With their third full-length effort, Beach House forces the listener to re-examine pop music status quo while taking another giant stride as a band.
Far more than a companion piece of leftover ideas, the album is light, musically savvy and, for the most part, pulls off a thick dose of shamelessly sunny pop across all of its 10 tracks.
The Age of Adz builds on his previous dabblings in electronica by integrating the ideas he has clearly been stewing with the aspects of his work so dear to fans.
Speak Now is Taylor Swift’s best record yet, all in her voice with no co-writers. It’s a powerful statement from someone who has proven that she knows who she is, and, whether Nashville likes it or not, is here to stay.
MGMT plots a strange course for their listeners with Congratulations, but the material here often exceeds that of the band’s initial full-length.
The Suburbs offers plenty of the dense and stately keyboard-heavy pop that fans of the band have come to expect, with some much-appreciated frothier moments, but a melancholy theme of reluctant adulthood, or resistance to change, runs through even the more lightweight numbers.
There are no enduring classics here like the songs on 2007's Live At Massey Hall, or anything to rival the material that helped define late '70s AOR from, say, American Stars 'n Bars or Rust Never Sleeps. But this is a record well worth having, and it's a blessing that we still have enduring artists like Neil Young creating such vital music.
Here’s To Taking It Easy stands as a triumphant proclamation of Phosphorescent’s ongoing ability to provide quality heartbreaking Americana. The album also showcases Houck’s finely tuned ability to use an album in it’s totality as a vehicle to communicate story, heartache, and tribulation.
The fact that these guys can expand their sound and still feel entirely comfortable in their own specific framework, much less top themselves a second time around, is proof enough that Yeasayer are one of the best at what they do.