Converge’s seventh tortured opus... sees the foursome of vocalist Jacob Bannon, guitarist Kurt Ballou, bassist Nate Newton, and drummer Ben Koller perfecting their style, capping off this decade on a thrilling, shattering, explosive note.
As if the blues weren’t already dark enough. For the entirety of the Dead Weather’s debut album, Horehound, Jack White—who, in a commendable show of ego control, relegates himself to the drum stool for this, a sure-to-be successful supergroup (dirty word, I know) he somehow managed to cobble together in the downtime between fronting two of the only signs of life in today’s alt-rock landscape—Alison Mosshart and company are visibly determined to imbue an art form which is already obsessed with depression, loss, and all manner of cheerful things with even inkier shades of the human condition.
The album is best appreciated as a pleasurable pop treat from a group whose vision is ever broadening.
Musically, what impresses about Wind’s Poem are its sonic variety and freshness, even as the lyrics often stick to the corporal fears of Elverum’s prior catalog. Each song has a more or less distinct mode, which leads to a range of effective aural contrasts and interactions.
Call it surprising/delightful, or call it thrilling/glorious. Either way, Dragonslayer‘s pretty great.
Each individual track on Songs of Shame manages to develop not only as the album progresses, but with each time the LP is played, with new favourites manifesting themselves with each listen, a sign of a truly great album.
It’s the perfect summer album: exuberant, lighthearted, with hooks to spare, and plenty of surf rock. It’s just further proof that great things come in strange packages.
To Be Still is beautiful and subtly splintered and cathartic in an honestly incomplete way. And it is, finally, that rare kind of album: one worth getting close to.
Get Color builds on the success of HEALTH in all the right ways, proving the band worthy of an intimidating amount of hype while defying the expectations that come with it.
Bird probably could have stood to cull a few of the weaker numbers, and with the additional room, might have reworked a few of the selections from Useless Creatures into experimental pop songs, thereby tempering his lack of risk taking on Noble Beast.
Such quality care is evident throughout most of Breakdown, and, as such, individual moments positively glisten, even if the widescreen view of Breakdown feels a bit muddled and confused, the whole actually being less than the sum of its parts.
As if in an attempt to gain the attributes of the album’s namesake bird, the songs on Eagle feel like they’re rising on thermals, shifting and soaring effortlessly where the wind takes them. And occasionally they dive right for your throat.
Although Farm sacrifices some immediacy and fire for expansive emotionalism and nuance, the album is a solid addition to the Dinosaur Jr. catalog and one whose highlights may prove even better with time.
Both Meek Warrior and Love Is Simple are strong albums, but there’s a sense of unfulfillment in them — Akron/Family seems to be testing itself in new areas rather than completing a task. On new album Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free, though, that changes, as the band delivers a masterpiece.
This is Pearl Jam’s "fun" record, a disc that was likely just as exciting to record as it is to listen to.
Sure, Bromst is a terrific album — it largely builds on Spiderman of the Rings, injecting Deacon’s manic compositions with a depth and complexity that challenge lazy readings of his work. However, it still feels more like a transition piece than a destination.
Actor marks no huge departures her work on Marry Me, but it still manages to constantly surprise, always meshing the earthen with the industrial in strange and compelling ways.
Listening to The Hazards of Love is thrilling, both because of the music itself and because the disc was such a sheer gamble from the first. Improbable as it seems, they just might pull it off.
Wilco’s success is largely due to their ability to continually surprise, if not outright confound, their audience. Their first five albums saw the band transform from alt-country torchbearers to Wall-of-Sound sculptors to post-rock deconstructionists. Facilitating this transformation was a steady rotation of band members, moving both into and then out of the ranks, eventually leaving frontman Jeff Tweedy and bassist John Stirratt as the only two orig inal members. Looking back over their career, it’s easy to see that this constant shuffling of members propelled Wilco’s sonic evolution.
Hospice is a fully-realized and fully-functional concept album.
There are ... occasional stumbles that suggest that some lessons cannot be learned quickly, and that melody is an essential component of their sound that needs more attention. For now, though, this is much better.
This is country music the way God intended it to be. On his second set for Lost Highway, this Texas-reared singer-songwriter delivers a dozen tunes full of hard living, hard drinking and hard rocking. The album could just as well have been called Roadhouse Son as Bingham’s biography reads like the lyrics of a country song, the tale of a young talent nurtured by roughnecks and raised on rough times.
What makes The Life of the World to Come one of 2009's best albums, and the Mountain Goats' studio albums maybe the single greatest second act in modern American rock/indie/whatever music, is that he never assumes those groups are, at the heart of it all, different from each other or less deserving of our attention and compassion.
The band’s finest work, My Maudlin Career continues the pop rush we’ve come to expect from Camera Obscura but also develops the band’s sound and identity in significant ways.
Fever Ray makes up for the lack of highs by being an even more all-enveloping experience than the last few Knife records.
The Ecstatic feels like the album Mos has always wanted and intended to make. It’s experimental and progressive without being too left-field and isolating. It’s hip-hop without being a photocopy of what he’s released in the past. Simply put, it’s Mos being Mos: Equal parts oddball and genius, even with his flaws.
xx is a thoroughly cohesive, moving and accessible album. This young band of Londoners exhibits a level of maturity, artistry and potential that far exceeds their years.