Tag Archives: music-album-reviews

When we think of the Red Hot Chili Peppers at their best — making rock that was both breezily Californian and exceedingly funky — guitarist John Frusciante has always been the heartbeat of that sound. Of course, Frusciante’s experience with the band has been tempestuous. He’s quit twice, most recently …

Released last summer to tease Machine Gun Kelly‘s sixth album, the single “Papercuts,” with its strummy Cobain-pain guitar and brain-stewing power chords, was met with a mild shrug of support. According to the proverbial “people on the Internet,” it was seen as another lateral “rock” move from the ex-mixtape rapper …

Koffee has only had about a dozen of her songs widely available to stream until now, but the 22-year-old Jamaican artist is already proving she can reinvigorate reggae and dancehall for a pop audience. Her joyous 2018 smash “Toast” earned her spots on two of Barack Obama’s coveted playlists, and …

The spring semester has arrived, and chief faculty advisor for the Weezer Institute of the Arts, Professor Rivers Cuomo (now officially America’s most popular Cuomo), has prepared a lecture connecting the Bard and Vivaldi to domestic conviviality. “Shakespeare makes me happy,” he declares, repeating that thesis a couple of times …

It’s been flat-out exhilarating to watch Charli XCX elude conventional stardom for so many years. Though she’s thrown some tracks into the commercial vortex, she’s been too much of a free-thinking weirdo to let her boundless creativity get crushed out by mainstream expectations. Instead, she found a way to feed …

What a difference two years make. On 2019’s Mirrorland, Earthgang conjured a stew of Black music idioms – trap, sampled soul, Southern blues, percussive polyrhythms – with audible joy. Breaking into Billboard’s top 40 albums chart, the album established Olu (a.k.a. Johnny Venus) and WowGr8 (a.k.a. Doctur Dot) as one …

In 2002, Avril Lavigne’s skate-punk aesthetic and emo-but-energized angst quickly made her the queen of the aughts pop-punk revival scene. Since her third album, 2007’s The Best Damn Thing, she’s ebbed and flowed, dipping her toes in bubblegum pop and more self-serious pop rock. Her seventh album, Love Sux, brings …

Eddie Vedder has always seemed like a singer inextricably bound to his band. Since the beginnings of Pearl Jam, he has flexed his warm baritone with an intensity or a sensitivity that perfectly matched his fellow musicians’ loose fury and anxious jamming; Vedder’s voice depends on Pearl Jam’s music, and …

Marry Me is a fun, gaudy rom-com with a fun, gaudy soundtrack, successfully tapping the distinct musical styles of the film’s co-stars, Jennifer Lopez and Maluma, who perform together and solo throughout the LP. As Lopez put it to Billboard, “You can’t have a movie about two pop stars who …

Ten years ago, Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz made it big with mainstream trap production, luxurious rhymes about champagne on airplanes, and non-sequitur punchlines. Chainz was a rapper who could out-rap legends, but his music wasn’t necessarily expansive: There wasn’t the flurry of topics, motifs, sequences, or tics you’d get from …