Most songs are laid over a percussion track that despite the occasional presence of Max Kennedy Roach is mostly programmed and staccato. It’s not a classic, but the songs are as urgent and effective as ever and you’re recommended to complete the course. [Mar 2018, p.53]

Chosen topics prove less crucial than his relentlessly tedious delivery. [Feb 2018, p.51]

Not everything is great--in particular “Lifting You” with Ed Sheeran is about as limp as you’d expect--but even the clumsier moments feel relevant and contemporary. [Feb 2018, p.51]

They feel energised with Keenan back in the fold, and while the pronounced riffs on the introduction of “Little Man” might hark back to their hardcore days, the emphasis here is on groove. [Feb 2018, p.46]

What unites them through the funk of “Zipper”, the smooth, slightly cheesy pop of “Hottie” and the sudden bursts of metallic dissonance on “Sister/Nation” is a sense of hiphop starting over, moving beyond iconography and iconoclasm into a world where they have absolute freedom to make shit up as they go along. [Feb 2018, p.46]

If there’s a heaven for a gangsta, Eazy-E is smirking down on South Central serene and secure that G Perico is doing immaculate justice to his legacy. [Mar 2018, p.61]

Much of their output since has been consolatory rather than essential, and ultimately Clone Of The Universe can’t quite escape that tag, but Fu Manchu remain justly loyal to old production values--absurd amounts of bottom end and tube fuzz, basically. [Mar 2018, p.58]

These tracks embody the heartache arising from Remy struggling with her place, and the place of her sisters, in the world of male power and dominance. [Mar 2018, p.57]

The fit between Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet--whose list of previous collaborators includes Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass--is so natural it’s almost a wonder they haven’t worked together previously. [Mar 2018, p.53]

Absolutely gorgeous. ... It’s as clear, translucent and dazzling as the medium it both plays with and describes. [Mar 2018, p.52]

Pissing Stars sees his songwriting separate more fully from the motherships of Silver Mt Zion and GY!BE, skirting new fringes only a solo artist could reach. [Mar 2018, p.52]

Tahoe is a record for after the fall, after the collapse, a compulsive soundtrack for an age that is both post-natural and post-virtual. [Mar 218, p.46]

What's so delightful is how everything instantly clicks back into place for the listener who is familiar with Dab's work, how accessible and pleasurable his sound is for anyone coming to it for the first time. [Mar 2018, p.46]

The first few listens don’t disclose the full complexities of Simon’s work – it remains semi-horizontal and distant, like a tired shrug. But after several repeats, the circular motifs begin to, if not get under the skin, then at least claw at it a bit. [Mar 2018, p.44]

The execution is elegantly minimal and yet alive with textures and warmth, despite the album's melancholy and often morbid content. [Mar 2018, p.55]

A confidently created body of work that shows her strength in piecing together abstract compositions. [Oct 2017, p.65]

The results isn't always compelling; at times the trio lean on cliched sounds--ominous synth tones, for example, or whirring stock effects--that have also crept into previous release. But more often, the pieces on Rainbow Mirror avoid banality through forced patience. The extended track lengths greatly benefit Fernow’s chosen range of sounds and moods. Given the room to stretch and develop, he and his colleagues maintain a level of subtlety throughout. [Dec 2017, p.56]

A cohesive album in the traditional sense, Hesaitix is an epic world-building exercise littered with simulations of natural beauty. [Dec 2017, p.55]

Distorted and wobbly piano samples summon up the spirit of 1990s rave, but in a quietly euphoric way. Harmonies occasionally jut out, seemingly more a product of chance than by design. [Oct 2017, p.49]

Impossibly both epic and restrained; somebody call CERN. [Nov 2017, p.67]

Far from consistent, its best tracks are those unconcerned with hooks or choruses, maintaining a stealthy pace but humming with all the frantic, pristine detail of the best Future tracks. [Dec 2017, p.64]

Throughout there's a strangely prosaic lyricism at work making the mundane threatening. [Dec 2018, p.48]

Moving between diverse musical contexts, with self-assurance yet also unflagging inquisitiveness, open to the unexpected even within the familiar contours of Ruby My Dear or ’Round Midnight, Smith continues to renew and transcend his legacy. [Dec 2017, p.58]

He might be a slightly better rapper [than his father Will], he’s certainly a more adventurous artist and the fact that he’s a product of his generation shouldn’t detract from that. [Jan 2018, p.78]

All the more powerful for jumping from comic invocations of Ric Flair and Friday The 13th to casual and viciously flippant references to Xanax and other addictions. [Jan 2018, p.78]

Female defiance and desire in a glossy, dystopic package. [Jan 2018, p.77]

Post Self is an extreme, and extremely good, record, as moving as it is troubling. [Jan 2018, p.69]

he way the music suddenly jerks into life from stasis to movement is fine and the whole thing is beautiful and embracing and makes you think peaceful thoughts. By mid-afternoon though things get really ragged. ... Whatever made those earlier tracks sound so great is missing now. [Jan 2018, p.62]

This ludicrously exhaustive deluxe edition includes hour after hour of live takes, demos and interviews. Fascinating, but none of it overshadows the original album. [Dec 2017, p.70]

Fans will find things to love here, I’m sure. But Savage Young Dü won’t be making any converts. [Dec 2017, p.69]

Diggin’ In The Carts is the most inventive video game music compilation in living memory. [Dec 2017, p.67]

The Saga Continues is a somewhat unwieldy collection of Wu offcuts with seemingly no concept. Less an album than a collection of outtakes. [Dec 2017, p.64]

Amalie Bruun (aka Myrkur) returns in feral form with a fresh set of frozen warnings and blackened ballads. ... On “Funeral” she teams up with Chelsea Wolfe for a duet that never quite gels and feels frustratingly half formed, while “Kætteren” confusingly slips a sliver of traditional Scandinavian folk music into the mix. Even worse is end track “Børnehjem” where demonic child whispering over Myrkur’s medieval monkish chant evokes Blair Witch memories and ultimately drags the whole album down. [Dec 2017, p.60]

Moore responds by occasionally holding on to his riffs, exploring their textures before returning to chop and grind mode. Such moments help break up the pair’s machine-like momentum, which in places makes tracks blur together; some actually sound like reprises of each other, somewhere between natural motifs and a well of ideas running dry. But the thrill of Moore and Hayward’s best right hooks and body blows justify the amount of punches thrown. [Dec 2017, p.55]

The update here is that the music is from Glasgow, a city apart from the more cosmopolitan hubs of the global dance network, and one that’s increasingly recognised for its ‘scenius’. It’s perhaps these dislocated elements that make Golden Teacher a solid though ultimately unspectacular British curiosity. [Dec 2017, p.52]

The quartet sound vital here, powered by a passion that is infectious and thrilling. [Dec 2017, p.52]

There are no radical leaps forward from the previous album, but that matters not a jot. The soil in this territory is rich, the flora is fragrant, and the echoes of the past harmonise together like happy memories. [Dec 2017, p.51]

What works so well here is that all the elements are pursued with equal intensity. It is not that noise cedes to the electronics, or the guitars make way for the voice, or turns are taken. On the contrary, everything is plugged in, blindly ongoing without lessening. [Dec 2017, p.50]

The Icelandic icon moves ever closer to the Platonic ideal of what it means to be Bjork. [Dec 2017, p.50]

The record inevitably calls to mind such seminal sci-fi soundtracks as The Terminator and Blade Runner. ...The album is nonetheless imbued with an intrinsic purposiveness which emphatically renders its sounds meaningful in excess or independent of conceptual determination. [Dec 2017, p.49]

When she laughs that she’s never read Robert Greene’s self-help manual 48 Laws, not only is she declaring her album a bullshit-free zone, she’s redefining priorities for 21st century grown-up rap. On this form you have to hope her approach prevails. [Nov 2017, p.70]

While not as suck your frozen heart out bleak as her last album, Abyss, Hiss Spun explores metal's darkness on a more intimate scale. [Nov 2017, p.67]

As a cranky comeback album, it's as welcome as the amped-up reprise of Dr Jacobi as podcast prophet on Twin Peaks: The return. [Nov 2017, p.67]

While he operates in similar sonic territory to Ariel Pink, Mondanile is as disarmingly gentle as Pink is strutting and cocky. [Nov 2017, p.67]

An album both generous and balanced in its patient give and take, upbeat and open, full of enthusiasm and joy. [Nov 2017, p.67]

The mood of the album is always upbeat, ending with the forward looking “Vorfreude 2”--the German word meaning an anticipation for future pleasures--and doesn’t venture into any of the weirder, harder, filthier, squelchier corners of electronic music.[Nov 2017, p.66]

The voice of singer Rolynne provides a fluency and depth missing elsewhere; her emotional precision and expression cut right through the ornament of this otherwise rather forgettable album. [Nov 2017, p.66]

Ununiform demonstrates that Tricky has retained his sense of adventure; even at its most opaque and cryptic lyrically, his music remains hypnotic. [Nov 2017, p.64]

Clark’s fifth album isn’t a retreat to an earlier style--if anything it’s even brighter, bolder and broader than St Vincent, even more given to IMAX worthy gestures-- but Clark does appear to have reconciled the streamlined automation of her new aesthetic with the orch pop crafting of her first three records, Marry Me (2007), Actor (2009) and Strange Mercy (2011). [Nov 2017, p.64]

It’s all extraordinarily listenable thanks to Woolford’s clear vision in tracing various threads of connection between these forms of electronic funk. However, sometimes the direct, hyperspecific references, which can have such impact in club contexts, distract from the flow in the context of an album, and the moments where he navigates the spaces between those specifics become the most enduringly impressive. [Nov 2017, p.62]

O’Dwyer’s explorations of forgotten spaces, ways of listening and acoustic phenomena are as rich as ever, this haunted collection of subterranean sounds revealing even greater depths to her sprawling, strange work. [Nov 2017, p.61]

Yoshimi’s mesh of voices is sometimes overpowering, although, as with Björk, that feeling of overpowerment is part of the deal, constructed to bring the listener to a place that feels like the edge of something--the singer’s endurance; the listener’s understanding--only to push them over into somewhere else entirely. [Nov 2017, p.61]

Maus’s genius is to splice nostalgic sonic expectations for the future with new structural realities. [Nov 2017, p.60]

Lindstrøm is better able to keep everything the right side of good taste, for better or worse. This continuous set of eight tracks gets into its spooky stride towards the end. ... A darker second hour might have been even better. [Nov 2017, p.59]

The mainstreaming of yoga, mindfulness and other pursuits of spiritual enrichment in our digitally distracted, permanently anxious modern reality might have tipped the balance, as Laraaji pulls in listeners who aren’t necessarily collectors of forgotten, strange or otherwise outsider music. [Nov 2017, p.58]

On some of the songs Langford’s slightly rough and ready approach is the grit that helps produce the pearl; on others it’s made to sound out of place by the very musicians who play his songs so well.

Mechanics Of Domination is careful, elegant and cerebral but it is also quietly stirring. [Nov 2017, p.56]

A fitting tribute to one of the greatest collectives in music history and essential for anyone who has ever had their lives changed by Parliament/ Funkadelic. [Nov 2017, p.54]

Modern production simply won’t allow for the kind of warm frictive depth in the low end or biteable chunkiness of beats those albums revelled in--but as a dazzling showcase for Bootsy’s still-ill skills it’s great, always problematising what could be politesse with the sheer deranged drive behind Bootsy’s shades, always plumbing for excess as a watchword. [Nov 2017, p.54]

Fohr’s music achieves ever greater levels of emotional richness while keeping a careful distance from the confessional. [Nov 2017, p.54]

Translated lyrics illuminate and mystify in equal measure. [Oct 2017, p.67]

It may look wildly out of control but closer inspection reveals the symmetry and order that supported the garden’s historical design. [Nov 2017, p.53]

You might not think you need new versions of these. But you’d be wrong. [Nov 2017, p.52]

It’s no radical departure, but Gamble nonetheless conjures a new and unsettling sense of richness from differently focused materials. [Oct 2017, p.52]

Washington can flirt with bombast and kitsch, but his commitment is undeniable and the tunes are great. [Oct 2017, p.68]

Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is a sublimely reflective slice of nostalgia with none of the comfort or security that term implies--it’s a both hysterically funny and sharply political skewering of the games nostalgic reverie can play on people, and a people’s consciousness. [Oct 2017, p.67]

Wolves In The Throne Room return at full throttle. [Oct 2017, p.64]

On TFCF (short for Theme From Crying Fountain) Andrews comes into his own. The tracks might be loosely structured, ideas, samples, field recordings and styles scattered by the dozen across the album’s 33 minutes, but it’s a sense of a distinctive songwriter exploring fracturedness across a broad spectrum from the dancefloor to the introspective. [Oct 2017, p.64]

The result is an intuitive and spacious sound. Controlled but organic and broken down into contained but naturally arcing pieces, The Gradual Progression becomes a set of sequences using long drum rolls, cloudlike synths and eventually gentle vocal noises and ascents.

Revel in the poppy darkness of Beaches--sunset drenched “ba-ba-ba” vocals, upfront drums and twangy guitars--but also marvel as the Australian psych rockers draw out their swirling sounds into extended hypnotic workouts on this double album. [Oct 2017, p.64]

The result is an album which will satisfy fans of all the band’s distinct phases without necessarily ingratiating itself to anyone. [Oct 2017, p.61]

A set of vigorous yet highly intricate arrangements of new material. [Oct 2017, p.60]

Electric Trim is Lee Ranaldo’s 12th solo album but it sounds remarkably fresh. [Oct 2017, p.59]

An upbeat yet ultimately wistful record about living, dying, youth, age, wasting time, but also trying not to waste time. [Oct 2017, p.59]

His cartoonish vocals remain charmless, his lyrics as tediously self-referential as ever. [Oct 2017, p.57]

The detail and artistry of Take Me Apart more than justify the wait. [Oct 2017, p.56]

Zola Jesus is back to her dark roots, but enriched by intense layers of experience. [Oct 2017, p.55]

The sheer density of stylistic markers here is perhaps most representative of the nature of Iglooghost’s production, the album being immersed in the chaos of skittering beats and cut-ups with vivid synth lines that twist, crack and inflate in dazzling clusters. [Oct 2017, p.55]

The whole thing seems to aim for slightness (of the disc’s 20 tracks, only seven are over two minutes long), but many of these sketches have the gorgeous, pastoral-futurist texture of Boards Of Canada or The Focus Group. [Oct 2017, p.53]

This is the sort of shtick that the band have been pulling for over two decades, and it's as earnest and laudable as ever. ... Though, the band could also do with a sonic rehaul. [Oct 2017, p.53]

To run with the cinematic analogies, I'd suggest that Frost is the musical equivalent of Nicolas Winding Refn, all neon lit brutality and state of the art emptiness. [Oct 2017, p.52]

The Munster release makes for occasionally uncomfortable listening. [Sep 2017, p.66]

A few tracks stand apart: "Story Of OJ" and "Mercy Me" both impress for verve and venom if not his every chain of thought. Otherwise it's all so dry that after a couple of listens it feels more like spoken word. [Sep 2017, p.62]

Prophets Of Rage can’t help sounding a little male-menopausal even if lyrically the targets remain crucial and the trajectory remains ferocious thanks to the sheer undimmed timbre of Chuck’s meshrattling voice. [Sep 2017, p.55]

Parallels frustrates as much as it entrances because it feels like a collection of separate tracks corralled together for expedience. [Sep 2017, p.53]

How Did I Find Myself Here? is the occasionally thrilling result. [Sep 2017, p.50]

On Bioprodukt, his fourth album for Planet Mu, Edwards’s prolific nature again benefits from the honed ear of label boss Mike Paradinas, who curates a neat ten track journey through recent material. [Jul 2017, p.50]

Infinity Ultra keeps going with the introspective synth symphonies, but there are a couple of spots where it’s also up for a party, although maybe one where the dancefloor is full of blissed out narcoleptics. [Aug 2017, p.63]

This is a deep but balanced record, elegant in its melancholia and experimental. [Jul 2017, p.57]

Circle’s ability to fuse distant or disparate modes and styles is part of what makes their music so compelling. Where attention might before have been generated out of the way it all fitted together, the tension here is more about viscerality, more about the vocal and guitars tearing through your body than seeping into your brain. [Sep 2017, p.48]

Silhouettes & Statues--83 songs across five CDs--is a useful opportunity to take stock of goth’s actual achievements. It charts the genre’s emergence from post-punk, emphasises points of overlap with anarcho, industrial and even synthpop, and ends in 1986 before the arrival of Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson and hordes of neo-celtic, pagan folk and cyber goth sub-groupings. [Sep 2017, p.69]

At some point in the future Tyler, The Creator may define his ideology and grow tedious with it; for now he remains on top form revelling in ambiguity. [Sep 2017, p.62]

“In The South” is a mash-up with Gucci Mane and Pimp C that could’ve snuck on the back end of a posthumous UGK set. [Sep 2017, p.62]

Every beat is a slow motion epic, every hook aches with promethazine exhaustion transcended through force of will. [Sep 2017, p.62]

[New Facts Emerge] finds the group in passable but not especially inspiring form. [Sep 2017, p.59]

Nothing Is Quick In The Desert shows them in fantastic form, sidestepping those laboured moments of musical correctness that made 2015’s Man Plans, God Laughs so patchy, and focusing on the kind of ear-popping chaos that made so much of 1994’s Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age so uniquely addictive. [Sep 2017, p.55]

Dreaming In The Non-Dream is a protest record through and through. It captures a rabid collective frustration and expels it with a palpable urgency. The fact that Forsyth and the rest of his group can do it with an eloquence that’s hard to summon in these dire times makes it all the more rewarding. [Sep 2017, p.50]

For just a few moments [on "Slow Your Roll"] there’s an unmistakeable sense that what’s already a decent album could have been a whole lot better, could have been inspirational. [Sep 2017, p.50]