A mid-1970s Tangerine Dream vibe is more apparent than on previous Noveller albums, albeit still further removed from the trappings of rock music per se, and it largely comes off as a soundtrack in waiting for a film in which a hard-up community of 19th century nomads travel slowly across an arid plain. [Aug 2020, p.64]

The selections step sufficiently far from the territory established by their own songs to generate intrigue without stretching credulity. [Jul 2020, p.64]

Heart’s Ease picks up directly from where Lodestar left off. The lightness of touch of that earlier album, the delicate and sparse instrumental backing, so unobtrusive it enables rather than dominates, and her knack of filleting songs down to their bony essence, are all elements Collins pursues further here. [Aug 2020, p.52]

There’s a luxuriant impulse at work on this second album by the London-based keyboardist and producer. The strings in particular work beautifully on the soporific funk of tunes like “1989” or “Toulouse”, suggesting a Xanaxed Roy Ayers recording for CTI in the mid-70s. Aug 2020, p.68]

It fizzles out in places – there's none of the languor of previous work nor the melancholy that collaborator Jeremy Greenspan perfected in Junior Boys – but at its best this is aural champagne, chill, crisp and delectable. [Aug 2020, p.66]

The swelling, churchy ambient post-rock of Juliana Barwick’s latest could spill over into pomposity in heavier hands, but the freshly Los Angeles based artist exudes a modest air. [Aug 2020, p.64]

He knows that being the most complete version of himself requires lifelong searching – græ never fails to feel like such a journey. [Aug 2020, p.63]

Intoxicating oddness permeates some of these slow, shimmying jams. [Aug 2020, p.59]

Exquisite acoustic compositions meet Crampton’s taste for dissonance and distortion. [Aug 2020, p.54]

Throughout the album there’s a palpable refusal to push forward a frontperson – the vocals are truly shared, so Coriky merge and blend around each other and it’s this intuitively generated mutual conciseness that’s so gorgeous to hear. [Aug 2020, p.53]

Gane forgoes the intensifying momentum found elsewhere in his work for a more conventionally cinematic arc. [Aug 2020, p.52]

Far from being some utopian unity of the opposites her work has summoned – beyond binaries – she’s still clearly experimenting and sometimes failing. [Aug 2020, p.48]

The album suffers a little from its 14 song duration. The Mael wit works best when it’s tightly presented. [Jul 2020, p.52]

It’s a strange brew, some distance from the monumental party music that has tended to characterise the duo’s three previous albums. [Jul 2020, p.50]

Where Tuttle takes a more detached standpoint he’s less successful. Perhaps attempting to mimic corporate blandness, “Cambridge Drive Shopping Centre” mixes field recording of shoppers with a dogged guitar motif to fast diminishing effect. For the most part however he keeps cynicism at bay, a welcoming guide to his kingdom of everyday beauty. [Jul 2020, p.53]

It’s a much rougher around the edges effort than 2019’s GREY Area, but it works because Simz is an alum of the pirate radio days; this is her forte. Sonically it’s a dream. [Jul 2020, p.59]

Barring the title cut’s debt to Steely Dan, the pomp is dialled down just enough on Deleted Scenes for the band to flex their fusionoid chops, adding a whole other element of kookiness to their already brow-raising style. [Jul 2020, p.56]

An exciting second album. ... Their otherworldly fetishisation of dystopian collapse is so exhilarating it’s almost tolerable. [May 2020, p.48]

The eight pieces here function as a drummer’s showcase, certainly, but Contact’s wilful limitations conceal an eclectic approach. ... Time spent immersed in Contact will reap reward. [May 2020, p.52]

An album of big hooks of which “Golden Brown” is perhaps sharpest with its promise “The boys are back in town”. [Jun 2020, p.62]

White noise is the most versatile tool in Brighton producer Alan Myson’s kit: he deploys it as a gloss on everything, to either mind-quieting effect on tracks like “Angel In Ruin” and “Oblivion Theme”, or as an anxiety accelerant as on the fuzzed out battle-pitch “Bladed Terrain” where static hisses behind stomping, crunching thwacks and arpeggios. [Jun 2020, p.60]

In the past this rage was intrinsic, wounds covered with cheery sugar, but now there is emotional distance at the core of Heavy Light, filled with others’ voices. Whether or not a deliberate choice, through this transformation the album loses some of its potency and ability to affect. [Jun 2020, p.59]

Music that feels lived in and vivid, instilled with notes that roam between lives of people on the fringes while finding magic in the mundane. [Jun 2020, p.59]

As a whole, Goons Be Gone feels strangely anachronistic, but not nostalgic. Retrieved from the heyday of punk rock, but with a lot of its own to say. [Jun 2020, p.59]

The record works best however when Leandoer wears his heart unashamedly on his sleeve.

Where Spectrum was full of empty (head) space, All Things Being Equal is flooded with warm, luxuriant modular texture, across its bandwidth. [Jun 2020, p.56]

1988 is full of these striking juxtapositions, placing tales of hustling and gunplay in smoothed out, soulful musical beds. [Jun 2020, p.50]

With their reverent, celebratory tone, tracks like “Naked (You Enter & Leave This World With Nothing)”, “I Will Follow You For Life, Everywhere” and “We Must Grieve Together” speak to the music’s function as an integral part of a community’s healing process. Sung together in deep harmony and pulling their inspiration from a source too powerful and mysterious for words, fra fra’s funeral songs offer a glimpse into how the people of this particular corner of West Africa deal with the pain, uncertainty and finality of death. [Jun 2020, p.49]

For Schofield, the word scrambler symbolises both a sort of opiate and a happy place from childhood, so the music highlights this dichotomy by fusing danger and warmth into an irresistible oxymoron. A sensation of the world ending while we carry on dancing. [Apr 2020, p.51]

Whether the listener feels it succeeds will depend on their willingness to accept its surface passivity. ... Shall We Go On Sinning is most persuasive on the second side. [May 2020, p.60]

There’s a kind of manic, excessive inventiveness here, as if the song needs just one more bridge or a doubling of the refrain to sustain its ideas. Yet on closer inspection they are often internally samey. [May 2020, p.53]

Apart from a few works for chamber instruments, which have a similar pleasing air of fakeness to Michael Nyman’s faux baroque cues for Peter Greenaway, these sketches all have uncertain origins and textures. [May 2020, p.66]

Strike a rich vein of form. ... This record lacks a stated motif, but finds the musician digging into the American primitive style (which has often been at least in the orbit of his playing) more keenly than before. “Celerity”, “Enville” and “Vellum”, deft instrumentals all, sit ably in Fahey/Basho territory. [Apr 2020, p.50]

As Jackie Lynn, Fohr’s voice still occupies center stage, but it does so within synthesized set pieces crafted for her to inhabit. Like a hotel decked out with themed rooms, each song on Jacqueline has its own fine-tuned palette and nostalgia-tinged lighting scheme. [Apr 2020, p.49]

The too brief, purely instrumental “Sensational” is the best track, with suggestions of Weather Report’s jazz rock expansiveness. But the general impression is gimmicky and lightweight – effects without causes. [May 2020, p.66]

Filled with ghosts; confessions; jokes; an abundance of Jay-Z features and a prodigal son offering explanations for his disappearance and return. [May 2020, p.65]

The production is flawless. ... But the obvious big tunes fall flat.

It Is What It Is is a fitting ethos for an artist whose genre-twisting tendrils have extended themselves into the highest reaches of the pop canopy, simultaneously flexing their deep funk and jazz roots. [May 2020, p.62]

For those who appreciated the rigour of old, the new album might offer a challenge due to its lyrical sentiments and a base literalism that might be ironic. [May 2020, p.60]

Such excursions don’t amount to the group reinventing their personal wheel, but at just over an hour, this album is about the length of an average Necks performance, and at least as exploratory. [May 2020, p.58]

It’s hard to believe this is the same band who bowed out with Ghost Stories. There they sounded uptight and reticent; here they are restless and free. The creative rebirth continues. Where to next? [May 2020, p.55]

There’s no stridency, special pleading or chewing of scenery, just gentle enactments. This is what folk music used to do before Volk became toxic. Malkmus represents his characters via traditional techniques. [May 2020, p.54]

Surprisingly, it works and doesn’t come apart, punctuating a conceptually striking, musically flawed, but altogether enjoyable record. [May 2020, p.53]

What makes Knuckleball Express slightly different from previous Hex albums is that the songs seem slightly straighter, though it’s a matter of moments before the apple cart is upset and a whole packet of noodles is scattered over the mix. [May 2020, p.52]

The band’s template has barely changed over those years but that isn’t to suggest a lack of artistic growth. “How Deep It Goes”, the opening track from their tenth album Let It All In, is a prime example of their peculiar progression as it exudes the reassuring warmth of California songsmiths of yesteryear yet still somehow manages to wedge a wash of icy interplay between Huemann’s guitar and Matthew Pierce’s synths smack dab in the middle of the track. [May 2020, p.48]

Producer Gary Odlum builds an atmospheric, sunset glow version of the Tuareg sound that rolls and chugs with every conventional element in place, but has a widescreen stadium swagger few other groups have mastered. [Apr 2020]

Knowing the emotional background behind its recording makes it unbearably poignant but this crackly, lambently textured mix of treated piano, longwave static and vocals would move anyone who had a heart. Sublime art from horrible circumstances and Craig’s best work to date. [Apr 2020]

Rose Golden Doorways sits somewhere between grindcore and raga. Created in a consecrated place – a church in Stoke Newington lends volume and reverb – it moves relentlessly forward, a continuous 38 minutes that reaches an apogee with the alien blast of “Those Among Us”. [Apr. 2020, p.59]

If there’s a criticism, the album is a bit samey: virtuoso drum intro, declamatory trumpet, modest group support. The formula becomes ever more predictable with each return, but Allen and Masekela are irresistibly listenable almost irrespective of what they are playing and Rejoice is a very special opportunity to hear two masters who’ve orbited at a distance coming together. [Apr 2020, p.48]

It’s as stunning and vibrant a set of agitpop brilliance as Conn has ever produced. If he’s ever moved you, move to this. [Apr 2020, p.64]

This new set sees them nailing their sound to tighter structures a little, but there’s still that delicious ill-discipline at work throughout. [Apr 2020, p.56]

Each piece is sturdily constructed, but a loose leaf informality allows the 18 tracks to hang without necessarily hanging together. [Apr 2020, p.53]

The quartet’s albums represent a live sound that applies the means of a beat combo to frankly ecstatic ends via tuning while their mixtapes offer a more diverse and fragmentary accounting of collective interests. The twain finally meet on The Common Task. [Apr 2020, p.56]

Gorgeous string arrangements, sax and synths give Birthmarks a palpable sense of encroaching mist. [Apr 2020]

We Are Sent Here By History is a meditation on all of the war, death and resistance that has shaped the world we live in today. Whether or not we can use the lessons learned from that pain to create a future that is worth living is a question that remains unanswered. [Mar 2020, p.56]

Some might find the shit-fi recording (albeit aided by a keen producer’s ear), the relentless bleakness, or Del Rio’s blackened vocals to be dealbreakers. But it’s undeniable that Raspberry Bulbs are not only unencumbered by constraints of genre, they’ve forged a sound unique to themselves. [Mar 2020, p.54]

Denzel’s flows are as hungry as ever, at times managing to channel the untamed spirit of DMX (see “Diet”) while Kenny’s production is the ideal mix of weighty drums and potent bass. It’s an energetic listen and one that can hopefully act as some sort of cure for Old Heads Syndrome – the belief that no one is making real hiphop anymore. [Apr 2020, p.68]

It’s hard to tell if there’s irony in all the anachronism but the record’s nostalgic to the point of kitsch aesthetic feels out of touch. [Apr 2020, p.67]

Every song on Fungus II aspires to soundtrack a twisted comic book or Hanna-Barbera cartoon about itself. Segall’s guitar and bass playing is wailing and distended while Chippendale lays down tight bursts of percussive fire. For the beetle-browed half hour this album lasts, these guys are here to party. [Apr 2020, p.63]

Like Stanley’s film, Stetson’s score fully realises the terrible, wondrous majesty hinted at in the 1927 text. [Apr 2020, p.62]

This is Smith’s most essential non-Fall work since his collaboration with Inch back in 1999. [Apr 2020, p.60]

Grave Of A Dog presents a challenges to the listener because although it succeeds as a well-executed project, there is a disjunction between form and content. Hayter in particular seems to gesture at a narrative, but its precise nature is left unclear. [Apr 2020, p.60]

Hus’s second album Big Conspiracy is the refined work of a man who’s emerging calloused and implacable from a tough decade, most recently a 2017 conviction for carrying a knife which cost him eight months and a string of festival appearances. Through it all, his music has swayed joyously escapist more than harrowing or politically charged. [Apr 2020, p.56]

Unlike many electronic producers whose work echoes the chill of black metal, he retains a certain subtlety – each jolt of sound is unburdened by grand posturing. [Apr 2020, p.52]

How literally Allen wants us to take his nod towards Herman Melville’s whale is left tantalisingly openended, although this tapestry of ghoulishly misremembered tales has an obvious parallel with Melville’s patchwork of story and allusion. [Apr 2020, p.49]

It seems telling for an album about self-discovery that the most convincing tracks are those where he’s openly panicking over his identity rather than those where he’s found an uneasy peace. [Mar 2020, p.61]

There Is No Year is a mixed bag of disparate musical styles, played out as an intelligently composed accompaniment for Fisher’s complex political rhetoric. [Mar 2020, p.58]

Wire’s music is characterised by unusual structures and perspectives, an approach largely absent from Mind Hive, the post-punk group’s 17th studio album. The most prominent themes here are political, with mixed results. [Mar 2020, p.57

Companion Rises does not choose between the structure of a catchy acoustic guitar motif and those sometimes abrasive electric moments where composure is allowed to drift away. Instead it opts to combine them. [Mar 2020, p.56]

This remake justifies the whole shebang. So perfect is the fit, in fact, that it feels uncannily like Scott-Heron’s sonorous rasp must have been recorded to fit this backing. ... Though often dark, this is both a celebration and a vindication: a truly great album. [Mar 2020, p.56]

With her second full-length album MHYSA has curated a minimalist smorgasbord of experimental arrangements, classic R&B tropes and seductive melodies, blending to bring the raw, naked emotion of the artist to the fore. [Mar 2020, p.52]

The folk inflection and multiplicity of Gately’s vocals make the album seem ancient. Or conjured. The songs aren’t ghostly as much as they feel witnessed, imbued with a palpable presence. ... Gately has sampled and mixed in her mother’s voice with her own, as if in acceptance of the balance of life and death. This co-existence – or the yearning for it – is ingrained in this astonishing album as a freshly carved cut in a foundational wooden beam. [Mar 2020, p.48]

Countless Branches does nothing different, but seems to knock them all dead by virtue of its naked simplicity alone. Some of these tracks are scarcely crafted songs at all but simple musings, addressed to no one in particular, not even an inward self, just uttered over soft, slow piano chords. [Mar 2020, p.48]

On the first, Williams engages each of Elkhorn’s members in turn. ... Williams switches to shahi baaja for the B side, casting effects-tinged tones like some cosmic fly fisherman wading into the confluence of two imaginary streams. [Mar 2020, p.47]

The first three Meters albums are their best by far, but every disc in this box is overflowing with addictive, brilliant funk. [Feb 2020, p.64]

Names of North End Women is marginally the more engaging of the two albums, possibly due to the previous creative relationship between Ranaldo and Refree. But All Hands Around The Moment actually illustrates most compellingly the contributions of each collaborator. [Feb 2020, p.55]

More passionate and sophisticated than much of what passes for musical eclecticism these days, Dark Matter is a fusion of old and new, acoustic and electronic. [Feb 2020, p.42]

If anything Quadra is even better [than 2017’s Machine Messiah], expertly filtering fresh textures (the fat synth that opens “Isolation” immediately raises an eyebrow, along with the Carl Orff-like chorale of “Last Time” and the Bollywood-ish orchestration of “Capital Enslavement”) into tightly coiled songs whose ferocity is comparable to Exhorder’s 2019 comeback Mourn The Southern Skies – albeit with a great deal more ambition and (effective) experimentation. [Feb 2020, p.56]

Hot Rats is testament to the power of the overdub, and as such, The Hot Rats Sessions mostly consists of a selection of instrumental parts presented in isolation, which won’t be of interest to all. As with the album, the rambling blues jams are the least interesting, and the real magic is in the origami-like marvels of “Peaches En Regalia”, “Son Of Mr Green Genes” and “It Must Be A Camel”. ... Most remarkable are the outakes.

The album opener “Electron Central” sets a blissful, meandering pace, winding around in a shimmering drone like a drop of ink diffusing in a glass of water. ... The album closer “Empty Hold” takes a more unsettled turn, swooning and rattling into a resonant void. [Feb 2020, p.61]

Downbeat, deliberately anticlimactic, refusing to abide by rap orthodoxies, while affirming one of the genre’s dominant reflexes – calling out pretenders. Think of Marceliago as Macbeth transferred to Hempstead, Long Island, or any of the city’s other unacknowledged locales. Marciano’s rhymes read like rap koans. [Feb 2020, p.60]

The nine tracks here compact his characteristic baroque late jungle excesses into compact, juddering frames. While they still rarely swing, their frenetic motion carries bent and warping keys, rolling breakbeats and maddened blarps of synth towards a clear endpoint. [Feb 2020, p.58]

OOIOO retain and reconfigure the most appealing elements of rock music while reimagining the familiar band-as-gang dynamic to suit their own personalities. Charismatic and cool like few contemporary rock bands are, their sense of fun always feels inclusive of the listener. [Feb 2020, p.52]

Moments illuminate the nimble beats and perky dayglo synthetic patches and above all the fierce resolution of purist independent grime anthems such as “Dem Man Are Dead” and “Badman Walking Through”. [Feb 2020, p.48]

Musically the project is weighed down by Haigh’s hugely uninteresting and one-dimensional piano playing. ... Haigh’s ear for electronic texture does do some of the heavy lifting for which his piano playing is not equipped. [Feb 2020, p.47]

Despite its self-effacing title Workaround comes not as an afterthought to the above, but as distillation and progression, its 14 tracks at once crisply compelling and filled with playful delight, honed by minimalism and absorbingly complex, a constant 150 bpm that’s the opposite of metronomic. [Feb 2020, p.46]

It Should Be Us returns to the lunging bass distortion and nauseous slowed down beats of his instrumentals – the only voices to speak of rising from the churning depths as eerily pitched-down house vocal moans. [Jan 2020, p.73]

The music on Ism is intimate. Pieces end with a jolt. Brief interludes take a questioning tone, as if the fragments are enough in themselves, no need for resolution. The album’s warmth – a quality shared by McCraven’s output – owes much to the International Anthem engineering approach. [Jan 2019, p.66]

Wet Tuna always sound as if they’re trying to escape the constraints of product and profit. “Disco Bev” is delightfully sour and affectionate, “Sacagawea” more expansive and produced sounding, but it all hangs together brilliantly, even as it falls (dis)gracefully apart. [Oct 2019, p.52]

There probably isn’t a better sequenced album on your shelves. ... The remastering is immaculate, tightening up the jangle and twang, cleaning up Russ Kunkel’s drums and improving the separation of instruments throughout. Some of the alternative versions are a little slower than others; take three of “Some Misunderstanding” might just possibly be superior to the issued take, in the usual sense that sometimes musicality was sacrificed to technical perfection. [Jan 2020, p.78]

A highly enjoyable and entertaining album. [Jan 2020, p.74

I’m always holding out hope for more of the genius heard on Doris but it’s unfortunately absent on Feet Of Clay. [Jan 2020, p.74]

No sound is extraneous, every lick is needed, a minimalist musicianship that focuses you on Jeff Tweedy’s heartbreaking words. Their best in ages. [Jan 2020, p.71]

London based trio The Comet Is Coming unleash their finest yet, letting rave electronics, jazz funk and a dancefloor directed low end meet and mingle and mash, again suffusing everything with a positivist but markedly apocalyptic mysticism. [Jan 2020, p.71]

It’s a smart meld, digging up some real finds and gesturing towards a switched-on DJ mind. [Jan 2020, p.70]

The most successful moments come when the supernatural energy of Rimbaud’s work are palpable in their musical translation. [Jan 202, p.69]

Part of Souleyman’s thing is upsetting delicate ears with his so-called vulgarity – it’s music for taxi drivers and party crashers. Likewise these swooning synth stabs may sound kitsch to discerning ravers, but the fun is heroically nonstop. [Jan 2020, p.69]