The only thing working against Drastic Fantastic, really, is its lame title.
The Bluegrass Diaries easily ranks among the standout releases in a very strong year for country music.
Our Ill Wills is a consistently stronger, more cohesive collection than its predecessor.
“Maturity” isn’t necessarily the first word that comes to mind when talking about the music of the Go! Team.
Kala seems aware of the potential of pop and hip-hop to empower those who have been denied a voice.
Challengers speaks to the real breadth of the New Pornographers’s skill with all manners of pop styles.
Junior Senior’s Hey Hey My My Yo Yo sounds every bit as fresh and exuberant now as it first did in the summer of 2005.
After Hours wants for the fire that Raul Malo brought to his recordings with the Mavericks throughout the 1990s.
What makes Vanderslice perhaps the most consistently compelling songwriter on the indie scene is the critical fecundity of his text.
It’s A Bit Complicated is an album of the most ephemeral sort of pleasures.
It almost entirely ignores what it is that gives the duo its claim as perhaps the greatest rock act of its generation.
S.O.S. feels too much like a rote genre exercise from an artist who has already proven that he’s capable of something far more inspired.
While it has the depth that her fans have come to expect, Translated from Love is Willis’s coolest record yet.
Between Raising Hell isn’t flawed in any ways that speak to an underlying creativity, ambition, or significance.
Singing about being destitute or outrunning death, Cook is never less than convincing.
Porter Wagoner’s exceptional Wagonmaster finds the 80-year-old Grand Ole Opry legend at his most vital.
With a few exceptions, Gretchen Wilson’s One of the Boys doesn’t go out of its way to debase women or pander to the neo-con demo.
Plague Park introduces Handsome Furs as the rare side project that isn’t entirely superfluous.
Both as a writer and a vocalist, Osborne has the chops to record a killer soul album, but this tasteful-to-a-fault effort isn’t it.
Even at their most retro, Wilco is among contemporary pop music’s most vital acts.