First Listen: Pavement, ‘The Secret History, Vol. 1’
In the early 1990s, Pavement was especially rough around the edges. A new collection of unreleased recordings from the era captures the band’s absurd charm.
Category: Music Reviews
Review: HEALTH, ‘Death Magic’
Grandiose, industrial pop scaled to match the band’s all-caps name: What Mad Max: Fury Road is to the road movie, Death Magic is to synth-pop.
Review: Worriers, ‘Imaginary Life’
On a razor-edged LP produced by Laura Jane Grace of Against Me!, Brooklyn punks stare down the judgment of peers, the corruption of institutions and the clumsiness of gendered language.
Review: La Luz, ‘Weirdo Shrine’
A surf-rock album that rewards close attention: there’s deep intensity and knowing behind the mellow.
Review: Lianne La Havas, ‘Blood’
With this album, a London singer — a Prince favorite — and her versatile voice inch closer to mainstream pop.
Review: Totó La Momposina, ‘Tambolero’
Twenty-two years after La Candela Vive, the Colombian vocalist reimagines her seminal album with Tambolero.
Review: Red River Dialect, ‘Tender Gold And Gentle Blue’
Drawing on late ’60s British folk-rock and psychedelic music, this is a quiet and desperate record that is always but a squall away from breaking apart.
Review: The Mynabirds, ‘Lovers Know’
Recorded in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, this is a record with an explorer’s heart.
First Listen: Omar Souleyman, ‘Bahdeni Nami’
There may be no more unlikely act in indie/electronic music than a sunglasses-and-keffiyeh-wearing wedding singer with a chain smoker’s gruff voice.
First Listen: Ashley Monroe, ‘The Blade’
A solo singer, go-to collaborator and member of the Pistol Annies, Monroe is a star who’s both arrived and rising: accepted by insiders without losing her veneer of outsider cool.
First Listen: Watkins Family Hour, ‘Watkins Family Hour’
Nickel Creek’s Sara and Sean Watkins lead a good-natured variety show with an all-star cast that includes Fiona Apple, Greg Leisz, Benmont Tench and others.
Review: Tame Impala, ‘Currents’
Kevin Parker’s new music veers farther away from psych-rock bombast and toward falsetto-dripped soul, fragments of dance music, and long interludes set aside for woozy, disorienting deliberation.
Review: White Reaper, ‘White Reaper Does It Again’
On its first full-length album, the freewheeling Louisville band plays to classic rock ‘n’ roll ideals while simultaneously trying to dissolve them in acid.
Review: Flying Saucer Attack, ‘Instrumentals 2015’
The English band’s first album in 15 years lives in the crevices between abstract noise and melodic atmospheres. It feels outside of time, as if its songs began eons ago and could last forever.
Review: Ratatat, ‘Magnifique’
These are rock instrumentals that needn’t overcompensate for their lack of words. They don’t strain to be heard or scramble to stand out, but instead convey coolness that seems effortless.
Review: ‘Nina Revisited… A Tribute To Nina Simone’
The tribute, which strives to update Simone’s ability to capture the hope and rage of the ’60s for a contemporary audience, features six songs performed by Ms. Lauryn Hill.
Review: Miguel, ‘Wildheart’
His third album manages to capture an emotional precinct, an impression of a complex city going through changes and a man working to define real intimacy in the midst of so much tarnished beauty.
Review: Neil Young + Promise Of The Real, ‘The Monsanto Years’
These taut, righteously furious, stone-simple songs fit together under a catchall concept about companies wielding extraordinary influence over our quality of life.
Review: Matt Pond PA, ‘The State Of Gold’
The band’s 10th album sounds at home among its many predecessors, satisfyingly reconciled between Matt Pond PA’s restless drive and its rustic roots.
Review: The Velvet Teen, ‘All Is Illusory’
The band has always had a flair for the sonically dramatic. On its first album in nine years, there’s a euphoric energy that never really lets go.