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]

Kozelek remains as inscrutable as ever, but he avoids the archness that sometimes infected his earlier work. [27 Nov 2003, p.92]

Goats Head Soup didn’t — and still doesn’t — sound like what one would have expected from the Stones after Exile. ... The alternate mixes of a few of its songs don’t add terribly much, but the same can’t be said of an instrumental jam on “Dancing with Mr. D,.” which lets you eavesdrop as the band locks into a groove and jams without Jagger. ... The Brussels Affair bristles.

Vince’s knack for combining brevity and sly wordplay, together with Kenny Beats’ restrained production, make the album particularly lucid from start to finish.

It’s rare to hear Dylan sound like a fan trying to be a peer, but that’s what’s evident here. Those sessions serve as the core of Travelin’ Thru, Dylan’s 15th “Bootleg Series” release, but since the Man in Black is spry and dominant throughout — he’s the true star here — it could also be a new entry in his own Bootleg Series.

Guest turns by singer Jessy Lanza and violinist Owen Pallett are telling high points--if Snaith's vocals sometimes lack character, his tracks never do.

Often on Currents it feels like you've camped out in a middle spot at a festival, halfway between a mainstage rock headliner and the dance tent.

Extends the murky, revelatory folk of [Bonnie Light Horseman] with wistful reflections on the passing of time and free-falling in love. [Jan 2022, p.71]

At its worst, the music on Everyone’s Crushed sounds like etudes – studies in experimentalism, finger exercises for tyros in the avant-garde. But when Water From Your Eyes find transcendence – especially on the record’s final two tracks, “14” and the extra winky “Buy My Product” – it can be quite stunning.

The band has tossed some of the sunny pop of 2001's The Coast Is Never Clear, paring down some of the horn-happy melodies that have defined their style, but their songs are still bright and elegant.

JPEGRAW is both a musically dense snapshot of an American stoner dad just trying to focus in a world that allows for anything but, and an album that amalgamates an array of sounds, influences, riffs, and samples while still finding room for the searing guitar solos that made his reputation.

Cottrill, who performs as Clairo, raises the stakes on Sling, her compelling, sharply-focused and musically adventurous second album.

Beam finally brings the blood, instrumental colors and quirky but fluid arrangements that make explicit the worry and wounds running red in his Southern-gothic stories and dead-love letters.

Her debut full-length fuses together jagged textures, vaporous synths and her versatile voice into forward-thinking R&B animated by its restless innovation.

Transatlanticism should be overwrought -- it's an album about young men enduring lost love in an ocean of memory; instead, it feels like a conversation with an old friend.

Lee’s sound design—the rush of Uzi getting sucked into a portal, the hum of the spaceship engine, the unsettling, pulsating rumble coming from the great beyond—co-exists seamlessly with the album’s production. It creates narrative tension and helps create a broader cosmic context for his sex marathons and shopping sprees, for the great eccentric force with which he raps and sings.

Painful memories are twirling around in Lenker’s head on Songs. It’s an album that lives up to it’s name by capturing the basic, natural truth of her art.

A pulse-quickening, mind-tickling dance LP 27 years after their debut? This duo did much more than get lucky.

Deeply unsettling, heart-quickeningly intense and often gorgeous.

Vampire Weekend have gotten better at just about everything they do.

Grande’s latest is a gorgeously exposed journey to the end of her world — or at least what she believes to be the end. It’s a divorce album that goes through all the stages of grief, and the singer navigates a new beginning with some of the most honest and inventive songs of her career so far.

Both messy and marvelous.

It's no surprise that Wire still aspire to make complex, strange punk; the shocker is that the spine-tingling Send sounds fresher than the pop punk currently being generated by pups half their age.

The rare art-rock album that comes as much from the heart as the head.

El Camino is the Keys' grandest pop gesture yet, augmenting dark-hearted fuzz blasts with sleekly sexy choruses and Seventies-glam flair.

It's a dizzying, nonchronological spin through the Madonna years, years it makes you feel lucky to be living through.

His music is loose and rustic, his writing skirts the heart of the matter instead of bulldozing into it, and his careful deadpan imbues everyday statements with almost mystical resonance.

With age/sex/location, Lennox has delivered her best work to date, one that mostly leaps past her patchy but inspired Shea Butter Baby debut in quality.

It seems the isolation of lockdown made her bolder about looking inside herself. The most exciting thing about Hold the Girl is that you can’t even guess where Sawayama might go next.

This isn't a mixtape, it's a suite of songs, paced and sequenced for maxaqimum impact.

Her best LP since 1998's landmark Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. [May 2020, p.89]

The Pere Ubu-like drive of the band lives up to every word.

Her goal on The Collective, as was her goal with Sonic Youth, is to subvert listeners’ expectations. Gordon will turn 71 next month, and she’s made one of the most daring albums of her career. If you want to get it though, you have to turn it up and submit.

[Lambchop vocalist Kurt] Wagner shares a sense of offbeat phrasing and doleful humor with his singer-songwriter friend Vic Chesnutt that is both profoundly Southern and affectingly universal.

It's Malin's personal reflections, such as growing up a child of divorce in the Seventies in "Almost Grown," that give Fine Art its soul.

Bun B, doesn't wallow in the macabre. Instead, we get UGK basics: songs about drugs, sex and flossing, flavored with thudding, no–nonsense beats.

Their most compellingly dire-sounding [album], not as grabby as their 2005 debut, Funeral Dress, but rocking out in a frayed, mordant way that makes every stick-in-your-head chorus they share seem like a small triumph.

She does sultry and cool well.

On the first half of her impressive solo debut, Presley fills her disappearing middle-class blues with sharp, compassionate tales of unfulfilled pensions and steep tuition bills. Later on, the bona fide coal miner's daughter changes gears with a series of vulnerable country-soul ballads.

These 12 songs map out a concise history of American soul, with a heavy dose of New Orleans strut.

The album arcs like a well-calibrated live set through the soaring "Thorns of Life," the Hall and Oates soul of "Sarah, Surrender," and the title track's spikey New Orleans funk.

It's a revelation. Tyros (Maren Morris) and legends (Dolly Parton) mine deep cuts to reveal in John's songs a very country strain of stoic melancholy. Miranda Lambert delivers a stormy "My Father's Gun"; Don Henley and Vince Gill wring pathos from the divorce lament "Sacrifice."

Always an underrated vocalist, he delivered lyrics with two-pack-a-day gravitas, gruff aggression and flashes of fraying soulfulness. Musically, he doubled down on vintage earthiness and living history. ... The deluxe edition includes six bonus tracks that show just how much fun these guys were having at the time.

For the most part, Years finds Anderson at his most convincing, and moving, since his hit-making heyday. It’s the type of record that should cast his entire discography in a new light, an inspired offering that shows a forgotten legend pulling off a new trick just as effectively as his old ones.

Americana firebrand makes a grand rock & roll record worthy of her Bowie jumpsuits. [Sep 2020, 68]

A tonally and emotionally dynamic set of of originals that touches on compassion, perseverance, and divine intervention. [Jul/Aug 2021, p.137]

Despite its scattershot title and the fact that it was recorded in five separate studios across Nashville and California, Strays feels like Price’s most cohesive collection yet guided by light West Coast shadings courtesy of Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Dawes). Price finds ways to effectively and subtly tease out different shades from her longtime versatile band, the Price Tags.

A great album of stretching out, proving that her sounds and beats can do more than just make feet tangle.

Todd Snider's compressed story-songs are so vivid and knowing that they seem completely plausible, even the one on his new album voiced by a piece of discarded junk mail that dreams of being a tree again.

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.

If listeners have the stamina — and the patience — Senjutsu is one of the most rewarding and vital albums in Maiden’s catalog.

Most of Spiritualized's ninth LP comes off intricate, elastic, and soulful. [Mar 2022, p.71]

Japandroids sing about lost youth and sex and drinking atop hammer-of-the-geeks distortion swirls and holler-along refrains a gorilla could pump some paw to.

To be sure, it's a jazz album, as much about tradition as expanding it, informed by Coltranes (John and Alice), Miles Davis fusions, bebop and more; yet it's clearly shaped by crate-digger funk and film scores, hip-hop collage and gospel.

An album that rewards both short attention spans and deep listening. It’s a real treat to hear them zip between sonic epiphanies.

Badu seems so taken by hazy texture--and so determined to play the weirdo--that she's neglected to write many actual songs.

This isn't just B.B. King's best album in years, it's one of the strongest studio sets of his career, standing alongside classics such as "Singin' the Blues" and "Lucille."

Mostly they provide gentle melodic loops familiar to fans of old-school soukous and indie-rock fusionists like Vampire Weekend. But sometimes they break ranks.

This handsome solo acoustic set overlaps a few songs with earlier entries in Neil Young's official bootleg series. But there's no shortage of standouts.

Just a classic power trio lineup in the spirit of Midwest post-punk juggernaut Husker Du and its barely-sweetened antecedent Sugar, with Bob Mould conjuring the ecstatic rage of his earlier bands for a grim new era, apparently still convinced that the best way to meet crushing hopelessness is by barreling head first through it with a throat-shredding howl and all amps cranked.

The album doesn’t possess the piercing introspection, precision or revelatory quality of Swimming, but of course, Miller wasn’t there to see it across the finish line. It serves as a fitting coda to his career.

Her torchy virtuosity on her medium-small vocal instrument, applied to country-bluesy-Stonesy ballads and driving midtempo rave-ups, transforms what could have been a dull exercise in rote revivalism into sweet soul music.

If you liked Warm, you’ll like Warmer. It’s Tweedy at his most self-findingly laid back, low-key and ruminative, leavening intimate recreational folk-rock with offhanded guitar tastiness.

Leans on her singer-songwriter side. [Mar 2020, p.91]

uknowhatimsayin¿ succeeds as a kind of high-wire act that balances Brown’s folk hero status against his documentarian sensibilities, tragedy against comedy, bluster against self-mockery. It’s shorter than his previous albums, and also lean in a way that few other rappers could replicate. Five albums in, he remains a singular talent who only needs a few short words to tell a good story.

Us sounds great, with Ali's sensitive, stentorian voice plowing through sleek jazz and blues loops from producer Ant. But the album ends up blandly heavy, weighed down with dark street dramas and lessons about how "the same color blood just pass through our veins."

Despite its length and musical theme, Cruel Country doesn’t at first feel like a grand statement, but Tweedy has subtly laid out the ambitious concept of tying his classic American music to the classical theme of American social and political alienation (this, Uncle Tupelo fans, is where the record truly becomes roots music).

Live in Paris is a 48-minute purge reaffirming the power of that hoary rock cliché, the live LP.

The results are both pure Ellington ('Day Dream') and Monk ('Bright Mississippi'), as well as pure Toussaint, emotionally and structurally expansive, yet as keenly done as one of Toussaint's perfectly knotted ties.

He’s pulled off the neat trick of making his music at once elegant and more refined but also warmer and more intimate — the polished-marble smoothness of Steely Dan with the generosity of an Al Green or Yo La Tengo record.

It's full of surprising, creative moments that recall Nas and Kanye West.

That dead-end sense haunts the people he sings about on much of Look Now; they’re further down the road of life yet just as troubled because, as always, a satisfied person in an Elvis Costello feels like someone who got off at the wrong bus stop.

Real Animal is one powerful sermon.

The music is as bleep-y as it is banging (James Blake produces on two tracks) and touchstones include Andre 3000, James Joyce, Leonardo DiVinci and Jay Gatsby.

It ultimately sounds like a radio stuck between two stations, a bit like the Hold Steady with laryngitis. Luckily there are enough musical diversions to keep it interesting.

The production is vivid, trippy and abrasive, bleeding the line between hip-hop and EDM--a sound as compellingly haywire as Brown is an MC.

So goes the follow-up to the 'Chunk's 2010 comeback, Majesty Shredding: rock vets fighting demons with delicious noise and sugar-crusted hooks as darkness falls.