Eve might just be her strongest yet, bold in its subtlety and intimacy, with Zedek's writing bittersweet and observational. [Sep 2016, p.81]

A Weird Exit has an immediacy and coherence that was missing on previous outing, 2015's Mutilator Defeated At Last--a fine album, but not as hooky as this one. [Sep 2016, p.80]

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

A Place Called Bad augments such high-water marks as 1983's Blood red River with rarities and live tracks like a 1983 demolition job on Captain Beefheart's "Clear Spot." All of it whets the appetite for explorations of Salmon's sprawling post-Scientists oeuvre. [Sep 2016, p.88]

The 12 songs on his eighth ares till gloriously strange, though: lyrically as kaleidoscopic as mid-'60s Dylan, and packed with fascinating, contradictory references. [Sep 2016, p.76]

Her ambitious third record marks anther giant progression in an already distinguished career, and offers provocative thoughts on sacrifice and identity that should outlast its 48-minute runtime. [Oct 2016, p.22]

Without question, Schmilco is Wilco's quietest, most disquieting album. [Oct 2016, p.24]

It may be OR's best album yet. [Oct 2016, p.36]

Her darkest effort yet, a harowing chronicle of a woman barely keeping herself together. It's also her liveliest effort yet--not to mention her most confidently diverse. [Jul 2016, p.71]

The songs are pillowed by vaporous electronic backing that recalls the slow-moving, aquatic drift of Push The Sky Away and the sonic explorations of Cave and Ellis' Minimalist Soundtracks. [Dec 2016, p.26]

An album that's both sad and angry, thoughtful and impassioned, and desperate for America to escape its chequered past. [Nov 2016, p.18]

The most prismatic Hiss Golden Messenger record to date, one that ranges confidently from the folk shuffle of "Say It Like You Mean It" to the taut rural funk off "Like A Mirror Loves A Hammer." [Nov 2016, p.22]

Smash The System is looser, punchier, a surrealist pop masterpiece. [Nov 2016, p.28]

It's the interplay between the core duo, and between the American and African influences, that gives Wood/Metal its hypnotic pull. [Nov 2016, p.23]

A more polished and focused affair that demonstrates the breadth of Duncan's sparkling ability, not to mention his pop chops, while conveying a gorgeous otherworldiness that effortlessly channels peak Cocteau Twins and Radiohead. [Nov 2016, p.26]

It's become a cliche to treat every latter-day Cohen album like a potential swansong but it's hard to imagine a richer, finer or more satisfying finale than this. [Nov 2016, p.18]

The Ramones, like Warhol or Lichtenstein, were masters of doing one thing brilliantly and repetitively--something reinforced by the second disc of this set, which contains singles and unreleased demos, including tracks that would appear on subsequent albums such as “You’re Gonna Kill That Girl”, “You Should Never Have Opened That Door” and “I Don’t Care” but could easily have fitted on Ramones.

Yes, it's largely tuneless, the guitars and drums about as co-ordinated as a set of blindfolded square dancers, but the sisters' naive approach yields endless wonder. [Nov 2016, p.52]

Tribe carry their burdens as lightly as they did on rap landmarks such as People's Instinctive Travels and The Low-End Theory. [Feb 2017, p.38]

Some of the rather quizzical couplets here, all of them set to heart-wrenching chord sequences that hark back to the band's favorite 1970s guilty pleasures. It set SFA apart from the world of Britpop in the mid-'90s. [Dec 2016, p.51]

It's a mind-boggling assemblage of swingin' 50s "space-bop" like "Soft Talk" and "Super Blonde," processional chants such as "Rocket #9" and "Journey To Saturn." and electronic keyboard voyages like "The Perfect Man" and "Disco 2021," an edited taster of the monumental "Disco 3000." [Jan 2017, p.46]

Unreleased mixes, instrumentals and PiL's semi-legendary 1979 concert at Manchester's Factory are worthy additions, stretching the dense, dubby miasma out for four hypnotic hours. [Dec 2016, p.51]

[The] now East Memphis-based artist comes off as an eloquent country/folk songsmith. [Feb 2017, p.26]

Their breakneck energy highlights the thrilling strangeness of their structures and textures. [Mar 2017, p.40]

It's a subtler and darker sibling to The Sophtware Slump or Just Like The Fambly Cat. [Apr 2017, p.30]

An even richer reward for admirers--since he's never written with such frankness. [Apr 2017, p.32]

Ibibio Sound Machine barely need drums to weave their polyrhythmic magic. [Apr 2017, p.32]

Segarra is skilled at identifying the shifting goalposts that immigrants have to live by, and staring past them. [Apr 2017, p.18]

Overwhelming and beautiful. [May 2017, p.35]

Mental Illness is as elegantly dark as a wrought iron gate. [May 2017, p.35]

Age seems to have deepened his poetic faculties, these rootsy narratives scarred by experience, but all the richer for it. Crowell's best since The Houston Kid. [Apr 2017, p.26]

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

Hitchcock sounds more energised and vibrant than he has in decades. [May 2017, p.31]

Some of Feist's most affecting and exhilarating music to date. [Jun 2017, p.16]

A broader exploration of form. ... Like most everything here, ["Geraldine" is] a beautifully weighted moment. [Jun 2017, p.26]

This collection makes clear that there are still many more stories to tell, more beauty and evil left to uncover. [Jun 2017, p.40]

The beauty of Coltrane's work, and the way she could transform a personal system of belief into the highest accessible art, is striking. [Jun 2017, p.44]

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

A clutch of glistening electronic pop gems. [Jul 2017, p.37]

This wired counterpart [to 2016's lush Singing Saw]pays tribute to a New York tat now exists only in the songwriter's head, or his record collection. [Jul 2017, p.35]

The Nashville Sound sees Isbell swaggering confidently along the rockier edge of his range--as usual--he's at his best on the reflective ballads. [Jul 2017, p.32]

Purple Rain sounds incrementally more alive. [Sep 2017, p.51]

It's an album of songs beautiful on the surface, but with darkness nibbling on all sides. [Sep 2017, p.18]

The intimacies of David Briggs' production and the pure strength of the songs suggest an album that, with a few overdubs and a bit more polish could have worked as that desperately anticipated follow-up to Harvest. ... Pride of place, though, goes to the two unreleased tracks {Give Me Strength and Hawaii]. [Oct 2017, p.

American Dream is a triumph, then, and possibly LCD Soundsystem's finest album so far. [Oct 2017, p.18]

Hallelujah Anyhow may have been recorded swiftly, but the abandonment is still exquisitely detailed, as every listen to "Domino" reveal further nuance beneath the swagger. [Oct 2017, p.22]

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

Bowie’s Berlin is more about a state of mind, a population and its thinking than an actual place. Brian Eno and his intellectual playfulness; Robert Fripp’s alien guitar; Tony Visconti’s embrace of meaningful technology. Between them they gave Bowie the materials to build a city larger and more magnificent than anywhere you could hope to find on a map. [Nov 2017, p.44]

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]

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

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]

Soul Of A Woman proves to be so much more than your average swansong. ... Sly, spirited and sublime, it packs a whole lot of action into its 36 filler-free minutes. [Dec 2017, p.16]

Skittishly improvisational without undermining the overall serenity. A good time for your chakras guaranteed. [Dec 2018, p.18]

Ty's most unrestrained albums stands among his best. ... Like sitting by a loaded jukebox that turns out gems all night. [Mar 2018, p.16]

Consistently stirring and heartbreakingly lovely. [Feb 2018, p.18]

Insanely beautiful, with the strength and delicacy of spider silk. [Mar 2018, p.25]

Sometimes the honesty gets close to discomfiting, but it's always compelling. [Mar 2018, p.47]

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

Youngs' take on British folk and art traditions remains rich and enthralling. [Apr 2018, p.37]

I'm Bad Now feels as much a modest masterpiece as Spring Hill Fair or Tigermilk. [Apr 2018, p.32]

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]

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]

The reassuringly lo-fi results might not be drastically different to UMO's previous three records, but the execution is certainly impressive. [May 2018, p.37]

Nelson's voice has lost none of its wry warmth, his fretboard fingers little of their astonishing agility. And the songs here are terrific. [Jun 2018, p.33]

Girly-Sound to Guyville is something much more revealing than an anniversary commemoration. It's a document of an artist finding and raising er voice: a souvenir from an era that questions long-held assumptions about the sex and the business of rock'n'roll. [Jun 2018, p.38]

The death of beloved bandmate Carey Lander in 2015 seems to have inspired the freshest, blithest song's [Tracyanne Campbell's] written. [Jul 2018, p.34]

On paper this should be a mess; on record it's a thrillingly chaotic sonic voyage. [Jun 2018, p.27]

It's warm and weird, but suddenly no stranger than the world around it. [Jul 2018, p.32]

Highlights--there are many. ... Masterful. [Jul 2018, p.28]

[African Scream Contest's] successor is every bit as thrilling, extending its remit to cover the years from 1963-1980 and thus offering a more diverse range of cross-cultural fusion. [Jul 2018, p.49]

It's entirely addictive--one fix and you're hooked. [Jul 2018, p.36]

A strange, rich and global journey in sound--lasting just 37 minutes, Bon Voyage begs to be put on again, each listen revealing more of the myriad ideas that make up its weird majesty. [Jul 2018, p.22]

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]

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]

Whoever is singing, the beats are choppy and the mood intense. A revelation. [Oct 2018, p.24]

Nash, his many voices and every credited musician on the album combine in a joyous noise you want to go on as long as one of those versions of "Caravan" Van used to do with The Caledonia Soul Orchestra. [Aug 2018, p.25]

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.

Few artists combine concepts of arcane and contemporary quite as atmospherically as New York's Odetta Hartman, who uses the banjo to provide melody and age but then embeds songs with dance beats and sound effects, before adding timeless jazz-folk vocals. [Sep 2018, p.30]

Their best for a while. ... An extended, uncharacteristically rocking release. [Nov 2018, p.34]

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]

Outstanding. ... Aside from the supple elegance of Landes' warm voice, the most arresting element is her sharp songwriting, which succeeds on a number of levels. [Oct 2018, p.26]

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

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

Its expansive ambition abetted by fellow travellers including Wayne Kramer and Peter Perrett. [Oct 2018, p.27]

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]

The gravity of his subject matter finds a contrast in Swift's playful musical settings. [Dec 2018, p.33]

It's an invitation to peer into the hidden spaces of an extraordinary modern songwriter, where calm and quiet moments prompt superlative work. [Nov 2018, p.32]

["Around The Horn"] inflates over a final few minutes into something uniquely epic. ... Lyrically, it's pretty baffling where "These Rocks," one of the albums' standout tracks, is the most openly confessional song Houck has written, set to a churchy musical swell, congregational and healing, the sound of a lifetime burden lifted by love. [Nov 2018, p.28]

An extraordinarily, beautiful, haunting piece of music. [Dec 2018, p.25]

Martin's new stereo mix succeeds, principally through lightness of touch. ... Over 107 tracks, we learn that the making of The White Album was not quite the frigid stand-off that we might have been led to believe. But nor does this glimpse behind the curtain diminish The White Album's mystique. [Dec 2018, p.34]

Now adds a shimmer of spiritual awaking to the mix. ... An energising release. [Mar 2019, p.27]

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

Beautiful, weird and wasted, Songs For Judy never lets us forget it. [Jan 2019, p.28]

The album works in isolation but maybe watch the film on Netflix first. ... Tonally, we're in the territory of Nebraska, Tom Joad and Devils & Dust, but there's also the deep romantic melancholic tones of Darkness and The Rising. [Feb 2018, p.18]

This LP captures him very much on the up. ... A delightful heaviness to songs like "Irrational Poison" and "Sin King" that gives the whole thing real heft and drive, protecting it from whimsy. [Mar 2019, p.32]

Tip Of The Sphere represents McCombs' practised skill as a shaper of his own world, with pride in his craft, a deep respect for tradition and the drive to refresh it via his own, idiosyncratic iteration. [Mar 2019, p.18]

They're rich articulations of home, longing and identity, the denuded production allowing a shivering vulnerability to pierce their core. [May 2019, p.32]