We weren’t sure if Madonna could surprise us anymore. Until she did.
Romain Gavras’s apocalyptically brutal music video for M.I.A.’s “Born Free” has disturbed a lot of people.
Malin’s solo career has always shown promise, but this album finally makes good on it.
Victorian America is an immaculately dusky exploration of Americana tropes.
The track should pique expectations for the new record simply by proving that M.I.A.’s bag of studio tricks is as inexhaustible as her attitude.
Coachella is a truly beautiful realm where long-absent bands and air-conditioned dance floors exist within walking distance.
Mary Chapin Carpenter has more or less been rewriting and rerecording the same album of introspective NPR and AAA playlist-ready songs with uneven results.
Gogol Bordello continues to churn out records whose rampant energy belies an increasing sense of atrophying decay.
Nobody’s Daughter is less interesting than America’s Sweetheart, in a rubbernecking kind of way, but it’s infinitely better constructed.
Cypress Hill stubbornly sticks to their tired ganja-and-guns formula on their latest effort, Rise Up.
I Am What I Am an honest reflection of who Merle Haggard has become in his twilight years.
The tacky use of a repurposed instructional audio sample is the warning sign.
Ozomatli has always distinguished themselves from their peers by working a hefty dose of politics into their party mix.
Swim’s songs are fully evocative of the stylistic struggles that the band has come to represent.
It seems poised to fall into a formulaic rut of middling expectations, wrenching cathartic redemption songs from decades of anguish.
Lynne’s production instincts are spot-on, never overindulging in the freedom afforded by her role as the producer.
Kate Nash’s sophomore effort proves that she’s still the best of the lot when it comes to balancing her pop hooks with a compelling persona.
That Nelson is in especially fine vocal form only heightens the impression that the album was recorded decades ago.
After five proper studio albums, middling songs like “Red Light” and “Bump in the Road” shouldn’t be the best he has to draw from.
Disappointment that it is, the album still might have been saved from the outer limits of tedium were it not so mercilessly dreary.
Palomino is one of the more exciting bluegrass albums in recent memory.