Flamagra is still more accessible than either Quiet or Dead! and this is most likely due to Ellison’s choice of vocal collaborators. [Jul 2019, p.49]

The record’s surfaces are highly polished and glisten with a near futurist glow that’s only occasionally interrupted by percussion, most affecting when those pristine surfaces recede to emphasise the melodic lines that dance over them. “Vanity” lets ominous synths rumble while ornate electronics flourish above while the reverberating motif of “Tasakuba” is potent with longing and desire. [Jul 2021, p.69]

The whole album sounds less written, performed and recorded, more like it’s streaming directly from Thundercat’s brain to the listener’s. [Apr 2017, p.57]

This ambitious album deserves to be a crossover hit. [Jul 2017, p.46]

Rainford is a classic set of Scratch vocals: science fiction nursery rhymes, apocalyptic lullabies, their melodies light as air yet rocksteady. Scratch’s delivery at the age of 83 is like Dylan’s present-day rasp, no longer about hitting notes or even tone necessarily, but heavy with the weight of his personal and musical history. [May 2019, p.61]

1988 is full of these striking juxtapositions, placing tales of hustling and gunplay in smoothed out, soulful musical beds. [Jun 2020, p.50]

An expansive record that thoughtfully integrates electronic elements. It almost feels transmitted from a parallel past – a form of retrofuturism where science fiction meets folk. [Feb 2022, p.48]

The Future Never Waits (oh, that pesky future!) benefits from the addition of former Coil/Spiritualized/Waterboys keyboard player Thighpaulsandra, who appears to have opened up the band’s sound in such a way that seems almost effortless. [Jul 2023, p.52]

Avalon Emerson & The Charm will find favour with anyone into Cocteau Twins, dreamy bedroom synthpop and anything Balearic. “Entombed In Ice” feels nostalgic but fresh, Emerson’s vocals floating effortlessly overhead. [Jul 2023, p.63]

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]

O’Dwyer’s explorations of forgotten spaces, ways of listening and acoustic phenomena are as rich as ever, this haunted collection of subterranean sounds revealing even greater depths to her sprawling, strange work. [Nov 2017, p.61]

On the tracks where Baha works with collaborators, he bends his production style to suit the vocal quirks of the artist featured alonside himself. [Jul 2018, p.59]

A natural follow-up to his first solo outing. [#229, p.68]

Abalanced, democratic collaboration, with neither unit dominating.... Ghost's faraway sound lends Damon & Naomi's straightahead arrangements a yearning, devotional air... [#199, p.56]

With unobtrusive, yet telling contributions from friends including Meg Baird, The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, she conjures up a bittersweet sense of location and changing times through six pieces that are subtly complementary, in their character and impact, meriting comparison to the finely nuanced ambient soundtracks of Angelo Badalamenti. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.96]

This is a synth album of considerable finesse, a soundtrack to imaginary films. [Nov 2016, p.67]

Here as elsewhere, Hval manages to perfectly combine an eerie, folkish, ethereal pitch that even veers on yodelling at times, as if summoning an army of hidden folk, with an earthly sensuality that speaks of all kinds of lust, particularly the kinds that hint at lengthy afternoons in obscure cabins. [Jun 2018, p.58]

This intensity and force, despite the stillness, brings a new dimension to Low's sound and makes C'Mon an interesting addition to an already impressive body of work. [Apr 2011, p.60]

With Hell Can Wait, he inches logically towards a modernisation of the chaotic wall of noise formula that defined Public Enemy than immediately pulls back from it. [Nov 2014, p.76]

Sauna Youth are a tight unit, their constituent parts meshing into a formidable wall of sound, but it might be an idea to lose a member or two, subtract an element and make space for uncertainty. [Jun 2015, p.52]

Knowing the emotional background behind its recording makes it unbearably poignant but this crackly, lambently textured mix of treated piano, longwave static and vocals would move anyone who had a heart. Sublime art from horrible circumstances and Craig’s best work to date. [Apr 2020]

An unusual and unexpected triumph. [Jun 2011, p.44]

Harvey's new strategy has been successful although White Chalk might be something of a curio, it's certainly her most haunting work. [Oct 2007, p.60]

How Did I Find Myself Here? is the occasionally thrilling result. [Sep 2017, p.50]

This new collaboration with London's Heliocentrics admirably recreates a smokey 70s atmosphere. [Sep 2014, p.64]

Lyrically, Foster possesses both esoteric wisdom and an ascetic purity yet never wanders out of reach; she has the musical instinct of her troubadour sisterhood (Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Judee Sill et al) and in the spoken word moments, the cosmic gravitas of Eden Ahbez. [Dec 2018, p.48]

The music--hums, clangs and muffled booms--wields an ominous, oppressive power, especially on headphones, that can create a feeling of queasy horror even for those unaware of the record's backstory. [Nov 2014, p.68]

While Harris’s voice has become more manoeuvrable, the combination of echo, layering and breathy delivery push the literal meaning of her lyrics just out of reach. Instead the words are like a lure, drawing you further into the space between unfurling sequences of hesitant notes and quiet cries. [May 2018, p.49]

Gordon sings with a becalmed daydream-y satisfaction, mixing and matching phrases from different notebooks into a confident patchwork. [Nov 2019, p.54]

Walker's latest project effectively balances the saccharine with hovering fear, demonstrating his continued capacity for writing cinematic music invested with strange drama. [Sep 2016, p.57]

More substantial, positive and dynamic. [#225, p.58]

The comparison between [The Disco's of Imhotep] and Ancient Echoes revealing the absolutely consistency of Moss's vision over the years. [Aug 2016, p.50]

Code warms up as it winds down, as Malone is joined by frequent collaborator Ellen Arkbro for a trio of live recordings. [Sep 2019, p.56]

Whatever your take on Tibetan Buddhism, this is done with powerful sincerity and musical sensibility. The Albanian born Kodheli in particular does a remarkable job, and I defy anyone to listen to Anderson’s voice for an hour and not become a better person. [Oct 2019, p.48]

Though not all the tracks are fully realised, Molina was clearly pushing into new territory: that he never got there is a tragedy. [Sep 2020, p.57]

Some of these tracks have a stark, haunting beauty that marks them out as perfectly realised compositions in their own right. [#258, p.68]

The Sun's Tirade is a master class in restraint and pacing. [Nov 2016, p.64]

The director has previously been namechecked by Lopatin as an early idol. Consciously or not, he applies a more vivid psychedelic impulse to a comparable tying together of sound and vision. [Aug 2017, p.56]

This intriguing, relatively mild entente between elegiac melodicism and freeform lyrics has many moments of quiet innovation. [#256, p.63]

Amalie Bruun (aka Myrkur) returns in feral form with a fresh set of frozen warnings and blackened ballads. ... On “Funeral” she teams up with Chelsea Wolfe for a duet that never quite gels and feels frustratingly half formed, while “Kætteren” confusingly slips a sliver of traditional Scandinavian folk music into the mix. Even worse is end track “Børnehjem” where demonic child whispering over Myrkur’s medieval monkish chant evokes Blair Witch memories and ultimately drags the whole album down. [Dec 2017, p.60]

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]

There’s a lot to wrap your ears and brain around, and it can make a strange load of sense if you allow yourself to be carried away by its relentless stream. [Nov 2021, p.52]

This is not the Wand record to spin while you do the chores, but it is, the one you might spin when you're looking for reasons to keep on living. [May 2014, p.69]

Electric Brick Wall isn't as groove based as the previous album, but it's an even more complex, discomfiting listen in many respects. [Jun 2014, p.48]

If Brian Wilson had crashed a motorcycle and holed up to recuperate at Big Pink with The Band, this is how The Basement Tapes would have sounded. [#256, p.49]

With Exai they've created a work which reveals renewed faith in their own identity and which should act as compass in years to come. [Mar 2013, p.57]

Andrew WK's lucid, luminous production delivers a sequence of music that seems to hover between states. This is a musical achievement. [Jun 2011, p.46]

It's a Mark McGuire record in the way he plunges into all his personal enthusiasms and arrives somewhere more interesting when he comes up for air. [Nov 2015, p.56]

Mandel's combination of virtuosity, shopworn aesthetics and lustful neediness is ultimately winning. [Jan 2017, p.73]

This is fierce, uncompromising music. [May 2017, p.47]

It is surprisingly polite and beautiful in places yet conjures up an air of real menace and myriad Nietzschean altitudes and climates. Fras’s voice and heavy, laden, deadpan German is perfect for Nietzsche’s portentous fragments and aphorisms. But there is a lightness here too. [Aug 2017, p.54]

Silhouettes & Statues--83 songs across five CDs--is a useful opportunity to take stock of goth’s actual achievements. It charts the genre’s emergence from post-punk, emphasises points of overlap with anarcho, industrial and even synthpop, and ends in 1986 before the arrival of Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson and hordes of neo-celtic, pagan folk and cyber goth sub-groupings. [Sep 2017, p.69]

What's so delightful is how everything instantly clicks back into place for the listener who is familiar with Dab's work, how accessible and pleasurable his sound is for anyone coming to it for the first time. [Mar 2018, p.46]

His ability to manipulate sounds of urban bleakness into piss-stained musique concrète is as present as ever, from bass that booms like mourning gasometers to choking metallic smog ambience. Yet Younger’s skill lies not as yet another artist soundtracking urban decay but in enticing and confounding with sounds that straddle the uncanny valley. [Jun 2019, p.40]

Their third album Horizon is mellifluous and pretty, with a rolling, tumbling quality that feels like a downhill race. [Jul 2019, p.57]

Heavy, expressive and uncompromising, both Wrecked and Analog Fluids Of Black Holes gesture at fresh, purposeful possibilities for noise and experimental music. [Nov 2019, p.49]

Like Stanley’s film, Stetson’s score fully realises the terrible, wondrous majesty hinted at in the 1927 text. [Apr 2020, p.62]

Rose Golden Doorways sits somewhere between grindcore and raga. Created in a consecrated place – a church in Stoke Newington lends volume and reverb – it moves relentlessly forward, a continuous 38 minutes that reaches an apogee with the alien blast of “Those Among Us”. [Apr. 2020, p.59]

There is a genuine synergy here. Khruangbin have crafted oneiric Manding inflected backdrops as though they have found what they were looking for all along, and Touré settles into them like he’s just got home. [Dec 2022, p.67]

Perpetual Now has tangential relationships to house, techno, dub, ambient and psychedelic minimalism, but manages to plot a coherent and personal path between them all, with each of its four long tracks given space to breathe and expand. [Dec 2022, p.66]

The focus is on the uniqueness of their music (check out the Deep Purple inspired organ solo on “Forest Dweller”) which infuses progressive song structures with foundational black metal’s penchant for folk melodies and historical narratives. [Jul 2023, p.62]

Each track feels like an experiment in throwing footwork principles at other genres to see what might stick, but the results are uniformly excellent. [Apr 2018, p.62]

Strike a rich vein of form. ... This record lacks a stated motif, but finds the musician digging into the American primitive style (which has often been at least in the orbit of his playing) more keenly than before. “Celerity”, “Enville” and “Vellum”, deft instrumentals all, sit ably in Fahey/Basho territory. [Apr 2020, p.50]

Allegiance & Conviction is Windy & Carl’s first new album in a good long while, and it was worth the wait. [Sep 2020, p.61]

The speech modelling software used to articulate the narrative generates a somewhat grittier, odder voice than your average online speech synthesizer, but that doesn’t keep the album’s expository moments from being momentum killers. The passages where artificial voice gets fed into some typically squelchy MOM electro beats are considerably more fun to listen to. [Feb 2021, p.52]

Oddisee is a hyper-eloquent, charismatic rapper, and this album is buoyed with lyrical wit and lush instrumentation. [Jul 2015, p.57]

Everything that 30 years ago made Dinosaur Jr a lightning bolt of enervated languor is present here. [Sep 2016, p.59]

The best thing they've done since Stakes Is High. [#250, p.73]

Oozing Wound frontman Zack Weil has an unhinged screech reminiscent of Destruction's Schmier, symbolising the group's mastery of a kind of primitive thrash with no goal greater than the release of energy. [Nov 2013, p.52]

The production on Carnival OF Souls is particularly vivid. [Sep 2014, p.58]

Swagger can be infectious and the album works as a playful, blissed out hymn to the dancefloor. [Nov 2016, p.55]

Where the 1982 take was hollow and grating, the gaps and silences gradually roaring with accumulating noise, this version is euphoric and transparent. [Jun 2014, p.42]

"Feral," "Codex" and "Giving Up The Ghost" finally win me over. [Apr 2011, p.62]

Donaldson’s lyrics tend towards the observational, and are often delivered with a wry turn of phrase that can be laugh out loud funny. ... The Town That Cursed Your Name juggles pathos and bathos throughout. [Apr 2023, p.58]

Romantiq is hypnotic, curious and, at its best, genuinely fresh and beautiful. [May 2023, p.54]

There's such a freshness to Brett Sparks's music that few comparisons can be made. [#269, p.42]

Whether K Bay is progressive rock or not, White hooks you in with his big warm voice and big tunes, and then goes weird on you in such a strong way that he can’t really be asked to leave. [Aug 2021, p.55]

Indebted to various traditions of US rock, from resonant folk and blues to elegant indie pop, its understated songs are looser and more varied here than in her music with bands like Helium and Ex Hex, as if serving a different, affirming purpose. [Jun 2024, p.61]

The depths of the production reflect the depth of concept, as Morgan makes vertical connections between personal relationships and queer and Black histories. ... Water is a palpable step forward from a versatile, ambitious artist. [Dec 2021, p.52]

The album’s first half is simultaneously some of Godflesh’s most aggro material and as gleaming and chromed as a Terminator that’s been burned down to its metal skeleton. Purge isn’t a completely boom-bap orientated album, though. “Lazarus Leper” is both one of the album’s longest tracks and one of its most old school. The primitive drum machine beat sounds like something that could have come off the group’s very first EP. [Jul 2023, p.51]

It's an almost-pitch-perfect progression of eight tracks across 39 minutes. [Oct 2014, p.54]

The first half of the album presents a disparate sequence of songs, the punky “I Want To Tell You About Want I Want” mixing with a rather laboured piece about Virginia Woolf’s and Sylvia Plath’s suicides (“Virginia Woolf”). ... This second half finds Hitchcock at his most purposeful. [May 2017, p.46]

An unequivocally rocking set on which Chasny is backed by his former group Comets on Fire. [Aug 2012, p.56]

More often than not the group sound like they're going through the motions. [Jul 2012, p.57]

As the 12 minute “The Lure Of The Mine” closes out this odd and enigmatic record in typically relentless fashion, the sensation is one of standing back and watching, impressed but stubbornly, confusingly unmoved. [May 2017, p.56]

Tracks like "Steel Drummer" shade between euphoric rave and freakout energy, while "Black And Blue" has a distinct rock edge with its dark riffs and darker mood. [Sep 2013, p.63]

Legacy + is a unique intergenerational conversation on wax. Both halves are set in Afrobeat, while one sticks more to the tradition than the other, and the contrast is beautiful to hear. [Apr 2021, p.58]

For their fifth album The Witness, Montreal group Suuns pick their way through new songs that on the surface sound sparse but are actually thickets of sonic invention. [Sep 2021, p.62]

“Working The Ditch” and “Smiler” sound like they could come from the same sessions as Melvins’ 1993 major label debut Houdini. But there are atypical twists in “She’s Got Weird Arms”, whose new wave-ish verses are broken up by cascades of bug-eyed dissonance and “Allergic To Food”, which reminds this listener of “Forkboy” by Al Jourgensen and Jello Biafra’s side-project Lard with the tempo lowered to mid. [May 2024, p.50]

The Invisible Way has Wilco's Jeff Tweedy behind the faders, and he superbly captures the concentrated simplicity of Low's aesthetic. But sometimes the restricted palettes can be a little cloying,[Mar 2013, p.56]

The result is a kind of lo-fi dream music, sea-changed and composite, with whisper-core mbalax drifting in and out focus between vaporous synth washes, low-key beat programming, spoken teachings and lilting song. [Feb 2021, p.61]

The entirely instrumental Deep Fried Grandeur is too cohesive to be a mere jam, and even though Walker’s bandmates – drummer Frank Rosaly, bassist Andrew Scott Young, and guitarist Brian Sulpizio – are skilled improvisors, the performance remains centred by rock pulses throughout. [Mar 2021, p.60]

This might not have the more overtly radical studio tricks and militant attitudes that make, say, Moodymann more acceptable to experimental music fans, but as a narrative joining fusion to ghetto house to microhouse to churchy soul to beachlounging Balearica, it’s a deeply involving piece of work. [Jun 2018, p.56]

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]

They sound for good or ill like they’ve beamed in from psychedelic hard rock’s boom period too. ... Face Stabber is 80 minutes long, with two songs accounting for 35 of those minutes, and betrays mild hubris as regards their ability to jam interestingly. [Sep 2019, p.60]

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]

Rising Down's most immediate qualities are the raw aesthetic and the burning importance of its message. [July 2008, p.66]

There’s a heavy Eddie Henderson vibe here, propulsive, warm and engaging, and by the time the album closes on the jagged street vignette of its title track, it’s evident that BBNG have gone back to find a new future, a new lease of life. [Nov 2021, p.48]