It's the freshest, most exciting and far-reaching left-field album in years. [Jun 2003, p.102]

Neon Golden often comes on like a radical update of New Order's Lowlife period, where mournful guitar songs are integrated into a mesh of clicks, pops, glitches and samples. [Mar 2003, p.96]

Kiwanuka is loaded with memorable songs, but the best way to experience them is by listening to the album from start to finish. [Nov 2019, p.26]

As bootlegs from the period have shown, there's a good three hours of stuff out there from these and the so-called "Brown Star Sessions" for Clear Spot. On the fourth disc here, you can find the pick of it. [Dec 2014, p.85]

Love And Theft was quite unlike any other pop album--apart, that is, from Modern Times, its direct and audacious sequel. [Sep 2006, p.72]

In every respect, the performance captured here is as raw and un-redacted as the original record. ... What times. [Jun 2018, p.42]

Exhaustive in the best way possible, emphasising the logistical nightmares of hosting such a big event but also putting listeners right there in the stadium. [Apr 2023, p.41]

Remarkably, the world they create together never curdles into sentimentality. ... Wednesday turn that stabbing pain into triumphant rock'n'roll. [May 2023, p.39]

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]

It is music whose scope, erudition and vitriol makes everything else in this year of exceptional musical timidity seem puny. [Nov 2003, p.106]

Crackles with a wisecracking energy. [Aug 2020, p.36]

When Nevermind rocks, it does so extremely. [Oct 2011, p.101]

Together they make smart but unstudied pop music, as invigoratingly weird as it is instantly winning, stuffed with gleefully incompatible styles and with a broad emotional range. [Oct 2022, p.31]

All Mirrors is her boldest reinvention yet. [Nov 2019, p.30]

Natural Brown Prom Queen revels in ear-catching beats and hooks while still maintaining Parks’ mile-a-minute rate of musical ideas. [Oct 2022, p.34]

Anglo-Saxon sextet Sweet Sweet Lies dress nasty themes in sweet acoustic melodies and sharp suits. [Mar 2012, p.98]

Yes, it’s fascinating at times to be a witness to the meticulous construction of great music, but the contents of this boxset feel a mite desperate, rather than generous, and the flabbiness of its 11-minute jams is entirely inappropriate for an album that famously doesn’t contain an ounce of fat.

In short--a monumental album.

For all the ideas and juxtapositions that illuminate these songs, none feel jarring or tokenistic. [Apr 2015, p.79]

Over two decades on, in remastered form, these tracks have aged well, retaining their multi-layered, bass-heavy eclecticism, and moving back and forth between gentle melancholia and hands-in-the-air euphoria. [Jun 2017, p.49]

It’s an odd sort of idea: a trio paying tribute to themselves. But even if no new ground is being broken exactly, there’s a pleasure in hearing the old space cadets out on manoeuvres. The music of Apollo is meditative and benign, yet strangely inscrutable; a reminder that while you might be able to visit space, it will never be home.

They sound as Zappa seldom does: not over-thinking it, and guilelessly lost in the moment and in the exuberant joy of the playing. [Feb 2020, p.40]

A heroic, controlled crash landing. [May 2020, p.25]

Grief, memory and friendship billow up throughout the nine tracks. [Mar 2021, p.31]

Artists from Phil Lesh, Bob Weir and Steve Earle, to J Mascis and Aaron Lee Tasjan, whose "Travelling After Dark" is a strong cut - interpret Casal's lifetime of work, fittingly as radio staples. [Feb 2022, p.37]

Feeding The Machine operates in a bold and unorthodox way. [Apr 2022, p.34]

Recalls both Erykah Badu and Arlo Parks, but there's no heavy shadowing here. [Apr 2023, p.32]

Black Bayou is a showcase for Finley the storyteller, an artist who can convincingly inhabit narratives that may not be entirely based on his own experiences, lifestyle or even beliefs. [Nov 2023, p.27]

Four crisply recorded shows.... A super-funky artefact. [Aug 2015, p.94]

Richer textures, but no luxury-studio sheen or indulgence: the expanded resources are deployed with the care and rigour that characterised her previous use of humbler tools. Her voice is so distinctive and her writing so personal that a strutting backbeat and a flying hi-hat don't affect the essential character of the music. ... Perfect. [Mar 2021, p.36]

Fed is beautifully excessive, ornamented with dazzling soul/pop arrangements. [Sep 2008, p.114]

A vivid storyteller, June approaches traditional music with a similar mix of irreverence and affection. [Apr 2017, p.30]

Golden Hour doesn't carry quite the same bite as either 2015 predecessor Pageant Material or 2013's Sam Trailer Different Park, preferring a more loved-up vibe that favours pillowy sophisti-pop over bittersweet country. [May 2018, p.30]

It's a lean, thrillingly muscular set from a genuinely distinctive talent. [Oct 2018, p.26]

While Waxahatchee has never sounded more suited for mass approval, Crutchfield has never seemed truer to herself. [Apr 2024, p.30]

It's hard to believe there will be a better record than Last Exit released this year. [Jul 2004, p.102]

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

It's Apple's refinement as a writer that makes this harrowing psychodrama so gripping. [Aug 2012, p.69]

It feels like one of the landmark American albums of the century so far. [Jan 2008, p.86]

Lankum have found a convincing way to keep the damn hulk going, stoking the engines of folk tradition and setting course to who knows when. [May 2023, p.24]

[A] breathtaking, virtually flawless album. [Sep 2002, p.104]

A bold debut that continues their frenetic explorations of post-punk kraut-jazz but also moves into more electronic and soundscape-like worlds. [Jun 2021, p.33]

Finds Muller reviving a lush disco spirit he once discretely discarded. [Jul 2005, p.92]

It's a extended mediation on the expat experience, with yearningly hymnal renditions. [May 2021, p.27]

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]

Concise at 12 tracks, the stylistic coherence seldom fails to engage. [Feb 2007, p.73]

It is arguably, the Replacements album that best balances the tension between the snotty punk rockers they began as, and the crossover success they were terrified of becoming ... [The included demos and mixes] will find favour with adherents of the rougher, readier Replacements, who around now were struggling with whether or not to blossom into something bigger. [Nov 2020, p.52]

Another radical musical/ psychological metamorphosis. [Jun 2024, p.39]

Even by Head's own lofty standards, this represents a late-career masterpiece. [Jun 2022, p.29]

[A] set of lean, characteristically nuanced, folk-edged songs. [Aug 2022, p.30]

We find all sorts of intriguing experiments. [Aug 2020, p.30]

Anthology is no means definitive, but it remains a comprehensive overview of a terrific and influential band. [Aug 2014, p.89]

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]

Live At The Fillmore 1997 stands as both an outstanding document of a great rock'n'roll band at full throttle - and as good a live album as has been made by anybody. [Jan 2023, p.32]

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

If nothing can quite replicate the excitement of hearing these songs for the first time, the first disc of this double-CD set makes a good job of restating the importance of The Smiths as a singles band.

It's a sharp turn to the left for Swift and a fine reminder that she is more than just a gleaming pop phenomenon, but a remarkable songwriter too. [Oct 2020, p.36]

In isolation, it’s a dozen of Young’s best songs, powerful no matter how many times they’ve been reshuffled since. But in reality, it risks getting lost in the shotgun spray of Young’s self-curation. [Oct 2023, p.49]

It's an album that unfurls like a flag on a battlefield, glorious, tattered, defiant, full of big choruses, vaulting harmonies, a brazenly windswept sound. The guitars couldn't be louder, bolder, more heroically deployed. [Nov 2023, p.28]

It's this mix of songwriting voices as well as the tight thematic concept of The Dirty South that makes this such a strong LP, and the new songs don't diminish that. [Jul 2023, p.44]

The first disc of 4CD retrospective of their early mid-90s work is an embarrassment of riches. [Feb 2012, p.84]

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

You don't expect progression from such evident classicists, but there's a new clarity, poise and refinement. [Apr 2004, p.107]

32 years on from Swans' formation, Michael Gira is not only still moving forward, but making some of the albums of his career. [Jun 2014, p.81]

Sweeping strings and sparse piano merge deftly with Jordan’s melancholic voice on “Light Blue”, while the fingerpicked “c. et al.” is bare-bones heartache wrapped up in tender beauty. [Dec 2021, p.33]

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

A wealth of new material for diehard fans. [Aug 2017, p.46]

Their heaviest to date. [Nov 2005, p.108]

It's been a gradual recalibration and Songs For Our Daughter ruffles more of Marling's characteristic composure: she's feeling the breeze, focused, pressing keenly forward. [Jun 2020, p.24]

In the jigsaw puzzle that is Bob Dylan, The Whitmark Demos are crucial pieces, and it's easy to get lost in the depths, the sheer audacity and beauty, of this music. [Nov 2010, p.107]

Divers feels like her most comfortable, charming album. [Nov 2015, p.80]

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

The band hits an altogether richer seam on the Fleet Foxes-like “Mine Forever” and the vast sweep of the string-laden title track, rooted in the lost highway myth but sounding more akin to classic Walker Brothers. [Jul 2021, p.30]

A celebration of the inherent power of community and music’s ability to connect and resonate through the ages, created by someone fast becoming one of the most important young voices in modern American folk music. [Oct 2022, p.18]

Like any new city, this album may take some getting used to--there's beauty everywhere, but the streets are far from a neat grid. But as you walk them, Holter's genius as a sonic town planner reveals itself. [Sep 2013, p.96]

Bad As Me is the sound of a supremely confident artist convening a raucous celebration of his own myth, and is multifariously marvellous. [Nov 2011, p.78]

There's a lighter, more hopeful bent to the musical settings, which perfectly balance the more dissonant leanings of The King Of Limbs with a sumptuousness and gentleness they've rarely sought since OK Computer. [Aug 2016, p.81]

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

It's a bravura fusion of dense-art metal/pop and strutting baroque disco. [Nov 2017, p.36]

Waxahatchee's vision is clearer on Saint Cloud. [May 2020, p.34]

All are very good indeed.

An even more ambitious conceptual album that finds her sharing her insecurities, praising her heroes and going on a fairytale voyage over 19 tracks. [Oct 2021, p.30]

Return To Cookie Mountain sees TV solidifying their more ethereal tendencies into denser compositions. [Aug 2006, p.100]

A rare rock record with the rage, urgency, wit and shattering of complacency usually found in grime. [Apr 2017, p.32]

At times it hits harder and heavier than anything they've attempted before. [Nov 2020, p.32]

Courtney Barnett has managed to expand her lyrical preoccupations and musical interests outwards and upwards, while still retaining the magic of her past peak. [Apr 2015, p.68]

RTJ3 is the pair's most focused and mature work to date. [Mar 2017, p.34]

In a still-uncertain climate, its emotional honesty and crystalline truths are a gift.[Jun 2021, p.32]

Both adventurous and accessible, a record in love with the obliterating power of sound. [Apr 2003, p.120]

Patty Griffin reached something of an artistic peak with 2015's Servant Of Love, a record that distilled her love of American folk, blues and country into an intimate song cycle with a powerful emotional pull. Its follow-up is no less personal, perhaps even more so. [Apr 2019, p.28]

Her sixth, co-produced by Jonathan Wilson, executes no radical stylistic swerve but neither are its 10 songs of a single type. Rather, they’re a balancing of country – here are echoes of Tammy, Emmylou and Lee Hazlewood – and torch song (kd lang, Roy Orbison), with the odd flourish of cocktail-lounge melancholy (a la Badalamenti) and classic, MGM-style orchestrations. [Jul 2022, p.28]

The nostalgic tug of the earlier, dancier singles remains strong, but as a bonus disc of rarities demonstrates, their experimental side is equally compelling. [Mar 2012, p.101]

Its initial oddness now just sounds like a ramshackle tryout for what was to follow. [Jun 2012, p.91]

Gathering is another collection of Dylanesque strummings, rescued as always from generic blandness by Ritter's alacrity as a lyricist and husky grin of a voice. [Nov 2017, p.36]

If you're a Prince bootleg freak you'll know most of it already, but if not it's a great introduction to his writing for outside productions. Often, the real revelation is how closely performers hew to his demos. [Jul 2019, p.48]

Skyway Man's fantasy realm is absorbing enough that he can pull off increasingly audacious musical combinations. [Dec 2020, p.38]

Another excellent set of verbose tunes delivered with the vocal swagger of Morrissey or Alex Kapranos, against a shimmering curtain of prime pop jangle. [Mar 2023, p.28]

Striking successor to 2021 breakthrough Pohorylle. .... Her phrasing is exquisite throughout. [Oct 2023, p.26]