There may be nothing explicitly political in the songs on Be the Cowboy. But there’s plenty implicit, from the DIY American mythology of the title, to the way the songs validate voices that are shaky, hurting, irrational, and damaged, while also being smart, wry, powerful, and deserving of love.

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.

Jaguar II is a shining demonstration of the aptitude that made Monét a sought after collaborator, but here, in the album’s comfy old-school soul and sharp modern edge, she preserves something fresh and unique for herself.

The album is packed with hilariously nasty kiss-offs like “Piece of Shit” and “Ur Mum” — it’s got hooks for days, cheek for weeks.

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.

As a songwriter, the former choirboy pulls melodic influence from traditional gospel music à la Kanye West, Chance the Rapper and others. A fan of Dvorak, Kirk Franklin, Brandy and Björk, the artist, born Josiah Wise, sings love songs that resemble hymns like "Cherubim," on which he lets loose a flood of emotions as helicopter drones compliment his distended vocals.

Like almost everything on Neon Bible... "No Cars Go" is excess with a point: We are drowning in the unspeakable and running out of air and fight. If only everything else on Neon Bible made that point with the same dynamic overkill.

An earthy, moving psychedelia, eleven iridescent-country songs about surviving a blown mind and a broken heart.

The long-awaited Norman Fucking Rockwell is even more massive and majestic than everyone hoped it would be. Lana turns her fifth and finest album into a tour of sordid American dreams, going deep cover in all our nation’s most twisted fantasies of glamour and danger. No other songwriter around does such an expert job of building up elaborate romantic fantasies, and then burning them to the ground.

The album hits its strongest points when Morby opens himself up to reckless abandon, stripping himself of the introspective pretenses of soul-searching and instead embracing the unpredictable chaos of life and all its imperfection.

With their fifth studio record, Phrenology, they finally become what we've always hoped they would be: a hip-hop band that strikes a very funky balance between righteousness and humor, between headbanging grooves and truth-telling.

Like its 2011 debut, full of attitude and guffaws, delivered in three-part harmony over down-home country.... But there's pathos beneath the jokes.

How can any young band evolve toward that full-grown third album after starting out with a meditation on death and grief? It's no problem for Arcade Fire--these Montreal indie rockers are not shy about gunning for a solemn, grandiose, three-hankie anthem every time out.

What Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" was to the hippie era, Jamie xx's solo debut is to British club culture: a wistful valentine conjuring a more innocent time.

The ambiguity in the songs adds to their haunting quality.

The wormy hooks and earnest falsettos suggest the possibility of ginormous hits if Weeknd were to clean things up a bit, both lyrically and sonically. But let's hope that doesn't happen too soon.

Pecknold has come up with a pleasing album about letting go and being thankful for what we’ve got, be it love in a time of quarantine or an old Silver Jews record.

Quietly beautiful.

Kala strikes deep. There's a resolute sarcasm, a weariness and defiant determination, a sense of pleasure carved out of work--articulated by the lyrics, embodied by the music.

Rage Against the Machine's 1992 debut is a grenade that keeps exploding.... Remastered to museum-clean standards, the reissued album comes with DVDs of holy-shit live shows and music videos, plus demos that prove just how down and detailed the group had every song (even if Morello still couldn't resist changing solos).

Although Wick is still flawed--its track list puts three weak, sort of aimless cuts up front and some of the songs could use some editing--it suggests greatness.

The effortlessness with which the Secret Sisters articulate their musical ambitions places Saturn Return among recent country-roots gems from songwriters like Jason Isbell and Pistol Annies. If working through their struggles has been a strange process, the wait was more than worth it.

Thundercat, Damon Albarn, Tame Impala's Kevin Parker, and a slew of Kendrick Lamar collaborators (Sounwave, Steve Lacy, Badbadnotgood) all make contributions, but the vibe is hers alone. ... Uchis is a woman on the verge, willing to share her vertiginous thrills and spills. Thank her later.

Densely composed yet effortlessly melodic.

Vernon remains an oblique lyricist, but the knottiness can be compelling.

Chronological evenhandedness short-shrifts their vaunted 1980s but shows that their confused past 15 years did produce some Georgia peaches.

It’s the sound of a veteran band indulging its most bizarre instincts and in the process reconnecting with everything that originally earned them such a loyal and obsessive fan base. Piggy would no doubt approve.

The result is by turns audiobook, podcast, and live album, and at its most potent when it becomes a hybrid of the three.

Always an underrated guitarist, Harvey makes use of the jaunty rhythms of British folk music, but takes no comfort in the past. And you don't have to care about English history--or England in general--to fall under Harvey's spell.

This disc cherry-picks from two previous Body Talk EPs while tossing in five new tracks.

Her first solo album shows that there are even more sides to this virtual-insanity innovator.

It all hangs together thanks to Garbus' voice, which slides seamlessly from Joplin-esque howls to delicate coos.

By and large, it lives up to the legend, or at least what anyone would have wanted it to be. The you-are-there ambience of what we’d already heard runs throughout the entire album, as does the same bravado and ferocity, whether the band is rolling out “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” for the hundredth time or a cover of bluesman Big Maceo’s “Worried Life Blues.”

Her fantastic new album, Remind Me Tomorrow, ups her ambitions even further, pushing toward a grand, smoldering vision of pop that can bring to mind Lana Del Rey and St. Vincent (producer John Congleton has worked with both), and the New Wave warrior-queen spirit of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O.

This is one of the year’s best pop albums so far, even in a 2019 that’s already turning out to be a great one for new music. Thank U, Next makes you suspect that the best Ariana is yet to come.

It's a startlingly vivid picture of the artist as a young man.

Far From Over might lack an obvious mainstream hook, but the sturdiness of its design and the passion of its execution make it 2017's jazz album to beat.

Sailor's Guide is classic album length--nine songs, 39 minutes--and best heard in one sitting; this is Nashville craft less as pop science than as expansive headphone storytelling.

Give Mirrored a handful of listens and you might just enjoy having your brains splattered against your speakers.

Her magnificent fourth LP grows her trademark examinations of romantic decay to cathedral-like scale.

Bon Iver isn't quite a crossover move. Big-pop synths appear, but more in the way a radio hit sounds leaking out of your lover's earbuds.

When they come back to Roy Ayers-style funk ("Radio Daze"), they prove nobody does it better. Let's hear it for steady employment.

The biggest feat here, though, is how Afrique Victime feels upbeat and hopeful from start to finish. There’s no real sense of worry or anxiety in the love songs, and Moctar’s calls for unity are set to a loose soundtrack of unpredictable guitar. This is how free rock & roll should sound.

Graying snobs once called this "intelligent dance music." Even now, few do it better.

His most consistent set since his debut, Urban Hang Suite, in 1996. Maxwell anchors the cloud-eating sweep of these tracks with solid guitar and bass hooks.

With or without artfully-cribbed melodies, the music is undeniable.

Its dizzying counterpoints, seductive crooning and orgasmic yelps will definitely heat up your next cocktail party.

Sexy without being pandering, arty without being pretentious, Robyn is a public service: a record that can make indie-minded geeks dance without shame.

His wordy narratives get hazy at times, but Sunday succeeds as a whirlwind tour through an overstuffed brain.

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.

A widescreen musical masterpiece with a knowing wink. [28 Mar 2002, p.68]

The overwhelming amount of material — 54 unreleased songs total — proves that even at Dylan’s lowest point, he was still capable of writing great music, even if the best songs often didn’t wind up on his albums.

It’s the cheekiness and humor of Deacon that really shines, without sacrificing the complex theatricality that has made Serpentwithfeet such a standout project.

The vibe is somewhere between the coherence of an album and the casual flow of a mixtape.

He rubs his shadowy croon against electronic gurgles or electric guitar, keeping his tracks spare and unpredictable.

Her voice is the headliner: Miked so close you can smell the cigarettes on her breath, it's sultry, wise, rueful and unapologetic, connecting a 1960s singer-songwriter tradition to the ache of the now.

Thunder, Lightning, Strike was hailed as a pop masterpiece when it came out in the U.K. late last year, but clearing all the samples held up its U.S. release until now. Wait no longer.

Its refusal to take the easy route around grief makes its drum fills (played by Grohl in his first return behind the kit on a Foos album since 2005) land with more intensity and its guitar slashes, some of which recall Nineties left-of-the-dial darlings, hit harder. Even the more subdued tracks like the swirling “Show Me How,” which is leavened by Grohl’s daughter Violet’s lilt, have an urgency to them that makes But Here We Are an immersive listen.

Eighty-year-old sax great Sanders pushes his sound to its most heavenly extreme. [Apr 2021, p.73]

A sprawling, eclectic set that ranges from the slightly tepid to the truly transcendent.

he rich, albeit brief, collection of songs on to hell with it feels like the kind of genuine and heartfelt openness that the internet once promised.

The organic, delightfully earnest tracks blend Miss Colombia‘s avant-Latin sonic palette with revered cross-generational traditions, forging a new world of musical borderlessness that Pimienta is glad to call home.

The songs are more laid-back than the band's earlier work, but they're still catchy enough to rattle around your brain for days. [12 Jun 2003, p.94]

By the time Price sings about losing a first-born and crying out to God, bruised stoicism muting the sound of her knees hitting the floorboards, you're reminded of the incredible power that lies in tradition well-used. It's a power the rest of this record makes plain.

Dark, hypnotic, abstract and remarkably sexy.

A record as good as anything by her old band that was also a pop success.... This three-disc reissue adds a raft of cool demos, a 1994 concert and four EPs.

Blur went from wanna-be's ("Popscene") to provocateurs ("Parklife") to artistes ("Beetlebum") to world travelers ("Good Song"), and, rare moments of torpid dross aside, remained fascinating with each mood change.

Mostly it shows how Lambert earned her throne: by singing top-shelf songs in the voice of a woman getting real. Listening to her records is like eavesdropping in a hair salon.

LCD have managed to be both underground hitmakers and bona fide album artists as easily as Murphy splices guitar noise and machine thump.

Barlow's new approach made for one of the best indie-rock albums in a year full of stellar ones--and Sebadoh's greatest work.

Her third LP imagines a 2015 mainstream by reflecting what it once was--Loretta and Dolly in the Sixties, sure, but also Emmylou in the Eighties and Reba in the Nineties.

There's some info overload, but Ellison is an ace with pacing, and a distracted soulfulness guides the frantic laptop science.

Tom Petty inarguably was an American treasure, and this set offers a different valuation of what that means. Beyond the chart crushers, he was an even more thoughtful poet, precise in capturing life’s pleasures and acrimonies, and a perfectionist. When you cut away the stuff that’s already out there from the set, it makes you want to know more.

With Shields, they still sound like Radiohead at a Buddhist retreat, but the songs are more muscular, increasingly driven by drummer Christopher Bear's innate swing.

Ram sounds ahead of its time.

Twigs' deconstructed shards of U.K. grime and garage land heavier, while elegiac vocals soften the songs without blunting their edge.

Like Akomfrah’s Data Thief, Madlib sees the connections between the past and future. On Sound Ancestors, he manages to give us a sense of what those connections feel like.

Influence aside, what's just as impressive about this handsome anthology of barely legal rarities is how well tracks work as songs.

He doesn't just rediscover the past, he remakes it.

The Futureheads reclaim pop punk from the Warped Tour crowd -- and revive it in the process.

A Light for Attracting Attention contains some of the songwriters’ most easily enjoyable music in years.

If anyone expected a drift into sentimentality, her writing’s just gotten bolder, with arrangements that stretch the definition of “Americana” to the point of meaninglessness (Shires won the “Best Emerging Artist” trophy at last years Americana Music Awards).

Full of muscled, vintage R&B grooves, fevered soloing, psychedelic arrangements and oracular mumbo jumbo, it's the wildest record Rebennack has made in many years.

It's easy to read themes of mortality into the lyrics, but this is a stirringly indefatigable farewell.

Transcendental Blues is an intermittently twangy, often trippy and, yes, generally transcendent outing.

Cooder has delivered a remarkable song cycle that tells the story -- a sort of brilliant and flavorful film-noir history lesson that samples the past freely.

So his return to political-minded material on Harps and Angels is reason to wrap yourself in the flag and cheer.

In many ways, Daytona replicates Jay-Z and No I.D.'s 2017 rap highlight 4:44: two older men who simply practice their craft, their legacies already secure.

The songs are subtler, statelier, with Matt Berninger's baritone exuding lonesome warmth. [31 May 2007, p.93]

Some Rap Songs is the rare album by an immensely talented lyricist who deigns not to pull out any fireworks, opting to sink into the cushion’s of a therapist’s couch in the search for an honest work of art. It’s a delicate statement of restraint, and in this case the process shows more of the artist than ever before.

This reissue pairs his metaphysically funky 1974 masterpiece, Inspiration Information, with a similarly spacey unreleased LP cut between 1975 and 2000 that positions this multi-instrumentalist as a missing link between Sly, Jimi, Stevie, Prince and Frank Ocean.

Like deciphering an ancient cassette tape, distorted right up to the point of destruction, Scaring the Hoes is, in fact, a little scary. And that's what makes it so compelling. The chaos makes way for clarity.

James Murphy and his wrecking crew of New York punk-disco marauders don't waste a moment on the superb American Dream--it's a relentless, expansive, maddeningly funny set of songs asking how a lifetime of good intentions and hard work can blow up into such a mess.

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.

These discs offer a fascinating glimpse into the years when he transformed his words into a persona: Ziggy Stardust, the first anti-rock star.

Despite the thematic monotony, Tucker and her band mates think louder and rock smarter than anyone in their class; a modest effort like All Hands would be another band's masterpiece.

In somebody else's defiance of death, we in the audience get an intense affirmation of life, not to mention some of the best jokes in rock & roll history.

The big improvement is in the songwriting: This time around, Cee-Lo works a memorable tune into almost every one of these eighteen overstuffed tracks.