Mixtapes are often low-risk, low-reward affairs, but every now and then an MC exploits the format in the name of some rep-making (or rep-breaking) stunt.
Thanks in no small part to Death Cab, there’s now a permanent niche for indie pop that’s smart, sad, and refined, and Codes and Keys fills it nicely.
The album finds the band undergoing the best kind of reinvention.
In the interest of accurate advertising, we propose that the band renames the album Decent! Enough!
It’s a minutely detailed and evocative recreation of what, to generations of filmgoers, will always be the sound of the Old West.
Relative to the other woodwinds, the saxophone is pretty damn cool.
To an even greater extent than Saadiq’s warmly received The Way I See It, Stone Rollin’ is a retreat from relevancy.
A rhymer no less gifted than T.S. Eliot once said that April is the cruelest month.
w h o k i l l proves that Merrill Garbus isn’t just a brainy artiste with a killer voice
Would-be revivalists Holy Ghost! have come a good half-decade too late for this particular resurrection.
The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues doesn’t quite return Between the Buried and Me to the art-metal vanguard.
It helps that the track sounds as quick and clever as Santi herself.
The best moments on the album find Hunx and His Punx relating to their source material not as tropes, but as sources of power.
Eschewing the dynamic pop and soul flourishes that made Lemons something of a crossover vehicle, The Family Sign is simply flat.
Whatever C’mon lacks in newness it more than compensates for in intimacy and richness.
Similarly on-trend via the increasingly prominent underground R&B movement, the Weeknd takes the genre to even rawer places.
Hearing ReturnOf4Eva is like living in a fantasy world where Pimp C had never died.
Ravishers show promise as songwriters, but their disavowal of all things gimmicky or outlandish leaves them sounding indistinct.
A thunderstorm can be awe-inspiring, but it also doesn’t give a shit whether or not you get bored halfway through.
Never an especially technical rapper, Khalifa doesn’t take his game up on Rolling Papers.