Rampen feels more expansive than much recent output – it’s certainly longer, but its panoramic character is neither purely durational nor new for the band. Their affinity for a kind of psych folk balladry has been clear since at least as early as their covers of Lee Hazlewood’s “Sand” (1985) and Bonnie Dobson’s “Morning Dew” (1987). Rampen calls both to mind, but the work it’s most consistent with is 1996’s Ende Neu, an album of latent possibilities in the pit of a creative block. [Jun 2024, p.48]

Orchestras must be the greatest album from a jazz composer since the glory days of Gil Evans. [Jun 2024, p.64]

“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]

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

Finlay Clark and David Kennedy ride a similar wave to improv duos like 75 Dollar Bill or Orcutt/Corsano, recalling their own thrilling work on 2020’s Fast Edit. The sliced mayhem of that set is missing here: instead, the group seem to have spent the years working on stitching themselves ever more tightly together. [Jun 2024, p.58]

Despite their brevity, each track articulates a complete piece; they’re eventful miniatures, not sketches. But while they are sufficiently eventful to engage, the lack of someone to play off of deprives this music of the sense of an emotional stake that arises from White’s decisions to challenge or facilitate someone else. [Jun 2024, p.57]

Funeral For Justice comes a step closer to channelling an authentic Mdou Moctar live experience. The title track wastes no time to demonstrate the unfettered power on tap, bursting from silence into a series of electrifying riffs and fervent claps, never letting up. [Jun 2024, p.53]

Timeless and considered, Lives Outgrown is a complete, but still complicated, portrait of the intersection of grief and life. [Jun 2024, p.50]

Though some of the genre mixing does feel abrupt rather than fully integrated – for all its charms, “Asha The First” is a bit overstuffed – the album largely works, unified by Washington’s unwavering vision and exploratory spirit. [May 2024, p.58]

“Working The Ditch” and “Smiler” sound like they could come from the same sessions as Melvins’ 1993 major label debut Houdini. But there are atypical twists in “She’s Got Weird Arms”, whose new wave-ish verses are broken up by cascades of bug-eyed dissonance and “Allergic To Food”, which reminds this listener of “Forkboy” by Al Jourgensen and Jello Biafra’s side-project Lard with the tempo lowered to mid. [May 2024, p.50]

The acoustic guitar led instrumental “Underwater City” being an exemplary diversion into acid folk. Elsewhere “Re-generate” and “The Black Sea” are a couple of highly enjoyable (albeit slight) space jams, and exit track “Stargazers” regrettably bails out just when it starts to take off. [May 2024, p.60]

Something In The Room She Moves feels impossible to completely pin down. [May 2024, p.52]

Lines like “History repeating itself” and “She never lost hope/When life was so hard” feel a bit generalised – the sentiment might have benefitted from a more nuanced or poetic approach. Overall however the decision to give the heroic and celebratory a wide berth is a sound one, making way for something much darker and more unsettling – a reminder that doing the right thing in times of widespread fear and conflict is seldom easy. [May 2024, p.49]

Akoma is unpredictable without any recourse to smartarsedness, Jlin keeping everything sounding fresh and spontaneous, as though both she and the listener are on a journey of innovation and discovery. [Mar 2024, p.48]

Its ten tracks are heady, contemplative, spacious with a sense of impending loss. [Mar 2024, p.56]

Walls Have Ears is a postcard from Sonic Youth in their salad days, with newly recruited drummer Steve Shelley cementing a core line-up that would endure until disbandment 26 years later. [Apr 2024, p.75]

“Dreamfear” sticks to the artist’s more conventional penchant for collage-style dance music. .... “Boy Sent From Above” is less convincing, clumsily layering Auto-Tuned vocals over the kind of schmaltzy synth one might hear in pop outfits like Yazoo. [Mar 2024, p.54]

Despite the sonic shifts – from grinding electronic roars to manipulated vocal samples and field recordings to shimmering harp to desolate piano – it remains unified, because of Ayewa. [Mar 2024, p.50]

Hard edged synths and massive, crunchy beats lend righteous swagger to Gordon’s bleary guitar squalls and jetlagged sprechstimme. [Mar 2024, p.46]

The sounds can seem a bit insubstantial when compared to his earlier work, like 2018’s Soil, where serpent angled to suffocate the listener in raw emotion. But he eventually finds a nice groove that yields rewards. [Mar 2024, p.59]

It’s gorgeous stuff, but whether the future she imagines is entropic or hopeful, it’s hard to say. [Mar 2024, p.57]

I dig a conceptual framework but to be honest my enjoyment of Rooting For Love has little to do with earthbound concerns and everything to do with sheer escapist pleasure in form and grain. [Mar 2024, p.52]

All the ingredients required are present: sonic invention, surprise, risk taking, fun and adventure. [Mar 2024, p.56]

The music is gentle but ominous, and it’s hard to be sure which impression they want to linger. “Read The Room” and “Teleharmonic” are more conventional rock songs; the former in particular could have come off any 21st century Radiohead album. [Mar 2024, p.52]

Although this record is Rhys’s most polished to date, he does squeeze in moments of strangeness – subtle and paired down, bubbling beneath lush production and melodic arrangements. [Mar 2024, p.52]

An air of devotion does indeed hover over this music, filtering through the stately intonation of Anima Brass and the a cappella singing of The Macadam Ensemble, as well as the quiet concentration of Malone’s own playing. Yet it emanates not from the rarefied air of religious sentiment, but from the composer’s passionate dedication to sound itself, and her respect for its potential capacity to realise, as the title of the concluding piece puts it, “The Unification Of Inner & Outer Life”. [Mar 2024, p.50]

This is an overgrown jungle of music; ideas bury one another, making it all the more striking when a pure, clean line manages to weave its way through the tangle and rise, like a flower turning to face the sun. [Mar 2024., p.46]

[“Vapours”] is brilliantly executed and, in places, genuinely frightening. Yawning drones and hissing percussive swells open the gates to chaos in “Of Shadow And Substance”, an epic 21 minute churn of layered tape loops, cello and bass strings, harp and percussion. .... The piece is more haunted and atmospherically dense than its predecessor, however both pieces share a remarkable sense of immediacy.

It’s one of the most vibrant, purposeful rock records of the year, as Ambro balances the sickly weariness of this day and age with a triumphant jubilation of simply being alive. [Dec 2023, p.54]

With unobtrusive, yet telling contributions from friends including Meg Baird, The Cure’s Lol Tolhurst and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, she conjures up a bittersweet sense of location and changing times through six pieces that are subtly complementary, in their character and impact, meriting comparison to the finely nuanced ambient soundtracks of Angelo Badalamenti. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.96]

It’s a startling new sound she has here, featuring voices of an unplaceable vintage, piano, bells and chains that carry centuries’ worth of dust and shadow, the songs a distorted and twisted take on gospel that’s sometimes slurred like a warped record, sometimes scarifyingly stark and always tightroping between redemptive faith and avant garde oddity. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.92]

Gabriel’s not trying to be clever here, he’s being sincere. And because I favour savoury over sweet, I can strongly recommend the Dark-Side Mix which has more room to breathe, a fatter bottom end and weirder edges all round. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.84]

This worthy sequel to XXX is the first release since 2011 to offer a convincing portrait of Brown as a wholly realistic character. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.81]

Where Vernon’s album [For Emma, Forever Ago] registers like a melancholic exorcism of listless youth and failed relationships, Bachman does not engage in that kind of soul searching, though he elicits a similarly potent emotional response. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.77]

It’s all well played and lusciously presented, and if you’re meditating to the album, little here will disrupt your vibe. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.77]

Aesop’s penchant for storytelling – particularly on “100 Feet Tall” and “Aggressive Steven” – is still incredibly engaging, delivering a fraught narrative that touches on mental health, exploitation of the vulnerable and human responses to corporate stimuli. [Jan/Feb 2024, p.77]

Most tracks feature piano and vocals in a mix of essentialised South African stylings. A highlight is the simple, lilting hymn “Nomayoyo”, with Ntuli’s gentle, breathy vocals. “Lihlanzekile” is a quietly rolling piece of melancholia. [Dec 2023, p.58]

Each piece might be filled with personal meaning to the artist, but they all leave enough space for listeners to reflect on their own worries. The transition between the noisy, illusory interlude “[ A Backlit Door]” and the understated beauty of “Haruspex” is an especially poignant moment on an album rich with them. [Dec 2023, p.54]

The About Group, which included Hayward and Alexis Taylor from Hot Chip, tried with some degree of success to square the circle of song and free improvisation, but Abstract Concrete’s embellished structures feel more natural and no less imaginative. [Dec 2023, p.43]

“Airavata” falls into kitsch, with Atwood-Ferguson on electric guitar and violin/viola. The album’s often better than that, however. .... In all, a mixed picture. [Dec 2023, p.42]

A combination of versatility (Lucas is both singer and multiinstrumentalist) and judicious use of the recording studio makes Vanishing Twin’s fourth artist album devoid of voids. It’s perhaps their best release to date. [Dec 2023, p.52]

Listened in sequence, the nine cuts are like chapters of a hike through a black pine forest, where the air is sharp and time stands still. A sense of foreboding makes way for desolation, ultimately unearthing liminal pockets of awe. [Dec 2023, p.52]

Butler offers seven tracks whose energy swings between chaotic and cool. [Nov 2023, p.62]

A striking collection of shadowy electronic soul. [Nov 2023, p.62]

With Return To Archive, the balance is just right – this gets nearer to sound art. [Nov 2023, p.52]

On The Comeback Kid Marnie Stern has returned bolder, brighter and stranger than ever, an artist in complete command of her idiom. [Nov 2023, p.51]

A band aware of where they’ve been but also reconnected and plotting a future. [Nov 2023, p.46]

In terms of idiosyncratic yet thoroughly danceable electronic music, Cunningham remains nearly peerless. [Nov 2023, p.46]

The Pyramids may not be breaking new ground here, but Afro Futuristic Dreams is arguably the best thing the reunited group have created. [Nov 2023, p.46]

The grooves, textures, feel and playing here are immaculately realised but the unique way this band put together what they can do makes it, as ever, way more than just retro-psyche. Perhaps their best, most fully realised record yet. [Oct 2023, p.56]

This album will be warmly welcomed by On-U Sound and reggae fans everywhere. [Oct 2023, p.57]

The Patience is a little less introverted [than 2021's Elephant In The Room], looking beyond the shutters of lockdown, and feels like Jenkins is maturing into an artist who is aware of how his frustrations need to breathe, wait (hence the title) and take time to coalesce. It’s his best music since his early mixtapes, and certainly his best official album since 2018’s remarkable Pieces Of A Man. [Sep 2023, p.57]

Everything here is balanced in a way known to collectivist jazz but unknown to egotist pop, and it makes for something refreshingly human, engagingly communal and ultimately convivial. [Oct 2023, p.56]

There are arrangements within this album that compel due to the precision and control exerted over the sound design. Lopatin creates earworm upon earworm that seem to spiral into each other. As always, however, it seems as though he is holding back – I wish he would give in more to the stupidity teased at the beginning of “Plastic Antique”, where he uses a delayed, plodding synth to introduce the track. This reticence permeates the release, adding a layer of alienation. [Oct 2023, p.50]

It’s a joyful noise, for sure. [Oct 2023, p.50]

While Haram was a bit heavy on the neo-noir vibes, Test Strips bustles with dynamic turns, and guests inspired to step out of character. [Oct 2023, p.51]

The album cuts across a plethora of genres, refusing to be static. “La Vacanza” and “Sublime” completely submerge you into this dream state, slowing down, giving a reprieve from the increasing intensity. [Sep 2023, p.56]

An account of stifling domesticity plays out over a propulsive 4/4 rock beat and swirling woodwinds, which serve to evoke how, in spite of everything, she felt “electric, alive, spirited, fire and free”. .... Testament to the subterranean efforts to prevent this woman’s story from being forgotten. [Oct 2023, p.52]

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]

Atlas is entirely ambient, a slipstream that moves in slow motion using dense atmospheres to confuse the listener, who is only momentarily permitted to take a specific position. The closing composition “Earthbound” guides us back towards the ground, but any sense of spatial awareness is already too skewed and you are left to wade your way through the remnants of sonic fog. [Sep 2023, p.56]

Protect Your Light, recorded at the late Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in New Jersey, is the group’s warmest work yet. [Sep 2023, p.57]

Its 16 tracks are vignettes of memory and emotion, which see her thoughtful production informed by IDM, glitch and electronic emo. True to the album’s concept, there's a charming bedroom maximalism. .... Lovely, affecting record. [Oct 2023, p.48]

Bird Machine is not a revelation, but it can be a joy. [Oct 2023, p.54]

It’s great to hear “Starfield Road” and other tracks from Sonic Youth’s neglected post-Dirty albums. But it’s the deep cuts – like the stunning “I Love Her All The Time” and the closing “Inhuman” – that really drag you back. [Oct 2023, p.66]

She’s not one to let ideology or commercial realities kill her sense of uninhibited playfulness. So the scorching “Balloons” with her withering take on white fans buying Black trauma is followed by the flirtatious “Boomboom”, buoyed by the same hunger, the whole even more than the sum of its individually magnificent parts.

“Playing Chess” brings us to a smug, detached and ever so slightly creepy close. Big set pieces aside, however, there are gems aplenty amid the dross, from his rapport with Burna Boy on the menacing “Masculine” to a rare moment of meditative vulnerability wondering “Crazy how a murderer used to be a cuddler” on “Comeback”. [Oct 2023, p.60]

Tasteful pedal steel from Lanois gives a gentle country inflection to cuts like “Arajghiyine” – there’s a neat dovetailing here between two desert musics – but Tinariwen’s refined nocturnal heaviness reigns unchallenged. [Oct 2023, p.60]

The 27th OSEES album is their most synthheavy yet, but those Blurt-like grooves are still in place and the songwriting is still tight as a gnat’s chuff on a record that in typical Osees style ranges all over the shop from new wave to skronk to punk to disco. [Oct 2023, p.56]

She’s done it again but, as ever, differently. [Oct 2023, p.56]

A perfectly pleasant pop record that at its best recalls the likes of Glassjaw (“FKA World”) and Hurl. [Oct 2023, p.56]

The most triumphant volume in the series, an at times nearly orchestral realisation of Branch’s unique compositional vision. It’s a shame there won’t be further volumes, but this caps off one of the great catalogues in 21st century jazz. [Oct 2023, p.46]

A set of songs syruped in late 1960s and early 70s pop and rock nostalgia, yet still manage to sound unique. [Sep 2023, p.64]

Combining live ensemble performances by an 11-piece instrumental group, string quartet and four vocalists, with brief AutoTuned solo interludes, this is above all, a collective music. [Sep 2023, p.60]

This batch is a collection of film and advertising themes that stretch the limits of library music. “See The Cheetah”, credited to The Big Game Hunters, would have had all the kids frugging at a 1990s easy listening club. Best of all is “Moon Journey”, Garson’s symphony of tootling chugs, zaps, bloops and blasts that scored the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing on CBS News. [Sep 2023, p.66]

If narcoleptically bland neo-soul is your bag, you’re in luck. A parade of guest singers and rappers do nothing to inject any interest. [Sep 2023, p.69]

If Magic 2 reveals that Nas can definitely still rap, it also continues his unfortunate run of uninspiring production choices. There are enjoyable moments, like the 50 Cent assisted “Office Hours”, the ominous string driven force of “Motion”, and the mesmerizing penmanship on “Slow It Down”, but overall the album falls short for an artist of Nas’s stature. [Sep 2023, p.68]

Earl Sweatshirt and billy woods, who kick off the proceedings with the intoxicatingly smooth “RIP Tracy”. MIKE and Sideshow offer up my personal favourite with “Bless”, and Boldy James teams up with TF on the moody “Trouble Man”. [Sep 2023, p.67]

From the trancelike undercurrent moving through “Bird On A Wire” and “Ghosts Of People” to the solid punk attack of “2020 Vision” and “Tout Est Meilleur”, the album is testament to Bush Tetras’ resilience. [Sep 2023, p.64]

Animals is a riotous, communal affair that doesn’t so much straddle the line between hiphop and jazz as wrestle with both traditions and emerge with something grand. [Sep 2023, p.60]

Ultimately the digressions charm and gel thanks to the generosity of Freedia’s performances, marshalling us through dance manoeuvres in service to the communal heart of bounce. [Sep 2023, p.52]

A smorgasbord of bittersweetness, with yearning pads providing a translucent bed for snatches of fragmentary counterpoint. [Sep 2023, p.50]

Harps and synthesized beats all have a home here; and it feels futuristic in a way that reminds me of Ursula LeGuin and Todd Barton’s Music And Poetry Of The Kesh: synthesizer based folk music as the imagined legacy of a future indigenous culture. [Sep 2023, p.67]

The album’s stylistic breadth and the cinematic sweep of its production add up to a more polished version of the anthemic, collaborative sound cultivated on the tour, heard on his 2020 Live At Le Guess Who? 2018 album. [Aug 2023, p.51]

A definite mixed bag, Pink Bikini is best when its songs feel fully formed in their own right, rather than semi-scripts set to music. [Aug 2023, p.56]

A delightfully disorientating new missive from David Thomas and his band of talented reprobates. [Aug 2023, p.62]

I consider 2018’s Digital Garbage one of their finest albums and the fact that Plastic Eternity doesn’t quite measure up to its scorching brilliance is understandable – few records do. This one is looser, less wound-up and perhaps a little less cohesive. But it is always, always nice to have them back. [Aug 2023, p.62]

The results are a little underwhelming. Lyrical themes are repeated throughout the album and the feeling that something is missing compared to the projects that came before is hard to ignore. This might be due to having become accustomed to hearing Mike as part of a duo; but also that since 2012 he has been rapping over El-P's beats, which are a big part of RTJ's appeal and an effective platform for his vocals. [Aug 2023, p.54]

A welcome return from Baxter Dury, as he turns his gaze to the past to offer up a typically wry dissection of his upbringing and his formative years. [Aug 2023, p.50]

Funky Nothingness is, in any case, an enjoyable addition to his extensive discography. It may not disclose some previously hidden dimension, or even pursue the experimentation with overdubbing that gave Hot Rats its particular character, but Zappa’s sheer love for music and the playing of it, the insatiable essence of his artistic libido, oozes from the grooves. [Aug 2023, p.74]

Held up against the 6Music conveyor belt of sprechgesang wannabes, however, the group’s debut album resembles both a nod to the past and an accomplished piece of work in the context of now. [Jul 2023, p.52]

Riveting. .... The lucidity behind every message on My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross is arresting, as it is drawing from a well of pure emotion that can be comprehended in full. [Jul 2023, p.48]

A necessary record, and a thoroughly compelling one. [Jul 2023, p.51]

There’s a consistent low level sense of discomfort, or of familiar sounds or words taking on bizarro parallel forms. Lyrically, the album is enigmatic, full of personal mythologies, and swings between the divine (Jesus, Elvis) and the domestic (schools, peanut butter sandwiches). The song titles are a puzzle of repeated words and variations of phrases, like a secret language in plain sight. All over the album are sounds that can’t easily be identified, or that sit in between recognisable timbres. [Jul 2023, p.52]

There are plenty of surprises on Bright New Disease, and much to admire. Joined together, the essences of each band are recognisably present, their unique flavours seemingly intensified and emboldened by the other. Enjoyably diverse and satisfyingly coherent. [Jul 2023, p.48]

The Omnichord Real Book isn’t for Me’shell Ndegeocello new jacks or the musically light hearted, but for listeners who aren’t afraid of taking a musical journey with no straight path. [Jul 2023, p.58]

Both NV and Deradoorian maintain their musical identities but balance each other’s urges with concision to the point where the record emerges as a holistic, kaleidoscopic transmission from a duo at play with each other and with the possibilities conjured by their shared will. [Jul 2023, p.51]

Bores are in the minority and easily avoided, the exquisitely curated majority impress both in isolation and together as kaleidoscopic wonder. An unlikely joy. [Jul 2023, p.58]