Thankfully it offers something much more than the sum of its parts and references. It speaks to our present moment with a yearning generosity and the kind of deep knowing that only comes with age. [Mar 2023, p.51]

One Eleven Heavy have an uncanny knack for sucking in the charms of rock heroes of yesteryear and expelling them with contemporary fancy, with the best results being the hazy drag of “Hot Potato Soup” and the dizzying Allman Brothers-like closer “Three Poisons”. [Nov 2019, p.62]

A few of these ten songs burble with easy rhythms – “Lye” rocks with crunchy, prog rock horns looped by The Alchemist. But overall, the tone of SICK! feels contemplative, slowly unfurling with repeated listens even as Earl crams over 20 minutes of thoughts into the work, with no hooks to leaven the intensity. [Mar 2022, p.43]

Pacific Ocean Blue has aged well, considered over 30 years later. [July 2008, p.46]

There’s still no shortage of the epic thumps and crashes that made Lotic such an exciting prospect in their early days, except now they have more space. Instead of overwhelming a listener with the persistent high of audio ultraviolence, it allows for more subtle dynamics. [Aug 2018, p.57]

It's a genuine pleasure to hear an ensemble this aesthetically united working at such a high level. [Nov 2016, p.61]

The aforementioned “Carpathian Darkness” is an archetype for the album as a whole, thoroughly captivating despite (or because) of its familiarity. [Feb 2021, p.46]

Joyful, heart-warming, brain-fizzing stuff. [Jul 2022, p.50]

Like remembering the loading sound of a ZX Spectrum or the incidental music of Teletext, the feel of these tracks provokes an odd nostalgia for equipment, now superseded and obsolete. [Apr 2019, p.72]

Whether it’s political (the second half looks pretty Brexit: “Aftermath”, “Catastrophe Anthem”, “Living Fantasy”, “Un UK”) or more private, there’s something at stake in every track. [May 2017, p.61]

The whole set has the provisional, unfinished feel of a diary or sketchbook. Some tracks are arranged so sparsely you’d think they’re missing parts; the flipside of this is that For You & I an incredibly personal, even intimate listen. [Nov 2019, p.64]

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]

These days, addressing race and gender in doom metal is considered extreme in itself; with Gas Lit, the duo demonstrate that extremity is not just found through deftly executed blastbeats and downtuned riffs, but within the decision to create music that defies categorisation. [Feb 2021, p.46]

Armed with limited instrumentation and Knapp’s understated vocal, the album’s seven tracks take on a form of storytelling, made alive with synthesized fluttering bat wings, bouts of sax squall and sinewy electronic backbeats. [Jul 2022, p.53]

This pairing actually works almost as well as the one that produced that incredible LP [1964's Folk Roots, New Routes]. [Nov 2011, p.67]

Closer Apart is a dazzling bilingual synth pop album that blends the wavy bass and beats of kwaito and gqom with postgrime and UK funky. [Aug 2018, p.58]

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]

It blends jazz, funk, dub and electronic sounds into a seamless, at times psychedelic whole. [Nov 2019, p.66]

The Sun's Tirade is a master class in restraint and pacing. [Nov 2016, p.64]

The album is consistently fast-paced, a simple but effective trick to amp up its pop thrills. [Mar 2022, p.46]

For those looking to block out the outside world and escape into something soothing and sublime, Past Life Regression will most certainly do the trick. [Jul 2022, p.56]

The musical quality is high, and it’s unusual among the saxophonist’s post-1959 studio recordings in reprising earlier compositions – he mostly featured new material. Coltrane’s rather unvarying dynamic level makes him a less effective film composer than his former employer Miles Davis, with his dramatic mastery – but Trane can’t be blamed for not fitting his music to the action, given that he had little idea what that would be. [Nov 2019, p.69]

This intriguing, relatively mild entente between elegiac melodicism and freeform lyrics has many moments of quiet innovation. [#256, p.63]

Ariel Pink's writing is completely scattergun, but this is what can make it so disarming. [Sep 2012, p.56]

She’s an astonishing live performer, but this is the next best thing and most likely a shoo-in for the best concert recording of 2022. [Mar 2022, p.46]

It's a firm and deliberate withdrawal from the spotlight but one tinged with sharp self-awareness and the humane intelligence that governs all of Bunyan's work. [Sep 2014, p.52]

Six decades later, this 90 minute slab of previously unreleased Monk reveals some strikingly fresh angles on his working methodology. [May 2017, p.68]

“Ablaze”, “Beauty In Falling Leaves” and the monumental title track attain a state of angelic transcendence before crashing solidly back to earth with “The Screen”, a stone cold falling meteor of a song that leaves a crater in its wake, and is probably the heaviest piece of music they have yet produced. [Aug 2018, p.59]

The core line-up of guitarist Buzz Osbourne and drummer Dale Crover, along with the recent addition of Steven McDonald from Redd Kross on bass, attack the vast catalogue of songs with great zeal while making sure to confound the masses in the way we somehow expect. [Oct 2021, p.51]

Best Troubador is a joyous reclamation of song, gentle and true to Oldham’s personal, more delicate style. [Jun 2017, p.60]

Much of the album feels like this – danceable songs with lyrics that urge thought about the state of the world and your own place within it. The most engaging moments are those where Hval lets herself escape into the pure fun of making jams. ... On a quarantine album, a little bit of escapism feels right. Hval continues to ponder philosophy in her writing, but throughout Classic Objects she brings light to her fears and memories too. [Mar 2022, p.48]

It’s hard to know exactly what he’s singing about much of the time, but Dawson’s ardour for the sound of language is irresistible. ... The Ruby Cord is Dawson’s most accessible album yet, but as elaborate as his futuristic visions may be, they remind us of the mess we’re all in the middle of right now. [Dec 2022, p.52]

There’s a beguiling modesty to tracks such as “Fire” and “4th Dimension”, while Yasiin Bey’s understated sprechgesang advising “Kids see ghosts sometimes” on the title track feels plausible, immanent, urgent. [Aug 2018, p.63]

The beginning of the record is slow – “News About Heaven” feels aimless, while the repeating melody of “Pray For Rain” gets tedious after its third or fourth time through – but with “Something Will Come”, the album’s ominous depth comes to light, ushering in a nostalgia that permeates through the final tracks and illuminates the depth of the duo’s sound. [Oct 2021, p.55]

For this album to be worthwhile, Hampson has to do more than revisit his old, gold moments. At the same time, this incarnation of Loop functions partly as a reassessment of what made the sound they landed on so glorious in the first place. Both notions can coexist, and for the most part they do, with loud, laudable abandon. [Mar 2022, p.48]

The eccentricity of the group remains intact, with tightly structured songs. [Sep 2014, p.55]

He just keeps getting better at writhing around in this narrow space of homage and usually lands somewhere just between endearing and brilliant. [May 2013, p.67]

Come Around sees Carla dal Forno’s songwriting taking new shapes and routes, allowing her to pour her cratedigging folk knowledge (showcased monthly in her NTS show) into these open and confident songs. [Dec 2022, p.54]

Nasir comes closest to being an unqualified success. Those still hoping for the return of ruthless adolescent Nasty Nas will be disappointed--although recent allegations of spousal abuse from ex-wife Kelis cast a troubling shadow--but his voice is thick with middle-aged grit and gravitas. [Aug 2018, p.63]

Laced with a shot of self-doubt that has it coming on almost like an electroclash Exile On Main Street. [#244, p.69]

At the heart of the album is a propensity for pop, memorable and simple – but Vanishing Twin are at their strongest when this impulse collides with an equally powerful drive towards texture and sensation – witness the propulsive “In Cucina” for example, or the furtive “Tub Erupt”. [Oct 2021, p.56]

Lighten up and wallow in aural filth as Siifu and Liv.e preach on keeping shit clean. Allow such a space for the exquisitely sloppy breaks and moans to work their magic and sudden bursts of clarity, urgent insights. [Jan 2021, p.87]

This is a synth album of considerable finesse, a soundtrack to imaginary films. [Nov 2016, p.67]

What makes this Johnson’s most compelling album to date is its unexpected emotive clout. In submerging the melodic substance of the songs in rolling drones, it is able to approach almost undetected and slink away with guile. [Mar 2022, p.50]

It's spiritual chamber music, mythopoetically encrusted, captivating and terrifying at the same time. [Sep 2014, p.55]

Oh Death snaps them back on track right from the opening, where drips saturated with fuzz and wah on the sizzling “Soon You Die” are flung forward by a swirling guitar solo. Meanwhile, the group’s vocalist becomes a proper mistress of ceremonies. ... The chiming piano and guitar licks of the closing “Passes Like Clouds” suggest that Goat have finally rediscovered their true selves. [Dec 2022, p.54]

Lamp Lit Prose sparkles with ideas even as it gets its groove on with a more developed version of his electronic R&B album last year. Everything here should be too much but with several albums under his belt, somehow Longstreth can as easily shift from one style to another as run them both at the same time. [Aug 2018, p.65]

It's one of the most personal recordings from any of the three collaborators. [Sep 2012, p.63]

The production on Carnival OF Souls is particularly vivid. [Sep 2014, p.58]

This new album manages to project an even simpler and more accessible surface with extraordinary depths of reference and feeling, even a track dedicated to Begum Rokeya, the Bengali feminist educator and author of the extraordinary genderswitching utopian fiction Sultana’s Dream. [Dec 2022, p.57]

It’s not just that this set feels way more focused and streamlined than the debut; the band have also been sharpened up by incessant live work to the point where Lally and Canty are murderously diamond-tight, and Pirog is flat-out incredible, encouraged by the sheer precision of what backs him to fly into some gloriously discordant fuzzed-up psych and post-punk abrasion. [Nov 2019, p.56]

Once this inward looking tendency was a strength; now it seems safe. [Nov 2016, p.68]

Screen Time is comprised of ambient guitar music, more often than not disinterested in rhythm and more focused on creating a feel and vibe that’s both haunting and cinematic. [Mar 2022, p.52]

Like every track on this EP, it's an incredibly precise and convincing reconstruction of mid-80s electro-pop that is nostalgic with out the obfuscating murk of H-Pop. [Nov 2011, p.70]

The album is the product of a consistent vision, synthesizing hip-hop's beat architecture and sound manipulation with bespoke funk playing. [Sep 2010, p.50]

We find reflective confessionals that are powerful and unexpectedly confrontational in their bareness. This is aloneness as selfcontainment rather than avoidance, honest emotions as seeking communion rather than victimhood. [Aug 2018, p.65]

For whatever accessibility that might be lost in the decision to eschew English lyrics is balanced by a fresh emotional immediacy. Arrangements are sparse and pristine, each sound serving a purpose. ... An album that witnesses Deerhoof at their most vulnerable and volatile. [Apr 2023, p.52]

Some of the tracks are dead ringers for math rock, but in Bishop and Chasny's hands that ornate form attains gut-level thrust. [Sep 2012, p.64]

Susanna's lucid singing shines through the thematic murk, and her instrumental settings are well-defined and ingenious. [Apr 2016, p.58]

Twelve Reasons deals in broad strokes rather than the collection of synapse-sparking details we've come to expect from this consummate trickster. But even in two dimensions, Ghostface is a phantom force to be reckoned with. [May 2013, p.57]

Triplicate’s greatest triumph is to strip cheap sentiment from the poetry by dimming the lacquer of the brass and muting the swagger of the singer, leaving the songs to crackle like revenant vignettes in the wireless of the mind. [May 2017, p.63]

Like her otherwise innovative Couldn’t Wait To Tell You, the 41 minute album has its inevitable longueurs (the abstract “Snowing!”). Otherwise it moves along with purpose and confidence. [Apr 2023, p.56]

Producers of Stranger Things, look no further: we have that second series soundtrack for you. [Nov 2016, p.70]

This is music with character. [Sep 2012, p.67]

While sparse guitar contortions made Both a melancholic record, the expanded palette here expresses a more nuanced but equally disarming range of emotions. [Dec 2022, p.58]

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

A definite return to form, Shook is the sound of a serious group equipped with the gravitas and shades of expression to carry their many ideas. [Feb 2023, p.44]

It’s powerful music for open roads and endless dreaming; once it’s turned on, time is suspended by the limitless layers of unbridled, electric sound. [Feb 2021, p.54]

While bound by established conventions, [it] is nonetheless rich and dazzling enough to soundtrack a saga that exists outside the bounds of normal human capabilities. [Oct 2008, p.60]

Together, these two collections add up to a desolate statement that is naked enough to make listening feel like a act of voyeurism. [Sep 2010, p.62]

This is resolutely a group effort, and freer and more fluid than, say, the proto-Americana of The Grateful Dead's American Beauty. [Sep 2013, p.52]

Each musician adopts a groove-plus approach, adding tunes, subtracting beats and spinning tension building, counterintuitive phrases off the common path, but never tripping it up. [Dec 2022, p.60]

A very nice slab of pan-generic, lof-fi, yearn-pop. [#231, p.59]

Obviously this is well-trodden ground, but even on the brink of corniness, the crunchy satisfaction of Sqürl’s sound makes them extremely listenable. [Jun 2023, p.60]

There's such a freshness to Brett Sparks's music that few comparisons can be made. [#269, p.42]

Though the compilation is vast and the songs hardly bleed into one another--we’re often jumping genres, pivoting off cascading basslines and quickly changing pace without missing beats--there is a level of thematic cohesion here. [Feb 2019, p.66]

It’s up there with their debut as an introduction to the Goat sound – a sound that seems even more pertinent and gloriously openended the further we’ve come from its first explosion. [Sep 2021, p.68]

Across the album woodwinds and brass establish the atmosphere, allowing Callahan to revisit some darker parts of himself with the safety of knowing that everything will be fine. [Dec 2022, p.64]

Touching and beautiful. [#256, p.63]

Clark [is] aiming for what he calls full mind distortion. The title track delivers. [Sep 2012, p.72]

Altın Gün’s unwavering commitment to Turkish psychedelic rock receives a glossy refurbishment here. [Feb 2021, p.60]

One of his purely enjoyable recordings. [Sep 2010, p.68]

Now far from young, and sounding a little tired, his voice is still tender with yearning, and devotees will welcome a further installment in his emotionally ramshackle story. [Sep 2013, p.52]

Just like the great dub albums of the past, this is one that will provoke revisits to the original. [Jan 2012, p.67]

As I spent more time with their tunes piercing through my earbuds, I finally succumbed to their truly infectious ways. [Jun 2019, p.65]

Black Girl Magic is Honey Dijon’s most personal work to date. Over 15 tracks, Dijon collaborates with notable guests like Josh Caffe, Hadiya George, EVE, Mike Dunn and Channel Tres. The energy here is infectious. [Dec 2022, p.64]

There are some satisfying rushes of buzzing sawtooth waves, and luminous passages that hail back to the Workshop’s glory days. But the most successful tracks let their beautiful and odd electronic timbres breathe on their own, rather than adding them as a dressing or a side dish for the piano melodies, or other attempts at constructing a more conventional pop backbone. [Jun 2017, p.65]

[An] excellently focused overview. [Nov 2016, p.70]

LV's South African explorations sound fresh in the current vogue for Footwork and trap rap references. [Sep 2012, p.73]

There’s a brace of humble attempts to get his head round his situation, tracks like “Trauma” and “Oodles O’ Noodles Babies”, brilliantly nuanced performances where Meek wavers on the edge between uncommon restraint and a violent simmer. Jay-Z showing up on “What’s Free” to boast about tax avoidance brings everything back into perspective.

Audet’s obfuscatory impulses only make the album more compelling. [Feb 2021, p.58]

This is a visionary coming into his own. [Sep 2013, p.56]

Dig into the four-to-the-floor derangement of “Lapwing” and the post-rock inflected “First Light” to hear a band seemingly capable of doing anything, yet remaining fleetfootedly themselves throughout. [Jun 2019, p.56]

There is a genuine synergy here. Khruangbin have crafted oneiric Manding inflected backdrops as though they have found what they were looking for all along, and Touré settles into them like he’s just got home. [Dec 2022, p.67]

There's at once a sense that Venice is weightier and more purposeful than its predecessor. [#243, p.56]

His murky but upbeat productions augment this sensation, giving Skelethon a sort of B-boy gothic feel, an old school park jam recreated by Tim Burton. [Sep 2012, p.74]

Song Of Co-Aklan is a more than welcome return from a puckish master of social observation and surreal manifesto: “Let’s Flood The Fairground” indeed. It isn’t a consoling album and its humour is biting at best, but as a way of getting through a bruised and confused new spring, it’s the perfect companion. [Apr 2021, p.52]

McCartney’s infamous whimsy tempered by his refreshed penchant for odd sonic detail (the spectral guitar tangles that trail through “Find My Way” for instance) and an aged voice whose natural erosion is more feature than fault. [Feb 2021, p.58]