Ritter stands out as a devoted classicist whose repurposing of buried objects feels tinged with lifelessness.
The album’s length and wide stylistic breadth give the packed-in feel of a career-spanning collection.
Less a musician than a kind of gonzo multi-specialty clearinghouse, Mike Patton has ensured career stability by turning himself into a commodity.
Victorian America is an immaculately dusky exploration of Americana tropes.
Gogol Bordello continues to churn out records whose rampant energy belies an increasing sense of atrophying decay.
The tacky use of a repurposed instructional audio sample is the warning sign.
Swim’s songs are fully evocative of the stylistic struggles that the band has come to represent.
It seems poised to fall into a formulaic rut of middling expectations, wrenching cathartic redemption songs from decades of anguish.
This is joyful, colorful, uplifting music, bursting with complex horns and restive use of time signatures.
The Dark Leaves finds Matt Pond PA spinning in an ever-deepening hole.
Nonstoperotik delves both overtly and suggestively into the seamier edges of Black Francis’s psyche.
Hippies is the kind of inconsequential romp that feels like a much shorter album than it actually is.
Pieces is a tightly packed collection of clichés.
She & Him’s music makes good on the cutely reductive premise of the group’s name.
Northern Lights captures the live show as circus.
The album asserts itself as a refreshingly pointed piece of chamber pop.
The album is Xiu Xiu’s most vibrant experiment since Fabulous Muscles.
Shearwater’s The Golden Archipelago is the kind of album that makes other bands look lazy.
Peter Gabriel’s first album in eight years carries the definite stink of pandering opportunism.
Ain’t No Grave amounts to a touching and often very sad sendoff.