Album Reviews

With civic arts support low on American capitalism’s to-do list, orchestras and composers are canoodling more frequently with rock and pop acts — who of course have their own struggles, wringing pennies from streaming platforms et al. When the outcome isn’t just simpleminded hits-with-strings reheats or half-cooked vanity concertos, it’s …

In the volatile universe of rap music, traditionalists and young trendsetters butt heads like rams, and artists can blow up and flame out in a matter of months. But DaBaby, the Superman-tough 27-year-old Charlotte rapper who has soared to the center of the zeitgeist over the course of 2019, isn’t …

Jesse Malin had a shit year in 2018. His father, former guitarist, and producer all died. So his new album Sunset Kids, his first in four years, could have been a major bummer. Instead, it’s a celebration of survival that finds the New York City hardcore troubadour reflecting on life’s …

As a founding member of the pioneering Underground Resistance crew, Robert Hood is Detroit techno royalty, and thus, by definition, an EDM architect emeritus. His beats are so sublime, jazz composer Vijay Iyer wrote a tribute to him (see “Hood”). This hour-plus mix in the DJ Kicks series – dependably-curated …

The first LP from Muse since their 2015 album Drones is a throwback to the first seven years of the Eighties. The tom-toms are cavernous like a Jan Hammer or Phil Collins production on the Miami Vice soundtrack. The dystopian, technophobic action movie narrative seems in the same vein as …

This Canadian is an award-winning rapper in his homeland — his 2011 albumTSOLearned a Juno for Rap Recording of the Year, beating out Drake’sTake Care. But in the U.S., he hadn’t drawn much notice until he began hosting Netflix’s rap history seriesHip-Hop Evolution. His new album is typical of his …

Few artists deserves as much credit as Robyn for marrying the sciences of 21st century pop and club music; her records are precisely calibrated verse-chorus-verse hook-fests that erupt into brief moments of ego-dissolving dancefloor bliss. Her songs can feel intensely intimate – vulnerable, melancholy, lonely, despondent – which makes their …

Last year, Annie Clark, d.b.a. St. Vincent, released Masseduction, a jittery portrait of 21st-century angst that straddled the gap between her neurotic, intricate art-rock and alt-pop’s big hooks and intricate textures. Produced by maximalist du jour Jack Antonoff, the album was a thicket of ideas, a cri de coeur about modern …

It’s difficult to offer a different perspective on an artist whose songs you know by heart. It’s even harder with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The group’s 1993 Greatest Hits album is 12-times platinum, and more than half of his albums were Top 10 sellers. By the time of his …

Most Aphex Twin music since 2001’s Drukqs has been some amalgam of Richard D. James’ greatest tricks: the tripping-over-a-drum-machine skitter, the gorgeous piano dirges, the blissful ambience, the squelchs of acid techno gone feral. The Collapse EP starts with a spasmodic, flickering updates of classic Aphex – opener “T69 Collapse” …