We weren’t sure if Madonna could surprise us anymore. Until she did.
What sets Them Crooked Vultures apart from the stockpile of self-indulgent hogwash is the sense of merriment flowing through it.
Just as Number Ones’s sequencing highlights Janet’s impressive early years, it also underscores her startlingly abrupt decline.
While Shape of Energy isn’t some collection of piss n’ vinegar rock brilliance, it’s a good amount of fun.
The feel of Xenophanes is sketchy and somewhat improvised, but there’s no sense that these songs are simply impressionistic doodles.
What may have in some hands come off as a remarkable display of versatility only reinforces Chris Carrabba’s limitations as a songwriter.
The difference between sticking to a sweet spot and running in place is sometimes vanishingly small.
When taken as a whole, em>The Fountain is significantly worse than any one track would suggest.
Tongue’s paradox is that the more Dizzee and his collaborators don’t work, the more the album does.
She Wolf is unequivocally “American.”
Night Music captures the macabre power of darkness, where ordinary shadows are stretched into ominous significance.
Tara Jane O’Neil insists, rightly and eerily, that as much cold space exists between two people as between two stars.
Annie sports a tiger-shaped dress on the album’s cover art and dons a more aggressive persona to match.
For the unconverted, it’s hard to hear the album as anything more than inessential.
In Love & War is deserving of greater commercial impact than it is likely to earn.
A little restraint works in Carrie Underwood’s favor.
In essence, Reading is the unqualified exhibition of Nirvana’s intensity as a live act.
The album contains substantial flaws that cannot be chalked up to prog-rock growing pains.
Despite an irreverent name that roughly translates to “casual sex” in Japanese, Asobi Seksu is hardly some flip indie-pop outfit.
Memoryhouse finds Richter at a germinal stage, ranging between the somewhat dry and the heartily excessive.
Molina & Johnson is a compilation that’s as evocative as the best work of either of its namesakes.