A soulful romp through psychedelic melodies and sprawling noise-scapes, Skeletal is also a whimsical, Girl Talk-style pastiche, with 15 tracks that consist of a multitude of song fragments.
Overall, Consolers feels less like a project and more like a jam session. But it's fun to watch White make things up as he goes along.
With their new album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, the pair rejoin the rock conversation as if they'd never left.
Johnson yelps at one point — making it clear that his band still finds resonance in words that were clichéd by 1956. And for that, you’ve got to salute them.
It's not every goth-punk fiend who can celebrate his fiftieth birthday with an album as loud, filthy and brilliant as Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
For Emma, Forever Ago never turns into a pity party, because Vernon has a light touch, with zero interest in narrative or confessional lyrics.
That Lucky Old Sun lacks the magnificent shock of SMiLE, Wilson's 2004 completion of that '67 album. But it has a natural, hopeful flow that leaves you warm all over.
Off With Their Heads is great British pop in the dynamic lethal-irony tradition of the mid-Sixties Kinks, the early Jam and, with that vintage-New Wave tone of Nick Baines' keyboards, XTC's 1979 album, Drums and Wires.
Only by the Night is long on astral, arena-ready largeness, with blippy keyboards, droney guitars and whoa-oh-oh backing vocals.
Some of the music is gripping — the modal-sounding chorus and blippy groove of “My People” suggests an R&B version of Radiohead — but other tunes feel like absent-minded doodles, and Badu’s social consciousness nets middling returns.
While it shows that the 55-year-old barbed-wire country singer is wary of rock's trappings, Little Honey proves she's still crushed out on the music.
His return to political-minded material on Harps and Angels is reason to wrap yourself in the flag and cheer.
On their debut, Vampire Weekend mostly earn points the old-fashioned way: by writing likable songs you'll be glad to revisit next month.
Coldplay's desire to unite fans around the world with an entertainment they can all relate to is the band's strength, and a worthy goal. But on Viva la Vida, a record that wants to make strong statements, it's also a weakness.
Santogold ultimately sounds like her own damn movement.
Mellencamp teamed up with producer T Bone Burnett to create a whole new sound — a set of textured, atmospheric folk and country blues that adds up to one of the most compelling albums of Mellencamp’s career.
Evil Urges explodes the band’s sound with the same kind of creative leap that Wilco took on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Radiohead took on Kid A.