May be the year's most surprising pure pop pleasure--precisely because it's nothing like you'd expect a pop album to be. [#224, p.61]

Indebted to various traditions of US rock, from resonant folk and blues to elegant indie pop, its understated songs are looser and more varied here than in her music with bands like Helium and Ex Hex, as if serving a different, affirming purpose. [Jun 2024, p.61]

Where NO was extreme in its attack, W opts to let the group dream, as a more acoustic angle is explored – with Wata’s ephemeral vocal being an ever present guiding spirit force that trails like incense smoke through the songs. Things eventually kick off, however, with “The Fallen”, a time-tested metal guitar dirge with an electronic sting in its tail that effortlessly reverts back to Boris at their amplifier worshipping best. [Feb 2022, p.58]

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]

This is darkly delicious pop--with no smiling. [Mar 2019, p.64]

A return to form. ... If anything this album is neither nervous nor holding its nerve, but powerful, solid, the work of a group who know what it is they do and how best to play to their strengths. [Apr 2018, p.64]

Though still harbouring a sense of fun, there’s a maturity felt throughout Dennis. [Jun 2024, p.61]

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

Almond – who recorded his vocals while recovering from Covid – sounds audibly frail at times. But this works in the album’s favour, working humanity into the glossiness. The most effective tracks are those with sparse backing, such as “Polaroid” and the drolly misanthropic “I’m Not A Friend Of God”. [May 2022, p.53]

The blithe ease with which it slips from unruly quasi-techno to Tony Conrad-like violin drone (“Pumpkin Attack On Mommy And Daddy”; “The Wrong Thing”) keeps this consistently diverting. [Mar 2019, p.62]

The album has almost Wagnerian scope and immersive power, and at just over 50 minutes it's well organised as a start-to-finish listen. [Mar 2011, p.50]

“Casino High” has all the makings of a future garage summer banger. It’s skippy and infectiously danceable, employing vocal samples in a thoughtful way. The first of three collaborations on the album, “Real Hot N Naughty” (featuring actor and performer Felix Mufti) is a love letter to queer dancefloors. Flirting between trance and less chaotic hard house, it injects a tongue in cheek dose of fun into proceedings. [Jun 2024, p.61]

This intelligently compiled collection brings together the best (and sometime worst) of these mostly forgotten groups. [Aug 2016, p.66]

Celestite cannot simply be characterised as pastiche, however, as the Weaver brothers and Dunn have constructed dramatic instrumentals using the material of previous compositions, ensuring a thematic and sonic continuity with their own past. [Jul 2014, p.61]

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]

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

An engaging, unpredictable album of Tortoise-like vibraphones, guitars, minimalist repetitions, wry syncopations, occasional duff notes and subtly daubed electronics. [#228, p.69]

Green commandeers her forces, keeps things simple, and makes irresistibly confident and sharp guitar pop. Addictive. [Aug 2021, p.65]

The Moths Are Real is a crisp and atmospheric set of idiosyncratic and finely crafted pop songs. [Mar 2013, p.60]

A minor pleasure of the album is the beautiful way it's edited together, a gently manipulated impression of random accidents. [Sep 2015, p.47]

[An] overstuffed sound hurricane. [#255, p.58]

Barry Walker’s softly rising and falling pedal steel melodies calcify the skeleton of “Memory Of Lunch”, while Patrick McDermott’s distorted guitar lines provide the flesh, shaping a harsher drone as a symbolic border between reality and dream. And while Roped In never renounces its cheerful perspective, the approaching darkness of his guitar overtones dispels childlike innocence. [Dec 2020, p.53]

On four extended tracks, Fennelly’s various keyboards (synthesizer, harmonium, piano) function as kind of bedrock that deftly accommodates a variety of tacks and textures from his partners. [Oct 2023, p.53]

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]

A warm and thoughtful record. Sometimes the production is a bit light--the first half in particular suffers from a rather MOR unobtrusiveness. But Laveaux’s voice is a treasure, her guitar playing is fresh and prickly, and things get more tangled and interesting the further along we go. [Apr 2018, p.67]

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]

Blue Songs nevertheless presents a level of poetic inventiveness that isn't easy to trace in the dance pantheon.

Thankfully, her second solo album Blueprint is not a punk revival record, but a great grab bag of tracks showing that Armendariz still has not only her patented hair-raising and blood-curdling shriek from the 70s, but a voice that can reference the evocative beauty found in the pipes of both Patti Smith and Judee Sill. [Jul 2018, p.59]