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.