[New Facts Emerge] finds the group in passable but not especially inspiring form. [Sep 2017, p.59]

When he muses on ideal love it comes off like How To Dress Well with a bit of a John Mayer wink--Vulnicura this ain’t. Longstreth is a talented producer and arranger and it shows here. ... Shame about the lyrics. [May 2017, p.59]

How you feel about the LP will reflect how far you’re into its comic meets splatter trick. It feels sketchy and underdeveloped to me. [Apr 2019, p.68]

Introspective, emotionally charged pieces such as “Father Time”, “We Cry Together” and “Savior” provide high – or jarring – points on the record, but elsewhere there are periods of lull absent on previous efforts. ... As sonically impressive as his latest album may be, his approach to the topics under discussion doesn’t feel sufficiently thought out. [Jul 2022, p.48]

The more they change, the more ADULT. sound the same: pared down electro pulses, synth jabs with industrial elbows, and Nicola Kuperus’s passive-aggressive post-Slits lilt. [May 2017, p.61]

This record has its moments, for instance the squarewave basslines and breakbeats of “Edelweiss” and the outro to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”. However, as is often the case with Laibach, the pervasive air of calculated irony prevents the album from passing from the ridiculous to the sublime, even when it all gets so silly that on paper it sounds like it should. [Dec 2018, p.52]

They're entering into new territory now and have yet to push as far out as they need to. [Nov 2016, p.62]

Rick Ross is pretty much incapable of going more than 30 seconds with out using the word boss--too bad, because Justice League turn out three monsterous cruisetime tracks toward the end. [June 2008, p.63]

In flashes it could be a parallel universe in which Mahavishnu Orchestra ended up inventing Japanese city pop: a luxuriously hi-tech vision of urban utopia. But just as often it has the futile atmosphere of those projects in which string quartets would perform Aphex Twin. [May 2017, p.61]

Fading out, they leave the impression of an album too ambitious for its own good, but offering moments of real awe. [Apr 2021, p.52]

There's nothing on their fourth album that couldn't have been recorded in the early to mid-1980s. [Sep 2010, p.50]

15 tracks of raspingly dry boilerplate hiphop, whose moods and references are pretty much (all) the Americans ones you'd expect. [Nov 2007, p.51]

Deprived of the rushing, crescendoless highs of Glass Swords, the tracks often seem to struggle to articulate their fascination, or to find satisfying structures. [Sep 2014, p.60]

He frequently seems bored with his own raps, rarely breaking his monotone and indifferently fluctuating between bragging about the quality of his weed and bragging about nothing. The record's saving grace comes with reemergence of producer Ski Beatz. [Sep 2010, p.68]

Ultimately only the title retains the tang of locality. [Nov 2016, p.73]

They sound somewhere between being tentative and caught in a frozen, allegorical state of sketchiness, turning the sleepy head of bedroom pop into a death's head. [Sep 2014, p.64]

The first part of this milary-concrete triptych is mostly vague interference and Radiophonic Workshop-style wibbling about that towards the end, has developed into discomforting BBC Ceefax music. The middle section is sonically richer... Part three is illbient comedown. [Jun 2013, p.51]

An album which largely plays assured and empty. Genesis is home to a few brilliant moments, however. [May 2016, p.49]

Some awful lyrical lapses scupper otherwise promising pieces. [#223, p.51]

Optical Delusion’s seven different guest vocalists yield wildly differing results, ranging from hits to misses. [Apr 2023, p.67]

“Dreamfear” sticks to the artist’s more conventional penchant for collage-style dance music. .... “Boy Sent From Above” is less convincing, clumsily layering Auto-Tuned vocals over the kind of schmaltzy synth one might hear in pop outfits like Yazoo. [Mar 2024, p.54]

As an album it’s almost entirely soporifically dull though beautifully appointed throughout (and it’s a joy to hear Beyoncé rapping) by some smart production from both main protagonists and some slick grooves from the Daptone band. [Aug 2018, p.68]

Tracks run the usual gamut, aggregating pop references and stylistic tropes from the entire history of hiphop, rock, punk, techno and their esoteric subgenres, and assembling them into a harrowing Frankenstein that’s more sardonic than revelatory. [Sep 2018, p.50]

As a pop album, Channel Pressure falls short, primarily because the songs simply aren't as good as their impeccable references demand. [Jun 20111, p.46]

Fans of Anderson's trademark spoken word phrasing, with pregnant pauses, raised eyebrows and question mark endings, won't be disappointed. [#211, p.52]

On earlier releases, the traces of anger, sorrow or despair rippling through the found voices seeded roaring rock improvisations that empathetically rooted and resisted the calamities visited upon them. But the improvising on [Skinny Fists] falls within beat parameters too tightly determined to generate any really useful dissonance. [#200, p.66]

A curious lack of urgency pervades. [Jun 2021, p.66]

Sounds at times as much like an audio documentary of Cameron's Britain as a collection of electronic songs. [Oct 2015, p.62]

Laced never stays still long enough to be pinned down. [Jun 2011, p.57]

His concerns are serious--consumerism, race, fame, relationships--but he rarely addresses them with the craft or focus they deserve. [Sep 2013, p.66]

The line-up sounds tantalisingly promising--but the hoped for bass-heavy meltdown never fully materialises. [Jun 2016, p.58]

The Redeemer, despite its pinpoint sonics, doesn't take the logical next step of offering a moment of reflection or clarity. [May 2013, p.50]

Shorn of its images, Carpenter’s score for David Gordon Green’s reboot of the Halloween franchise is oddly aimless. There’s the instant jolt of recognition: that simple piano phrase is resurrected, and given a steroidal boost, its famous 5/4 rhythm now underpinned with a sturdy kickdrum. But after that the music hardly seems to build in intensity, or riff off each other; there are certainly no new hooks or textures that sear the listening ear like the first. [Nov 2018, p.53]

Tricky's problem is that the future has caught up with him. [#233, p.71]

The sound is certainly has the depth and sheen you'd expect from Laswell. But what's missing is some of the edginess, invention and unpredictability that was Scratch's trademark. [Jun 2011, p.59]

Most of the songs here work in pairs, or groups of three, as if Elfman couldn’t decide where to finish an idea and instead offers a few variations on a theme, diluting the punch of each individual track. ... The best tracks here are the ones where Elfman acknowledges his own limits and fears, without hedging or flippancy. [Jul 2021, p.59]

The R&B tropes are part of a reassuring past, and the half-there vocals don't add enigma so much as leave the music unchallenged and stick in its old ways. [Oct 2013, p.47]

While some tracks here showcase his incredible touch, others are straightforward hiphop loops that might have been built using a Tony Allen sample kit, and the album as a whole lacks conceptual or thematic unity. [Jul 2021, p.60]

He's certainly dextrous enough as a rapper to accommodate this musical schizophrenia, bobbing and weaving with a raw aggression that also serves to mask that he has little to say. [Mar 2012, p.69]

Much of this fascinating, infuriating record is defined by his commingling of HipHop, Electro, dancehall, and, most problematically, stadium alt.rock... Some of it is just odd enough to work. [#209, p.62]

The project ultimately feels a little vague and indulgent. Though the sounds of plastic on offer are eclectic and the compositions joyous, Matmos seem to acknowledge climate change as a throwaway aside in favour of an avant garde remaking of physical theatre. [Mar 2019, p.55]

Boiling down the complexities and contradictions of the countryside to a succession of stiff choral hymns, a chance to understand and connect is lost. [Apr 2021, p.55]

The long germination period of the project is an indication of the duo’s perfectionism, which unfortunately results in songs that are overworked to the point of blandness. [Aug 2022, p.57]

It is mixed heavy in the low mids, blanketed by chorus effects, yet somehow misses warmth. Its ambitions are little short of symphonic. [Jul 2017, p.62]

A polished version of the group’s classic style propels this concept, but their invigorating eccentricity disintegrates as the album progresses. The opening title track feels familiar, with its quintessential electric riff, but this vibrancy quickly breaks down with songs like “Reduced Guilt”, whose tense harmonies drive a constant sense of unease. The record feels rote for the band, until it reaches its enigmatic conclusion. [Sep 2020, p.49]

The problem is that this music, heard purely as a piece of product rather than as part of a wider performance with site-specific logic, leaves the listener with too much time in which to speculate what wider agenda the group may be spinning. [May 2018, p.54]

Boosie's attempts to remain commercially relevant in today's rap climate, however, makes the album a diluted draught of medicine and mediocre chart fodder. [Jul 2015, p.57]

Here, the 70s simulations, artful enough in their own way, are presented straight. The result, sadly, doesn't evoke 70s Italian Horror; it merely makes one think of already-over-familiar period and genre signifiers. [Jan 2013, p.62]

This album finds itself wandering far too into pop territory, without the accompanying substance and adventure that made his preceding releases so refreshing. [Oct 2019, p.67]

Shorn of vocals, Xen suffer the same fate as much beloved contemporary beat music, which is a kind of dazzling monotony. [Nov 2014, p.63]

Keith's industry gripes are implicit from his two decade career as the Absurd Outside Rapper--so it's a shame he feels the need to come so blunt. [Dec 2008, p.74]

Far from being some utopian unity of the opposites her work has summoned – beyond binaries – she’s still clearly experimenting and sometimes failing. [Aug 2020, p.48]

Musically the project is weighed down by Haigh’s hugely uninteresting and one-dimensional piano playing. ... Haigh’s ear for electronic texture does do some of the heavy lifting for which his piano playing is not equipped. [Feb 2020, p.47]

Ashin, in giving so much of himself away, leaves little scope for the kind of mystery that might enable his musical settings to transcend their functional pop status. [Feb 2013, p.60]

His arch over-emoting robs his songs of any sense of genuine feeling. [Feb 2013, p.60]

Its balance of electronic, acoustic and vocal elements, while initially impressive, is soon revealed to be a product of the lack of any forceful musical or textual elements at all. [Feb 2013, p.60]

There are occasions when vocal inadequacy can be more emotionally fetching than full-throated virtuosity.... This, however, is not one of them. [#239, p.57]

As per usual after listening to an Oh Sees release, I’m impressed by the execution but left cold and hollow by their studious style. [Oct 2020, p.59]

I’m always holding out hope for more of the genius heard on Doris but it’s unfortunately absent on Feet Of Clay. [Jan 2020, p.74]

Things heat up a bit on “Misanthrope Gets Lunch” and “Oblivion Sigil”, when the shrill bursts from Kyp Malone’s synthesizer and Marcos Rodriguez’s guitar face off against one another like Irmin Schmidt and Michael Karoli of Can did on Delay 1968, but sadly, those are the only flashes of excitement to be found on the release. [Oct 2020, p.59]

Some of street rap's brightest new talents appear--Chief Keef, Young Thug, Rich Homie Quan--and wear their Gucci Mane influence proudly, each in their own distinctively warped ways and yet all brimming with exactly the joy that their progenitor has generally lost to age. [Jul 2013, p.68]

The mish-mash of styles wouldn't be an issue if it sounded like Pateras and Patton were surrendering to something other than themselves, but what comes across instead is a desire to demonstrate mastery. [Jan 2015, p.70]

["f=(2.5)"] has a nice queasy seasick vibe, but feels over-egged, with too many ideas thrown at it too quickly. Other tracks repeat this formula with diminishing returns and cut 'n' paste fatigue sets in.... "f=(2.6)" is a lot more fun. [Oct 2015, p.48]

The tracks are curiously undramatic, punching elements in and out like a demonstration reel. [Mar 2013, p.54].

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]

The Body’s central drive focuses on heaviness, both as a sonic and emotional motif, and while their creative apex I Shall Die Here demonstrates a logical conclusion of the former, I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer sees the band explore dramatic terror, to limited success. [Jul 2018, p.44]

It's not completely pants, but not great either. [Jul 2011, p.44]

Stripped of the visuals, the seemingly endless succession of minor variations (75 tracks between the two collections) on the same sets of glossy and pleasant synth arpeggios can be at once bitty and overwhelming. [Oct 2016, p.63]

This is pleasant but forgettable music, dissolving the instant it hits the eardrum. [Jul 2023, p.52]

Half of the songs here are as good as the highs of the first two albums.... Much of the rest is the victim of Madlib's infuriating tendency to leave things in fragments. [Jun 2013, p.54]

On his fourth album, he seems to be wrestling with how to modernise his signature blues and roots foundation without minimising its traditional elements. Parts that would work better with stripped down production are overproduced with the layering of background vocals, keyboards and added sound effects, making the music too rich for the message. [Jul 2018, p.48]

On paper, it's a strange fit. On record, too. [Jul 2013, p.52]

The conceptual core of Vessel’s third album is rather ambiguous. Queen Of Golden Dogs follows a loose narrative of self-discovery and transformation and a couple of queer literary and surreal visual art references. ... Musically, Queen Of Golden Dogs is similarly vague and amorphous. [Dec 2018, p.58]

Stripped of the visuals, the seemingly endless succession of minor variations (75 tracks between the two collections) on the same sets of glossy and pleasant synth arpeggios can be at once bitty and overwhelming. [Oct 2016, p.63]

The music still nods to Broadcast in its gothic otherness, and the basic format of analogue synth driving the bass, drums and vocals is unchanged. But the sound is more structured, more--gasp!--song-like. Unfortunately the production is imbalanced, rough and thin. [Dec 2018, p.59]

H-p1 is a slightly more adventurous outing than usual, due to the recruitment of synth player Shazzula, but the additional textures, pleasing as they are, fail to revolutionize what is essentially record collection rock. [Jul 2011, p.58]

Singer's Grave feels like an exercise, something which never be said for the work released under the Palace banner in the 1990s. [Nov 2014, p.72]

Nepenthe pushes the formula to [a] breaking point, where emotional manipulation crosses over into cloying, calculated and claustrophobic. [Aug 2013, p.53]

The impression left by The Hums's buzzing, keys-assisted pseudo-punk is that of a heavier Clinic or even Scottish also-rans Magoo. [Nov 2014, p.72]

Nehru is essentially indistinguishable from any number of bedroom rappers clogging Soundcloud with their freestyles to Doom's decade old Special Herbs instrumentals. [Nov 2014, p.76]

Sadly much of Music Is A Hungry Ghost is marred by a pebbledash of clicks and glitches -- that already overused signifier of au courant production. [#207, p.87]

As a prank or a statement, Expekoration is a particularly lazy one. [Dec 2010, p.50]

It all makes for an album which is strangely boring; the baroque detailing becomes an inaudiable blur. [Dec 2008, p.65]

If narcoleptically bland neo-soul is your bag, you’re in luck. A parade of guest singers and rappers do nothing to inject any interest. [Sep 2023, p.69]

Fay aficionados may be unsettled that our man seems to have been kidnapped by aliens and reprogrammed as a frail new age gospel singer. Eccentricity is kept to a minimum, as thin songwriting is padded out by repetitive chanting of a chorus's final line. [May 2015, p.49]

The epic slog of Culture II offers up more than 20 courses of candyfloss, toffee apple and burnt syrup in lieu of any real variety. [Apr 2018, p.68]

Hayward sounds bored, Coxon throws out Clapton-ish licks, and Taylor's milk-and-water vocals make him sound like the younger brother of The Beautiful South's Paul Heaton. Only Thomas seems willing to inject any imagination into the songs. [Apr 2011, p.52]

There's little to set the sombre half-tones of the Cave and Seed world alight with suspicous glimmers. [#228, p.59]

Throughout this solo effort--his fourth, for what it's worth--Callahan mumbles ever onward like a charmless, tranquillised version of Giant Sand's Howe Gelb. [Apr 2011, p.55]

Pleasant, yes, but not much more.... Too many of these 'songs' snap off at around the three or four minute mark, just as they start to get interesting.... It sounds consistently half-there. [#208, p.52]

If the Wu-Tang Clan's A Better Tomorrow was a shoddy attempt at cinematic audio in a Hollywood blockbuster sense, this is the arthouse variety show alternative with caricature Ghost as compere. [Sep 2015, p.57]

It all sounds very loose and off the cuff, but any positive sense of spontaneity is sabotaged by a delivery so careless it borders on the sloppy. [#229, p.68]

This may be the first solo Eno work that is entirely without interest. It is bafflingly below par. [Dec 2010, p.45]

PSB celebrate an idea of fusty Britishness but lack the imagination, intelligence or inclination to interrogate it or in fact add anything at all to the discourse. [May 2013, p.59]

[Tipsy] painstakingly process small episodes of manufactured excess and thoughtless musical effect into tracks evoking the giddy pleasures to be found in running your favourite party tapes at the wrong speed. [#206, p.81]

Given the sprawling length, naturally it's not devoid of a few stray gems and curiosities. [Oct 2011, p.60]

This trio are rarely an ecstatic proposition, preferring the slow burn to the white flame, but in truth there's little heat here at all. [Aug 2015, p.54]

Sadly their rather airless space rock doesn't really lift off beyond a certain Ambient politeness. [#244, p.66]

Despite the bloodlettting and reckless spending, Future just sounds bored. And occasionally lazy. [Apr 2016, p.50]

The track ["Power Circle"] and the entire album seems to lose its air after he [Gunplay] makes his exit. [Aug 2012, p.59]

Even in the midst of the fairly wretched Phase Two there are gems but you sure have to dig for them. [Feb 2016, p.54]

Pop itself is not a problem, it's just that in Tarwater's take on it nagging tunes and interesting textures are in short supply. [#253, p.65]

Not enough of Drukqs confidently breaks new ground, and too often James falls back on the all too familiar dysfunctional jitterbeat which has typified Aphex output since 1996's Richard D James album. [#212, p.55]

Preparations is a tediously uneven listen that drags on despite its 31 minutes running time. [Oct 2007, p. 63]

There is no shortage of bad ideas on the second installment.... But this ugliness is anchored by a series of largely curatorial successes. [May 2013, p.68]

Another slapdash cash-in from masked rap's last bastion. [Sep 2012, p.60]

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]

Sadly it feels like the gestation period has robbed Joker's music of some of its immediacy. [Nov 2011, p.72]

Much of the album's faults are down to Smith. Rather than steering the collective ship, his voice, slurred to the point of incomprehensibility, barely connects with the others. [Dec 2014, p.48]

Almost without exception, these 11 tracks lurch along at a donkey's pace that seems designed to signify grace and dignity, while the crystal cave reverb applied with such liberality by Randall Dunn, producer of choice for the likes of Sunn 0))), Wolves In The Throne Room and Earth, seems after the nth track to cloak a more profound problem, which is that much of the material on Strangers is thin pickings. [Jun 2016, p.54]

It's just a coarser, clumsier version of the updated industrial bashing of their last album, without the dreamy coronae of guitar.[Jun 2016, p.60]

Somewhere in Asphalt For Eden is buried beautiful music. [Jun 2016, p.62]

There is a resounding thinness to Purple Naked Ladies and its finest moments sound like a collection of scratch tracks from a lost Erykah Badu/Neptunes session circa 1998. [Mar 2012, p.54]

New material is conspicuous by its absence, and several shambolic passages indicate that the band barely managed to rehearse, let alone write songs. [Jul 2017, p.58]

He telegraphs all too simplistic rhymes schemes and rarely offers subject matter beyond deeply cliched braggadocio. He's rapping like he doesn't want to be there. [Oct 2010, p.67]

The music veers between between a kind of funk slop with trippy organ squelches and good ol' fashioned rawk with biblical overtones, It feels a little like drowning in a bath of Jack Daniels, but not in a good way. [Sep 2010, p.53]

Explicit references to surrealism and Japanese ambient, alongside DJ Screw and Jodorowsky, read as clumsy and uncritical homages to tired tropes and cliches, which ultimately serve a tactless and indulgent end. [Nov 2018, p.63]

It pains me to think they’d record something so vacant and unneeded. Maybe 30 years ago this would have been a different album. But here and now, Two To One is a case of too little, too late. [Jan 21, p.82]

There's being reflective and then there's navel-gazing, and unfortunately Alopecia is too frequently guilty of the latter to really engage either the mind or heart. [Apr 2008, p.66]

A sense of cluelessness pervades these songs, as though constructed without considering why or for whom they were intended. [Jun 2014, p.51]

Songs like "Brainfreeze" and "The Red Wing" plod more than march, piling on so many competing keyboard layers that the melody blots itself out. Others seem oddly unfinished. Only the two closing ten minute tracks evoke the classic Fuck Buttons widescreen neon pomp. [Jul 2013, p.56]

A Better Tomorrow feels trapped by history, an impotent reflection versus a proposed resurrection. [Jan 2015, p.65]

Still sounds like the work of someone desperate to gain the approval of the Drag City clique. [#215, p.69]

Chosen topics prove less crucial than his relentlessly tedious delivery. [Feb 2018, p.51]