By no means a vintage JJ Cale record, but one with much to enjoy and a fresh chance to hear his songs as he originally heard them. [May 2019, p.48]

But if the technology has moved on, he’s moved with it, and the results are significantly more interesting than what he was up to in the 90s. It feels rural, but modern; rustic, but hardly an idyll; a feat of true uneasy listening. [May 2019, p.51]

Dig into the four-to-the-floor derangement of “Lapwing” and the post-rock inflected “First Light” to hear a band seemingly capable of doing anything, yet remaining fleetfootedly themselves throughout. [Jun 2019, p.56]

He doesn’t strain in the falsetto passages and there’s no papering over the cracks in his phrasing. He’s as accurate and precise as he ever was, projecting even at low volumes. [Aug 2019, p.55]

House And Land’s eternal music drone tendencies are more sparingly employed than their debut, but folkie staple “Blacksmith” is a glorious outlier to this end, Morgan’s shruti box a keening back and forth foil to a two centuries old tale of metalworker induced heartbreak. [Aug 2019, p.64]

Delivers on the forward-looking promise of The Art Ensemble’s motto: great black music – ancient to the future. [May 2019, p.61]

This is folk music for the post-industrial era, which aspires to the condition of a true world music, not as a postcard from some Club Med of the mind, but as a dispatch from the front lines of both climate change and the extinction of animal species (real and imagined). Essential listening, and a real adventure in the undergrowth of the underground. Sit a spell in the shade of the Borametz. [Aug 2019, p.56]

In mindbending, psych-wormhole cruising mode. Nobody should be able to write a song like “Flesh Fondue”, about alien invaders out for human snacks, as a stomping rock-out, but Hawkwind pull it off. [Nov 2019, p.55]

While The Daisy Age won’t hold many surprises for diehard hiphop fans, the collection is well curated. [Dec 2019, p.64]

The music on Ism is intimate. Pieces end with a jolt. Brief interludes take a questioning tone, as if the fragments are enough in themselves, no need for resolution. The album’s warmth – a quality shared by McCraven’s output – owes much to the International Anthem engineering approach. [Jan 2019, p.66]

Moments illuminate the nimble beats and perky dayglo synthetic patches and above all the fierce resolution of purist independent grime anthems such as “Dem Man Are Dead” and “Badman Walking Through”. [Feb 2020, p.48]

More passionate and sophisticated than much of what passes for musical eclecticism these days, Dark Matter is a fusion of old and new, acoustic and electronic. [Feb 2020, p.42]

We Are Sent Here By History is a meditation on all of the war, death and resistance that has shaped the world we live in today. Whether or not we can use the lessons learned from that pain to create a future that is worth living is a question that remains unanswered. [Mar 2020, p.56]

For Schofield, the word scrambler symbolises both a sort of opiate and a happy place from childhood, so the music highlights this dichotomy by fusing danger and warmth into an irresistible oxymoron. A sensation of the world ending while we carry on dancing. [Apr 2020, p.51]

With their reverent, celebratory tone, tracks like “Naked (You Enter & Leave This World With Nothing)”, “I Will Follow You For Life, Everywhere” and “We Must Grieve Together” speak to the music’s function as an integral part of a community’s healing process. Sung together in deep harmony and pulling their inspiration from a source too powerful and mysterious for words, fra fra’s funeral songs offer a glimpse into how the people of this particular corner of West Africa deal with the pain, uncertainty and finality of death. [Jun 2020, p.49]

Barring the title cut’s debt to Steely Dan, the pomp is dialled down just enough on Deleted Scenes for the band to flex their fusionoid chops, adding a whole other element of kookiness to their already brow-raising style. [Jul 2020, p.56]

Music to aspire to, music from when it seemed like there might be a future worth dreaming about. [Oct 2020, p.68]

With his propensity for collaboration across disciplines, Coates blends classical training with an ear for invention. [Nov 2020, p.55]

Raymond has learned the most important lesson of American primitive guitar: whatever your influences, they need to project a bit of your emotional life. This, as much as her robust tone and nimble picking, is what makes Raymond sound like a guitarist with staying power. [Dec 2020, p.56]

The ten tracks here sprint, pound, flex and grunt, the guitar equivalent of a vigorous workout. Cerebral turns and Derek Baileyesque abstractions burble throughout, but Stateless hits more like a punk rock record than a study in extended technique. [Oct 2020, p.51]

Nightcap further distinguishes them as more than a clever amalgam of Dead tropes. The shifting time signatures and dramatic dynamics of “Wasted Time” suggest a fondness for Gabriel-era Genesis while the courtly melody and stentorian storytelling of “Altered Place” conjure thoughts of The Moody Blues at their late 1960s zenith. [Jan 2021, p.72]

Sixth album Long In The Tooth burnishes the group’s analogue groove science with familiar movements of heroic, brassy swagger. [Jan 2021, p.72]

Universal Beings E & F Sides is explicitly more of the same for fans of the original double LP. [Oct 2020, p.57]

All of the music is a kind of West African funk, a loping groove that’s an ideal platform for long, discursive but rhythmically grounded solos. ... “Leta’s Dance” has the feel of a mellow track from an early 70s Pharoah Sanders album, sweeping along like a river of electric piano and gentle guitar chords but ending with Bartz alone, keening on the bank, the new song leading seamlessly into the old ones. [Jun 2020, p.46]

Uniquely for Martin’s music, In Blue isn’t dominated by its low end – it’s the precise absence of warmth, the way Chen’s heavily echoed vocals swim in among the grainy textures and hypnotically simple melodies (so much of this recalls the dankest 1990s hiphop in vibe and directness), that makes the set so compelling, a perfect soundtrack to derailment and decay. [Jan 2021, p.70]

Return To Solaris is a fearsome ride, sublime in the most complete sense of the word. [Jul 2021, p.60]

Achieving a powerful balancing act between beauty and terror throughout. [Dec 2021, p.52]

His bringing the audience in to the creative process only intensifies its authenticity and demonstrates his desire to emulate the endeavours of his family, his own version of working in a team that shares the labour of shifting piles of dirt and stone, or raising the foundations of a new building. [Dec 2021, p.58]

These pieces exude a jazz inflected cool that's immediately intriguing. ... Dramatic and cinematic in its conclusion. [Jun 2022, p.44]

The songs are politically sharp and socially conscious, and Vieux sends out darkly nutating tendrils of blue over rolling, ravelling backing. [Jun 2022, p.61]

It serves as both a reconsideration of what’s come before and a confident step forward. [Jul 2022, p.52]

An album of sombre yet uplifting electronic music. ... If that [a requiem for a close friend and respected artist] wasn’t the original intent, one can hardly imagine a finer tribute. [Sep 2022, p.43]

Endure is smoother and glossier than the last album, but it’s still music that moves body and mind, inviting dirty dancing between flaming police cars. [Nov 2022, p.67]

Hutchings is eloquent on flute, Mthunzi Mvubu plays searing alto, while Muhammad Dawjee (tenor saxophone) and Malcolm Jiyane (trombone) have inexhaustible drive. [Jan 2023, p.62]

While ultimately not as inventive as some of Child’s earlier outings, Crash Recoil is nevertheless an urgent, kinetic techno record. [Apr 2023, p.60]

Lightning Dreamers may be over the top and all over the place, but that’s what it takes to project a complete picture of Mazurek’s vision. [Apr 2023, p.57]

It’s the definition of method to madness. The sense of barely controlled chaos, occasionally lashing out in random directions, only adds to the wonder that it holds together and maintains momentum. [May 2023, p.61]

A lifetime’s pain and a decade juggling mixtape fame with his trap life erupting in one magnificently choreographed molten flow of poetry. Not that it’s all full blast, Potter comes with the widescreen vision of Scarface or Ghetts, stepping back as necessary, philosophically patient. [Jul 2023, p.65]

Harps and synthesized beats all have a home here; and it feels futuristic in a way that reminds me of Ursula LeGuin and Todd Barton’s Music And Poetry Of The Kesh: synthesizer based folk music as the imagined legacy of a future indigenous culture. [Sep 2023, p.67]

Aesop’s penchant for storytelling – particularly on “100 Feet Tall” and “Aggressive Steven” – is still incredibly engaging, delivering a fraught narrative that touches on mental health, exploitation of the vulnerable and human responses to corporate stimuli. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.77]

Having already worked with the likes of William Basinski and Herndon, remixing for Björk and Max Richter, Jlin is taking the innovative spirit of a regional Chicago born style to the institutional stage of the creative establishment. Applying that to a project with a choreographer like McGregor is an experiment in combining the best of both worlds. [Oct 2018, p.55]

The sheer density of stylistic markers here is perhaps most representative of the nature of Iglooghost’s production, the album being immersed in the chaos of skittering beats and cut-ups with vivid synth lines that twist, crack and inflate in dazzling clusters. [Oct 2017, p.55]

Suffice to say that future, past and present are safe in the hands of 700 Bliss. [Jun 2022, p.47]

Their most beautifully conceived and ambitiously extended work to date. [#252, p.59]

Origin Of The Alimonies is Hunt-Hendrix’s most compositionally elaborate and layered work yet. [Jan 2021, p.74]

On Angels & devils, The Bug crystallises a vision of low end and lower urges that feels dangerously universal. [Aug 2014, p.48]

It collates her various sides and strengths into the most complete and resonant recording of her career. [Feb 2023, p.44]

This album explores that idea of opposites attracting and co-existing within one entity. It’s also a powerful, confident pop record tooled up to compete with the heaviest hitters (Paul White’s production is key, as it has been for Danny Brown and Charli XCX) while occupying its own uniquely ambivalent and querulous space. [Nov 2019, p.60]

This is a beautiful record, but I wish it had a little more chaos in it. [Oct 2008, p.58]

A record that is often overwhelming, at times breathtaking. [Nov 2018, p.55]

The vocal arrangements almost all verge on the irritating--overblown neo-gospel--but there’s too much good here to deny on that basis. [Oct 2016, p.63]

Well-placed details like the joyfully absurd airhorn sample in “Pachyuma” and the phased pulsing of “Orion Song” come across as both lighthearted and profound. “Moscow (Mariposa Voladora)” is a churning, chugging dancefloor banger, textured with acoustic instruments and resonating with a timelessness that unites past and present, ancient and future, here and now. [May 2018, p.46]

Polyphonic chants mesh with distorted piano hits and percussive clatter in an ecstasy of derision and judgment, before turning into a righteous roar. [Oct 2021, p.58]

Playing it, you're reminded anew of the restlessness and emotional range at the heart of Young's art. [Feb 2014, p.64]

Some of Out Of Season's lyrics are almost too impossibly idealistic and airy fairy to carry off. [#226, p.54]

The End Of Radio’s cache of 1994 and 2004 John Peel sessions admirably bucks expectations even as it serves up multiple reminders that Shellac are a crack live unit equipped with airtight panic room ragers. And while singer/guitarist Albini takes care to toast BBC DJ Peel, who died weeks prior to the 2004 sessions, the charge here lies in hearing Albini, drummer Todd Trainer and bassist Bob Weston improve upon and deviate from the studio recordings. [Sep 2019, p.62]

A polished affair which approaches doom metal with something like a pop sensibility – the melodies bring to mind Deftones or the accessible end of UK bands like Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride, though Esfandiari’s strain of gothic gloom, for all its theatricality, feels less superficial and more the product of genuine internal turmoil. [Nov 2021, p.62]

Where Vernon’s album [For Emma, Forever Ago] registers like a melancholic exorcism of listless youth and failed relationships, Bachman does not engage in that kind of soul searching, though he elicits a similarly potent emotional response. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.77]

It not so much that her talent has blossomed, more that it has thawed a little, releasing music that edges tantalizingly close to greatness. [Feb 2014, p.50]

From the cartoonishly unhinged prog/ boom-bap hybrid “Savage Nomad” to “Shine” (a duet with Blood Orange that flirts with melancholic, synth-heavy new romanticism) it’s the seemingly contradictory emotional timbres that animate uknowhatimsayin¿ and provide the core tension that brings the project to life. [Nov 2019, p.50]

Some will find Cruel Country monotonous; the patient however will be rewarded with an abundance of thoughtful, delicate, often brutally plaintive songcraft. [Aug 2022, p.60]

Swans are alive, utterly. A terrible beauty is reborn. [Sep 2010, p.51]

Drawing on such lofty motifs doesn’t make Dalt’s records any less intimate or enjoyable. Instead, they offer more space for exploring the most vulnerable corners of an artist’s emotional state, by using metaphor and allusion as a way to express the inexpressible. [Jun 2018, p.52]

The production, courtesy of DJ Dahi, No ID and James Blake, spirals outward from the world this Long Beach native’s peers inhabit and into satisfyingly experimental territory. [Oct 2016, p.65]

This strained affair makes the party rocking simplicity of 2 Chainz or even LMFAO look absolutely artful. Brown's too smart to make music this dumb effectively. [Nov 2013, p.66]

Don’t let inevitable mainstream acclaim obscure the beauty and ingenuity of this album; it’s big enough for everyone. [Apr 2019, p.52]

Both tends such fertile, fetid soil that it almost works as an argument against its creator bothering to break bread with anyone else. That is, until you remember that there’s no good reason that he or we should have to choose one course or the other. [May 2020, p.61]

A striking document of Swans' current live form. [Jul 2012, p.64]

His most intimate work to date. [Jan 2015, p.68]

Sorrow is a faithful revision. [Apr 2016, p.58]

[Tempest has] a sense of dues paid as a continual creative replenishment, rather than a swansong. [Nov 2012, p.63]

Ab-Soul music fuses street-level concerns with the sort of erudite, rhyme scheme-fixated wordplay more commonly associated with rapper who value beats and rhymes over life. [Jul 2012, p.71]

This collection, and its atmosphere of sharing a bench with the 20th century’s Mozart as he explores still nascent songs, is an appropriately seductive tease to what will doubtless be a decades-long unearthing of the vault’s untold treasures. The songs themselves, as they’re presented here, really are secondary to this feeling, something like finding a just unearthed message from a departed loved one. [Dec 2018, p.69]

Horse Lords music has never been untidy, but this LP’s seven tracks evince a hyper-focused precision. Even when they flirt with entropy during the last two minutes of “May Brigade”, the transition from rhythmic grid to textural layering is immaculately executed. ... This may not lead the people to call for Comradely Objects rather than Ed Sheeran or (name your preferred chart topper here) but it’ll do the job just fine the next time you need some new minimalist jams for a highway drive. [Nov 2022, p.62]

Until the Quiet Comes is cluttered and schmaltzy. [Nov 2012, p.59]

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]

Once this inward looking tendency was a strength; now it seems safe. [Nov 2016, p.68]

The quartet’s albums represent a live sound that applies the means of a beat combo to frankly ecstatic ends via tuning while their mixtapes offer a more diverse and fragmentary accounting of collective interests. The twain finally meet on The Common Task. [Apr 2020, p.56]

The recording and mixing is impeccable, with each instrument distinctly isolated, enabling the tracks to take on lively 3D forms. This does result in a striking directness, but the tightly wrapped sound sometimes feels like it’s in battle with the naturally inventive playing of the trio. [Sep 2021, p.56]

Still Brazy is thoroughly and unapologetically regional, but its thematic engines are universal. [Aug 2016, p.63]

Marshall’s electronic, krautrock-ish backing tracks extended what Lanegan had previously laid down on previous albums Blues Funeral and Phantom Radio. Gargoyle however has more of an early 1980s UK electronic rock feel, with Lanegan’s rough vocal rasp sawing through musical timbres reminiscent of what was being played out at Manchester’s Factory. [May 2017, p.47]

A streamlined combination of motorik rhythms, electronic textures and tuneful choruses. [#242, p.72]

Hot Sauce Committee finds The Beastie Boys being The Beastie Boys with nothing that isn't exactly what on would expect from The Beastie Boys. [Jul 2011, p.44]

Ex Eye fuse together in a whirring blare of intricately constructed math metal, where each player can be distinctly heard weaving their individual musical craft within the group’s membrane. [Jul 2017, p.60]

Black Encyclopedia Of The Air is a new reckoning of all things, an upending of the status quo presenting us with a world of new possibilities. [Sep 2021, p.56]

Those expecting a return to the group's former electronic shock treatment will be sent reeling by the subtlety of this latest release, where ceaseless sonic bombardment has been replaced with a more studied and intricately forged set of almost-songs and mangled machine shop melodies. [Jun 2013, p.56]

Tender without being overly sentimental, this is music with real feeling. [Dec 2018, p.59]

Hurley was simply ready to make a new record, which includes a cover of The Louvin Brothers’ gem “Alabama” and a remake of his gorgeous “Lush Green Trees”, and that’s what he did. It’s a gesture that shouldn’t be taken for granted. [Dec 2021, p.50]

A set of vigorous yet highly intricate arrangements of new material. [Oct 2017, p.60]

Rival Dealer constitutes Burial's boldest statement to date. [Feb 2014, p.44]

The issue with Pusha’s fourth solo album isn’t his insistence on portraying a heartless American striver as if he’s the rap game Al Pacino – it’s that he’s unable to consistently conjure the menacing intensity that enlivened his work with with twin brother Malice as Clipse. [Jun 2022, p.52]

It's a concise, tidy sounding album, with little of the noise leakage of old. [May 2011, p.51]

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]

The best stuff views the world through the sunkissed psychedelic lens of Brazilian psych-troupe Os Mutantes; the lesser material just sounds like lite Brian Wilson. [#243, p.59]

The closing 'Honey' leaves all the issues behind and drips with the kind of sultry retro-funk that proves New Amerykah to have been well worth any amount of waiting. [May 2008, p.70]

Extended periods of concentration can create a flow state in which work feels effortless, even meditative, and it's this state that Eyes On The Lines evokes. [Jun 2016, p.50]

Perhaps some of the head-scratching freshness of Burgess-Olson’s early material has been lost--but with her gear-led, no-fuss production sensibility, she slots in perfectly on Ninja Tune’s Technicolour imprint alongside prolific mavericks like Hieroglyphic Being and Legowelt. [Jul 2017, p.59]

Mechanics Of Domination is careful, elegant and cerebral but it is also quietly stirring. [Nov 2017, p.56]