As anyone who’s been there can attest, New Orleans isn’t really the best place to be sad.
On Car Alarm, the Sea and Cake continue to prove that being a breezy post-rock band is not an oxymoronic impossibility.
Tell Tale Signs is not the second coming of Self-Portrait, but it’s a hell of a head-scratcher.
What Jay Reatard is attempting on Singles ‘08 is hardly original but completely welcome at the same time.
Could it be that psychological complexity in rappers has become another tired cliché?
No moment on the album sounds out of control or wasted.
Nelly is as consistently entertaining as ever on the cameo-bloated Brass Knuckles.
Mega Breakfast is all relentless, delicious parody.
The album is filled to the brim with elite production and rapping, but it lacks the hungriness, spirit, and craziness of a classic.
There’s a unique pleasure in hearing a once one-dimensional rapper discover complexity.
For a rapper who doesn’t rap very well, the Game is proving to be amazingly resilient as well as oddly charming.
The contrast between Human Highway’s Moody Motorcycle and Arm’s Way could hardly be more stark.
The album goes a long way toward definitively documenting their trippy, ingenious maunderings.
You & Me is a thoroughly Walkmen-esque album, however tautological it may be to say so.
Nick Thorburn seems dead set on becoming the mad prince of indie pop.
The Botticellis have done the work already, so you won’t have to do a thing.
With Thing of the Past, Vetiver comes across like a well-orchestrated coffeehouse act with unusually exquisite taste.
Dan Bejar has encrypted his creations to the point that their significance is entirely his to bear.
Do not buy Cut and Run, but consider downloading “Faith, You Changed Your Name.”
The album’s hookless, driving songs about broken relationships and drunken melancholia fit nicely into Peter Katis’s indie-rock framework.