Album Reviews

Manu Chao first made a splash in the late Nineties with his fantastic debut solo album, Clandestino, the work of a multilingual, post-modern leftist busker whose music seemed to infuse the everything-at-once sonics of Beck’s Odelay with the spirit of Woody Guthrie, Bob Marley, and Joe Strummer. The title appropriated …

The first solo Future mixtape in eight years, the gritty, immediateMixtape Pluto, lurches in like a relapse, resurfacing the familiar demons that haunted his moody, nocturnal, tortured projects likeMonsterand56 Nightsa decade ago. It’s a quick splash of reality in the middle of a blockbuster 12 months of comparatively lusher and …

Those outside of the New York music scene may not be all that familiar with Jesse Malin. The punk and hardcore pioneer turned gritty troubadour of the streets never really had a mainstream hit, despite writing some of the most melody-rich songs of the last two decades, beginning with his …

Who is Katy Perry? As she reminded people in the initial run-up to her comeback single “Woman’s World,” where she dusted off her six RIAA-bestowed Diamond awards, she’s one of the biggest-selling pop stars of the millennium, with fizzy, playful tracks like “California Gurls” and strident empowerment anthems like “Firework” …

The most thrilling way to experience the Voidz‘s third album, Like All Before You is on vinyl, imagining it as a roulette wheel, dropping the needle like a ball and seeing what you get. The record is the most unpredictable that the group, which features Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas, has …

Despite stiff competition on that year’s rock-legend road-show circuit—the Grateful Dead touring the massive Wall of Sound speaker system, CSNY reunited, hitting the sheds, and de-uniting in record time—there was only one outing anybody meant when they said Tour ’74. That January and February, Bob Dylan and The Band reunited …

It’s been 12 years since Nick Lowe released a new album, but the venerated 75-year-old rock & roll sophisticate is back on his game with Indoor Safari. It’s an album of clever, lovingly crafted tunes steeped in Fifties rockabilly and the early-Sixties British Invasion greats, sounds he’s been channeling and …

You’d have to look pretty far and wide to find anyone in music who has been as consistently good or eternally enjoyable as Miranda Lambert. Almost 20 years into her run, she’s defined her career by always going her own way, both musically and lyrically.Her ninth solo set was recorded …

Nada Surf are always the indie-rock grown-ups in the room—the band who know exactly who they are and what they’re doing. Their excellent new Moon Mirror has all the tropes that go into a Nada Surf album: exquisite guitar chimes polished until they gleam, melodies that kick in and stick, …

The third volume of Neil Young’s ongoing Archives box set series chronicles 1976 to 1987. In that time frame, most artists might release three or four records, one possibly being a Greatest Hits comp. But not Young. After all, this is the guy who wrote “Cinnamon Girl,” “Cowgirl in the …