Review: Jay Daniel, ‘Broken Knowz’
One of Detroit dance music’s freshest talents carries on the city’s legacy of electronic funk, while finding new ways to reinvigorate it.
Category: Music Reviews
Review: Gillian Welch, ‘Boots No. 1 The Official Revival Bootleg’
Welch and partner David Rawlings sift through their musical archives and select 21 tracks that document their early- to mid-’90s rise, before they emerged as leaders of an ascendant Americana scene.
Review: Highly Suspect, ‘The Boy Who Died Wolf’
An unexpected Grammy nominee earlier this year, the Cape Cod band fine-tunes its retro-grunge attack into something far more dynamic, soulful and alluring.
A Tribe Called Quest Stands United, One Last Time
Two decades after splitting up, the pioneering rap crew released its final album Friday. We Got It from Here mines sounds from across hip-hop’s history, but the content is bracingly of the moment.
Review: Pink Martini, ‘Je Dis Oui!’
To take in the band’s ninth album is to experience a globetrotting victory lap across eight different languages, all tackled with cosmopolitan sophistication and the playfulness of pop.
Review: Thee Oh Sees, ‘An Odd Entrances’
The prolific psych-rock band’s newest album — its second in only three months — traffics in alternately jittery and hypnotic jams.
Review: D∆WN, ‘Redemption’
As electronic dance music continues to experiment, D∆WN stands apart by making challenging pop music with soul. Redemption radiates defiance in its celebration of the self.
Review: Bob Dylan, ‘The 1966 Live Recordings’
During the months he spent on the road in 1966, Dylan refined a way of inhabiting and transforming his own songs that was different from anything he’d done before.
Review: Daniel Bachman, ‘Daniel Bachman’
At 26, Bachman is already an established voice in the solo guitar music scene, but he knows that evolution comes in steps, not leaps. Here, he presents the most rounded version of himself.
Review: Hart Valley Drifters, ‘Folk Time’
These recordings, made three years before the Grateful Dead formed, capture the beginning of Jerry Garcia’s musical quest to explore every aspect of what makes American music so rich.
Review: Sad13, ‘Slugger’
Sadie Dupuis’ new solo songs are brimming with taut hooks, layers of flittering keyboards and electronic beats that’ll get everyone bobbing and moving on the dance floor instead of in the mosh pit.
Review: Sleigh Bells, ‘Jessica Rabbit’
The duo’s fourth album is a testament to the power of a celebration gone weird, with chopped-up and resequenced hooks working as the raw material for a scathing, fragmentary kind of pop.
Review: Ronnie Dunn, ‘Tattooed Heart’
Three albums after wrapping his run with one of the most successful country duos of the ’90s and early ’00s, Dunn deftly carves out a role for himself amid the genre’s current youthful landscape.
Review: Martha Wainwright, ‘Goodnight City’
Wainwright’s singing shows a deep awareness of the multiple meanings that can merge and overflow — even within utterances as direct as a lover’s whisper or a lullaby.
First Listen: Lambchop, ‘FLOTUS’
Kurt Wagner’s ambition has taken a hard left on the Nashville group’s new album, which ditches Lambchop’s typical organic feel for something far more progressive.
First Listen: Jim James, ‘Eternally Even’
The My Morning Jacket frontman adopts the role of gravel-voiced doomsayer in a new solo album that takes grim foreboding and makes it funky.
First Listen: Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions, ‘Until The Hunter’
Nearly 30 years into her career, Mazzy Star’s singer still takes her time in the pursuit of beauty. Here, she works with My Bloody Valentine’s Colm O’Ciosoig, as well as guests like Kurt Vile.
First Listen: Kristin Hersh, ‘Wyatt At The Coyote Palace’
In an album named for her teenage son, the singer-songwriter and punk mystic reflects upon some of her life’s most perception-altering junctures.
Lil Wayne’s Rikers Island Memoir Only Tells Half The Story
Gone ‘Til November, transcribed from the journal he kept while at Rikers, isn’t particularly revealing, but it offers a chance to stop and take stock of where the rapper has been since.
Review: Michael Mayer, ‘&’
One of global techno’s boldface names pushes himself into new territories on a collaboration album stocked with dance-music’s leading lights.