The band’s first album in a decade is more haunted than its arena-sized choruses suggest.
Floating along on a muttery wave of gelid, slushy demi-pop, Papercuts’s You Can Have What You Want should raise few eyebrows.
Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle once again proves Bill Callahan to be as ageless as the forest.
Arguably no other indie-rock band was as lyrically antiestablishment during the Bush era as Portland’s the Thermals.
Two Suns offers a rich, distinct world of subterranean lullabies, spacey timbres, and ghostly beauty.
Spry and creatively unmoored, Richard Swift’s The Atlantic Ocean breathes life into boilerplate piano-man song structures.
Black Dice’s songs on Repo are patchwork structures bursting with found sound and grating scraps of noise.
Stranger illustrates how slight the distinctions between country, blues, and folk genre labels are.
Teng eschews conventional pop-song structures without succumbing to the fussy, overworked arrangements that bog down other classically-minded artists.
For pretend dance music, Junior Boys’s third album, Begone Dull Care, has a few moves up its inseam.
Cohen’s voice has aged and deteriorated since Field Commander Cohen was recorded, and in some ways the new instrument is just as compelling as the old.
Rust is like mayonnaise for the ears.
Fortunately for Kanye, but unfortunately for the rest of us, most of Living Thing follows in the vein of “Nothing to Worry About.”
The album is the musical equivalent of a bowling alley chockfull of orderly, milkshake-drinking youth.
Call Prince what you will, but don’t call him oblivious.
The restraint that McBride shows in both her vocal performances and her song selection are a refreshing change of pace.
Defying Gravity barely gets off the ground.
The album may not have any standout hooks to give him another inescapable radio hit, but it does suggest that DeGraw has finally found a style that suits him well.
It might not be the future of music, but this is music you can swing your doorknockers to.
Although a slow, not quite graceful recovery, Grace/Wastelands is also a stab at realized potential.
The band’s affinity for harmony and subtle melodicism elevates Skye over heavier exercises in drop-tuned brutality.