He's hook man to pop's most advanced megastars – see Solange's "Don't Touch My Hair," Kanye West's "Saint Pablo," Frank Ocean's "Alabama," Drake's "Too Much"--but his debut LP proves him their peer.

If you can't enjoy Joy, you will probably never enjoy Phish. Yet, to paraphrase a vintage Phish song, what's most impressive here is how much they seem to be enjoying themselves--truly, deeply, gratefully. It's nice to have them back.

Neko Case's clarion pipes remain the calling card, but on her 8th studio LP, between lyrics and vocal arrangements, they've never channeled more imagination or sense of purpose.

Silent Alarm is dance rock, but highly caffeinated.

A lower-dosage Animal Collective, the Foxes stuff their free-form songs with rich, swirling melodies; billowing clouds of organs, tom-toms, bells and assorted stringed instruments cloak group vocals whose secular-gospel, suede-fringed precision owes plenty to Crosby, Stills and Nash.

At 15 tracks, Petals for Armor can occasionally feel redundant; two or three songs feel like retread territory that was better explored elsewhere, and there’s only so many metaphors you can create for flowers. Still, the album’s final third, while the most pop-oriented section, is also its most interesting. ... It’s the sound of an artist blooming into some the best music of her career.

When Hughes' drolleries and hopeless romanticism combine, the effect can be sublime.

On I Am Easy to Find, another standard-bearing indie dude brand has reconfigured itself with multiple women’s voices at the LP’s core, a portion of the roughly 77 musicians that temporarily explode the band’s quintet. ... They pull it off without diluting their National-ness.

Hilton and Garza explore foreign cultures with wide-eyed curiosity and a taste for the unexpected.

On This Stupid World, the forlorn ambience is more lived-in and close-to-home than it’s ever seemed in the past. ... A record like this makes easing towards the abyss feel a little less painful.

The best moments on Daddy’s Home highlight those jagged borders and contradictions. Clark’s howling vocals and delightfully angular synths on “Pay Your Way in Pain” make it one of the strongest album openings of the year.

There is an emphasis on keyboards, in pulse and architecture, that adds buoyancy and color to James' writing and flatters his keening, stratospheric tenor.

The album’s musical backdrops range from breezy to absorbing, but it’s Koffee’s performances that are consistently bewitching.

Human Ceremony is a very impressive record for a band that's only been putting out music for about a year.

The minimalist, glassy music, combined with her depiction of her younger companion’s spirited imagination, makes for an ending that manages to contain enough optimism to inspire O, Zinner, and Chase to keep their collective spirit smoldering, even against the 21st century’s brutal headwinds.

It's another memorable chapter in rock's longest-running soap opera, with both Lindsey and Christine thriving on the dysfunctional vibes.

Her rap style and World Wide Whack’s buoyant production make sure its heavy themes don’t weigh it down; instead, the beats build her character.

Eminem contributes three new songs, all self-produced, which happen to be three of the most ferocious hip-hop songs ever recorded.

He is, simply, better than any other MC in hip-hop except for Jay-Z.... The Marshall Mathers LP is a car-crash record: loud, wild, dangerous, out of control, grotesque, unsettling. It's also impossible to pull your ears away from.

The album is full of moments like this, where the lyrical conventions of a hand-me-down genre are enlivened with genuinely personal urgency.

Lots of cowbell, lots of bass. [21 Sep 2006, p.82]

RTJ4, which the band rush-released a few days ahead of schedule, is laser-focused. ... Mike unloads on racist cops, systemic poverty, corporate media, and other eternal enemies. But the album never feels preachy, because the music bounces as much as it brays, with an elastic flow and deep history.

Surrounding herself with the cream of Southern bluegrass musicians -- dobro master Jerry Douglas and guitar prodigy Bryan Sutton among them -- Parton is by turns reflective ("Little Sparrow"), playful ("Marry Me"), dolorous ("My Blue Tears"), spirited ("I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby") and spiritual ("In the Sweet By and By") on this nearly hour-long modern-bluegrass tour de force.

Caprisongs is her most buoyant, she doesn’t sacrifice her creative nonconformity or intimacy. She strikes a careful balance, akin to perfecting an arabesque on a razor blade, as she revels in production that’s carefree, cathartic, and completely life-giving.

Laurel Hell can feel, at first, like an impenetrable record, full of guarded gloss and pop production that feels more like cold caution than anthemic summoning. That’s exactly Mitski’s point. ... More often than not, the songs about personal turmoil double as self-conscious career commentary.

Suga might sound like a moodier big sister to Tina Snow or Hot Girl Meg. But as the new songs show, Megan at her most vulnerable is still tough as a tank.

It documents the Stones on a historic roll, reveling in their mastery.

The boys' fantastic third album is steeped in the fuzzed-up guitars, three-part harmonies and cotton-candy choruses of Big Star and Cheap Trick.

Passion Pit's full-length debut proves he isn't fronting: It's a shiny bouquet of synth-pop roses, with perfumed Eighties keyboard whooshes and modern stutter beats crooking a finger toward the dance floor.

This is loud, expansive, unrepentant Metallica.

Gigaton is a testament to how Pearl Jam’s own deeply held dissatisfaction still burns brighter than ever.

Rihanna has transformed her sound and made one of the best pop records of the year.

They evoke folks as diverse as Led Zeppelin and My Bloody Valentine, but the gently woozy Sigur Ros don't sound like anything or anyone else so much as a classic-rock band bewitched by white magic.

There is lots of excellent rapping, but the most startling bars belong to Yugen Blakrok, a female MC from Johannesburg, who gets a feature alongside Vince Staples and outshines the headliner, no mean feat.



A not-as-good-kid traversing the same m.A.A.d. city as Kendrick, Schoolboy complements Lamar's narrative distance with evocative, unflinching first-person dispatches from the front lines.

All of the pieces in the box set complete a puzzle that explains how McCartney found himself again and hit the stride that has propelled him to the present day.

Not only do Rage understand the sweep of rock and rap history, but they had bold and unusual ways of tearing that history up.

Yeah, he's a romantic; a cynic, too. But above all, a songwriter: brilliant, perverse, funny as human nature. Which is pretty damn funny.

On her strongest album yet, she sets a poignant road tale between New York and Ontario ('Buffalo') and pens a fierce, Crazy Horse-ish squall about crack, murder and racism in her own back yard.

The Stills' excellent debut album, Logic Will Break Your Heart, is a stunner, a rush of shoegazer guitars and suave lover-boy angst.

Finally, the Cribs deliver the tour de force they had in them, and it's about time.

It’s a tight 10-track collection that lyrically and musically probes the concept of freedom—what it means, whether it’s a blessing or a curse.

Marshall has always been one of the most emotionally intense songwriters around, but with Sun she has made her riskiest, most vital album, not to mention one of her greatest.

Reznor's first NIN album in five years, it is one of his best, combining the textural exploration on the 1999 double CD The Fragile, and the tighter fury of his 1994 master blast, The Downward Spiral.

Mavis Staples takes her comeback higher still with this set, using an A list of songwriters informed, but not bound, by roots music.

Heavy-breathing sex chants with a heart of darkness.

Lazaretto [is] literally a house of blues (the title is Italian for a lepers' hospital), with each room outfitted according to White's mood and trials.

When I Was Cruel is a collection of tough tunes and textures that recalls -- but doesn't recycle -- the records that endeared him to his earliest admirers.

The reissue may not be a treasure trove of unheard material, but the gems that echo the sounds of the American South are comforting and familiar. And that’s not a bad thing.

His most jubilant disc since Born in the U.S.A. and more fun than a tribute to Pete Seeger has any right to be.

'Wrestlers' epitomizes what makes this quintet the sharpest dance rockers this side of their pals LCD Soundsystem: catchy tunes, monster grooves, and lyrics resolving the heartfelt and the smartass.

The most exciting thing about No Cities is that Sleater-Kinney are one of those bands again--they sound as hungry, as unsettled, as restless as any of the rookies on their jock.

New Blue Sun is not the best ambient record you can hear in 2023. .... However, New Blue Sun will probably be the only ambient record many people do hear in 2023, and it’s great that such a lively, sumptuous album gets the gig.

The big news, though, isn't YYY's groovier sound--it's the heat they radiate.

They don't mess around much outside their tessitura - they like to keep everything light, fast and punchy.

Her perfectly turned sixth LP deals with identity and autonomy; it's got feminist musculature and the dirt of a working musician under its fingernails.

The set radiates playfulness and pleasure – the opener "Arisen My Senses" is a breathless barrage of abstract beats and pop timbres, a musical multiple orgasm. But Utopia's no more "pop" than Vulnicura, and not all shiny, happy fantasias.

This debut EP is a small masterpiece of downtempo sound sculpture, finely detailed and often as gorgeous as it is discomforting.

On this seven-song EP, Bethany Cosentino combines the sundown power-pop buzz of Best Coast's 2010 debut with the Hulk-hug melodies and emotional gravity of last year's The Only Place to make for something masterfully archetypal but utterly her own.

This expanded reissue adds Not Forever the 1989 demo tape that got them signed.... It shows a vision startlingly complete, and its scrappiness occasionally serves the songs better.

The irony is that The Eternal might be their most concise record ever. It's also a rock & roll ass-kicker.

Angry, bold, pointed and eclectic as hell, Stag suggests that Nirvana and Sleater-Kinney are just as important to Ray as Simon and Garfunkel.

Her knack for heart-swelling choruses shines through on a set of tracks you might play while winning a marathon.

Ode To Joy shows off some of Wilco’s prettiest and most comforting songs, Tweedy’s enlarged heart transplanted back into a band — its lineup now unchanged for roughly half of its 25-year history — that’s never sounded more empathic.

It's heartbreaking and hilarious, in equal measure.

“Suspirium” is a radium-glow piano ballad that would have fit in nicely on Radiohead’s most recent album; the jazzy soul of “Unmade” and the trip-hop shiver of “Has Ended” are even more surprising, carrying welcome echoes of Yorke and co.’s brilliant Amnesiac-era B-sides. These tunes are vintage Yorke, and they make you wish he’d written more of them for Suspiria. At least until you hear the second half of this record, where the song-songs thin out in favor of even weirder electronic buzzes.

Thanks for the Dance is a surprise, a sort of séance as shiva, a magnificent parting shot that’s also that exceptionally rare thing — a posthumous work as alive, challenging, and essential as anything issued in the artist’s lifetime.

St. Vincent is her tightest, tensest, best set of songs to date, with wry, twisty beats pushing her lovably ornery melodies toward grueling revelations.

Beck bounces through Dylan's "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" with blazing distortion, while Peaches strips the Stooges' "Search and Destroy" down to sexy bass and krautrock beats.

The original All Things has aged brilliantly (the fresh remix doesn’t hurt). ... The two CDs of early demos (day one made with Voormann and Starr, day two acoustic versions) could easily stand on their own; these are spare, campfire-ish takes on which Spector would soon add Wall of Sound bricks.

Where a song like “Dimeback” felt like dream pop backwash, the 12 tracks here draw endless comparisons. In “Rylee & I” alone he evokes the mangled production of Bon Iver’s 22, A Million; the gauzy seduction of Jai Paul’s demos; the attention to space in Arthur Russell’s World of Echo; and the everyman sensitivity of John Mayer. That Mk.gee can bring to mind such varied artists is a testament to his ingenuity.

Brainwashed is a warm, frank goodbye, a remarkably poised record about the reality of dying, by a man on the verge.

Eminem just may have made the best rap-rock album in history

While it can often go dark, the vibe is empathic; Shake’s said the record was designed to comfort, and counter hate.

The Chicago-bred singer-guitarist works one of rock's finest faux-British accents, sounding like an early-Seventies prog-folkie. It's a perfect vocal vibe for music that can recall the very late Beatles and New Morning-era Dylan.

Other tracks, like the kinetic breakbeat jam "A Cidade," by DJ Dolores with Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hutz, take the Tropicália spirit into the 21st century, where it sounds perfectly at home.

If you have a favorite Foghat album or can name a single member of Deep Purple, you will love Broken Boy Soldiers; fortunately, it doesn't end there. [18 May 2006, p.226]

The album's wanton schizophonia results in such a switched-on pileup of styles that Groove Armada have earned their own rubric -- call it electrocrash, and consider it great.

An album where she keeps finding ways to give her artistry a new edge.

This is a sprawling, furious, deeply ambivalent theme album about institutional racism, the failures of black leadership and the pathologies and promise of early-21st-century African-American life.

There is a grim magnetism coursing through these 10 new songs--and most of it is in Dylan's vividly battered singing.

Clapton pays broad tribute to Johnson as a composer and public-domain synthesist.

There is a flow and coherence to these fifteen tracks that make the narrative whole much larger than the sum of its occasionally goofy parts.

It's hard to care about any shortcomings when the tunes are as masterfully crisp as they are on much of V.

A thrill ride of a listen, a motley mix of slick bops and searing confessionals that wonderfully encapsulate all of her various vibes.

The result is the best Pretenders record in years, a mix of galloping rockabilly and country & western songs, delivered in Hynde's trademark snarl.

The Pretties were impatient modernists, carrying that blues zeal to psychedelia (1967's "Defecting Grey"), rock opera (ahead of the Who, on 1968's S.F. Sorrow) and progressive rock (1970's Parachute) with spectacular if commercially dire results. This grand box takes that tale, across 11 studio albums and a feast of extras, up to the present day.

Virtually all of these songs and recordings have held up beautifully. [28 Oct 2004, p.104]

While the song selection (including classics like the brass-balled superfunker "Zombie") is killer, recording info would help. The music speaks for itself, but presidential history deserves better.

Even in duets with [Wainwright and Boy George], Antony is the dominant voice of solitude and agonized waiting. [10 Feb 2005, p.84]

Wilco's seventh studio album is a triumph of determined simplicity by a band that has been running from the obvious for most of this decade.

It might also be his most broadly emotional set ever; certainly it's his most sharply focused record since the game-changing tag team Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs decades ago.

Across the 10-track LP, the folk-tinged singer belts with gusto. ... The album's strongest moments, however, are Carlile's riskier departures towards the LP's end.

There is plenty of unexpected texture to keep your ears engaged.

Thankfully, Tucker’s latest never succumbs to old-age weariness.

Upping the spectacle from Fun Fear his 2012 debut, I Love You, Honeybear is an autobiographical set about love, marriage and derangement that's both ironic and empathic.

For all the broken romances on The Loneliest Time, it’s an uplifting experience.

At times, the album is a victim of its own ambition. But it wouldn't be half as awesome a ride if it had aimed any lower.