Surf is an album that further pushes modern hip hop into bold new frontiers.
With their bare-bones instrumentation and country-inspired, heartstring-tugging narratives, The Lowest Pair might be one of the best under-the-radar Americana duos today.
Most of Then Came the Morning shows a confident band stepping more fully into a compelling sound.
Goon is mostly excellent slow songs about heartbreak, about the fear of failure, about losing your direction and hoping to find it.
Foil Deer never seems out of focus. Dupuis’ voice as a songwriter is growing more captivating with every release, her songs’ direction streamlined without growing predictable.
If you’ve been searching for your perfect summer soundtrack for 2015, you may look no further.
Rock ’n’ roll has a knack for brute force, but these songs are never less than nimble, always full of electricity and a steady barometer of unfailing good taste.
The 11 songs on Beautiful resonate in a deeper way by varying the sonic palette and focusing her words inward.
Range Anxiety is a great guitar record for people who love the guitar but not in the way that Guitar Center people love the guitar.
Even if Yoakam is still using his songs to sift through the wreckage of broken relationships’ past, he’s doing it with a still-blazing fire in his belly and a huge grin barely hidden underneath his Stetson.
Although Hop Along’s lyrical content can be heavy at times, Painted Shut’s tracks are well-balanced between catchy indie pop with an edge and more discordant fare.
Coming Home, however unintentionally, represents the spiritual cleansing and soulful healing we need right now. It’s the sound of an era where civil rights seemed so desperate, but progress also felt in reach.
It’s an artistic success as a literary exercise, and as a wrestling fan it’s hugely gratifying to see a serious artist that I’ve enjoyed for decades take wrestling seriously.
Sound & Color is a daring and deliberate record, and its greatest success stems from the band’s complete defiance with its choices.
Carrie & Lowell is a demonstration of why Stevens sings songs, of why we listen to songs: to feel less alone, to make sense of the things that are hardest to make sense of. Hopefully it proves as rewarding to the singer as it is for his audience.
By channeling her anxiety into wonderful, shaggy, relatable and supremely catchy songs, she’s made Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit one of the most compulsively listenable albums to come out so far this year.
Honeybear thrives on the knife’s edge of that enigmatic split personality, as he attempts to reconcile the love-swept optimist with the world-weary wise-ass.