with fits of glam flamboyance and a raw rockabilly bluntness, Moz's third solo LP made clear what Smiths fans already knew: Here was a new kind of superstar. For more proof, check this remastered reissue's must-see bonus DVD.

Now they just rock out, stripping New Wave and metal and rockabilly down to primal thrust and blare. There are half a dozen songs under three minutes on Fever to Tell, and they sound absolutely complete.

A brilliant leap forward.

When Jacklin isn’t waxing philosophical on mind-body duality, she’s simply showing the special way she processes the world around her. The result is a profound statement that stands as an early candidate for this year’s strongest singer-songwriter breakthrough.

Bejar's ninth disc detours into all manner of early-Eighties smoothness - glassy New Wave bass lines, blue-Monday synths, turquoise- sport-coat saxophones, backup singers straight off a Steely Dan record, all filtered through the obtuse, literary bent that turns Destroyer albums into such fun puzzles.

The gem here is the new song, “No Bullets Spent,” which is about praying for the end of some existential anguish (“What we need now’s an accident/No one to blame and no bullets spent”). It could be about politics, it could be about a bad day frontman Britt Daniel had waiting for his number to be called at the DMV. Regardless, it’s another catchy, taut, perfectly restrained rocker that belongs in a collection like this.

Dance Fever may be Welch’s most ecstatically extra work yet. [May 2022, p.75]

Leo's racial politics are serious and confused in that familiar white-guy-in-D.C. way, but word-heavy, wound-up gems such as "Hearts of Oak," "The Anointed One" and "The Ballad of the Sin Eater" prove he knows how to turn political conviction into punk energy.

Clark is good at bending country boilerplate.

Bad Bunny conquered the singles game with ease. On X100PRE, he cements his place among the elite in Latin pop--and in pop music writ large.

Although they indulge more textures this time, they don’t stray so far from Dogrel’s art-punk blueprint to the point of losing themselves. It’s just that the palette is wider and more pronounced. If anything, their chiming, noisy guitars and messy arrangements only fit their highfalutin aspirations even better.

What results is a fully realized artistic statement without a skippable track, even if a few songs trail off a bit toward the end — almost as if Baker knows the rush of cathartic energy has left everyone involved a little exhausted, including herself. And that’s just fine, because this is enough reality for a lifetime, let alone one record.

Most of the time, as on a soulful version of Patsy Cline's "She's Got You," Giddens imbues these classics with a freshness and vitality that feel right at home in 2015.

His superb major label debut Brandon Banks is sprawling autobiography overflowing with dense, unflinching, granular detail sourced from his 15-odd years of toting guns, staging robberies, and selling drugs in Southwest Houston.

Where Cobb's fine 2016 breakout Shine On Rainy Day cast him as singer-songwriting tale-teller, these songs are more from the gut.

If his longstanding difficulties and insecurities were always present just barely beneath the surface on Wilco’s classic records, they are starkly prominent and central to what is often a deeply moving new LP.

More, please.

Parquet Courts are especially versed in the clipped, repetitive buzz of Wire's '77 classic Pink Flag, but, like Pavement, they soften post-punk's cranky edge with the glazed, lonely wonderment of fresh, wide-eyed New York transplants.

Helm struts his slippery shell-game groove on 'Jed' and works it deftly throughout. But he digs deepest here with his voice, which veers between soulful stoicism and boozy yowl.

Tantabara has a scruffy, econo, indie-rock vibe reminiscent of beautiful Brooklyn afrojazz punks Sunwatchers or Tel Aviv-born Brooklyn guitarist Yonatan Gat, who shreds aggressively on Tal's "Entente."

It's fine music to nest in.

Minimizing their usual production trickery in favor of live-in-the-studio ensemble thrust, these merry pranksters swim in classic-psychedelia grooves while offering oodles of art-rock allusion.

The ebb and flow of eighteen concise, contrasting cuts writes a story about Moby's beautifully conflicted interior world while giving the outside planet beats and tunes on which to groove.

Both the most extreme record Bjork has ever released and the most immediately accesible. [16 Sep 2004, p.79]

It’s a scorching art-pop statement.

Ghostface Killah is so charismatic, he can brag about being an old coot and make it sound badass.

[Cancer4Cure] is a paranoid reality show – and that's its appeal.

Lovers is a departure for Wilco guitar swami Nels Cline, whose side projects generally involve free-jazz freakouts. That's not to say this wordless double-disc set, featuring an all-star orchestra full of sharp improvisers, isn't wildly inventive in its water-colored way.

Knowing he was crafting his farewell, Vega leaves as he arrived, raging over Suicide-style industrial grinds.

Multi-layered and deeply personal, Something is Sivan’s most adventurous album in more ways than one. Musically, the singer stretches out to explore new instrumentation — and ornamentation. .... Lyrically, Sivan manages to be earnest and self-aware, without descending into bitterness or self-loathing.

Murphy mixes the organic and the synthetic, rock and electro, loud guitars and louder beats. Like any good dance producer, he excels at the art of tension and release.

It's some of the year's most thought-provoking hip-hop.

Swift sings on the sweet, lonesome “Dirty Jim,” which has lyrics that sum up the album’s deep tones of loneliness and regret. Offsetting some of that weight are Swift’s generous soul and rock arrangements, which he tracked almost entirely on his own, with a deft studio touch.

Kiley Lotz has a voice like a bell, one that holds on to its strength and resonance even when she's singing of knotty emotions like those that dominate her second full-length as Petal.

Their debut suggests the White Stripes' White Blood Cells by way of M.I.A.'s Arular, noise that's friendly and cute, primitivism that masks pop smarts and respect for tradition, from New Wave to Sixties rock.

Blue Hearts gushes more piss and vinegar than Stanley Kubrick could fill a hallway with, but what makes it jaw-dropping is the precision with which Mould has focused his ire on conservatives, evangelicals, homophobes, while leaving room for some self-criticism as well. ... Blue Hearts often feels like a lost Hüsker Dü album with Mould howling invective over his buzzsawing guitar.

[Out Hud] uses guitars like proper rhythm instruments, meshed best with penetrating drums, space synths and a dash of sticky dub. [23 Jan 2003, p.67]

They're not out to break ground as much as to perfect a sound they consider timeless -- and on portions of Indestructible, they nail it.

While FACE does at times dwell on the existential what-ifs that plague twentysomething men who have the world’s gaze turned squarely toward them, for the most part it’s a compelling showcase of the silky-voiced singer-dancer’s pop strengths.

The National are letting light and air into their shadows.

Full Circle is a homey set, with few new songs and no May-December duets or hotshot young rockers, Elvis Costello notwithstanding.

Pure instrumental pleasure. [10 Feb 2005, p.82]

Recorded in about a month and surprise-released to fans, it's full of casual stunners.

Tyla’s debut, sure to be on repeat at better houseparties this year, shows she’s up to the challenge; amapiano probably couldn’t ask for a more effective ambassador.

It's heartbreaking and hilarious, in equal measure.

The release is thrillingly palpable.

Young charges forward here, playing half of the imminent Neil Young in pristine, tremulous-vocal form and reclaiming six of his Buffalo Springfield songs.

Vicious is a combination of punk's snottiness, Detroit rock's raw power and the stylized blues freak-outs of bands like Pussy Galore.

You wish the band would let some tunefulness creep in, but the dozens of riffs, guitar spills and slogans pack a messy, intelligent punch. [13 May 2004, p.72]

This release buys Clark some time to refine his studio vision of modern blues. It also shows that wherever he chooses to go from here, he has what it takes to get there.

Uchis’ 360-degree view of love and versatile voice make Red Moon in Venus a wholly satisfying examination of emotionalism in its many forms — romantic, carnal, self-preserving.

The overall effect can be vaguely schizo -- many of these tracks seem more like cool fragments than true songs.

This barebones performance absolutely sparkles — a “Tombstone Blues” that’s much quieter than the original, but so spry that it’s irresistible. It stands totally on its own, and so does the album it’s on.

It Is What It Is, is just as daring in its musical reach, and its pairing of goofy and gutting [as 2017's Drunk].

Taken together, it's a comprehensive document of a great band with endless secrets to reveal, even now.

At every turn -- high-mountain balladry, brassy R&B, near-metallic blues rock -- Rosanne sings of coming through loss with a poise and confessional will that are utterly country and absolutely in the family tradition.

A lushly orchestrated set of throwback, country-tinged folk pop that, despite some resemblance to previous works like Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, sounds like little else in his catalog. Frankly, its sheen is off-putting at first. But once you settle in, the set reveals some of Springsteen’s most beguiling work ever.

Yeezus is the darkest, most extreme music Kanye has ever cooked up, an extravagantly abrasive album full of grinding electro, pummeling minimalist hip-hop, drone-y wooz and industrial gear-grind. Every mad genius has to make a record like this at least once in his career--at its nastiest, his makes Kid A or In Utero or Trans all look like Bruno Mars.

In refusing to pander, either to easy nostalgia or to current trends, she touches on something timeless.

Immersion is a good way to characterize the grip and whirl of construction recounted on the two CDs of demos in this seven-disc box, which includes a previously released recording of the 1980-81 stage show.

Wildheart is an even bolder move: an intoxicating master class in electro-porn R&B--the coin of the modern genre--that's also a soul-searching critique of same.

On Last Man Standing, Willie Nelson continues to turn his ninth decade into a classic country song full of remembrance, regret and resilience.

Body doesn’t have the telekinetic bond of the Necks’ famed live show, or the gorgeous ambience of recent albums like Vertigo and Untold, but it brings these veterans into a different space.

All that said, this is an exercise for die-hards and audiophiles: To PJ's credit, the original didn't leave much room for improvement.

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga might be Spoon's commercial breakthrough, doing for them what "Good News" did for Modest Mouse, but for certain it's one of the Austin, Texas, trio's finest records.

Every amp tone on this album is just sweet enough, every jangling rhythm hits exactly where it should. Rolling Blackouts are playing an old game, but they're damned good at it.

The record’s nine songs clock in at just 28 minutes total, which feels just right, the samey-ness among songs playing as a strength, conjuring a mood and maintaining it, yet never feeling predictable, in part because it’s hard to get a bead on precisely what each song is about.

Across the whole album, Ware’s voice fills each moment with incredibly lustful longing. It feels timeless more in its emotionality and drama than even in the sound itself, which stays firmly strapped to a bygone era. Her nostalgia feels like a proper tribute, mostly because it digs so deep to the core.

Much like “Nothing Matters,” songs like “Caesar on a TV Screen” and “Burn Alive” start like hung-over reveries before vaulting into trampoline pop, wrapping up with crashing crescendos. Over the course of an album, that approach veers towards formula. But there’s no denying the way their blowsy, unrestrained songs knock you upside and down and leave you with a dizzying high.

Takk . . . suggests a far more abstract Coldplay stripped of their stadium bombast.

Blood Money is especially grim, a bitter suite about greed and moral bankruptcy.

Given one last chance to make an impact, Jay-Z has come up with one of the better albums of his career, though perhaps a shade lesser than his very best, Reasonable Doubt and The Blueprint.

A perfect match of sound and soul, the set introduces a new guitar hero, and confirms Auerbach's arrival as a roots-music producer to be reckoned with.

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.

Invasion of Privacy flaunts so many different aspects of Cardi's game, it comes on like a greatest hits album, as undeniable as the excellent New Wave suit she rocks in the cover art.

Former guitarist for roots heroes the Blasters, Alvin fills his 11th album with small towns, highways and losers we imagine he's encountered on countless tours.

[This collection is] loving genuflection; it's also proof that Johnson, 21st-century country's outlaw ne plus ultra, is also one of its most sensitive balladeers – beneath the scary beard, he's an old softie.

With freight-train heavy riffs so indebted to Sabbath's Tony Iommi that he should get royalties, trippy lyrics about diverse subjects such as weed, ganja and pot, and endless groove for days on each of their songs, they've made an album that sounds exactly how Sleep should sound in 2018.

It’s “woke,” but in the sense of “sleep-deprived so long the fluttering of your eyelids booms like kettledrums,” and that realm of paranoid body-freezing anxiety is the zone where Yorke feels right at home.

Malkmus doesn't display his wry humor as much as usual on Sparkle Hard (though "Refute," a country duet with Kim Gordon, is a hilarious portrait of Portlandian romantic intrigue). But the album still manages to generate a unique empathy for the world and those enduring it around him.

There's a campfire vibe, though given the heat put out by even the acoustic jams, bonfire is more like it. The electric guitars flash like lightning, the looping melodies and Tamashek raps hypnotize.

There's a kick in the way song after song masks his darkish vision in elegantly hooky arrangements whose sonic signature owes more to folk rock than to prog or musical theater. [5 Oct 2006, p.68]

Apple's strongest and most detailed batch of songs yet.

On the fifth Breeders album, the songs are all cinematic movement--hiding, escaping, screaming in the meadow, running for the exit.

On Sometimes, Forever, every languid lyric and opaque melody feels strategically placed with care and concern.

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.

Hey What is a well-rounded experience from the first track, the gorgeously devastating “White Horses,” to the last, “The Price You Pay (It Must Be Wearing Off)” and all its tentative hope, with moments in between that ebb and flow with the capriciousness of human emotion.

Her new band's no-frills approach incorporates doo-wop melodies and Joan Jett anthemics without ever being cutesy or overthought. Clearly, she's no novice at heartache.

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.

What makes this music connect is Simon’s ability to make a spiritual setting feel down-to-earth, what you might expect from one of American pop music’s greatest conversational songwriters.

[Don’t Forget Me reveals] a rustic, more organic-feeling pop-rock sound. Upbeat tracks like “On and On and On” and “Never Going Home” are perfectly made for big-voiced sing-alongs in a way that brings to mind Michelle Branch’s early work. Meanwhile, the meditative high-note “All the Same” is raw and elemental. .... The sense of unguarded affection perfectly sums up Don’t Forget Me.

More than any of his previous albums, Pretty Toney hones Ghost's wild style into accessible confections.

This sloppy but spirited congregation may well end up as an alt-rock novelty, but more disciplined souls might want to follow the way that The Beginning Stages of . . . suggests.

Yoshimi isn't the end-to-end triumph that was 1999's The Soft Bulletin.... But the production is equally ambitious, with burbling electrobeats underpinning sci-fi orchestrations that sound like the brainchild of Esquivel and the Orb.

The fourth Blood Orange LP is equally powerful, and maybe even more personal than [2016’s Freetown Sound].

She’s got a sly sense of music history, which is how she can reach so far on Cuz I Love You.

A fine set of yacht-y, good-natured, mind-finding tunes. [Jul/Aug 2021, p.133]