Gore
“There’s a strange new godless demon awake inside of me,” Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno sings at the start of the band’s eighth album. But if the lyrics suggest demonic possession, his honey-toned delivery seems more suited to suited to separating a prospective sexual partner from their clothes. It’s a startling…
Next Thing
22-year-old Greta Kline started puting intriguing song sketches online when she was in her teens, slowly amassing a cult following before releasing her promising debut Zentropy in 2014. On Next Thing, Kline, who records with a roving group of collaborators under the moniker Frankie Cosmos, moves from the lonesome bedroom to the cramped garage, updating her cloistered lo-fi aesthetic with a…
Welcome the Worms
“I’ve been fucking high every night / Trying to lose myself again,” Bleached’s Jennifer Calvin tells us on the L.A. trio’s second album, as surfy guitar fuzz and party-crashing snare-snaps push zombified disillusion towards a weird kind of defiance. That tension between entropy and exhilaration, corrosion and confidence, makes Welcome…
Lost Time
The second album from Seattle’s Tacocat’s is full of concise, energetic pop-punk, built on surfy guitars, sharp melodies and the whip-smart feminist wit of singer Emily Nokes. These brief, conversational songs fly by like text messages to a best friend – emoji-laden missives about girl power, cats, aliens, weed and…
Everything You’ve Come to Expect
Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner has been chronicling late-night disaffection for a decade. But he’s come a long way musically from the Monks’ early machine-gun guitar charge. The second album he’s made with buddy Miles Kane as Last Shadow Puppets is drowsily gorgeous, soft-focus California burnout, á la Beck and…
Weezer
The Weezer cult will always rest on the band’s 1996 overshare masterpiece, Pinkerton, where Rivers Cuomo bared his soul about his fears and fantasies, sniffing a teenage Japanese girl’s fan letters and drooling over cello players. Latter-day Weezer fans understandably cherish the myth that Pinkerton was reviled by the adult…
Midwest Farmer’s Daughter
Truth lies in the details – and that goes double for tradition-minded country music, a point Margo Price’s debut makes fiercely. In “About to Find Out,” a Loretta Lynn-styled can of whoopass, it’s the image of a selfie-snapping jackass fast-forwarding the song into the present. In the honky-tonk hangover “Hurtin’ (On The…
Mind of Mine
Zayn Malik has had sex. But he doesn’t just want that fact to be implied in his lyrics or ingrained in his music. The 23-year-old ex-One Direction member wears it like a Boy Scout badge, placing himself between sheets and against walls time and time again. His solo re-introduction is a…
Songs From the Shoebox
On paper, Future Islands side project the Snails might not seem like much of a departure from the band that spawned it, an eccentric Baltimore synth-pop trio that rocketed to viral fame in 2014 on the strength of a riveting Letterman performance. But though the Snails feature William Cashion and Samuel Herring —…
This Path Tonight
Graham Nash was one of the ’60s great can-do optimists. So when the guy who wrote “Teach Your Children” and decreed “we can change the world!” suddenly delivers a public “fuck you” to long-time bro David Crosby and releases a solo LP about a world that “really doesn’t care/if we live or…
Patch The Sky
No cellos, no club music electrobeats, no acoustic guitar breathers, and no light at the end of the tunnel – precious little, anyhow. Just a classic power trio lineup in the spirit of Midwest post-punk juggernaut Husker Du and its barely-sweetened antecedent Sugar, with Bob Mould conjuring the ecstatic rage of his earlier…
Post Pop Depression
There’s a famous early-Seventies Mick Rock photo of Iggy Pop – wild-eyed in a T. Rex -T-shirt, a pack of Lucky Strikes clamped between his teeth – with his arms around David Bowie and Lou Reed: together, the troika who smacked rock & roll out of its hippie daze and…
This Is What the Truth Feels Like
If there’s a moment that sums up why Gwen Stefani is so eternally beloved, it’s the surreal scene from The Voice last fall when she led her team through New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give” in a swirl of confetti. Only Stefani could sound so perky while threatening to…
George Fest: A Night to Celebrate the Music of George Harrison
In the fall of 2014, an expansive group of artists – from Brian Wilson to Butch Walker – got together for two concerts in Los Angeles honoring George Harrison. George Fest is a concert album put on by Best Fest, the traveling tribute-show series that has convened all-star tributes to Bob…
Vroom Vroom
Charli XCX is the rare pop diva who can make an EDM robot character sound more punk than pop. Her four-song Vroom Vroom EP is the perfect snack between 2014’s Sucker and her as-yet-untitled third LP. With Sophie of naifish UK pop collective PC Music producing every track, this quick-hit release unleashes something more…
ColleGrove
In an age where the most acclaimed Southern rap is the emo Codeine mumblecore of Future and Young Thug, an album that combines two of the brashest wiseasses south of the Mason-Dixon is either an unfashionable oddity or fresh breath of salty Borsht Belt air. There’s not a pun too…
Painkillers
After spending a decade singing openhearted confessionals as the frontman of New Jersey punks Gaslight Anthem, gravel-voiced Brian Fallon is turning down his amp for a solo debut full of acoustic ballads and midtempo alt-country songs. Fallon references heroes like James Brown and Van Morrison as he transforms rough old…
Emily’s D+Evolution
Talented jazz musician Esperanza Spalding is best known for snatching the Best New Artist Grammy from the clutches of a young Justin Bieber back in 2012. That year’s experiment, Radio Music Society, transmuted the textures of neo-soul through tricky changes and unlikely arrangements – avant-garde, yes, but ultimately as welcoming…
untitled unmastered.
We’re up to our molars in data-seas of dissonance, and most of us are flipping out, at least a bit. Why wouldn’t our best artists mirror that? In the wake of Kanye’s work-in-progress psychodrama comes this left-field Kendrick Lamar surprise drop – a similarly unfinished-feeling, just as all-over-the-place, yet somehow more…
Star Wars Headspace
Zen master music producer Rick Rubin has played Yoda to countless musicians over the last decades. So he’s the perfect guy to executive produce an album of Star Wars-themed EDM. The possibilities for such a project are pretty limitless, and the best tracks here approach the beloved source material with…
Summertime: Willie Nelson Sings Gershwin
Willie Nelson may be the king of outlaw country, but the LP that made him a household name was Stardust, his quintuple-platinum 1978 set of old-school pop standards like “Georgia On My Mind,” “All Of Me,” and “Blue Skies.” Blue-jeaned badasses might’ve sneered that their Whiskey River-running hero had gone…
This Unruly Mess I’ve Made
Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ 2012 breakout, The Heist, was a heartwarming underdog success story. A true son of Seattle, Macklemore does a fair amount of hand-wringing over his fame on this long-awaited follow-up: The album opens with “Light Tunnels,” which makes winning at the Grammys sound like a winter shoveling…
99¢
“All I want to do is bottle it to sell,” Santigold tells us on the smiling, reggae-inflected tune that opens her third record. It’s a fitting boast from an artist whose stylish mix of dubby hip-hop and neon-tinged New Wave has been used to hawk cars, insurance and Bud Light…
I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It
Hey, what gives, fellas? INXS and Duran Duran weren’t around in 1975. This ascendant U.K. quartet ground their second album in sleek dance rock that often feels like it was sculpted on a gaudy Eighties budget as the bandmates tried hard not to get too sweaty in their aqua-neon sport…
Full Circle
For Loretta Lynn’s first album since 2004’s Van Lear Rose, her startlingly great 2004 collaboration with Jack White and his crew, the iconic queen of no-bullshit country music, now 83, looks more backwards than forwards. Culled from a decade’s worth of sessions and co-produced by John Carter Cash – Johnny’s son, whose…
Dig In Deep
Bonnie Raitt has long been a singer-songwriter’s best friend, a deep-blues interpreter with sublime taste in composers, from Jackson Browne and Randy Newman to the Jazz Age siren Sippie Wallace. Raitt is as bold and sharp on Dig In Deep, made with her longtime road band. She takes sensual charge…
Yes, I’m A Witch Too
Some artists are primarily about the work, others about the ideas. John Cage tilted famously towards latter, ditto his pal and co-conspirator Yoko Ono, whose recent career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art was an impressive reminder. Among those ideas, the 2007 LP Yes I’m A Witch was a…
Livin’ on a High Note
Pairing a veteran singer with next-generation material is a crapshoot conceit, and odds drop when the songs are commissioned instead of curated. But after two Jeff Tweedy-produced LPs did for her what Rick Rubin’s benchmark American Recordings did for Johnny Cash, Mavis Staples takes her comeback higher still with this…
Side Pony
With the title track to Lake Street Dive’s latest LP – surely the greatest coiffure anthem since Willow Smith’s “Whip My Hair” – frontwoman Rachael Price coins a fresh double-entendre for a down-low lover, rhyming “You’ve been in my stable” with “I see you whenever I’m able” while boldly venturing, “Who doesn’t…
Painting With
Avant-pop institution Animal Collective have specialized in ecstatic noise explorations for more than a decade. But their 10th album skips the signature escape-pod reverb washes, speeding up the tempos and shortening the song lengths to come up with the zippiest music they’ve ever made. Animal Collective’s core trio recorded Painting With…
The Life of Pablo
The world has distracted from Kanye West’s creative process – except, as he shows on The Life of Pablo, distraction is his creative process. This is a messy album that feels like it was made that way on purpose, after the laser-sharp intensity of Yeezus. It’s a labored-over opus that wishes it…
Night Thoughts
It’s been nearly a quarter of a century since Suede introduced Brit-pop to the world on a 1992 Melody Maker cover that dubbed them “the best new band in Britain.” The London outfit went on to release a series of U.K. chart-toppers, only to fall victim to changing tastes toward the…
New View
Among midlife indie kids working a sidelong vision of classic-rock ecstasy, there aren’t many doing it with more grace or smarts than Eleanor Friedberger. She’s been at it since the early 2000s – first with her brother Matthew in the Fiery Furnaces, and now as a solo artist – and…
The Catastrophist
Tortoise were matter-of-fact poobahs of a modestly potent Nineties movement dubbed “post-rock,” which was pretty much what their elders called “prog-rock,” but with beats refreshingly prioritized over wanky virtuosity and way fewer proto-Game of Thrones fantasy-fiction lyrics. (In Tortoise’s case, lyrics were largely ditched altogether.) It was an excellent notion…
Adore Life
With its raised-fist cover photo and violent, primal post-punk grind, you’d expect the second album from arty London band Savages to be an anti-everything screed. But their music is driven by emotions that are almost unprecedented in the genre that gave us Joy Division and Public Image Limited: “Love is the answer,” they…
Moth
Brooklyn duo Chairlift have attained the synth-pop holy grail: They’re the Yaz of our time, filling their albums with perfectly sculpted, searchingly lovely tunes wrought from tense, tugging intimacy just as Vince Clark and Alison Moyet did on classic songs like “Bad Connection” and “Only You” 30 years ago. Yet…
Matter
It’s difficult to listen to St. Lucia’s second full-length without thinking of a list of Eighties touchstones: “Home” recalls the high-energy grooves of Prince at his purplest, the synths on “The Winds of Change” sound a little like Madonna’s “Lucky Star.” Ultimately, though, St. Lucia mastermind Jean-Philip Grobler – a…
Malibu
Like Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment or Raury, Anderson Paak is a dreamer and a romantic who blends hip-hop, R&B, rock and soul into a funky world all his own. The Oxnard, California, musician updates the muted grooves of Soulquarians-era landmarks like D’Angelo’s Voodoo with the sweeping, wide-screen ambitions…
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