It’s both a high-profile showcase for Chance’s talents and a platform he cedes to a dozen or so guests. It’s a set of block-party-ready summer jams and a sepia-tinged acknowledgment of the inaccessibility of the past.
Even a compilation of demos from the past three years of recording sessions, slipped into countless television appearances, bears a striking coherence.
A mighty weird “gospel album” wallowing in contradiction, a collection of music that acts as if music itself couldn’t have possibly existed before it.
Bowie’s latest doesn’t need to haunt in order to dig deep, but these seven tracks have enough power and depth to be unpacked for years.
The record is only nine songs long, and one of those is a string reprise of an earlier tune, but You Want It Darker is as deep as it is compact.
Thank You manages to do the damn-near impossible and sound both as urgent as Atrocity Exhibition and as easy and effortless as The Low End Theory.
Never before have Radiohead made anxiety such a singular concern, or unease such an agonized-over art form, as they have on the brooding, stewing, contagious A Moon Shaped Pool.
Skeleton Tree is unquestionably a document of staggering loss. But it’s also a testament to the beautiful ways in which human beings bind together in the direst of moments.