For every head-nodding beat, Game Theory has a head-turning treat. [7 Sep 2006, p.100]

Andy Stott cooks down the abstract beauty of his 2012 LP Luxury Problems to a new minimalism.

Isolation Drills makes the case more persuasively than ever that these indie-pop godfathers should matter to more than just the loyalists.

The title track and "Pay My Debts" are unusually groove-driven near-pop. But the trumps are familiar folk-rock incandescence.

[Tempest is] a thing to behold.

Giving both of these records some distance allows for the songs to have breathing room, and for Whole New Mess to stand on its own.

As insightful as it is, Piano & A Microphone is also imperfect: You can hear him flub the rhythm and adjust the tone of his voice. But that’s also part of what makes it so moving now. Here is a truly spontaneous moment, something we can share with a departed icon, his 88 keys and anyone kind enough to dim the lights.

Blunderbuss gets stranger and more fascinating the closer you listen.

Apologies To The Queen Mary is often unfocused, but it's plenty lovable.

The loveliness comes at a predictable cost in breakaway energy. [30 Nov 2006, p.112]

It all adds up to something so captivating that vocal guests like Erykah Badu ("See Thru to U") can get a little lost.

The root vibe is elegant techno minimalism, but that vibe is augmented with wildly eccentric detailing.

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

Foil Deer is an upswing from the listless cynicism that clouded their 2013 breakout, Major Arcana: This time, Dupuis and fellow guitarist Devin McKnight take charge.

There's a tender heart beating beneath the evil distortion and punishing blitz.

Producer Steve Albini makes sure you feel every snare slap and guitar abrasion.

Words & Music improves the sound on Reed’s original tape (available to hear, with many others, at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, home to the Reed Archives), and evidently takes some liberty with song order.

There are numerous nods to classic rock throughout. ... Lambert’s more adventurous side comes out on “I’ll Be Loving You,” which combines echoing piano notes and thick coils of electric guitar into a booming anthem that’s more Arcade Fire than Alan Jackson. ... The LP’s final track, “Carousel,” is a breathtaking ballad of trapeze-artist romance and long-buried secrets.

Hindsight reveals, like so much in Reed's career, an album full of greatness, beneath its consensual role-playing and market-minded mishegas. This final chapter in the vault-scraping Velvets reissue series, a handsome six-CD set, reaffirms it.

What still sets the Avalanches apart, besides their careful groove pacing, attention to detail, and uncanny ability to move you from inside a track to outside looking in, is their sweet sense of nostalgia.

They ratchet up the latent R.E.M.-isms, elevating themselves heads above their musical kin.

We get the sound of master musicians in their comfort zone, doing everything their own way. Nobody would want to hear the Beasties try anything else.

The Prodigal Son, Cooder's first album in six years, serves both as an urgent commentary on our current dystopia and a satisfying window into the interpretive process of a musical mastermind.

Recorded near Joshua Tree, the LP loses itself in the desert and finds timely survival metaphors everywhere. And it burrows deep into desert mythology without invoking any of the hoary narratives above (they’ve already done a Bono tribute, after all).

The result is the most enjoyable record Mars has been a part of — a glorious excuse to turn out the lights, break out the bubbly and let the sublime power of their almost troublingly uncanny retro verisimilitude work its mimetic magic on your soul and mind.

At 76, her music remains truly vital: unsettling, touching, funny, undeniable.

Just as “Deja Vu” and “Good 4 U” proved Rodrigo was going to be much more than a one-and-done phenom with a viral hit about careening through heartbreak, Sour confirms this is just the start of her story, where she expertly rides the wave of teenage turbulence and emotional chaos down any road she chooses.

It's a bash-up of prog-rock, electronica and funk, in descending order of influence, and Bruner conjoins all of them to create a drifting, happily disorienting otherworld.

Sometimes the Walkmen's anthemic naturalism wanders without much direction.

Yeah, it's literary; yeah, it's the polar opposite of cosmetic-surgery pop. As such, it's not for everyone. But its jazzy rawness represents a high point of emotional craft in a career defined by it.

There's a heart beating in Burial’s out-of-body sound, and Rival Dealer plays like an ashy memorial to a beat that lives on.

Expand[s] her folk-based sound, mixing Radiohead-style atmospherics, Seventies pop melodies and even a splash of soul. [Jul - Aug 2022, p.120]

It’s Almost Dry, Pusha’s fourth solo album, adds levity to his troubled-conscious colloquies, presenting a well-balanced portrait of a complex man with some serious burdens on his heart.

The music's hard to classify, but one word might sum it up: ecstatic.

Free Again finds Chilton, not yet 20, in fast bloom.

Nobody in Nashville has a truer, fuller tenor than Dunn; he excels here, amid vivid arrangements that emphasize the band's roots.

For all its audacity and lyrical cleverness, Search is an album with insecurities as remarkable as its confidence, with desperate measures justified by sincerity of purpose.

Her music embodies a dyed-in-the-wool timelessness that can't be counterfeited.

One of the more creative and accomplished records you'll hear this year. [19 Aug 2004, p.118]

On the group's fourth proper album, a mightier Mouse refine their weirdness and become a pop band while grasping at dark truths that pop ordinarily denies.

Some of the music is gripping--the modal-sounding chorus and blippy groove of 'My People' suggests an R&B version of Radiohead--but other tunes feel like absent-minded doodles, and Badu's social consciousness nets middling returns.

A new, six-disc anniversary box set offers a holistic look at the album with demos, a completely remixed version of the record, and a live recording.

A beguiling good time. [Mar 2022, p.71]

Lykke Li is a different kind of Swedish wunderkind: an ingenious oddball.

No youngsters this side of Arcade Fire (who record for the Chunk's Merge Records) articulate ambivalence with such skill or heart. Few even try.

Kaplan and Hubley sing their most confessional, intimate lyrics ever, over whispery guitars, brushed percussion, vibes and organ drones. It's a spell of blissful, psychedelic make-out music... these songs are great - heartfelt, rugged, melodically sumptuous enough to keep unfolding after dozens of spins, full of folk-rock flesh and blood.

His second album will thrill anyone who loves hearing a great writer in any genre do not-nice things to the English language.

West is the producer Common has been waiting for all of his career: He makes Common both catchier and edgier at the same time.

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.

McBryde’s second major-label release, Never Will, is just as daring and deep, sometimes deceptively so [as Girl Going Nowhere].

You could argue that the Truckers should have revved up this Skynyrd side more often. But instead they let the songwriting speak for itself, and it sings loud and clear.

Mainly, though, The Hunter demonstrates how contemporary radio rock can still be made with imagination, precision and a majestic sense of force.

A wonderful little record that never lets up, piling on unassumingly buzzy fun until you start realizing you might be in the presence of a true power-pop monument.

Todd Snider decided to quit his high school football team during his first mushroom trip; years later, he got conned by someone impersonating a NASCAR driver and found himself fronting a country cover band after a drunk woman knocked the original singer on his ass. It's all there on The Storyteller, the populist folkie's career-spanning concert LP.

It's a moment that feels like an emotional explosion – and it sums up everything great about Wild Flag.

She tears the form down to its roots -- acoustic guitars, touches of old gospel and blues, and a gorgeously bummed, torchlit ambience.

Scattered about this engaging, enigmatic disc is a bit of Dusty in Memphis, a touch of Bobbie Gentry's swamp-country persona, a hint of Prince's instinct for making voices and rhythms sound positively libidinous, and a whole lot of Shelby Lynne.

For all Beck lifts from the Seventies, the album never sounds like a period piece; there's always something extra in the mix, stray elements that are both goofy and strangely apropos.

An album so disjointed that it seems to artfully fall apart as it plays.

There isn't a weak song on Money; most of them are unforgettable.

What can at times sound facile in its un-coded repugnance deepens, on repeated listens, into both sophisticated political statement and haunting music.

The problem with You Could Have It So Much Better is, as with so many second albums, consistency.

All over their superbly funny second album, Protomartyr chase the post-punk guitar buzz of classic American bands like the Dream Syndicate, while also evoking raincoat-clad Brits like the Wedding Present.

My Morning Jacket are going nowhere fast - but in all the right ways.

This two-disc set tells the story of that sound ["The Minneapolis sound"], from the proto-disco Seventies to the synthed-up Eighties.

Hot Chip have always made songs that slip between the erotic and and neurotic, but this time out there’s another level, as the tracks slip sideways to comment on our upside down world. From the gospel preaching about peace on the opener, “Melody of Love,” to the dark images of dancing in circles “like we’re dead” in the closer, “No God,” these songs combine difficult thoughts and easy pleasures. Complicated music for strange days and nights.

What lifts God's Favorite Customer beyond homage is Tillman's slicing, free-associative candor as he examines the cost in sanity and constancy of his craft and touring life.

Digs into childhood trauma with all the acoustic verve and wit you expect from this guy.

Her third LP, cut with bass-minded partner Nate Brenner, suggests an innovator in for the long haul.

Luminaries such as Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch and Dolly Parton also make appearances -- but it's always clear who's sitting on the throne.

This teaming of a gifted poet and bruising metalheads is like Lou Reed and Metallica's Lulu--but about half as long, and about twice as heavy.​

Royal Headache's execution is so straightforwardly 1977 that it almost teeters on generic garage-rock pastiche. The saving grace is this album's undeniable heart and soul.

The 1975 take on that overwhelming anxiety with nerve and aplomb, and the result combines the fist-raising inspired by anthems with the gut-punch provided by precisely described longing.

Strange’s undeniable talent and versatility have resulted in one of 2022’s most audacious albums, one that whirls through ideas while exploding preconceptions.

The Smile are back with Wall of Eyes, a lavishly gorgeous second LP. No one is going to convene a Deep Listening Consortium to unpack its meaning, and that’s part of the appeal. This music drifts, and we drift with it.

A great deal of the material here was covered on 2009's Live in London, but it's well worth the price to hear backup singer Sharon Robinson's exquisite take on "Alexandra Leaving," Cohen's hilariously self-referential "Going Home" and a finale where he covers "Save the Last Dance for Me."

The best Superchunk album in recent memory.

Written partly during lockdown, the record features some of the least-annoying songs about the pandemic recorded since the initial outbreak in 2019. And that’s heavy praise, considering some of the truly treacle-shellacked tracks that oozed into the zeitgeist last year.

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.

The music's urgent, live-in-the-studio feel pairs well with Tweedy's lyrics, which seem more direct and compact than they have in a while.

Forget Frank Lucas: The real black superhero here is Jay, and with American Gangster, Gray-Hova is back in black.

Her EP is a captivating flirtation with the Latin music world. Selena en español is a revelation worth revisiting on a full-length project.

[A] lovely album of folk-tronic lullabies.

On Obviously, they’re still oddballs, but in the best way. At a moment when pop strives for lo-fi, solitary-world intimacy, the jazz-pop-whatever band refuse to think small. Fully living up to the water imagery in their name, they’ve made their first truly abashed yacht rock record — with all the hooks, musical interplay, sophistication and sometimes dodgy lyrics of that genre.

On The Show, it sounds like Niall Horan knows exactly where he’s going.

With Work of Art, he solidifies his status as a street-pop superstar.

Contains his catchiest, most immediate compositions in decades.

Cheat Codes is a balm to Gen X hip-hop fans who feel out of step with trap’s spare beats and mumble rap’s hazy flow, proof positive that hip-hop requires a senior circuit.

Can be folky or synth-y, full of tunes and lyrics that follow a strange logic toward rich epiphanies. [Feb 2020, p.85]

Although Lekman's voice sometimes sounds like Morrissey doing a Kermit the Frog impression, he revels in strong songwriting and brilliant hooks played on steel drums, funky horns and hip-hop bells.

Reborn as Palaceer Lazaro in Shabazz Palaces, the rapper still waxes poetic with the old boho bounce as he lounges in the club or decries the evils of American culture.

Hive Mind, the group’s 4th LP, is its most polished, full of tranquil, yearning Quiet Storm and light-footed, live-band funk.

Unreasonable Behavior is a dark techno melange that wriggles free of categorization... Garnier exploits the stylistic atomization of electronica, bringing together a whole palette of sounds to evoke one very specific thing: dread.

The Coen brothers, together with producer T Bone Burnett, have assembled a collection of folk, bluegrass, gospel and hobo country so true to the music's down-home, egalitarian roots that it's hard to distinguish the old tracks from the new and the folk heroes from screen actors.

El Último Tour Del Mundo isn’t by any means a repudiation of the genres that have made Bad Bunny a star; if anything, it’s proof of how far they can stretch.

Lyrically, he's a seeker, but he could stand to get out more--"My whole world turnin' on the couch," he testifies at one point. But even when Vile's buggin', that couch remains a beautifully chill place to hang.

The Whole Love seems like a celebration of that freedom, with songs that roam happily all over the place.

Musically, it sticks to the band's established brand of warrior-cry punk metal.