 2018’s remarkable Pieces Of A Man. [Sep 2023, p.57]

LCD Soundsystem's gift is to forge iron from irony, show that cleverness need not be enervating. [#252, p.46]

Explosively powerful, yet resoundingly fragile, her extended vocal technique illuminates an astoundingly rich range of embodied possibility. [Apr 2019, p.64]

Double Negative stands alongside Yo La Tengo’s There’s A Riot Going On as a painfully honest expression of what it’s like to live in a post-truth country and have to call it your own. [Oct 2018, p.58]

The nature of their interaction sheds light on the physics and mathematical realities which underlie music and its capacity to stimulate or move us. Often in that process Drift Multiply happens to be unapologetically beautiful. [Dec 2020, p.55]

Raven is full of powerful earworms that mobilise every inch of soul and flesh. [Feb 2023, p.52]

Each listen evokes a different feeling. At times there is a feeling of contentedness. [Oct 2019, p.55]

That the album works so well is less a testament of Twigs's charisma and talent--real as those may be--than it is the limitless possibilities of well-paid freelance teamwork. [Nov 2014, p.63]

Sound Ancestors is a masterpiece. The 16 pieces not only expand the conversation around the art of sampling, but also further hiphop’s ability to grow as a collaborative Black artform. [Mar 2021, p.54]

Implausibly enduring, oddly endearing and extreme in ways both unexpected and otherwise. [Sep 2020, p.57]

Combining tight dynamics with the blurred intent of an impressionistic backwsh, some tracks rush by like vast landscapes, with individual features suddenly highlighted in freeze-frames. [#228, p.59]

While Steinski's work with DeFranco aka Double Dee, is the most dazzling--precisely because it avoids the pitfalls of run of the mill culture jamming and guerrilla media tactics--Steinski's solo tracks certainly have their own pleasures, even if they are more straightforwardly textural than his collabotation with Double Dee. [June 2008, p.57]

It’s very easy to get lost in this music, in the sense of immersively absorbed rather than uncomprehending. [Jun 2022, p.47]

So it's Ra the entertainer we get here.... On the second disc the first three tracks take matters further out. [Oct 2014, p.70]

The new Pusha T album is more assured and therefore effective than the last Clipse album, nowhere near the focused brilliance of their first two. All production is handled by Kanye West who’s likewise harking back to his glory days with assorted updates on his College Dropout sound. [Jul 2018, p.62]

His new LP is a sonic assault; holding tight to punk ruthlessness and discipline, drenched in Dirty South origins. [Oct 2018, p.68]

Though the compilation is vast and the songs hardly bleed into one another--we’re often jumping genres, pivoting off cascading basslines and quickly changing pace without missing beats--there is a level of thematic cohesion here. [Feb 2019, p.66]

It’s hard to get with the tiresome self-deprecation of that album title, the way he hides his pain behind a smile and hides his smile behind a dope aesthetic on that artfully blurred cover. When Earl does choose to project beyond his navel he has a powerful, booming voice and an ear for novelty. Where his gaze shifts to the outside world he can be inspirational. [Feb 2019, p.56]

On Scaring The Hoes, Brown and Peggy sound great together while offering few artistic revelations. [May 2023, p.52]

As with For You And I, the awkwardness of these beats seems dictated less by technical nuance and more by the idiosyncratic rhythms of the human body. ... Even more so than its predecessor, the album is maybe most striking when this idiosyncrasy explicitly reflects James’s lived experience as a Londoner, channelling the steppy rhythms of the hardcore continuum. [Jul 2021, p.60