The results are almost too intimate to bear. [Jun 2018, p.33]

The Renaissance offers a compromise between the rootsy East Coast rap he helped to define and the LP you imagine the label wanted. [Jan 2008, p.111]

On disc the effect can be bludgeoning--although you can hear that onstage it must make for a wild night out. [Mar 2017, p.26]

British Sea Power are still without a 'Wake Up' or a 'Float On' but Do You Like Rock Music? is exhilarating in its ambition, full of songs that will warm the cockles at whichever National Heritage site they choose to play next.

Pleasingly, the most difficult thing about the album is its name. [Dec 2008, p.116]

Just Us Kids in part repeats the forumla, targeting SUV drivers, filthy corporations, and Dick Cheney, in an affecting but familiar preach to the converted. [June 2008, p.97]

They could afford to take more liberties with the musical cliches thereof: listening to Gaslighter is a bit like eating 12 courses of dessert. [Oct 2020, p.29]

Dreamy, classic-sounding pop nuggets, sung by Cox with a wry, casual authority. [Jan 2011, p.79]

The addition of a horn section brings pleasing texture to the likes of "Hotel" and "Revisited," but it's rarely enough to lift The Antlers out of their willfully wounded torpor. [Jul 2014, p.69]

The DIY production can smother their delicate melodicism, and those parping horns can sound distinctly cheap and shrill. [Jan 2002, p.131]

They're still a little too in thrall to the obvious precursors to take flight, but there are some great, clanging pop songs here, too. [May 2016, p.78]

There's a less scrappy approach on this album, a glossier production with more realised and experimental offerings. [Jun 2017, p.28]

If at times it's a little too knowing for its own good, the music itself is less claustrophobic than before. [Nov 2007, p.121]

A disappointing triumph of retro-goth style over substance. [Jul 2013, p.80]

City of Refuge finds her back in Appalachian mode though, the songs shaded with fiddle, banjo and dulcimer and borne aloft by Washburn's airy voice. [Mar 2011, p.92]

You're left wishing these jazz quintet pieces breathed more. [Aug 2022, p.26]

We can enjoy Foxing's prophecies of impending doom, particularly when they're clothed in Animal Collective harmonies, U2 bombast and even avant-garde R&B. [Sep 2018, p.29]

Cherry's still youthful voice and angsty lyrics feel somewhat disconnected from these dubby rumbles and dirges. [Mar 2014, p.73]

Ten years ago this hand-stitched tapestry of astral-jazz harp, dusty acoustics, crackling breakbeats, music-box twinkles and twitchy "Intelligent Dance Music" might have seemed bravely genre-bending, but now it's as cosy a pair of favourite slippers. [Feb 2010, p.84]

That quest to explore her true colors is tenderly juxtaposed with some grand arrangements--woodwind, strings, marching drums--that bring to mind Minnie Riperton, Bond themes and '40s Disney movies. [Aug 2018, p.24]

[The first half is] all dismayingly unconvincing and lacklustre in execution... Then something changes.

There's an intriguing version of Michael Jackson's "Human Nature" and tunes by Monk and Ellington alongside originals that lurch from freaky modernism to stately classical. [Oct 2010, p.108]

While it's not a great record, the world would be a marginally better place if people were drooling over John Wizards rather than Vampire Weekend. [Sep 2013, p.90]

The atmosphere is organic and engaging, the only problem being that amid the fug of good vibes, no one remembered to write a killer song. [July 2008, p.94]

A madly ambitious, darkly despondent and goofily exuberant grand folly of a record. [Album of the Month, Dec 2005, p.98]

This is an exercise in extravagant claustrophobia, not nostagia. [Apr 2009, p.86]

Presumably bucketloads of fun live, the novelty wear thin on record. [Nov 2010, p.101]

A move into electric guitar, Hammond organ and bass bring mixed results. [Aug 2013, p.79]