The album is at once a reckoning and a self-conscious pivot.
The Winter of Mixed Drinks is, in a lot of ways, Frightened Rabbit’s weightiest record yet.
Like jj n°2 before it, n°3 strikes a balance between the blasé and the magical, matching facetious.
Broken Bells boasts some truly marvelous songs, but these peaks are sandwiched between tracks that struggle to exceed colorless tedium.
Have One on Me is a strange and strangely pretentious mess.
Black Light impeccably delivers on everything you could possibly want from the 14-year-old band.
Shearwater’s The Golden Archipelago is the kind of album that makes other bands look lazy.
Peter Gabriel’s first album in eight years carries the definite stink of pandering opportunism.
Corbin doesn’t reach the same heights of George Strait’s best singles or even of his halfway-interesting recent albums.
To say that Rogue Wave’s Permalight is a two-faced record is critical understatement at its finest.
Most of the tracks on this compilation make a solid case for the band’s feel-good music harboring some serious feel-bad impulses.
Ain’t No Grave amounts to a touching and often very sad sendoff.
Stephen Bryce Avary performs all of his material with so much gee-whiz earnestness that you won’t be able to resent the guy.
Fly Yellow Moon is a charming bout of champagne pop.
The Swedish quintet are rarely masters of producer Phil Ek’s approach.
Despite its obvious ingredients and well-worn criterion, Brutalist Bricks comes off peculiarly fresh.
Beach House’s album boldly complies the subtle and the overt.
The program turned out to be more or less a Loudon Wainwright show with the distinction of exemplary recent material.
The gimmick behind Fixin’ the Charts Volume One is a strange one.
Ryan has proven that he can still make a melancholy perspective into a compelling listen, but Dear Lover is simply monotonous and disappointing.
Peace & Love finds Juliana Hatfield at her most vulnerable and intimate.