They're indubitably human this time around. [Jun 2015, p.54]

His latest disc is only occasionally compelling. [Jun 2015, p.50]

The atmosphere is underwrought, miserable, monochrome. [Jun 2015, p.46]

Cave and Ellis have created a brave and fittingly incongruous score. As a standalone album, however, it doesn't walk so tall. [Jun 2015, p.45]

Summoning Suns is too derivative to be a major work, but it shows promise. [Mar 2015, p.46]

Over melodic, it sounds like it was made by a TV composer working to a brief for a rave episode. [Apr 2015, p.65]

On tracks with genuine maverick talents like E-40, his fundamental lack of character appears (or disappears) in sharp relief. [Apr 2015, p.65]

Fay aficionados may be unsettled that our man seems to have been kidnapped by aliens and reprogrammed as a frail new age gospel singer. Eccentricity is kept to a minimum, as thin songwriting is padded out by repetitive chanting of a chorus's final line. [May 2015, p.49]

It's a series of blows that fail to connect.... Taken on its own terms, divorced from the genre to which it owes its existence The Ark Work's dogged pursuit of incongruous juxtaposition can be hugely entertaining. [Apr 2015, p.53]

Somehow unconvincing, it's like beach bar escapism spliced with an incidental tune from the TV comedy show The Mighty Boosh. [Mar 2015, p.60]

Nice enough, and the climax of the title track is truly transportive, but no real departure from previous form. [Mar 2015, p.56]

With its introversion and focus upon the everyday in both subject matter and imagery, the appeal of Shedding Skin depends partly on your appetite for people watching. [Mar 2015, p.48]

The veneer slides aside to reveal more palpable excitement with the arrival of MCs from the UK grime contingent. [Mar 2015, p.48]

The moody bits are surrounded by so much that is abstract that their affective properties seem a matter of happenstance rather than expression. [Mar 2015, p.46]

It refuses any stylistic centre that might tie together its genre signifiers. [Mar 2015, p.58]

There is, in the end, something vaguely nauseating about a bunch of popular entertainers in middle age creating state-supported art inspired by the deaths of countless young men caused by an act of state-subsidised slaughter. [Jan 2015, p.61]

The mish-mash of styles wouldn't be an issue if it sounded like Pateras and Patton were surrendering to something other than themselves, but what comes across instead is a desire to demonstrate mastery. [Jan 2015, p.70]

A Better Tomorrow feels trapped by history, an impotent reflection versus a proposed resurrection. [Jan 2015, p.65]

Much of the album's faults are down to Smith. Rather than steering the collective ship, his voice, slurred to the point of incomprehensibility, barely connects with the others. [Dec 2014, p.48]

With Hell Can Wait, he inches logically towards a modernisation of the chaotic wall of noise formula that defined Public Enemy than immediately pulls back from it. [Nov 2014, p.76]

Nehru is essentially indistinguishable from any number of bedroom rappers clogging Soundcloud with their freestyles to Doom's decade old Special Herbs instrumentals. [Nov 2014, p.76]

The impression left by The Hums's buzzing, keys-assisted pseudo-punk is that of a heavier Clinic or even Scottish also-rans Magoo. [Nov 2014, p.72]

Singer's Grave feels like an exercise, something which never be said for the work released under the Palace banner in the 1990s. [Nov 2014, p.72]

Shorn of vocals, Xen suffer the same fate as much beloved contemporary beat music, which is a kind of dazzling monotony. [Nov 2014, p.63]

Too often though, and as is almost always the case with live sets, the album is cloistered and airless.... It doesn't so much scourge New York as embody the place it has become. [Nov 2014, p.71]

They sound somewhere between being tentative and caught in a frozen, allegorical state of sketchiness, turning the sleepy head of bedroom pop into a death's head. [Sep 2014, p.64]

Deprived of the rushing, crescendoless highs of Glass Swords, the tracks often seem to struggle to articulate their fascination, or to find satisfying structures. [Sep 2014, p.60]

Brooks builds eight neat instrumentals from gradually layer guitar, playing in a closed circle with himself, a dialogue that is sometimes affecting but more often banal. [Aug 2014, p.59]