A kaleidoscopic trawl through formative memories, cascading with melody and intimate reminiscence. [Apr 2015, p.83]

Sinking Into A Miracle is absolutely beautiful--otherworldly, often, and quietly ecstatic, in its own, strangely pop way. [Jan 2019, p.17]

There are surprises everywhere. While "R&B" and "Nearly Daffodils" are sprightly, irreverent post-punk, the influence of Black Country, Nee Road nd Radiohead are evident on the complex, proggy title track and the diverse, hushed final third of the album. Lily Fontaine's lyrics, to are deep and funny. [Apr 2024, p.32]

Plum feels very much like a landmark in his still-fresh career. [Oct 2017, p.38]

A fabulous treat it is too. [Apr 2021, p.37]

If there’s any justice, Mug Museum should break Le Bon out of her current cult status. [Dec 2013]

Serves as both a potent primer on the traumas and triumphs of life in a not-so-racial America and an enthralling demonstration of her playful musical sensibility. [Jun 2019, p.37]

A sublime composition. [Feb 2024, p.37]

Although What If's nine instrumental tracks are heavily rhythmic, this is a refreshingly gridless and affecting music, with serrated clicks and muted arpeggios wandering organically in and out of time. [Apr 2017, p.30]

A soulful, adventurous, state-of-the-nation classic. [Apr 2013, p.73]

For all its muddied textures and sideways lurches, it is a magnificently engaging and expansive work. [Jul 2003, p.112]

A highly original band in its prime. [Jun 2005, p.107]

Opening up the album to new ideas and interpretations without obscuring the man himself. [Mar 2020, p.35]

An exhilarating band set that mixes electric and acoustic instrumentation, it’s at once fiercely modern and as ancient as the Niger river. [Jun 2021, p.22]

The results are spectacular. [Jul 2014, p.66]

This record has all the earmarks of Vernon's next big thing. [Oct 2013, p.69]

More mellifluous than menacing despite its formidable display of power, Life Metal may be the richest work in the band's 21-year-mission to reconfigure Tony Iommi-worthy riffage into a soundtrack for mindful meditation. [May 2019, p.34]

Dion's unknown recordings are a lavish tour de force of folk-into-rock and blues-into pop. [Jul 2017, p.50]

Offers the kind of transcendental electronics that burrow into your brain. [Mar 2021, p.37]

A record that yields a procession of hidden treasures. [May 2017, p.38]

The group's commitment and almost minimalistic sense of repetition resulting in a metal longplayer of unrivaled scope. [Jul 2012, p.96]

Finely honed reflections that add a new perspective to the conversation of politics. ... The songs here are simple, but they contain multitudes. [Oct 2019, p.25]

A debut album bursting with character. [Feb 2022, p.37]

It's one of those records that is somewhat sui generis, and yet with an appeal that is universal and accessible at the same time. [Apr 2018, p.33]

It's not only Jones' most absorbing album since 1997's beats-drenched Ghostyhead, but a record that crowns her career, not as an end but as a culmination. [Jul 2015, p.85]

Epic debut, an emotionally rich and stylistically broad mediation on homeland, exile and identity. ... A lavish feast of an album. [Nov 2019, p.30]

An unqualified triumph. [Jul 2016, p.73]

A classic of modern psychedelia. [Jun 2005, p.113]

This record - Cocker's finest work since This Is Hardcore, maybe - marks the arrival of an adventurous collective who might just be getting warmed up. [Aug 2020, p.26]

This scintillating set pulls and pushes extant studio ideas into wonderfully weird new shapes. [Apr 2021, p.32]

If its redemptive poignancy often recalls Richter's masterful Sleep, Voices is more dynamic, instead provoking--not subduing-thought. [Sep 2020, p.35]

The best-kept secret in the Coltrane archive seems to leap between every stage of his career, like a greatest-hits sampler being improvised in real time. [Sep 2018, p.45]

13 Rivers is a sparse, raging and noisy record. [Oct 2018, p.37]

The more menacing "Fuzzbuster #09" could almost be an interlude on Sonic Youth's Confusion Is Sex. A few other discoveries are equally astonishing. [Jul 2023, p.48]

Thirty years later, these songs have lost neither their grandeur nor their menace. A wealth of live tracks, rarities and covers. [Sep 2018, p.47]

Joining the fun are pals such as Ethan Miller, Stephen Malkmus and Cass McCombs, who add to the sense of chaos, but do not diminish the cohesion that make these diverse jams so stupidly, thrillingly rewarding. [Dec 2015, p.79]

An amazing album. [Mar 2007, p.75]

Weathered and intelligent, these songs resonate like folk antiquities from another age. Even more remarkably, they never sound forced. [Apr 2007, p.116]

Ultimately, it's that compassionate vision of song that resonates through Life Is People, as Fay observes the passing of the days with redemption in mind.

Richard's voice slowly becomes an instrument that blends into this song cycle, creating a blissful spiritual balm. [Nov 2022, p.35]

This is the best childhood summer holiday you ever had, condensed into 45 minutes of delicately arranged, beautifully performed, big, bright, cheery music. [Jul 2003, p.118]

Double Negative is their biggest step forward to date, an album that scrambles their sound completely; it sounds nothing like Low and everything like Low. ... Low have made what might be their most relevant album, one that holds a mirror up tot he world. [Oct 2018, p.18]

Make no mistake, X&Y is an exceptional pop record. [Jul 2005, p.98]

This reissue eschews context and explanation to let their catalogue stand as its won defiant rock monolith, And as it should. [Dec 2014, p.93]

Some of the most effortlessly insightful songs in the modern country-folk canon. [Nov 2020, p.37]

A dazzlingly clever record--great beats, brilliant production, top tunes and some of Albarn's best singing. [Jun 2005, p.106]

Donald's back in his self-referencing sweet-spot, and all's right with the world. [Nov 2012, p.69]

Songwriting of the highest calibre. [Sep 2003, p.104]

The LP opens with “My Golden Years”, a delectable mélange of Harrisonian 12-string riffs, Wilsonian harmonies and layer-cake hooks, and reaches its apex with the glorious Beach Boys homage “In The Eyes Of The Girl”, with Sean Ono Lennon co-producing and playing bass. [Jun 2024, p.35]

Best of all, perhaps, the skill and imagination she displays in her arrangements suggest that there's a lot of scope for adventure in the future of a musician who found her groove but seems unlikely to get stuck in it. [Nov 2017, p.34]

[A] profound, funny, intricate album. [Sep 2016, p.63]

The Most Lamentable Tragedy feels like a quintessentially modern album, a scintillating examination of mania and neurosis that uses the history of rock'n'roll as mere stage dressing for its bravura performance. [Sep 2015, p.65]

This is a record of rare beauty and poise. [Nov 2003, p.107]

It’s a fantastic album, containing poppy firecrackers like “Jackie Down The Line” and moments of timeless, mature lament such as “The Couple Across the Way”. [May 2022, p.28]

It sounds both timeless and brand new. [Oct 2018, p.43]

There are barely any duff Sault tracks. [Sep 2021, p.26]

Ya Know cuts deep, with the best singing and wiliest melodies of his career. [Jun 2012, p.96]

What threads these eight songs together into a true album rather than just a compilation is the idea – the threat, the inevitability – of leaving and being left. Partly that’s due to Auerbach’s judicious curation, but that fear of loss animates almost all of Son House’s music, if not all of the blues in general. ... House conveys as much joy on these songs as he does pain, telling us so many years after his death that we cannot experience one without the other.

Intermittently funny and never depressing, this confirms him among America's greats. [May 2005, p.108]

through his efforts to convey a profound experience of loss in a long-gone summer, these songs offer an uncommonly generous wealth of grace and beauty. [Aug 2023, p.32]

This is the Slowdive you've been waiting for. [Oct 2023, p18]

These cuts are glorious on their own merits. [Jun 2012, p.92]

This is the most powerful, literate and just plain individual British debut album since The Streets' Original Pirate Material. [Jul 2006, p.94]

The self-lacerating starkness of "Drive" still freezes the blood, while at the other end of the emotional scale, "Nightswimming" finds solace in snapshots of a lost summer. [Dec 2017, p.42]

Professor Beam has made his first art movie, and it's a stunner. [May 2013, p.70]

Her sixth is as deeply personal as it is un-self-pitying, the lyrical punches falling with even more righteous force. [Mar 2023, p.29]

The musicianship lifts Sad Songs... even further into the realm of the extraordinary. [Dec 2003, p.133]

Call it an expansion rather than a reinvention--but it's a dramatic and rather dazzling one. [Mar 2020, p.27]

Rarely has anyone making such exciting and fashionable music been so unapologetic about being mature, too. [Apr 2007, p.97]

Saloon's light touch makes a strong impact. Wonderful. [Aug 2003 p.104]

Rarely since the Laurel Canyon heyday of CSNY, Jackson Browne et al, has the confessional mode been quite so unashamedly mined for artistic ore. [Jun 2013, p.68]

This... is still very much a Dears record: confused and unfocused, a messy kind of masterpiece. [Sep 2006, p.90]

72 minutes of creeping contemplation and subdued drama. [Jul 2021, p.31]

The Radio Dept. recall that giddy moment before sounding like the Stones was considered revelatory. Only these Swedes re-tweak the formula, sounding, if anything, better than Ride, Slowdive, Lush, Boo Radleys et al. [Sep 2004, p.100]

The larger-than-life Elton of the live stage gets a workout on "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting" and "Benny And The Jets," pounding rockers on the most impressively diverse collection in his catalogued. [Apr 2014, p.91]

The rootsy exuberance of Lullaby giving way to a mixture of romantic longing and social commentary. [Nov 2017, p.22]

This crisp new full-album remix merely enhances the brilliance. [Nov 2015, p.93]

What should have been the next step in Branch's innovative career became a tragically beautiful final document that captured an artist cresting a peak. [Oct 2023, p.30]

As much as these graceful and meditative pieces became threnodies for Sakamoto's condition, 12 is also something of a personal and creative victory for the composer. [Mar 2023, p.30]

Though feisty honky-tonk numbers like "I Don't Do Windows" shimmer, the worldweary ballads--especially the Johnson/Alison Krauss duet "Make The World Go Away"--are Sublime. [Feb 2013, p.74]

Across 14 varied tracks, Avery's compositions become engulfing, such is the pull of his palpable textures, dense soundscapes and tantalising beats. [May 2018, p.24]

For all the baubles and padding presented with this definitive edition, the disc you’ll turn to again and again is the one you’ve been playing all your life.

With its combination of Goodman's ache-filled vocals and Crazy Horse clamour, "Keeper Of The Time" is an even more striking demonstration of what she can do. [Aug 2022, p.26]

Bursting with warmth and character even when nearly tweaked beyond the point of recognition, Murphy's voice has rarely had a more satisfying showcase. [Oct 2023, p.31]

As a whole, it's brilliant. [Dec 2013, p.68]

An album of hope and humour and beauty, Phantom Power is frequently as deep and mysterious as the title intimates. [Aug 2003, p.100]

As vital as any of their previous four LPs. ... All Nerve's highlights are myriad and frequent. [Apr 2018, p.24]

This is what The Graceless Age as a whole does so unforgettably, bearing witness to a burning world. [Sep 2012, p.70]

Heroes may be elegiac, but it's as spirited as it is poignant. [Jun 2012, p.70]

Matangi is her most exhilarating and mulch-faceted album. [Jan 2014, p.75]

Summerteeth captures the band as they shed the last vestiges of their alt-country beginnings and introduce the ingredients that would catch fire on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. [Dec 2020, p.53]

Producer Ross Orton helps sharpen their attack, and the quartet are at their very best on "White Rooms And People's" fierce synth-funk, the Suicide-like "Tomorrow" and the thudding grooves of Valleys." [Nov 2020, p.37]

Her interest in medieval and early music offers her compositions both a somnolent beauty and a melancholy grasp of simple, slow melody that's refined and tender. ... They're stunning. [Nov 2018, p.27]

Villagers' sleeve is telling: a pile of disparate old junk that somehow sites together as a piece. The remarkable thing is that this album achieves that so spectacularly. [Jul 2023, p.16]

A complete rethink has resulted in the most uninhibited and visceral album of her career. [Jun 2014, p.78]

This official release has been ably remixed by Bob Pridden, a roadie at the Fillmore back in ’68. ... Everything is delivered with the muscular sincerity that made The Who such a compelling and memorable live act.

The music here swells, surges and rages without ever losing the vulnerability at its core. [May 2024, p.31]

Harris makes the most of the means available to her and allows her songs to land the way they need to land. [Nov 2021, p.34]