Tag Archives: music-album-reviews

Sharon Van Etten has become a paragon for the type of stormy, sincere singer-songwriter rock she has perfected over her past half-dozen albums. 13 years into her recording career, Van Etten has now become the type of securely-defined, universally revered artist for a younger generation of songwriters who look up …

Miranda Lambert’s 2021 collaborative album The Marfa Tapes, with Jack Ingram and Jon Randall, was a stripped-down set that helped resituate the Texas-born Lambert in the tradition of Lone Star singer-songwriters like Guy Clark and Robert Earl Keen. It also further cemented the country star’s reputation for stylistic risks — …

Are you a part of Anitta’s Algorithm Nation? OnVersions of Me, a dazzling omnibus of pop digitalia, the 29-year-old Brazilian singer-MC-dancer goes door-to-door, trying to unite the people behind her surging campaign for Global Dance-Floor Booty Inspector. Burning brightest when micromanaging every market-tested and quantized musical detail with blissfully canny …

The new Kurt Vile album begins, like many great yarns, in medias res. The poet-king of Philadelphia is at an airport somewhere in North America, pondering the prospects of his own mortality and a cold beer, when an epiphany hits him: “Listenin’ to ‘Heart of Gold’/Gonna open up for Neil …

Fivio Foreign makes everything, even a threat, sound like a joyful improvisation. He’s loose (and jovial) with it, demanding, on his 2020 hit, “Big Drip,” “Send me the addy, I’m hunting him down,” as if his opps were brand new acquaintances he’s already sending NBA2K invites to. (By comparison, his …

The beauty of Ivory, Omar Apollo’s magnetic full-length debut, is that even through complex production choices and rich sonic flourishes, it always feels effortless. The LP is a bountiful trove of genres and technique; crack it open and sharp guitar licks, celestial harmonies, aching soul melodies, and even touches of …

Vince Staples was first known as a gangster rapper. But what he actually is, is a realist rapper. His music deals with violence in its most human form: ordinary, everyday, and eclipsing the vibrant sun of his native Long Beach, California. Staples isn’t about warmth; he’s deadpan and sardonic, cerebral …

Coi Leray’s album Trendsetter marks the culmination of a nearly four-year journey that began with the RIAA-certified success of 2018’s “Huddy” and continued with 2021’s “No More Parties.” It also included a handful of minor dustups: video of her at last year’s Rolling Loud Miami drew social media mockery for …

The sound of Terror Twilight, the final album from Pavement, the Platonic ideal of 1990s indie rockers, was the guitar-waggle of frustration, the warp and woof of a brilliant songwriter and still-more-brilliant guitarist struggling against the limits of a band he’d outgrown. By 1999, Pavement leader Stephen Malkmus had long …

There are many ways to introduce yourself as you crash into rock & roll history. It turns out that one of those ways is to yell, “I went to school and I got the Big D!” The U.K. duo Wet Leg made a surprise splash last year by dropping two …