They are beautifully and simply arranged, but it is not an entertaining album to listen to in any conventional sense, nor can it be shaken off easily. It is, however, the kind of album that makes all others seem frivolous while you’re hearing it.

For an album that’s 15 tracks to be this consistently good is a rarity, an anomaly, and an artistic triumph that should place it on every Best Of list at the end of the year.

Aside from a sterling, unobtrusive remastering job—kudos to mastering engineers Andy Pearce and Matt Wortham for opting not to artificially magnify anything about the mix—the real selling point with this new edition is the inclusion of a complete live show recorded a week after the album’s release. ... The newly brushed-up live recording—which significantly improves on the sound of the bootleg—takes the cake for the most accurate and well-rounded live document of Black Sabbath in the ‘70s.

Browne has always led a double life: sensitive singer/songwriter and committed activist. During his 40-year career, there’s been a tug of war between the romantic poet and the surging outcry. On Standing In The Breach, his first album since 2008’s Time The Conqueror, the Southern California soft rock icon seamlessly reconciles the two.

Homegrown establishes itself as its own rightful—perhaps even required—chapter in that legacy, yet another bold statement from one of the musical giants of the last half-century.

This is a marching band that’s veered way out of formation, and is making utterly original music.

Despite his quiet voice and instrumentation, his music refuses to recede into the background. It commands your attention in every conceivable way.

The proof is in a finished product where nothing feels out of place or approached half-heartedly. It’s as perfect a pop album as you’re going to get this year. Savor every last bit of it.

The authenticity that appeared in patches throughout his last record, The Sun Is Always Brighter, steers his latest.

Working with Lukas Nelson’s Promise of the Real, Young’s urgency is infused with youthful intensity.

It’s his most ambitious undertaking to date, and while it presents no obvious singles or easy entry points, he pulls it off without it feeling pretentious or ponderous.

Sprinter crackles and explodes, with a dynamic range that’d make Steve Albini blush.

Spanning 22 tracks and the great sprawl of a nation, Big Wheel and Others compiles more of these vital impressions than any of McCombs’ previous releases, documenting something so damned beautifully alive--so restless and sensual and swinging and true--the album accrues power by virtue of its breadth.

Arctic Monkeys arrive at the end of AM a lot wiser than they may have appeared from the slow opening stomp of the LP.

The result is a nearly flawless, organic LP.

The joy of The Promise: The Lost Sessions of Darkness on the Edge of Town for any serious Boss employee is the notable twinkle of notions that would later grow into classic rock staples.

Each track is an excellent pop song and a complete sound environment, the sonic equivalent of a sensually immersive art installation.

Like "The Pirate's Gospel," her cruelly unheralded 2006 debut, To Be Still is a staggering meditation on the idea of home in its many forms, and shares its predecessor's knowing heart--young, but already familiar with the tugging weights of time, family and love.

If you don’t like country music, don’t bother. But if you do have an ear for Waylon and Willie and the boys, then you’ll find plenty to love.

Fade is just 10 distinctive, beautiful songs in 45 minutes meant to show their languid new peers (Real Estate, Beach House, Grizzly Bear, what have you) who's boss. It shouldn't work. It's to that roaring 20-year streak's goodwill that it does.

With DAMN., Kendrick Lamar plays by the rules and then sets the rule book on fire, and continues one of the most impressive run of albums of any artist in recent memory.

The production is bright and clear, and the arrangements showcase the star.

Titanic Rising doesn’t feel blissfully adrift. Instead, it feels like Mering knows exactly where she’s going.

This unrelenting but beautiful melancholy forms the glut of Courage. Beauty is key here, especially with a song like “Bring Down,” where an otherwise depressing dirge is given liftoff by Smith’s sweet harmony and a twittering flute.

After all these years, the members of Veruca Salt are like sparks banging into each other, their notes and beats still giving off heavy heat. And ultimately, that is what makes Ghost Notes work.

The masterful Spike Field, isn’t just interested in mere questions: It aspires to tear apart time, inspect each shorn fabric and sew up each of its distant stretches to create a new, shimmering collage of the future-past. Within its intricately textured synth patterns, off-tune piano lines and yearning mezzo-soprano are tellings of intimate histories.

This is an album of remarkable consistency and sparkling beauty. If her music hasn’t clicked for you yet, listen to this record until it does.

The ArchAndroid is a fully immersive, theatrical experience. It's a near-perfect R&B album; hell, it's a fantastic hip-hop, psychedelic, neo-soul, dance and orchestral album too.

The album is saturated with high poly-harmonies, finger-snaps and hand claps, but the Charles Atlas-invoking title communicates Wavves' real agenda--"nyah-nyah" pop sucker-punches, sunny smiles so forced they come off as sneers, intense self-deprecation as psychic body armor.

Nine albums and eight years in, it’s time to stop trying to figure out what the hell Animal Collective--vocalist/guitarist Avey Tare, percussionist/vocalist Panda Bear and knob-twiddler Geologist--is, and just enjoy the orgasmic rush of danceable rock.

Seeing a band carry on the complexities of long-form songs, especially when giving their entire selves up to the process while they’re at it, is the boldest a debut can be.

It shouldn’t work--they went all or nothing. They got all.

"The enemy is everywhere" is The Monitor's twice-invoked refrain, the central thesis of an album that's both uncompromisingly bleak and impossible to ignore.

The official release of Nirvana’s headlining performance at the 1992 Reading Festival feels at once indescribable and quaint.

It’s all supported by a through-line of warm, cozy production that imbues the album with a pleasant nostalgia, the kind we’ve come to expect from Slim and his reworking of dug-in American genres like folk, country, and blues.

This is not an album to absorb in desperate moments, but rather an artfully brooding, grime-y thing that stands as a terribly unique and nightmarish account of what it could sound like to spiral out of control.

The young band has learned a great secret: It’s possible to make a massive, commercial, go-for-the-gusto Rock Record while still holding on to dark idiosyncrasies and seriousness of purpose.

What could be unwieldy becomes a vast patchwork of influences buoying empowerment.

Wand’s many talents are given full plumage on Plum. It will be interesting to see in what directions the band surveys in future albums. For now, this is about as interesting a new rock record you could hope to listen to.

Jack and Meg careen from riff to riff, idea to idea, clinging for dear life as they dig their spurs into the mythical rodeo beast of rock ’n’ roll. Their lean guitar-and-drums approach allows them to turn on a dime, following any stormy muse they please.

Their new record Blue Lights On The Runway has the potential to turn X1 into a stateside #1.

What Kelly has summoned is a shot of the good stuff from the wellspring of material everyone has to work with, and in the process he’s produced one of the best albums of 2015.

I Killed Your Dog dazzles with its musicality, but its emotion is what takes it to the next level.

Everything combines to enrich, enliven and add texture to the band's wild aesthetic, which is unlike anything else you're going to experience this year.

No song seems out of place and every single one will be your favorite the moment you listen to it because of extremely quotable songs.

If we could go back to a time where we had never heard these songs before, Hitchhiker would more than stand on its own as a brilliant piece of performance art. Stripped of the subsequent mythology or knowledge of what these songs would eventually become, each performance remains beautiful in its own right.

This album is pure, 10-bandaided-finger combustibility--the notes need room to breathe, like a freshly uncorked keg of moonshine, each pluck of each string hitching a ride on the cool, Allegheny mountain breeze.

They are, as you might expect, meatier and with more snap than the recorded versions, yet still lean and taut. There are no extended solos or long, drawn out moments of vamping. The band treats the show like a good club gig: playing their hearts out and encouraging the very vocal audience to join them in the fun.

Booker’s music emerges as defiant, insightful and both intimately and communally self-actualizing.

On II, Bad Books have proven that they are more than Manchester Orchestra with Kevin Devine or vice versa by dropping any ego and making a cohesive record. Thankfully, all of us reap the benefit.

His new record The Nashville Sound, his first with the 400 Unit since 2011’s Here We Rest, is triumphant in its topical resonance, but draws influence from the timelessness of lyrical curiosity. Whether delivering heart-wrenching lines on the crumbling of the American Dream, or the crumbling of a relationship, each is given an equal shake, and that makes his songs unreasonably powerful.

There is distinct pastoral element at work in the Tallest Man on Earth's songs. He invokes the elements and the myriad forces nature: rivers, islands, rocks, clouds, birds, meadows, rainstorms, hail, forests, weeds, lilies and wheat.

The songs illustrate a wise-beyond-years songwriting style, with none of the self-importance and indulgence that can come with more experience. Nothing feels trite or contrived. She’s a natural, with an impressive sense of restraint, placing points of tension and release right where they need to be.

Earle plumbs the carnal underpinnings of the blues: feasting on what can be, never mourning what’s done. It is frisky, with musicians thumping and plucking in what feels almost like a jam.

Okkervil River itself performs here with an organic ease that’s dramatic without reaching for histrionics, continuing to tattoo its rough folkish flesh with Motown horns, power-pop overdrive and chugging New Wave bass.

Underneath the orchestral flourishes and children’s choirs, beneath even the frequent textural shifts and melodic detours, are a set of melodies that find new ways to cut straight to the listener every time.

Best of all, it’s very self-aware. Stickles puts it all on the table, ready to blame, excuse, forgive and destroy himself perhaps as an example for us when we’re trying to decide how to deal with our own imperfections.

The singer/songwriter takes the back seat and lets the college kids channel their inner Folds, and they successfully do so--often stealing the spotlight away from Folds.

With his old-timey Upland Stories, Fulks matures into an important voice.

Pusha T paints a vivid picture of the things he knows best throughout My Name Is My Name.

This record sounds like four musicians coming together, telepathically attuned to each other’s ideas, reveling in the strange mystery that unfolds when they play together under the same roof—a fragile sanctuary from the collapsing world outside.

One of the acest efforts of 2023 so far. ... Museum performs like a meticulous, well-crafted ballet where JFDR’s crew of players are the ballerinas. Across nine songs, she deftly hypothesizes what emotional boundaries exist in and beyond her world.

Tomorrowland is like a good, ol' fashioned rock anthem of kiss-my-asschaps autonomy.

This is an album that knocks you over at first. But when you gather yourself, get back on your feet and listen again, you'll want to hit the play button a second time.

Anyone weaned on the fizzy punk abandon of Bleach-era Nirvana--that holy union of feedback-dappled punk on metal--will identify almost rapturously with The Wytches’ studied homage.

It’s the last three songs that push an already arresting album to the next level.

Both anxious and anthemic, the third most famous band from Leeds, England (behind Gang of Four and the Mekons) lobs social commentary as sharp as drummer Nick Hodgson’s ties, and tackles subjects as brainy as evolutionary biology ('Like It Too Much,'), the tenets of self-help ('Tomato In the Rain') and gender politics ('Remember You’re A Girl'), all at breakneck speed.

Salutations expands Oberst’s raw scratch solo Ruminations’ 10 songs into a messier, more glorious celebration of squalor and self-indulgence with a self-loathing chaser.

Andy Votel’s encyclopedic liner notes and a Gainsbourg interview make this version the definitive reissue for the as-yet unsullied.

It’s a beautiful work of art about aging, regret and an arduous search for meaning. It’s an expansive record that explores a variety of sounds and themes, but it never feels confused or lost.

Elegiac by intent, the record is awash in poignancy, radiating from the deeply felt guitar and vocal performances of the 83-year-old King and his supporting band (anchored by drummer Jim Keltner, bassist Nathan East and pianist Dr. John) and from the carefully chosen material.

With Need To Feel Your Love, the band broadens its horizons without losing what made ‘em so promising in the first place. That’s always a tricky line to walk, and Sheer Mag does it with gritty grace.

Paper Airplanes features a stellar set of songs that should continue to expand upon Alison Krauss' already-great reputation.

The production is thick but elegant, applied with full knowledge that the songs could exist beautifully in a sparse acoustic-strummed daze, but that they deserve more than that.

Björk weaves into Medúlla a palpable longing for a simpler world--a world predating smart bombs and collapsing towers, a world in which life revolved around the expressive raising of one’s voice, both solitarily and in concert with others.

Though it’s true that this is not a “new” record, it’s still a crucial addition to not just Lenderman’s discography, but to the compendium of contemporary live material altogether as we know it.

The innocent appeal of Milagros’ tiny voice, though, is universal. And so is Aterciopelados’ music, which transcends all language barriers.

You can’t separate this band from nostalgia, and although that might seem like a crutch to some, it can be a major point of interest for others, especially when it’s done as well as it is on Deluxe.

Honor among thieves, love amongst scoundrels... Keith Richards has carved an encompassing survey of his own spirit and set it to a vast set of influences for all to see.

What makes the album so amazing is its ability to balance poignancy and fun.

Tonally, Feist exposes a storm of feeling on Pleasure, probing an abyss of her own confusion, lack of trust in others and self-imposed isolation, and yet also a core tendency to love and care.

The National have put out another album that could easily be argued as their best--and it may be easier to make that claim now than ever before.

The instrumentals are perhaps the most interesting; as unfinished tracks, you’re left to imagine the words Smith might have added to his work.

A few skippable songs don’t change the scale of Sumney’s accomplishment. With an auspicious debut in his rearview mirror and a blinding future ahead, he made an album that crystalizes the current state of his art and advances his worldview while at the same time clearing a path for whatever he wants to do next. Perhaps the only thing more exciting than græ will be seeing where Moses Sumney goes from here.

The gems on All Hail West Texas capture the pain and beauty of humans’ entanglements with each other.... These days it’s the loneliness of the album, and just the idea of the space that is West Texas, a vast and largely unpopulated sprawl, that hits home.

Preacher’s Daughter produces a crater-deep impact that commands respect and attention. Where one may knock some of the power ballads for sameness, one might instead find consistency, an album grounded in the artist’s inspirations and narrative mission that is, above all, tantalizing. It is hard not to crave more.

No bonus tracks, no live filler--no reason to mess around when the perfection was in the pacing.

Laugh Track is a companion piece to the band’s other 2023 album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, sure, but it stands on its own.

Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War)), is both the best work of branch’s career and the most fitting send-off one could imagine for the late trumpeter.

he has created an album of songs whose sounds and sentiments are much weightier than they appear on the surface, providing entry to somewhere much more wondrous and strange and troubling than it first appears. Semper Femina is a ticket for such a journey, one that provides practical insights but no easy answers.

Caramel and Mockasin definitely takes you on one hell of an adventure. Even though it might leave you feeling a little softened and dehydrated, I can’t wait to re-lace up my skates and embark on the next one.

Legend has grown by leaps on this disc, delivering a richer sound and more adventurous experimentation. [Dec 2006, p.88]

Produced by Bayley under executive production of Epworth, the album is bizarre, gorgeous, playful and dark--and it’s absolutely mesmerizing.

It’s the acoustically driven numbers, like Saliers’ “Alberta,” a moving song based on a 1903 rockslide that buried part of the mining town of Frank, Alberta, that spotlight the strength of the duo’s voices.

The relaxed, sleepy-eyed disposition of WARMER (perfect for a holiday weekend, in fact) belies the shades of decay that flit by in the periphery of Tweedy’s lyrics. ... Tweedy has given us an example of easy listening in the most powerful sense.

Like Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Quit +/or Fight flirts with perfection, a cohesive collection of all-too-fleeting pleasures.

The musical maturity is the most notable and commendable part of No Blues.

St. Vincent, instead, entertains and provokes at every turn and is disarmingly self-assured.