Turner's new side project, a collaboration with Miles Kane of Merseyside indie-poppers the Rascals, is a shameless nostalgia trip--and it's still compelling.

The darker moments like 'Contemplate,' where he explores insecurity against an elegiac Rihanna sample, prove he's best as a doubter, not a hater.

The album is exceedingly strange yet scrupulously crafted and intelligent. Chances are that Air, as they fashioned this fetching and jejune and weirdly disturbing score, were also having a small laugh.

Modern electric blues as Prince and George Clinton would have it. [Aug 2020, p.73]

The soundtrack is not as evocatively cinematic as the Wu's greatest songs, but it's a tasty mixtape.

Few bands are better equipped to release an odds-and-sods record such as Steal This Album!, because SOAD songs already seem like bits and pieces of different songs welded and held together through sheer force of will.

Loudon Wainwright III's latest album is a long joke, full of wry commentary on weighty topics like mortality and lonesomeness.

His lyrics have always run the risk of feeling overthought, and Pieces of a Man is no exception; for all his talent, Mick sometimes verges into dorm-room thoughts (“cottonmouth get you soon enough/wake up and realize the moon is us”) and cringeworthy high musings (“Fuck is woke if you conscious but still in the bed”). But his heart is in the right place, and his elevated lyrical aspirations steer him right more often than not.

For all its prettiness, Liberman tends to fade into the background. Even Carlton's wistful vocals often disappear into the mix.

Highlights "Comrade" and "Alaskans" are abstract but inspiringly muscular, while other songs drift into panoramas of tentative guitar lines, distant whooshing sounds and Vernon's wounded falsetto singing couplets not even he would dare make sense of.

This LP is like a special-mention science-fair project: two brainy kids speaking in tongues that are fascinating even when they're hard to follow.

For Lamp Lit Prose, Longstreth melds both strategies in a flood of ideas and magnificent vocal arrangements. The results are by turns dazzling and exhausting. Partly it’s is an issue of balance.

Cackling, croaking, and cracking up through vocal processors, he sounds like he’s having a blast. And you will too, even if you don’t remember any of it by morning--which also seems perfectly in the spirit of thin

Sounds a bit like a stripped-down version of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

The trio shape folk, gospel and blues influences into straight-ahead roots rock somewhere between the Lumineers and Lady Antebellum.

BEASTMODE 2 sounds like a Dirty South mixtape, and you can virtually imagine the duo grinding in an Atlanta studio somewhere at 4 a.m. after the strip clubs have closed. But like so many mixtapes from trap’s golden era, all the songs tend to run together into an amiably hardscrabble blur.

This batch of cadaverous Bowie-isms won't leave fang marks on your memory. [Sep 2020, p.68]

Live at a Flamingo Hotel (any Flamingo Hotel will do, apparently) has 19 swaggering, giddy takes of fan favorites like their better-than-the-original Architecture in Helsinki cover "Heart It Races."

Hebden's lovingly arranged pet sounds cohere nicely when he jacks up his trip-hop-y beats.

Matmos amble and shuffle toward a new interpretation of history. [11 Dec 2003, p.204]

Producer Ross Robinson (Korn, Slipknot) adds some arena sheen, true. But it's not enough to smooth the edges off "Arc Arsenal," a primal tantrum against rebels "robbed . . . of their cause," or to homogenize the ragged beats and mind-bending guitar flurries of "Enfilade."

Maybe with less to prove, the shapeshifters make some of their prettiest music ever here; apocalyptic vibe notwithstanding.

It's a brutal approach that tends to trample her fragile vocals and rarely flatters her winding tunes.

New Jersey's Real Estate unspool pretty reveries tinged with enough guilt and confusion to keep them honest.

Hot Shots II does its best to return to the epic soundscapes of The Three E.P.'s; the long grooves and easy melodies are back, and the band's tendency toward the diffuse has been reined in.

Leo's melodic gifts don't keep up with his lyrics. [22 Mar 2007, p.80]

Her most nuanced new lyric details an apostate tour-bus driver's descent into a luscious sin she probably knows better than she lets on.

An infectious love for their hometown and a sound that brings in soul, pop ballads, polka, Jamaica and Steely Dan makes this Wikipedia workout actually feel inclusive.