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]

As awkwardly beautiful as much of dark Comedy is, it's such a tricky album that it is a difficult to warm to. [Aug 2014, p.62]

While this collection of songs is indeed tremendously soft, too many vibrations are swept under the rug of Taylor's voice. [Aug 2014, p.58]

The finished product proves too studied and reverent of its sources. [Jul 2014, p.64]

Occasionally it threatens to work. [Jul 2014, p.63]

It's certainly big, but it's less clear if it's clever. [Jun 2014, p.60]

Only one track matches the flaming cannonball energy of their single, "Politicians In My Eyes"; the herky-jerky "North Street," which is as much funk as punk. [May 2014, p.77]

It's hard not to feel that this dense conceptual flotsam is arranged around a lucuna. [May 2014, p.67]

The mirth on offer here is thin fare, for the most part. [May 2014, p.63]

Aside from the odd flurry of inconsequential Afrobeat-inflected guitar, the style of Someday World is middlebrow session fare. [May 2014, p.61]

A sense of cluelessness pervades these songs, as though constructed without considering why or for whom they were intended. [Jun 2014, p.51]

The music tends to come up short of its lofty goals, a fact made more frustrating in the moments that prove that they are capable. [Apr 2014, p.60]

As jazz-inflected triphop goes, it's not even anywhere near as inventive or risky as DJ Spooky's Optometry sounded back in 2002. [Mar 2014, p.60]

Mess is more immediate than the past couple of albums, and in context, more baffling. [Mar 2014, p.63]

This album certainly achieves a kind of elaborated decorative wonkiness, but one wonders, as with Creed's paintings, what there is to return to after the novelty's worn off. [Mar 2014, p.52]

The astounding pressure of emotional ambivalence in Herndon's 2012 debut Movement--what belonged where? with whose porous body should the listener identify?--is half lost on this EP, which feels too sketchy to develop their immanent tension. [Feb 2014, p.56]

As it is, Have Fun With God is never less than listenable but seldom more than vaguely pleasant. [Feb 2014, p.44]

If music is ever really going to change the world, it's going to need more vigour and vitality than this. [Jan 2014, p.66]

Live From KCRW suffers from the stilted atmosphere that plagues most live radio sessions, with the audience, Cave and his Bad Seeds all on their best behavior. [Jan 2014, p.59]

The first part of this milary-concrete triptych is mostly vague interference and Radiophonic Workshop-style wibbling about that towards the end, has developed into discomforting BBC Ceefax music. The middle section is sonically richer... Part three is illbient comedown. [Jun 2013, p.51]

DeGraw's skill for mixing and matching swatches of sound is unparalleled, but without context it becomes much like choosing colours for your living room. [Dec 2013, p.48]

When the beats are sparse he shines, but the album bloats in its middle with too many R&B assisted dramatic gestures and not enough dead eyed and cracked crack music. [Nov 2013, p.66]

This strained affair makes the party rocking simplicity of 2 Chainz or even LMFAO look absolutely artful. Brown's too smart to make music this dumb effectively. [Nov 2013, p.66]

[He] sticks to the basic formula: modernizations of the sort of proto-trap Memphis riot music that defined his early career... but never transcendent. [Nov 2013, p.66]

2 Chainz moves around the sort of eclectic brat selection that Lil Wayne was devouring in the mid-2000s. [Nov 2013, p.66]

One can absorb the enthusiasm while feeling somewhat repulsed by the taste. On occasion, it works. [Nov 2013, p.65]

Surrender To The Fantasy showcases the latest stage yet of their oddly trad transformation, the unkempt electric savagery of their past domesticated to the point of extinction. [Nov 2013, p.56]

The R&B tropes are part of a reassuring past, and the half-there vocals don't add enigma so much as leave the music unchallenged and stick in its old ways. [Oct 2013, p.47]

His concerns are serious--consumerism, race, fame, relationships--but he rarely addresses them with the craft or focus they deserve. [Sep 2013, p.66]

Listening in one session is like wolfing a hurried seven-course meal with post-dinner coffee and is roughly as messy. [Sep 2013, p.65]

There's the sense that the group are holding back a little. Some tracks just don't quite work on a visceral level, as dance or as forcefields of conflicting elements. [Sep 2013, p.51]

Nepenthe pushes the formula to [a] breaking point, where emotional manipulation crosses over into cloying, calculated and claustrophobic. [Aug 2013, p.53]

In its favour, the album is immaculately realised, with a chromium production sheen that Lustmord imitators can only dream of. On the minus side: the fact that the album's polish makes it sound safe and predictable. [Jul 2013, p.69]

Some of street rap's brightest new talents appear--Chief Keef, Young Thug, Rich Homie Quan--and wear their Gucci Mane influence proudly, each in their own distinctively warped ways and yet all brimming with exactly the joy that their progenitor has generally lost to age. [Jul 2013, p.68]

Songs like "Brainfreeze" and "The Red Wing" plod more than march, piling on so many competing keyboard layers that the melody blots itself out. Others seem oddly unfinished. Only the two closing ten minute tracks evoke the classic Fuck Buttons widescreen neon pomp. [Jul 2013, p.56]

On paper, it's a strange fit. On record, too. [Jul 2013, p.52]

Half of the songs here are as good as the highs of the first two albums.... Much of the rest is the victim of Madlib's infuriating tendency to leave things in fragments. [Jun 2013, p.54]

Some Say I So I Say Light's uniformity can become a little wearing across 11 tracks. [May 2013, p.52]

The Redeemer, despite its pinpoint sonics, doesn't take the logical next step of offering a moment of reflection or clarity. [May 2013, p.50]

PSB celebrate an idea of fusty Britishness but lack the imagination, intelligence or inclination to interrogate it or in fact add anything at all to the discourse. [May 2013, p.59]

The rest of the album makes the distance between now and (Berlin) then of "Where Are We Now?" painfully evident, a pain heightened by Visconti's failure to convert this collection of session muso workouts into anything memorable. [May 2013, p.55]

Supermigration never quite brings these directions--Air, Lindstrom, Neu!--together though; instead of fermenting their own sound, Solar Bears end up falling into the space in between them. [May 2013, p.66]

There is no shortage of bad ideas on the second installment.... But this ugliness is anchored by a series of largely curatorial successes. [May 2013, p.68]

This particular experiment has left a formerly unpredictable group sounding as though they've been replaced by a bunch of tired retromaniacs. [Apr 2013, p.61]

Rat Farm has only the occasional flash of brilliance. [Apr 2013, p.53]

Nick Talbot of Gravenhurst sings over roughly half the album, but his melodies are about as memorable as weak tea. [Mar 2013, p.64]

The album doesn't wear so well over time. [Mar 2013, p.50]

The tracks are curiously undramatic, punching elements in and out like a demonstration reel. [Mar 2013, p.54].

Its balance of electronic, acoustic and vocal elements, while initially impressive, is soon revealed to be a product of the lack of any forceful musical or textual elements at all. [Feb 2013, p.60]

His arch over-emoting robs his songs of any sense of genuine feeling. [Feb 2013, p.60]

Ashin, in giving so much of himself away, leaves little scope for the kind of mystery that might enable his musical settings to transcend their functional pop status. [Feb 2013, p.60]

Most of this material has a tense, enervating effect, despite the haziness of the sonic palette Field-Pickering favours. [Feb 2013, p.60]

It's another cautious portion of well-made, moderately experimental not-quite-rock. [Feb 2013, p.49]

Ying & Yang, ultimately, just sounds a bit matey. [Nov 2012, p.61]

Accelerator captures a confused, jokey arc of the duo's trajectory that hasn't aged well in the 14 years since its release. [Dec 2012, p.70]

Desertshore is less a report than a dramatisation, an upending of their defiantly aura-less usurping of traditional performance modes in favour of a theatricality that feels more selfconsciously like a big event than the DIY/samizdat style of old.... [The Final Report] fares a little better, though again, it's a shame XTG have framed it in the form of a report.[Dec 2012, p.69]

Alc has already produced better songs for the actual Ghostface. So it is unclear why this album--or the rapper who made it--needed to exist. [Jan 2013, p.79]

Lux is OK, while it's on. But that's all. And that's a shame. [Jan 2013, p.64]

Here, the 70s simulations, artful enough in their own way, are presented straight. The result, sadly, doesn't evoke 70s Italian Horror; it merely makes one think of already-over-familiar period and genre signifiers. [Jan 2013, p.62]

As a collection, Psychedelic Pill is spotty and, at times, sleep-inducing.

The music is immaculately performed and produced, yet lacks the divine spark of inspiration that might elevate it above the status of demonstration reel. [Dec 2012, p.65]

His unfocused ire dominates every inch of space. It's frustrating because the best tracks here deftly whirl together seemingly disparate styles. [Dec 2012, p.61]

As it is, it's a new Godspeed album and it's a good one, but when you have set your standards as high as they have, it can only seem like a failure. [Nov 2012, p.59]

Parts of Dark Crawler are thrilling. But it sounds less like a confident stride forward than a cautious toe dipped into an unpromising future, one eyeball trained wistfully on the past. [Nov 2012, p.66]

Overall, as a listening experience in itself, The Master feels like a retreat. [Nov 2012, p.59]

Until the Quiet Comes is cluttered and schmaltzy. [Nov 2012, p.59]

"STP3/The Killer," "Silent Witness," and "I Come By Night" are exceptions, however--somewhere along the line a spark's been snuffed out. [Oct 2012, p.67]

The jazz moments here are thin, singsongy, almost marcato melodies. [Oct 2012, p.64]

A mixed bag. [Oct 2012, p.62]

Lacking the eldritch weirdness of Actress's music, their faded grandeur somehow feels strangely mundane, despite their inherent beauty. [Oct 2012, p.62]

Another slapdash cash-in from masked rap's last bastion. [Sep 2012, p.60]

The track ["Power Circle"] and the entire album seems to lose its air after he [Gunplay] makes his exit. [Aug 2012, p.59]

The novelty of hearing synths act like drums definitely helps, but the record also contains just what you might look for in any solo improvisation. [Jul 2012, p.65]

It's so sweet and monotonous they should try [naming the album] something instead like Strawberry Ice Cream. [Jul 2012, p.62]

Despite the lack of actual bass frequencies on Advaitic Songs, Om frequently sound weighed down which isn't the same thing as sounding heavy. [Jul 2012, p.61]

More often than not the group sound like they're going through the motions. [Jul 2012, p.57]

Wong knows that to build up this depth of texture he has to restrict the harmonic content, but endless repetition of pentatonic scales played very fast by 100 Fender Tele-wielding Wong doppelgangers loses it lustre as a listening experience some considerable time before the 16th track reaches its conclusion. [Feb 2012, p.68]

Iradelphic often feels lost in a borrowed soundworld. [Apr 2012, p.68]

Urstan can be seen as a remedial effort. [Apr 2012, p.58]

More than half of Pretty Ugly combines vocals prominently into the mix after a style that sometimes flounders in its own ambition. [Mar 2012, p.52]

He's certainly dextrous enough as a rapper to accommodate this musical schizophrenia, bobbing and weaving with a raw aggression that also serves to mask that he has little to say. [Mar 2012, p.69]

There is a resounding thinness to Purple Naked Ladies and its finest moments sound like a collection of scratch tracks from a lost Erykah Badu/Neptunes session circa 1998. [Mar 2012, p.54]

The lyrical intricacy and rhythmic playfulness of old are still there, but an arthritic creakiness creeps in, especially when he indulges in hackneyed poetism and dodgy wordplay. [Feb 2012, p.71]

He's tightened his flow ever so slightly, but the brutal artlessness of his writing and character remains. [Jan 2012, p.69]

Putting it plainly, this stuff sounds really old. The beats are dull, flat and 'blunted' in the least appealing sense. [Jan 2012, p.56]

Sound stretches and stretches without ever threatening to crack, and you start to long for some crude and rude collisions; a belch, a digression, a protest, an accident... [Machine guns blasts in the second half come] too late, and too orderly. [Dec 2011, p. 63]

It's more letdown than meltdown, as veteran drummer Steve Reid runs out steam about halfway through disc two. [Dec 2011, p.70]

There's no bullshit and no nonsense here, but listening to this album,, you might end up wishing that there was. [Dec 2011, p.68]

It sometimes seems too restrained, too polite. [Dec 2011, p.62]

The mood is subdued, the backing spare, meditative, but--as we've become used to with Bush--lacking in any adventurousness of spirit, at points, you could even describe it as late night jazz club tasteful. [Dec 2011, p.52]