The band’s first album in a decade is more haunted than its arena-sized choruses suggest.
Bonkers has always been a hat that Beyoncé has worn well.
The old stuff? Well, Polly Jean Harvey seems happy to keep it that way.
One of our favorite indie labels, Paper Bag Records, has released a track-for-track cover of Madonna’s True Blue album.
The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues doesn’t quite return Between the Buried and Me to the art-metal vanguard.
The lingering impression the album leaves is that it could have been a real knockout were Stanley still anywhere near his peak.
A return to classic form on Lollipop would be nearly impossible for the Meat Puppets.
The five tracks collected here are a jumble, but they also provide a window onto the stylistic borders of the band’s sound.
She expressed herself with the baptismal “Born This Way,” but Lady Gaga saved her prayers—or something like them—for the urgent follow-up.
It helps that the track sounds as quick and clever as Santi herself.
While Person Pitch rippled with punctuated sound, Tomboy is a cyclic plateau.
With W.A.R. (We Are Renegades), Pharoahe Monch is on spellbinding form, raging against society’s shortcomings and hip-hop’s countless ills.
With In Love with Oblivion, Crystal Stilts assert themselves as a unique presence in the modern noise-pop revival.
The best moments on the album find Hunx and His Punx relating to their source material not as tropes, but as sources of power.
The additions of Vig, Smear, and Novoselic end up doing little except reminding listeners of better days.
Make Some Noise” is your archetypal Beastie Boys tune.
As the coolly altered colors of the cover art indicate, Katy B’s On a Mission is euphoric without aggression.
In the quest to find herself, Jessie J seems to have gotten sidetracked.
Alison Krauss & Union Station’s Paper Airplane doesn’t offer an “in” for the unconverted.
Were Kirwan’s production a bit meatier, Bloodless Coup might be able to overcome the lapses in the band’s songwriting.
The album loses entirely too many of the elements that made the singer-songwriter such a singular Southern artist.