Sun isn’t the greatest collection of songs she’s ever released ... but even her B-game is always worth hearing.
Kozelek’s usual self-flagellation shares space with relatively lighthearted lyrics, with mixed results
Like its predecessors, Plumb is polite and smart, arranging its unceasing collection of hooks like books on a shelf.
For The Walkmen, heaven is a place where the momentous has become mundane, and vice versa.
Plot smoothes some edges and makes others more ragged, but the songs, shaped by the sharp guitars and martial drumming, are some of the strongest Falkous has ever written.
Compared to Leave Home’s murky smear of scream-fueled, shoegaze-shrouded punk, Open Your Heart is practically a party album.
The album is all warmth, putting Cohen’s improbably expressive smoker’s purr in the middle of simple yet sumptuous instrumentation
The highs are higher, the lows are lower, and the dynamic is even more exhilarating.
Delicate beauty and refined presentation still rule on the Brooklyn mainstay’s fourth album, Shields, but the balance is subtly shifting.
On his bolder follow-up, Kaleidoscope Dream, Miguel takes full advantage of his new commercial standing by abandoning genre conventions altogether.
Game as Daniel is in a supporting role, his spotlight turns provide the album’s highlights.
Good Kid is an exercise in tasteful restraint, with Lamar employing his boundless budget in creative ways.
We Don’t Even Live Here never sounds anything less than meaningful, yet manages to evade sounding self-important or overworked. P.O.S. has indeed never been better.
Rather than turning into something new, it settles into some comforting old sounds.
Three guitars, a sense of humor in the face of despair, and an unwavering commitment to the underrated art of the rock ’n’ roll sing-along are what define Local Business.
With The Seer, one thing is certain: Even during its quietest lulls, Gira has never sounded louder.
There are at least five songs on Blunderbuss that match the excellence of The White Stripes’ best, and on the whole the album performs the tricky task of updating White’s musical aesthetic without euthanizing its primal nature.
The Idler Wheel… is an innately private record, as Apple’s tend to be, but she has a way of drawing listeners in as she pushes them away, luring them, siren-like, into the maelstrom of her own reflection.
Tramp is Van Etten’s most confident-sounding album to date, pushing at the boundaries of her music and suggesting a turn away from the romantic wound-licking that has dominated her lyrics.
On Attack On Memory, he’s moved in the opposite direction, opening up wide spaces in his music and letting the fury beneath breathe and then bellow.
Celebration Rock finds that some of the best moments in life can come from uncertainty.
Snubbing nearly every contemporary radio trend, it positions itself instead as the latest in a line of revelatory, late-period neo-soul albums