On Life In The Dark, the Felice Brothers continue their decade-plus quest of chronicling our crooked national pathologies with quirky humor, slacker indifference and guarded folkie optimism.
This is music that fascinates on first listen but requires multiple spins for its complexities and idiosyncrasies to take hold.
Oberst’s naked presentation and generally obtuse concepts feel genuine and are worth mulling over for a deeper understanding of his expressive and largely enticing thoughts.
For a long time now, Radiohead has been achieving mesmerizing results by blazing the trail for synthetic sounds in rock and roll. But it’s the humanity, oh, the humanity, that makes A Moon Shaped Pool so moving.
This is shrewd, layered music that demands the songs be mulled over and scrutinized; even if that may not provide answers to questions McCombs poses.
FLOTUS fits surprisingly neatly into Lambchop’s catalog, capturing what makes this band so special and hinting at new directions it might take in its next two decades.
Shape Shift With Me, with its provocative title and explicit, non PC cover art no major label would approve, continues the band’s string of powerfully uncompromising but surprisingly tuneful albums that make you think, but only if you’re not busy thrashing in the mosh pit.
Painkillers quickly veers off from that attention-grabber, dials down the intensity of the music, and lets Fallon tread through settings more reflective and restrained.
Melodies take longer to reveal themselves and choruses don’t have the natural hooks Loveless has crafted before. Which just means you’ll need to spend additional time exploring the songs, mulling them over, absorbing the lyrics and letting their more elusive charms sink in.
Dig In Deep is another distinguished and near perfect entry into a classy, bulging catalog that has seen few missteps.
Carrying over the momentum from his last excellent release, 2011’s So Beautiful Or So What, this disc features Simon at his most restless, in terms of both his questioning lyrics and his search for the right sound, and that restlessness pays off for the listener in endlessly fascinating ways.
Taken as a whole, American Band is the group’s most thematically coherent work since their pinnacle of Jason Isbell-assisted records in the early 2000s.
It’s intimate and sprawling, personal and universal, affectionate and daring. It’s also not background music. Sit down in front of your largest speakers, turn up the volume, push play, close your eyes and let Michael Kiwanuka’s Love & Hate envelope your senses while taking you on a journey to the sonic expanses of your mind.
Individually, all of the songs are strong, self-contained bits of cleverly written and emotionally gripping indie rock ... Olsen has always been a compelling songwriter, but more than ever she showcases a range evident in just how versatile that songwriting is.