Album Reviews

Over the past two years, Rhiannon Giddens has emerged as one of American music’s most vitally prolific artists, collaborating across mediums as she’s written music for the theatre (the ballet Lucy Negro Redux), appeared as a regular on a television drama (CMT’s Nashville), formed folk-roots supergroups (Songs of Our Native …

Who’s scared of big, bad major labels? Cody Johnson, a former professional rodeo competitor and a stalwart of the proudly independent Texas country scene, transitions easily into the heart of the Nashville machine on his new album — fittingly titled Ain’t Nothin’ to It. Texas country is often ignored in …

There’s a tradition of experimental music in which avant-garde ideas are also tender and inviting – think Clara Rockmore, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Speigel, Laurie Anderson, Robert Wyatt, John Fahey. This duo project feels rooted in that notion. Lattimore’s already made one of the year’s best LPs, the deliciously hypnoticHundreds of …

Two decades ago, Steve Perry walked away from a legacy of carefree rockers and sentimental torch songs. His last recordings at the time, bonus tracks on a greatest hits comp, allowed him to stretch his elastic vocal cords to great heights, the likes of which he’d soared to with Journey …

On her first album in three and a half years, Nicki Minaj comes out swinging. “Unlike a lot of these hoes, whether wack or lit/At least I can say I wrote every rap I spit,” she charges on “Ganja Burns.” Queen is littered with subliminal disses, and though she doesn’t …

 Perhaps it’s a sign of how much hip-hop has evolved that artists from the Bronx, home to decades of rhyme pioneers ranging from Grandmaster Caz to KRS-One and Fat Joe, are no longer expected to mean-mug and spit traditional bars. Take A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, who easily fits …

Charles Lloyd’s engagement with rock is no passing dalliance: In the Sixties and Seventies, the saxist-flutist played the Fillmore, gigged with the Beach Boys and recorded with the post-Morrison Doors. But even that history doesn’t prepare the listener for how graceful and engaged the 80-year-old NEA Jazz Master sounds on …

In the decades since Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach and their ilk putrefied hard-rock radio with one dumbed-down, primitive heavy metal rager after another, there have been a few adventurous groups who have been able to break through by operating outside of the box. The most recent and most surprising has …

It’s been a mighty grim year to be a Kanye fan. For a lot of people, this guy is just a celebrity douchebag who dabbles in music on the side. But for the first time, it sounds like Kanye agrees with them. It always seemed like he cultivated that “jerk-off …

Back in 2013, Courtney Barnett covered Kanye West’s ‘Black Skinhead’ on Australian radio as a guitar-charged glam-grunge stomp, reframing its outrage in her bedhead Melbourne white-girl flow. It was a questionable yet telling move for a fellow verbose storyteller, delivered just as her single “Avant Gardener” – adeceptively offhand first-person …