Here is the latest Music News from Rolling Stone Magazine.
Love You to Death
“Nobody hurts you like me,” Tegan and Sara sing on the opening track from their eighth album. It’s a twist on a classic pop sentiment — a little sadistic, a little sly – floated over glistening disco synths and rising-tide drum burble, and it’s a perfect T&S moment. The Canadian…
Rita Wilson
Rita Wilson is best known as an actress and producer (as well as the wife of Tom Hanks), but her 2012 debut as a singer, AM/FM, was a strong set of classic pop and country covers that showed off her Broadway-steeped vocal chops. Wilson’s second album, recorded in Los Angeles and Nashville with…
Paging Mr. Proust
History repeats itself with the latest set by the Jayhawks, a band built on the Everly-cum-Burrito Brothers vocal harmonies of Mark Olsen and Gary Louris that, when Olsen departed in the Nineties, went from baroque country rock into rangier pop-rock territory. After his one-off return for 2011’s Mockingbird Time, its Louris’ show again…
Collective Sigh
If vulnerability had a sound, what would it be? Does being unguarded always mean being meek and unassuming? Or do the vulnerable have some fight in them? In their debut LP, Philadelphia noise-rock duo Pinkwash bare their teeth as powerfully as they bare their wounds. Inspired by the loss of…
Everything’s Beautiful
Pianist Robert Glasper has spent the past ten years decorously disassembling whatever walls folk may imagine separate the romantic funk of modern R&B from the abstract truths and monster chops of modern jazz. This not-having-two-effs-to-give quality alone renders Glasper a qualified son of Miles Davis and the ideal cat to aid actor/director/screenwriter/producer…
Black
Like a two-sided Lost Weekend, emotional – and literal – darkness is at the troubled heart of the first half of Black, Dierks Bentley’s adventurous 21st century take on cheating songs and the reclamation of love, which marks the most fully satisfying of the country superstar’s LP’s since 2010’s brilliant…
7/27
A lot has happened in the nearly 16 months since Reflection, the giddy, explosive debut from these five X Factor vets. Justin Bieber and OMI triumphed with the perpetually chilled feel of so-called “tropical house,” Rihanna and Drake brought Billboard chart-toppers closer to dancehall music, Fetty Wap turned hip-hop into a melodic taffy-pull and Missy…
Rest in Chaos
A few years ago, country-folk road-warrior Todd Snider abandoned his acoustic guitar and formed a new supergroup – Hard Working Americans – with veteran instrumentalists from the jam-band scene. Their 2014 debut was a surprisingly pointed post-Occupy covers collection centered around working class consciousness. The follow-up Rest in Chaos, with its dozen original songs, is the…
Teens of Denial
On “The Battle of Costa Concordia,” Will Toledo borrows verses from British pop singer Dido (her 2003 hit “White Flag”) to frame his angst, just like another wordy white boy before him. On “Stan,” released when Toledo was eight, Eminem fretted over a jilted fan’s anger; here, Toledo frets over…
Good Times!
The Monkees’ first album in nearly 20 years is also their best since the Sixties – to be precise, since the Head soundtrack in 1968. (Sorry, Instant Replay diehards.) It’s a labor of love – not just for the three surviving lads, but for all the Monkeemaniacs pitching in, headed by producer Adam Schlesinger (from Ivy and Fountains of Wayne), who contributes the gem…
If I’m Honest
Blake Shelton’s tenth studio album is his first since divorcing country music queen Miranda Lambert and subsequently taking up with his fellow coach from The Voice, Gwen Stefani, who duets here on the simmering “Go Ahead and Break My Heart.” It can be tempting to hear Shelton’s new breakup songs – the…
Day of the Dead
This five-plus hour, 59 track Grateful Dead tribute album is a monument of living history – an image of their golden road branching out endlessly. Curated by Brooklyn indie-rock luminaries the National, it conspicuously slights the Dead’s jam-band progeny to stake out more interesting claims and find richer connections – like 67…
Dangerous Woman
Pop costume-changer Ariana Grande has had seven Top 10 hits and we’re still no closer to figuring out who she wants to be. Is Grande still the retro-minded melodicist of “Bang Bang”? Is she still the house diva pulsing along with Zedd on “Break Free”? Still the hip-hop party rocker…
I Still Do
Eric Clapton’s 21st century output has been erratic, but his best efforts have come from root-tending: his latter-day B.B. King collaboration Riding With The King, the mid-00’s Cream reunion and Robert Johnson tribute, the late ’00s tour with Blind Faith kin Steve Winwood, the 2014 J.J. Cale homage. Clapton’s latest follows…
Fallen Angels
Dylan plumbs his good ideas fully: consider the mid-’60s rock’n’roll speed-trial of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde On Blonde, or his fin de siècle roots trilogy Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times. So it’s unsurprising that Fallen Angels continues his Great American Songbook foraging via songs made famous by…
Coloring Book
Kanye West called The Life of Pablo a gospel album. But the new mixtape-LP from fellow Chicagoan Chance the Rapper (who had a major appearance on TLOP’s “Ultralight Beam”) truly lives up to that promise. Coloring Book is the richest hip hop album of 2016 so far. Gospel choirs are…
White Hot Moon
Michigan shoegazers Pity Sex have outgrown the high melodrama of their emo-tinged 2012 EP Dark World. Their latest finishes a turn towards dispassionate Nineties alt rock nostalgia that began with their soupy 2013 debut, Feast of Love. The band has never sounded so desolate, or more distinctly themselves. Comparisons to My Bloody Valentine abound, Pity…
Hopelessness
“It’s an American dream” coos the transgender artist formerly known as Antony, on “Execution,” a spangled pop jam about state-sanctioned murder delivered over silvery percussive stabs and synth builds. It may leave you uncertain whether to dance or collapse in tears, which is the operative dichotomy of an extraordinary record…
A Moon Shaped Pool
For a Radiohead record, everything about the journalistic rush to judgment dictated by short-notice releases in our shoot-first media economy feels wrong, corrupt, diseased. That’s especially true for A Moon Shaped Pool, whose launch – that goofy word, as if LPs were space ships! – began with the band circulating snail…
The Colour In Anything
For a guy who specializes in quiet, forlorn music, James Blake can deliver quite an emotional wallop. Though he started out as a star of the London electronic avant-garde, his ability to mix downtempo dubstep textures with gospel-leaning piano balladry has won him writing credits on Beyonce’s Lemonade and the…
Ripcord
Not everyone wants to hear Pitbull shout “Mr. Worldwide!” in the middle of a country album. But the genially party-crazed Cuban rapper sounds right at home on the chirpy, margarita-doused “Sun Don’t Let Me Down,” assembled by disco great turned superproducer Nile Rodgers and pop-country trackmaster busbee. The rest of…
Detour
Aging rock and pop stars often seek a late-career safe harbor in country music, but 62-year-old Cyndi Lauper tackles the genre with characteristically daring eccentricity. Rather than dully respecting the vintage material she covers here, much of which dates back to the Fifties, she dotes on it, downplaying neither her…
Cloud Nine
The winkingly named genre “tropical house” was the sound of dance music in the summer 2015 – a languid pool party fantasia of vaguely Caribbean percussion, chirpy digital panpipes and a permanent license to chill. But while the Felix Jaehn remix to Omi’s “Cheerleader” and Justin Bieber’s “What Do You…
Views
The best thing you can say about Drake on Views is the worst thing, too: He’s a lightweight. That description suits his breathtaking nimbleness in switching between flows, intonations and genres; his fleet-footedness adapting to, and jettisoning, passing trends; his ear for killer stripped-down beats and his stunning economy when crafting hooks…
Honey
British soul rarely sounds this turned up. UK chart-topper Katy B’s third album is an ambitious collaborative effort featuring some of the biggest and buzziest producers around. Effortlessly moving between genres, she makes sure to put an R&B stamp on each song, keeping all the opposing styles and approaches from veering into…
Lemonade
What does it mean for Beyoncé to drop a new surprise album on the world within days of a giant like Prince leaving us? It’s a welcome reminder that giants still walk among us. Lemonade is an entire album of emotional discord and marital meltdown, from the world’s most famous celebrity; it’s…
The Ship
For more than four decades, beginning with 1975’s Discreet Music, Brian Eno’s solo works have presented a universe of sound frozen in slow motion, melting to reveal and revel in new layers of dreamlike impressions. Eno redefined minimalism with his 1978 LP Ambient 1: Music for Airports and on nearly…
Always Strive And Prosper
On “Rebirth,” a standout moment from his second album, ASAP Ferg makes his mission clear: “Now that you’re no longer a lord that’s trap, you have graduated to the Hood Pope.” The follow-up to his acclaimed 2013 debut Trap Lord sees the Harlem rapper open up with more honesty, humor…
Person A
For their fourth album, Alex Ebert and his hippie-vibes collective shambled to New Orleans, fusing light psychedelia with lighter R&B and jazz touches for music that often goes down like acid-spiked gumbo. Songs are as gaping as the seven-minute dashiki-ragtime reverie “Hot Coals,” and as campfire-warm as “The Ballad of…
Horses: Live at Electric Lady Studios
Patti Smith’s Horses: Live at Electric Lady Studios doesn’t sound like a live album, and that’s a good thing. Too many concert recordings sound surprisingly flat. Even the most adventurous band can suffer from an audio engineer sticking mics in front of the amps and then leaning back while the tapes roll,…
Lukas Graham
Balancing old and new-school soul with Bruno Mars panache, this Danish singer’s debut is a fine argument for pop optimism. His string-buoyed hit “7 Years” collapses Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” into the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four” for a life-journey meditation. “Drunk in the Morning” is a piano-and-brass-driven booty call…
A Cure for Loneliness
If you’ve been praying for Peter Wolf to drop a bluegrass remake of his J. Geils Band classic “Love Stinks” – congratulations. The man heard you. It’s just one of the welcome surprises on the Woofa Goofa’s superbly rugged new solo album, rambling through various strains of roots music, yet…
Human Performance
Even in an absurdly abundant time for brilliant young indie bands, Parquet Courts approach their jittery art-punk guitar buzz with a playful sense of adventure that sets them way ahead of the pack. The Brooklyn-via-Texas dudes have built a fervent following in the past few years by indulging their whims….
The Hope Six Demolition Project
PJ Harvey’s ninth solo album is a set of folk and blues op-ed journalism – following an activist impulse for this usually inward-looking artist that began on her last album, 2011’s Let England Shake. “Now you see them, now you don’t/Faces, limbs, a bouncing skull,” she sings against rushing acoustic guitars, braying sax…
Junk
M83’s Anthony Gonzalez has always had a flair for the cinematic. But after drafting 15 years worth of synthy film scores for the conventionally-attractive young adults of his fantasies, Gonzalez found more down-to-earth inspiration for his band’s latest, mining his childhood memories for musical influences. What emerged is a semi-autobiographical work, flippantly titled…
A Sailor’s Guide to Earth
“I hope you don’t grow up believing that you have to be a puppet to be a man.” That’s Sturgill Simpson, former Navy man, singing to his young son on “Call to Arms,” an indictment of America’s warmongering, media-stupefied culture that ends his spectacular mic drop of a third LP….
Santana IV
Santana IV is a canny title for this deja vu. The album reunites most of the Woodstock-’69 Santana – founding guitarist Carlos Santana, drummer Michael Shrieve, singer-organist Gregg Rolie and percussionist Michael Carabello – with guitarist Neal Schon, a teenage prodigy when he joined in time for the third album,…
The Wilderness
“Tangled In A Dream.” “Disintegration Anxiety,” “Losing the Light.” Explosions in the Sky songs might not have lyrics but it’s never hard to tell where they’re coming from. The expansive Texas band’s instrumental indie-rock sound-sculpting is wrought from a sense of somber apprehension and drift, of possibility coming into focus…
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