Album Reviews

The music of Terrace Martin is all about warmth. A prominent member of L.A.’s jazz scene, the multi-instrumentalist (and frequent Kendrick Lamar collaborator) builds off funk, hip-hop, and R&B to create lush tapestries that feel as bright and inviting as a perpetual 70-degree day. That cozy human element propels his …

Thanks to Nirvana’s Nevermind, for many fans, 1991 was the year punk broke. For others, its was the year of R.E.M.s pastoral smash Out of Time, U2’s technophilic, one-third-life crisis epic Achtung Baby or all 152 minutes of Guns ‘n’ Roses Use Your Illusion I and II But for many …

Nothing moves up a quarter-life crisis quite like a global climate catastrophe and a pandemic, so Lorde’s is right on time. With Solar Power, she’s right in the thick of it: wearied by teenage fame and capitalism, worried about the state of the earth and grieving the loss of her …

A quarter of a century has passed, and Shirley Manson still wants to tear your little world apart — especially if you support the patriarchies and idiocracies destroying the planet. On Garbage‘s seventh offering, No Gods No Masters (a slogan for anarchists and labor unions alike), Garbage’s redheaded Molotov cocktail …

Marianne Faithfull has loved as deeply and lived as tragically as any of England’s celebrated romantic poets of yore, but unlike most of them, she has lived to tell her tales. So on She Walks in Beauty, a spoken-word collaboration with violinist/songwriter Warren Ellis on which she recites some of …

It’s hard to tell if Cheap Trick still want you to want them, since a lot of In Another World, the band’s 20th full-length, fails to launch. Sure, there are the big choruses, bigger guitar riffs, and smart-alecky Nielsenisms that their die-hard cult craves, but at the same time, songs …

Among other things, Elton John’s sprawling new box set answers a question most of us have never even pondered: Did he have his own version of Smile? A few years after Brian Wilson had tried and failed to complete his attempted masterpiece with the Beach Boys, John considering launching his …

On Disclosure’s breakthrough 2013 debut Settle, the U.K. duo of Howard and Guy Lawrence employed a sample of motivational speaker Eric Thomas, flipping his rhythmic speech into irresistible dance music on “When a Fire Starts to Burn.” Thomas makes a welcome return on Disclosure’s third album Energy, his words used …

On his 1994 coming-of-age masterpiece Illmatic, Nas rendered the sprawling Queensbridge Houses, and the thrills and despair of young Black life in Dinkins-era New York City, with the detail and scale of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. He’s never come close to making another Illmatic, but he’s still mining the …

In the mid-Nineties, Paul McCartney reminisced on his fab years for The Beatles Anthology doc, received his knighthood from Her Majesty (indeed, a pretty nice girl), and hosted a freewheeling radio show, Oobu Joobu, that allowed him to goof off as he DJ’d rehearsal tapes and oddities from throughout his …