The trouble isn’t with Turner’s songwriting overall—Tape Deck Heart has more than its fair share of strong songs. The trouble is the absence of the sort of fist-pumping anthem that earned Turner so many fans to begin with.
Personal Record is a breath of fresh air. It’s a light, breezy summer album with a surplus of hooks and pop-minded melodies.
If you were a fan of No Time For Dreaming you’re going to be a fan of Victim of Love, and you shouldn’t really need to know anything about it other than it’s an album full of Charles Bradley songs. The Screamin’ Eagle of Soul is never going to let you down.
Spanning 22 tracks and the great sprawl of a nation, Big Wheel and Others compiles more of these vital impressions than any of McCombs’ previous releases, documenting something so damned beautifully alive—so restless and sensual and swinging and true—the album accrues power by virtue of its breadth.
While Pedestrian Verse feels like the most comprehensive Frightened Rabbit LP in the band’s nearly 10-year career, it also forgoes some of the band’s restless charm in the process.
Lousy with Sylvianbriar is steeped ankle-deep with Barnes’ academic non sequiturs, which swirl like psychotropic babble into and around a brook of warm, nostalgic rock tunes in perhaps the most organic recording of Barnes’ career.
More than ever, Old allows even passive listeners to care about what Brown is saying, to form a bond with him and to trust there is more of interest to him than women and drugs.
It’s difficult to disassociate Morton’s past from the product that details it. In fact, knowing his story actually helps frame the album’s seemingly dichotomous words and sounds. And it’s that combination that makes White Lighter so entrancing, serving as both warning and celebration of mortality.
To know so much, to feel so little and to embrace what is, she illuminates being young, gifted and bored with a luminescence that suggests life beyond Louis Vuitton.
Powers has turned “bedroom pop” into a visceral and emotional experience. While Wondrous Bughouse may not be for everyone, it certainly pushes new barriers.
Pusha T proves his worth in the shrines of the Rap Game Hall of Fame on My Name Is My Name, with slick wordplay and surreal depictions of his drug-dealing past.
Anxiety stilettos gut-wrenched entrenched psycho-sexual seductive destructive obsessive push and pull over accreting and ascendant deep soul jams
Ultimately Idle holds a handful of jewels in its bag of parking lot gravel. It’s far from terrible, but it’s equidistant from that and “worth a dozen more spins.”
From the first sung note of Hummingbird, Local Natives are frank in their presentation of a serious album, challenging listeners to heal along with them; cognizant that investment is proportional to remuneration.
It’s the one of the best QOTSA records to date. It also might be the first rock release of the dystopian blog-eat-blog era capable of recapturing the idea of music as a shared experience—that is, there are a lot of people waiting to get their ears in it.
It’s a record that often elevates the listener through its integrity and intensity, and sometimes grates through its failure to find the right music to express its complex lyrical sentiments.
There’s plenty to chew on with his latest, Dream River. And that’s just the lyrics, whose weightiness is given more heft by his controlled baritone.
My Bloody Valentine successfully followed up a decades-old classic with m b v, an album that stands as confidently, beautifully and masterfully composed as its predecessor.
Unlike the Frankenstein approach Nielson employed on the debut—which sounded like a depository for all of the music and pop culture he absorbed as a kid—there’s more consistent musical plasma coursing through the veins of II.
Those naysayers will declare this a fine return to form. From this desk, it is the only step forward for someone whose has proven herself so far ahead of the curve that everyone from Madge to Versace have come knocking on her door.
Sheff has succeeded in capturing a specific time and place. It puts you in his world and lets you feel a time when things felt new, with all of the potential and promise that life held before it reared its ugly head.
There’s so much to hear, all foreboding. It shouldn’t work—they went all or nothing. They got all.
Crutchfield’s inexhaustible desire to make short, emotional rock records at an impressive clip and get every overshare on is a rare thing in tuneful bandleaders these days.
Yes, Reflektor is very well an intellectual triumph, but—in a first for this band—it’s almost never an emotional one.
Ultimately, Yeezus is the least likable album Kanye’s ever made.
There’s plenty of disco with both soul and a brain. Random Access Memories has both, but it really makes too big a fuss of how long it took to arrive at that realization.
Silence Yourself evokes very real sensory and emotional connections, leaving it up to you to get something out of it.
The result evokes a tensile disaffection, something suppressed and never spoken. A deeply internalized album, it’s The National at their Nationalest.
It’s the most potent expression to date of Isbell’s talent (including his DBT output) and, hopefully, a harbinger of great things to come.
For a first foray into the pop universe, Days Are Gone is a hell of an opening salvo.
It’s powerful in both delivery and in effect, without being heavy-handed or sacrificing form. Both rappers take the opportunity to show their longtime supporters that they were right all these years, that they bet on the right horses.
CHVRCHES’ main talent lies in making a record which makes the climb more worthwhile than the summit.
It may not meet the high standards of Contra, but these new songs come pretty close, which is no small feat. And they may even convert a few non-believers along the way.
On Daze, Vile’s amorphous, ambient drones continue to solidify into sharp shapes with defined edges. While he was always a contemplative songwriter, Vile’s lyrics are now more ponderous and worldly rather than navel-gazing.
Monomania’s some heavy shit, wracked with longing and ultimatums and passive-aggression and aggressive-aggression and a monumentally shredding heartbreak.
What could be unwieldy becomes a vast patchwork of influences buoying empowerment.
What’s most impressive about 21st Century is that there’s nary a dud in the bunch, a difficult feat when it comes to making modern pop music that lives mostly in the past.
There remains just the right amount of depth to these summery sounds. Cronin’s lyrics, too, contain just the right amount of open-endedness.
Muchacho recapitulates that moment of love’s collapse and catapults out into the companionable lonesome that waits.