Tag Archives: music-album-reviews

In the last decade or two, you generally know what’s coming when you hit play on a new Neil Young record. You know there will be a few sweet lovestruck hymns that sound as if they’re being played in dusty Old West saloons or around campfires. You anticipate the songs …

The latest release from Damon Albarn’s ever-evolving project Gorillaz is one of the most diverse, wide-open, and free-flowing LPs the cartoon band has released in its 20-year history. That’s saying something; Albarn has always proposed Gorillaz as a space beyond and between pop music’s borders, and over the decades everyone …

Ziggy Marley is a global music royal with a deep Rolodex. His latest is a children’s album that, like his 2009 release Family Time, is full of famous friends and very kind vibes and intentions. Marley says he wanted to reflect the spirit of his four-year-old son, Isaiah, and to …

When a band has lasted 44 years, there’s no reason a global pandemic should keep it down. Mekons, the routinely brilliant, never famous punk-folk-country-etc. collective, had planned a session for its new album in April, in Valencia, Spain. When COVID-19 arrived, they cancelled the session but not the album, adopting …

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah and a lot of tact to pull off what bass player-singer-songwriter-producer Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner has over the past decade or so — to be a musician whose work traverses jazz, funk, hip-hop and pop, as well as the kind of artist who can …

Katie Crutchfield has always had a knack for noting subtle shifts in the weather. “I watch you anxiously/You paint it celestial, you paint it serene,” she sang over thrashing guitars on “Poison,” from 2015’s Ivy Tripp, making serenity sound like a death knell. On her latest album Saint Cloud, the …

Eminem has been one of music’s hugest stars for more than two decades, yet over the years he’s increasingly taken on the tendencies of the cult artist — the deepening sense of embattled insularity, the hapless angst, the lack of interest in the genre he once transformed. On his 11th …

Michael Bloomfield was the guitar hero who wasn’t remotely interested in being one. Discovered in the early Sixties by Columbia A&R honcho John Hammond, Bloomfield and his bee-sting guitar became a showpiece of the genuinely street-tough Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Dylan’s gone-electric moment, including “Like a Rolling Stone” and …

Orchestras are indie rock’s new Marshall stacks. That’s fitting on a lot of levels — as a satisfying class-action appropriation of elitist cultural tropes, as a deconstruction of those same tropes, and as an elevation of collectivism over American myths of individualism and exceptionalism that’ve lately been twisted into such …

The culture wasn’t demanding a James-Franco-in-Spring-Breakers-esque rapper-crooner in summer 2015, when “White Iverson” quietly started its months-long climb to No. 14 on the Hot 100. But Post Malone was fruitful, and his smashes multiplied. “White Iverson” (30 weeks on the Hot 100) beget “Congratulations” feat. Quavo (50 weeks) beget “Rockstar” …