Tag Archives: music-album-reviews

Back in the 1990s, the Black Crowes blew up out of Atlanta, playing soulful, swaggering classic rock in an era of alt-rock irony and grunge bellyaching. Even more impressively, the two guys at the heart of the band — singer Chris Robinson and his guitar-playing brother Rich — managed to …

More than five decades into their career, Judas Priest have always been one of metal’s most reliably great bands, likely because the responsibility they feel to the genre weighs just as heavily as the music they make. They never want to let down their fans, the “heavy metal maniacs,” as …

Ariana Grande’s seventh album begins with a question she spends the rest of the album trying to answer: “How can I tell if I’m in the right relationship?” Five years ago, on her landmark album on Thank U, Next, it seemed certain that she would have that question figured out …

Listen closely: On “Principles,” the jarring penultimate track of Kim Gordon‘s new solo album, The Collective, are the words she’s wailing “an actress of life”? Or is that last word “light” or “lies” or “live” or something else? The line transmits differently if you listen to it on a big …

Jack Antonoff has almost single-handedly made modern pop into a glorious safe space, an expansive, sensitive, creative biosphere where the biggest artists in the world — from Taylor to Lana to Lorde — can chase their wildest ambitions and find their most real inner selves while still making blockbuster records. …

For the past decade, Kacey Musgraves has been country music’s most daring traditionalist — a small-town realist who’s also a campy country-disco queen and a folkie who once wrote a song about smoking weed with John Prine. Her last LP, the 2021 post-divorce record Star-Crossed, was another reminder that her …

“Gang shit, I invented that, huh?” asks Schoolboy Q on “Pop,” a track from Blue Lips, his first album in nearly five years. It’s clearly an overstatement. But give the former Hoover Street Crip credit: Back in the early 2010s, he fused the open-eared, genre-less sensibility of Tumblr rap with …

Faye Webster measures love by what is lost. She loses track of time from endless daydreaming, she loses her sense of self when reminiscing over an ex. On 2019’s “What Used To Be Mine,” she doesn’t just miss a former lover, but the places that defined their relationship. The Atlanta …

It’s been five years since Mannequin Pussy released their critically-acclaimed album Patience, which proved just how versatile and unapologetically intense these Philly punk rockers could be. From perfect break-up anthems like “Drunk II” to screaming ragers like “Cream,” the band ventured beyond the noise rock heard in Fishtown dive bars …

A couple of years ago, Residente engaged in a war of words with J Balvin. Admittedly, it wasn’t a fair fight, at least on those terms, with one of Spanish-language hip-hop’s most accomplished artists putting the popwise Colombian reggaetonero on the defensive. Lurking beneath this back-and-forth volley of since-deleted video …