Zeit is imperfect, but there’s so much to be savoured here, and aspects you won’t get from any other Rammstein album.

As it stands, Giving the World Away is a decent record with some excellent highlights, but also one that fails to live up to Hatchie’s potential. It’s somewhat frustrating, most of the time.

Overall, the journey Everything Was Beautiful creates is definitely more entrancing and vivid than And Nothing Hurt.

Skinty Fia won't tell you much about whether that vein of insecurity that runs below the band's surface level of confidence can fuel good art indefinitely; in its best moments, though, it may make you want to hear the band crack open that ground and let their strangest selves out completely.

Tight as heck, gorgeously thematic, lovingly orchestrated, produced within an inch of its life (i.e. well), seamless, vital, other compliments, all of them. An album with a pulse.

This record does nothing to convince Kurt Vile skeptics to jump on the bandwagon, but for the already-converted it will also do nothing to drive them away. Indeed, this is certainly one of the singer-songwriter’s stronger efforts, even coming eight LPs into his solo career.

Together is a finely-crafted work which should hold up to listening under widely varied circumstances, likely to feel as much at home amid the windswept, skeletal trees of late autumn as on the porch on a humid summer evening. All told, there’s plenty to rejoice about, the sad boys are back in town.

Disco4 :: Part II might not get everything spot on, but it still stands up to Part I in a way that proves their last record wasn’t a fluke.

El Mirador is definitely on the right path, becoming Calexico’s strongest effort since Algiers. These cheerful tunes make for an immediate, fun affair.

His music more than stands on its own in its brilliancy and, again, the fact that it is supplemented by clearly thought out performance aspects should not mean that it is viewed as anything less than genuine.

This record comprises fourteen tracks, yet managed to be nothing more than a bad concoction of bad pop punk, bad rap rock, bad lyrics, and vaguely competent performances.

The sum total of their 2022 opus is a straight upgrade to SOUL GLO’s already brilliant back catalog, bursting with scorching new takes on old ideas and enough spirit and passion to set the entire scene ablaze.

While it has highlights aplenty, they seem the kind of highlights that would fare better outside of the context of Listening To A Whole Album In 2022. ... As a start-to-finish experience, there’s a tendency for things to melt together as momentum flags, the sequencing grates, or you find yourself paying less than your most devout attention to the swiftly passing milieu.

The resultant journey is a jittery, joyous, glorious, gleaming mess: substantially less coherent than their previous outings, but no less endearing.

Never Let Me Go is a fantastic album, and it could even be argued that it’s the most consistent and engaging album of their career – certainly, it’s their most ambitious to date.

Imagine the worst Good Charlotte song repeating “I fell in love with an emo girl” as a chorus. ... If anything, the more trap-infused tracks gracing the record’s back half fare better, solely because they aren’t direct copies of some of the most well-known pop punk songs of all time. Moreover, the extremely overblown production doesn’t achieve the same maximalism here, making for a comparatively listenable bunch of songs. Key word: comparatively.

On the one hand, this is a record which sees Destroyer recalibrate their formula, quite successfully, to avoid any potential staleness in the fifth incarnation of their recent run. As such, it feels like a record that most, if not all, music fans with any interest in Destroyer could enjoy. On the flip side, this album also continues the trend that Have We Met began, accentuating Bejar’s idiosyncrasies in a more pronounced way than before.

This is a respectable effort, with glimmers of excellence in many places. Indeed, this could well be an entrancing listen for the right fan, but sadly, for me, neither the atmosphere or the instrumentation is enough to prevent my mind from frequently wandering away while listening.

Synthetic synapses spark and crackle via the Boston 5-piece’s revered fusion of nu-metal revivalism and modern mathcore shenanigans, each track adding another glorious jerking movement to their macabre, digital death rattle.

This latest effort is an unabashed classic hip hop record for you to either take it or leave it. The only disappointment is that it could have easily been more than this.

The Long Road North is a more sophisticated record than A Dawn to Fear, and Cult of Luna’s reputation for steely competence is quite at home in its various details and refinements. It’s less contingent on the intensity of individual moments, benefitting more from a pervasive atmosphere of the risky-wilderness-journey variety.

Present Tense is a comfort album on the pleasant side of catchy; it’s the perfect collection of songs to augment your mood when the weather climbs to twenty-something centigrade.

CRASH might not be up there with her best, but it's still a good pop album, and worth trying for any fans of the genre.

The production is a tad artificial at times, way less organic than the somber, daring spirit of Opus Eponymous, but every instrument is performed with impressive precision by every ghoul, and Forge's vocals sound on point most of the time, save for some grating moments when he seems to fall out of character. The added backing vocals and the meticulous arrangements enhance greatly the album's overall sound, but the question remains if these sorts of embellishments are enough for the loyal sheep to keep their faith on what the Clergy is feeding them.

The lyrics might not always make linear sense, but there’s a sort of appealingly weird logic to it all, and the musical soundscapes invite the listener towards some (often placid) alternate dimension. This may be a mood listen, more than anything, but as a soundtrack to a relaxed moment on a sunny day, you could do a whole lot worse.