The album sounds beamed in from an earlier decade, but it runs deeper than nostalgia.
The only thing keeping Bleeding Heart Graffiti from being relevant is Warner Bros.’s nearly nonexistent promotion.
The Be Good Tanyas’s choices of cover tunes are fairly obvious and the album’s arrangements lack the band’s usual verve.
The emotions here are real and often outsized, but the memories themselves, like the album, are better when they get a bit fuzzy.
Beck’s latest album plays like a subdued collection of greatest hits.
Long Trip Alone keeps the country genre in another pair of capable hands.
Lupe Fiasco’s relentless positivism never overwhelms his casual rhymes.
Gang of Losers is a sturdy collection of barely contained alienation.
Under The Skin washes over you like a summer breeze.
It’s too inconsistent to be declared the masterpiece of which Colin Meloy and company are capable.
The masses are urged to wait for when Treasury’s best tracks are compiled on the boxed set.
Like Red on a Rose is a wholly unexpected move from an artist who seemed perfectly content with his status and already-secured legacy.
Jamie Stewart, the experimental-pop brainchild of Xiu Xiu, structures his songs like miniature horror films.
The production, thankfully, is varied, slick, and interesting.
Amputechture shows a band honing their eruptive sound and bringing it into tight focus for the first time.
Perhaps the blight of the rock ‘n’ roll pioneer is to sound like one’s followers.
You can practically hear the energy draining away as the album progresses and one song slides into another.
For once, Yankovic’s originals are better than his parodies.
The Lemonheads is nearly as great as the band’s masterpiece, It’s a Shame About Ray.
Continuum just doesn’t convince as a heady, soulful rock album or as Mayer’s creative quantum leap forward.
Ta-Dah isn’t an unimpeachable triumph from front to back, but it’s a hell of a good showing.