We weren’t sure if Madonna could surprise us anymore. Until she did.
Steve Ellison may be all kinds of intellectual, but on Cosmogramma he never loses sight of the less reflective pleasures of his craft.
B.o.B. is a vigorous young MC who throws a lot at you, and a sufficient amount of the album works.
The record comes across as less of a change in direction than a full-on identity crisis.
Lauderdale’s inspired choices of collaborators and calculated risks make the record one of his most rewarding.
Male Bonding is definitely not the first band to crank out waterlogged surf-garage jams in minute-and-a-half morsels.
The Electric Factory is perhaps the perfect venue for an artist like Jónsi.
Sage Francis spends a lot of time talking on Li(f)e, a troubled album whose strange production choices expose his biggest weaknesses.
Too often these songs appear as wasted canyons of distended nothingness.
Brooklyn quintet the National has found a balance on their fifth album, High Violet.
When Diamond Eyes isn’t trying quite so hard to be a great record, it ends up being a pretty good one.
The biggest problem with Dark Side is just how little of a Flaming Lips album it is.
Forgiveness, Broken Social Scene doesn’t have many reasons to apologize.
As long as Mark E. Smith keeps that up, he’ll continue to challenge the idea of what a band as old as the Fall is supposed to sound like.
Ritter stands out as a devoted classicist whose repurposing of buried objects feels tinged with lifelessness.
On each successive album, the New Pornographers have become less off-the-cuff and more cerebral.
The album’s length and wide stylistic breadth give the packed-in feel of a career-spanning collection.
Perhaps what’s most interesting about Hounds is how it fits into the narrative arc of Robison and Maguire’s career.
The album is cool by way of its out-of-touch bravado, and, in too-brief moments, graced by a tongue-in-cheek bittersweetness.
At some point, Craig Finn will have to grow up.
Less a musician than a kind of gonzo multi-specialty clearinghouse, Mike Patton has ensured career stability by turning himself into a commodity.