Album Reviews

Whether mixing up free-jazz and ‘80s punk-funk with Rip Rig and Panic on“Storm The Reality Asylum,”or rap and electro-pop on her own 1989 hit“Buffalo Stance”, Neneh Cherry has always bent styles to serve her own ends. She’s still doing it onBroken Politics, which folds a career’s worth of musical obsessions …

Lil Wayne‘s Tha Carter V has been a white whale for hip-hop enthusiasts since 2014, so it was surprising last month when the rapper Young Thug predicted that the long-awaited album was sure to fall short. “I’m Wayne’s biggest fan,” Young Thug wrote, “but [Tha Carter V] not goin’ to …

At this point, you come to a new release from rapper Ghostface Killah — many albums into a deservedly acclaimed and at times commercially successful career — for two reasons. First his voice, a national treasure, nasal but leathery and incredulous. Second, his ear for beats, which is to be …

Over the course of their first two albums, Bristol, England trio Beak> synthesized a a handful of elements from across the vintage moodscape and murkiverse: the minimal throb of Young Marble Giants, the relentless rhythms of Neu!, the squinchy electronics of Silver Apples and the muffled vocals of Can among …

St. Paul & the Broken Bones, who have just released a new album titled Young Sick Camellia, operate in a crowded field of vintage soul fetishists. These guys pop out of bed with a glad James-Brown-like cry and a shiny horn section at the ready: Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night …

Boots Riley’s first feature film — a surrealist depiction of his hometown Oakland during capitalist wartime — came with a clamorous, giddy score by hometown heroes Tune-Yards; its layered vocal loops and stampeding beats kept up with each increasingly bizarre twist onscreen. The movie’s official soundtrack, which showcases Riley’s long-running …

The title is a giveaway. Low Cut Connie‘s fifth album draws on the same sessions – at Ardent Studios in Memphis – that propelled this Philadelphia band’s 2017 blast of Fifties-infused glam-punk hallelujah, Dirty Pictures (Part 1). But these ten tracks, mostly written by singer-pianist Adam Weiner, are hardly leftovers. …

It is nearly business as usual. “Nothing to stop this being the best day ever,” Bono declares in “Love Is All We Have Left,” at the start of U2‘s sequel to 2014’s Songs of Innocence. But the singer’s delivery is striking in its restraint: like cautious prayer or a fragile …