From her luscious, aching croon, and her ensemble's solemn high-mesa twang and groove ... you'd never guess she wasn't covering Patsy Cline standards.
This album is, above all, a textural triumph, a quantum bounce from the brittle jitter and insect-chatter fuzz of the band's 2001 Yeah Yeah Yeahs EP and 2003's full-length Fever to Tell. It's as if the Velvet Underground had gone from the black-crusted minimalism of their first album right to the pop bloom of their fourth, Loaded.
With its skewed pop melodies, home-brewed sonic trickery and blazing fingerpicking, Under the Skin is a mesmerizing return to the side of Buckingham that birthed the proto-indie-pop strangeness of 1979's Tusk.
Toxic and delicious, Supernature will make you do bad things -- and like it.
His most jubilant disc since Born in the U.S.A. and more fun than a tribute to Pete Seeger has any right to be.
If you have a favorite Foghat album or if you can name a single member of Deep Purple, you will love Broken Boy Soldiers; fortunately, it doesn't end there.
On his skilled but sometimes labored follow-up ... the liberated ‘NSync frontman bears the weight of experience that drags down so many maturing lovermen.
Supposedly inspired by the Japanese tale of the same name, The Crane Wife makes no concessions to its major label, unless engineering counts.
Less miserable than Fiona Apple, less wacky than Nellie McKay and less hippieish than Tori Amos, Spektor shows off her gorgeous, fluttery voice, her burgeoning writer chops and her God-given quirks on her second disc, Begin to Hope.
The Black Parade, the New Jersey group’s third studio album, is the best mid-Seventies record of 2006, a rabid, ingenious paraphrasing of echoes and kitsch from rock’s golden age of bombast.
For every head-nodding beat, Game Theory has a head-turning treat.
He, Sylvain and their new Dolls have honed the legendary mania of the early records into a tightened combustion that is part "Personality Crisis" but also packs the matured anxiety and tattered-Sixties classicism of Johansen's 1978 solo debut.
Evoking Fear of Music Talking Heads, Station to Station David Bowie and Sign ‘O’ the Times Prince, the resulting disc might be the most oddly beautiful, psychedelic and ambitious of the year.
Rather Ripped is an excellent record, one of the strongest to emerge from Sonic Youth's amazing late period.
This music is relaxed; it has nothing to prove. It is music of accumulated knowledge, it knows every move, anticipates every step before you take it.