The songs rarely cohere into anything greater than the sum of their individual parts.
Sidewalks lacks a considerable amount of the bite of its predecessor.
North displays an astonishing level of growth and maturity when compared to Darkstar’s earlier hyperkinetic dubstep material.
“Runaway” is less of a video for the track of the same name than it is a film designed to be visual accompaniment to the whole of the Fantasy album.
There are very few artists with the desire to experiment with their sound during the twilight of their careers, and even fewer with the ability to do so convincingly.
Olympia is a lush, at times dazzling album that doesn’t always seem entirely aware of its own silliness.
This is how an ostensible country act makes a full-on pop album that sounds contemporary and relevant.
The Fresh & Onlys’s new album, Play It Strange, provides a trip back to the early 1980s.
Glasser is like Bat for Lashes or Florence and the Machine, but with less commercial ambition.
What charm the album does possess owes chiefly to the strength of the source material.
“Worn Out Tune” says it all, with its bluesy but not-quite-bleak atmosphere, and Elizabeth Ziman happily embracing “the ones we just can’t get enough of.”
“Doncamatic” is a far cry from Plastic Beach’s grandiose kitchen-sink arrangements.
That the album is a failure despite the authentic passion behind it only accentuates its participants’ respective ruts.
The Incredible Machine stands to be a transitional album for Sugarland.
Like most rural, Ben Gibbard-esque, Arcadian-folk singer-songwriters, Dave Beck has a fair share of girl problems.
Kings of Leon has amped up the “revival” half of their revival-rock offerings for Come Around Sundown.
Even as a bared-soul, one-man show, Lennon adjusted and perfected himself with clever production techniques.
I Am Not a Human Being is not a mixtape, but it’s not really an album either.
Stevens’s conceptual obsessions continue on this trippy, orchestrated journey that is, in two words, beautifully neurotic.
Evidence of Humanity meticulously and miraculously achieves the half-nervous, half-confident joy of extemporaneous performance.
It’s great to hear the alt-country vets sounding more alternative and more country than they have in years.