Tag Archives: music-album-reviews

Necessity’s the mother of invention, and just as U.K. racism gave rise in the late 1970s to the activist, mixed-race Two Tone scene, so has #MeToo informed a new wave of indie-rock. For a culture that likes to fancy itself woke despite an ongoing tradition of sexism and sexual predation, …

Kansas City indie-rock artist Kevin Morby is a secular guy with a spiritual side, and on his fifth LP he thinks deep (and sometimes somewhat less deep) about the nature of religious devotion, tapping a rich lineage of transcendentally-minded musical history. The title track is a rollicking piano number that …

Karen O and Danger Mouse have described their first-ever collaborative albumLuxPrima as a “shared destination,” and by the sounds of it, space is their place. The nine-song LP is a lush journey down the milky way of their rock ’n’ roll sensibilities, meaning a bit of the signature rough-around-the-edges heaviness …

Janis Joplin‘s time in the San Francisco blues crew Big Brother and the Holding Co. was relatively short, only a couple of years — just long enough to record two albums and become an era-defining flashpoint at the Monterey Pop Festival. Their second album, 1968’sCheap Thrills, became an acid-rock landmark …

Yet another lean and excellent project – her sixth in three years – from still-unsigned, still under-the-radar, still not-on-Rap-Caviar Chicago pottymouth Cupcakke. Her style should be irresistible for anyone who’s a fan of vintage cassettes with Parental Advisory stickers or modern bloody-shoe boast badasses, a mix of 2 Live Crew’s over-the-top raunch …

Six years after their brilliant reunion album, Anastasis, Dead Can Dance return with their headiest work to date: a two-act, LP-length meditation on the Greek god of pleasure. This record skews more toward Brendan Perry’s side of the duo, with Lisa Gerrard contributing only the female responses to his music, but …

A wonderful little record that never lets up, piling on unassumingly buzzy fun until you start realizing you might be in the presence of a true power-pop monument. The Beths are from New Zealand, so singer-guitarist Elizabeth Stokes’ accent might make you think of Courtney Barnett a little – especially …

After spending nearly two decades as country music’s most reliable post-Jimmy Buffett escapist, Kenny Chesney has turned to figuring out how to comfortably carve out a role as a respectable mid-career standard-bearer for grown-up universal country,between the distant forty-something nostalgia of 2014’s American Kids and 2016’s unusually meditative Cosmic Hallelujah. …

Four minutes into God Level, 03 Greedo’s sprawling, excellent new album, the Watts rapper cackles: “This is my last episode, season finale.” It’s not the end of the record. At that point, there are still 95 minutes left. But at the moment of this writing, Greedo has already marched to …

Through day ‘n’ night, cruel summers and G.O.O.D. Fridays, superstar button-pusher Kanye West and paranoid android cult hero Kid Cudi have remained thought leaders since they started working together nearly 10 years ago. Kanye’s grain-rubbing résumé in the last decade includes a nine-minute vocoder-prog opus, a minimalist industrial noise suite …