Tag Archives: music-album-reviews

“You got a love that’s a real long shot,” sings Dan Auerbach on “It Ain’t Over,” the loping, funky second single from Dropout Boogie. Dude might as well be singing about himself. In a moment when rock music barely exists in the pop conversation it once dominated, there is no …

Pusha T is to coke references what Larry David is to absurd social situations: He finds new and interesting ways to revitalize disquieting things that should have jumped the shark a long time ago. There are only so many ways you can invoke that houseware/cocaine-prep staple, Pyrex, and talk about …

If this record was released under anyone else’s name, the reviews wouldn’t have much to say. Lovely songwriting. Beautiful string arrangements. The bossa nova track “Olvidado (Otro Momento)” pairs well with a martini by the pool. Overall, solid album. No notes. But for Father John Misty, the bar is set …

Magdalene, the 2019 album by British-pop polymath FKA Twigs, was as exquisite as it was excruciating, nearly every song writhing with the anguish she experienced after a shattering period of heartache, loneliness, and health challenges. Shortly before making the album, she had several fibroids removed from her uterus — small …

2021 has seen its share of albums in which major artists meet huge expectations with supersize tracklists — records like Drake’s 86-minute Certified Lover Boy and Kanye West’s punishingly enormous Donda. Now you can add Alicia Keys to the list of A-list epic-makers. Keys, her eighth album, is a 26-song …

Summer Walker’s music evokes the spirit of the blues. The 25-year-old Atlanta native has a writing ability reminiscent of Bessie Smith’s descriptive love narratives, deeply personal but at the same time reflecting universal emotions and desires. Walker’s 2019 debut, Over It, was the most-streamed album by a female artist since …

Elton John was in the middle of his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour in March 2020, when the pandemic sent the world into quarantine. Soon, like the rest of us, he was back home. “I filled my days like everyone else seemed to be filling their days,” he writes in …

Reggaeton isn’t all that old in the grand scheme of things, yet there’s an industry-wide yearning for the halcyon days of early perreo, which was fostered in Puerto Rico’s Black communities in the Nineties and 2000s. Artists from Bad Bunny to Rauw Alejandro have offered up tributes to the sounds …

The timing has never been better for a good Liz Phair record. The full-disclosure lyrics and painterly songcraft she perfected on her classic 1993 debut, Exile In Guyville, can be heard these days in any number of excellent young artists across the indie-pop map — Soccer Mommy, Snail Mail, Jay …

The Black Keys have never been afraid to look backward — especially concerning the blues. The first two tracks of their 2002 debut, The Big Come Up, were lively, low-fi covers of tunes by Mississippi juke-joint bluesmen R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, and their 2006 EP, Chulahoma, was a full-on, …