Tag Archives: music-album-reviews

Yeat is from the future. Yeat is not from this planet. According to the Yeat mythology, this is all the biographical detail you need to know about the 23-year-old Portland rapper who currently has a stranglehold over children and young men aged 12-30, and whose new album 2093 does little …

It’s been a decade of reinvention for Hurray for the Riff Raff, the recording moniker of singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra. After years of street-busking and self-releasing acoustic records, Segarra cemented their status as an old-timey roots standard-bearer on 2014Small Town Heroes. But over the course of their past two albums–2017’sThe Navigatorand …

Michael Gordon isn’t one for subtlety. The songs that the New Jersey artist makes as Mk.gee froth and fizz and occasionally freak out, making their unwieldy production not just noticeable, but an integral part of the songwriting. Take “New Low,” the brisk two-minute opener to his exceptional debut album Two …

You’d be forgiven for being surprised that Jason Derulo hadn’t released an album since 2015’s Everything Is 4. In the nine years since that full-length’s release, Derulo has kept himself in the public eye, whether through his Tiktoks or his steady stream of singles; his fizzy collaboration with the New …

Describing the warm, fuzzy optimism of an Idles record requires only the most pretentious adjectives — ebullience, exultation, jubilation — words that Idles frontman Joe Talbot would likely laugh at heartily before offering a pint to anyone who said them. This is a band who once titled an album, Joy …

Les Amazones d’Afrique began in 2017 as a sisterly supergroup of singers from the West African region of Mali. Founded by Mamani Keïta, Mariam Doumbia (of Amadou and Mariam), and Oumou Sangare, and convened by French music-industry veteran Valerie Malot, the collective came together through a shared musical vision, as …

Last Thursday, after a sweet ceremony, the late great Kobe Bean Bryant was honored with a statue outside of Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. The ceremony was full of the quaint and charming details you might see on Sportscenter: Vanessa Bryant spoke, and joked about how it was Kobe who …

For over two decades, Usher had one of music’s most impressive release runs. While his Nineties and early Aughts R&B peers floundered as new generations of the genre came and went, the chameleonic crooner adapted, experimenting with dance music while maintaining his particularly seductive swagger. It’s been eight years since …

Everybody loves a good indie-rock origin story — like Paul Westerberg holding it down as a janitor in the office of a Minnesota senator before joining the Replacements, or Dayton, Ohio’s Robert Pollard teaching grade school while biding his time before Guided By Voices became a thing. Here’s a new …

“I’ve been staying open, you don’t wanna grow,” Brittany Howard sings on the title track from her second solo record. The song is a hard-funk failing-relationship jeremiad that might leave the “you” in question reduced to a puddle on the floor by the time it’s done. But whoever she’s singing …