This won’t be anyone’s favourite Placebo album, but Never Let Me Go is a good solid effort from a band with a considerably lengthy career behind them that hasn’t dropped a record in nearly a decade. So, it’s good to hear that they’re still around and continuing to push themselves, though perhaps just not far enough to be truly remarkable.

Two Ribbons is a powerful celebration of growth, change, and fidelity. [Dec 2021 - Feb 2022, p.152]

From the funky ’60s flavor of “Las Panteras” to the quasi-prog rock of closer “Lindsey Goes to Mykonos” the whole shebang is very well-rendered and highly entertaining.

Present Tense is a shimmering collection of songs that lead you through an immersive musical maze via a wide range of emotions, and is certainly an album to lose yourself in.

Georgia Gothic mixes the light and shade in equal measure and whilst it may wear its influences on its sleeve, the album deviates from an oft-ploughed furrow and takes things to new and interesting places with skill, guile, and heart.

Whether or not you can stomach this will depend on your schmaltz tolerance. In truth, the sum total of these seven songs is insubstantial. They sound like spring only superficially, the Vivaldi connection isn’t carried past the first song, and Cuomo’s lyrics rarely ascend above cliché.

There is a sonic poetry and timelessness to this music that is hard to quantify. As if it comes from a distant galaxy and doesn’t answer to our concepts of time or space.

Crash, while certainly not for everyone (what is?), is Charli XCX’s own translation of wounds—ahead of its time yet delivered somehow at the appropriate moment.

Warm Chris is a marvel to behold and a joy to listen to in spite of it being shot through with tell-tale signs of brokenness and burst bubbles.

When they all come together, the results are truly special, and Running With the Hurricane offers enticing glimpses of a more settled band, one teeming with soft hope and resolute joy.

Not a sequel as much as the photographic negative to Texas Sun, the EP is a collaboration that works best when it accents each group, finding something neither touch on their own. It can struggle for takeoff, but at times it channels Chaka Khan & Rufus in a hidden wink, a kiss, and the smoothed edges of a desert night.

There’s real heart and soul on this record – the only problem is that you have to get past the cool facade, and have some patience, to find it.

Even within such historical constraints of tradition, the group manages to find new flavors to express, new combinations to offer. The collective’s preservation of our musical past continues to make time skiff and point the way to the future.

Classic Objects is an album of stories and meditations. Jenny Hval treats them like classic objects, ones that deserve care when handled. Yet these objects are far from fragile—bubbling synth pulses and rolling percussions evolve into climactic crescendos and back again.

With such important and epic thematic material, the band’s historically climactic builds and stream-of-conscious writing are sorely missed. But the record succeeds when it gets gritty and passionate.

The album starts off gamely enough towards the same agenda [as 2018's Endless Scroll]. ... Sadly, though, much of the album is given over to high school level observations. [Dec 2021 - Feb 2021, p.151]

If My Wife New I’d Be Dead is a promising debut from an artist who certainly knows how to craft a tune.

Summer at Land’s End, further establishes him and his home recording nom de plume as one of the best “bands” right now in this style. Which is to say shimmering, jangly, and well, kind of “summery” indie-pop if one associates the season with wistfulness and longing and not just cars, beaches, and barbeques.

It’s the sheer power of her songwriting and her intricate arrangements that leave you dazzled and in no doubt that Yanya is a songwriter and musician of immense talent for whom the sky’s the limit.

In their effort to defy categorization by creating sonic pastiches from fragments of widely varying genres, along with their aversion to capitalization, they too often stray from creating compelling processed sound portraits such as “Dark blue” and instead end up with bristly and frazzled sketches, rendering the album as an auditory adventure will neither wow the listener nor will it disappoint.

With The Dream, we see a band dig deep into themselves and mature as artists.

Overall, this is a stunner. Kudos to Superchunk for making another terrific record in the middle of a global pandemic.

Where Forever was inspired by the excesses of Drake et al, wherein an album is more a morass of disconnected ideas, the suitably titled Small World narrows Mount’s vision. But without the creative divergences of its predecessor, you’re left with a fairly forgettable mush, saved only by its brevity.

Unfolding like a rock opera as it traverses the length and breadth of one man’s entire life from the Polynesian Isles to the Tasman Sea and back, angel in realtime is a bold and epic expression of identity, loss, and our need to believe in something greater than ourselves—in the divine—that angels do walk among us, albeit flawed but worthy of second chances.

Though the album might not have any kind of clear fully-formed artistic mantra, it does offer a thrilling, acute feedback loop of a band rapidly reinventing and evolving. In that light, speculation whether Empath will end up as beloved iconoclasts like Deerhoof or something decidedly bigger seems rather moot.

Squeeze tears you down and gives you a hug at the same time, which is no doubt disorienting, but certainly as Ashworth intended. [Dec 2021 - Feb 2022, p.153]

Trupa Trupa continue to be a truly engaging listen, though admittedly you must be in the mood as they are inhabiting such a twisted and paranoid sound, inspired in no small part by the dangerous shift towards fascism by the racist and homophobic Law and Justice party currently ruling Poland.

The Tipping Point is clean, respectfully confident, and actually has a purpose that justifies its subtle grandiosity. [Dec 2021 - Feb 2022, p.154]