Welcome back, David Berman, a literary indie-rock great who’s been gone way too long. Berman’s debut with his new band Purple Mountains is his first release since retiring his beloved band the Silver Jews eleven years ago. When the SJs first appeared in the early Nineties, they first struck people …
Read More »
Morrissey has always worn his influences on his black-on-the-outside sleeves. For as much as he crowed about the New York Dolls and the Cramps in his youth, his music both with and without the Smiths has reflected more erudite lyricists with an overall lighter musical touch. For California Son, the …
Read More »
After a surprising amount of press attention for a band yet to release a full album, Philadelphia’s Empath finally drop their debut: a fierce, spacey, cacophonous, 27-minute-long LP. Like the EP and singles that preceded it, Active Listening: Night On Earth is defined by manic mood swings. Plenty of great …
Read More »
DNA is the first Backstreet Boys album to hit Number One in nearly 20 years, quite a moment for a group that’s spent the lion’s share of those two decades wandering the pop wilderness. Of course, if the BSB who sold somewhere in the neighborhood of eleventy skadillion records between …
Read More »
Pistol Annies — the trio of singer-songwriters Miranda Lambert, Angaleena Presley and Ashley Monroe — won huge critical praise for their 2013 LP Annie Up, a wry collection of songs about drinking and divorce. But the album was released during a critical shift in country jump-started by the record-breaking success …
Read More »
Draco Rosa’s first studio album in five years opens in some confusion, salted with dark humor. The singer is one of the biggest and most notorious stars in modern Latin music. But when he walks into “Hotel de los Encuentros,” he gets the cold shoulder at the registration desk. The …
Read More »
In the mid Nineties, Trent Reznor was rock’s preeminent enfant terrible – a figure in black who covered himself in mud, sang “I wanna fuck you like an animal” and midwifed Marilyn Manson into the world. A quarter of a century later, he’s an Oscar-winning film composer and a dad …
Read More »
This Buffalo rapper, his brother Conway and their Griselda Records camp have an innovative aesthetic combining ’90s thug rap and Alchemist-style dusty loops. That, coupled with a canny marketing strategy aimed at vinyl swagbeasts – Westside Gunn’s 2016 breakthrough Flygod now trades for a ridiculous $600 online – has made …
Read More »
Back when white rappers were still a relative novelty, MC Paul Barman was the strangest one of all. An impossibly horny New Jersey nebbish, drunk on his own id and the possibilities of language, Barman blurted out his rhymes like some unholy hybrid of James Joyce, Eminem and a public-access …
Read More »
The triple album format springs to mind career-surveying hits compilations, Zappa-type improvisations, Grateful Dead live sets or the Clash’s Sandinista! A 27-song, three-disc record of all new material is not the kind of thing you’d associate with a pop-friendly hip-hop duo that had its first hits just four years ago. …
Read More »