Tag Archives: music-album-reviews

It takes 97 minutes to listen to Christine and the Queens‘ moving, three-act pop opera, Paranoïa, Angels, True Love, but you need months to understand it fully. On the album, the French artist (let’s call him Chris for simplicity) summons celestial bodies, pays tribute to his late mother, flirts with …

Jenny Lewis has never had trouble expressing herself. On Joy’All’s “Puppy and a Truck,” she sings, “My 40s are kicking my ass … and handing them to me in a margarita glass.” Even before she split with her indie-rock group Rilo Kiley a decade ago, she’d assumed a persona that’s …

One Direction’s Irish bard has always been the soul of warmth and charm, always ready to bust out his acoustic guitar and make a stadium feel like a rowdy pub. But Niall Horan elevates his game with The Show, his third and finest album yet. The last time he dropped …

In HBO’s Jason Isbell doc, he and fellow singer-songwriter Amanda Shires seem to court marital disaster debating the best word for a lyric (spoiler: their union survives). Writing is high stakes for Isbell. “If I was makin’ people dance, I wouldn’t sit there and waste my time,” he says, laughing …

With seventeen albums and mixtapes to his name, Moneybagg Yo has long established himself as one of the true pillars of modern-day Memphis hip hop. The rapper took a hiatus of sorts after the release of his excellent 2021 Gangsta’s Pain, a highly polished yet soulful effort that deepened his …

“It came in a flash — it came outta nowhere,” Dave Grohl wails over heat-lightning guitars and pummeling drums at the outset of his band Foo Fighters’ 11th album. Then, he sings a line marked by equal parts amazement and regret: “It happened so fast/and then it was over,” Grohl …

No one would make a better choice to helm the soundtrack to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse than Metro Boomin, the trap whiz with albums like Not All Heroes Wear Capes and Heroes & Villains in his discography. Part of a recent renaissance for blockbuster soundtracks (Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé respectively …

For fully half of Bob Dylan’s career, his primary focus has been the road. Since the late Eighties, he’s done plus-or-minus a hundred shows a year, pandemic excepted.Along the way, he’s been remaking his catalog, twisting the classics into drastic new shapes. He’d always done that, of course, from turning …

“Morning time, I get on my knees, I pray to Allah/Forgive me for the shit that I did,” harmonizes Lil Durk on “Pelle Coat,” a track from his new album, Almost Healed. The 30-year-old Chicago rapper has steadily gathered momentum ever since he signed with Def Jam in 2013. He’s …

“When was the first time you heard the word ‘saccharine’?” singer Rachel Brown asks, sounding a bit like a tired Beat poet, on Water From Your Eyes‘ jazzy song, “Remember Not My Name.” Like practically every lyric on the avant-pop duo’s Everyone’s Crushed – at least the ones that don’t …