Tag Archives: music-album-reviews

Kings of Leon frontman Caleb Followill is an arena-rock idealist, a firm believer in the undying power of setting up shop at the 50-yard line of rock & roll expectations and doing very brisk business. “Like in a mainstream melody / Oh, I want to take you in!” he told …

In the music video for “Gnat,” off Eminem’s latest album Music to Be Murdered By: Side B, a beard-sporting Marshall Mathers is admitted to a treatment facility for what we’re led to believe is coronavirus. “They say these bars are like Covid,” Em raps. “You get ‘em right off the …

The lives of novelists, filmmakers, musicians, and athletes have often been fodder for great works of art. But it’s possible that Operation: Wake Up, this odd little concept record from Mike Posner, is the first attempt to turn the slings and arrows of being a pop songwriter for hire into …

Artists’ influences are never nearly as interesting as what they do with them. Chris Cornell always thrived at taking well-known songs and making them his own. One of Soundgarden‘s earliest recordings was a rendition of Howlin’ Wolf’s steady-grooving, broken-hearted blues “Smokestack Lightnin’,” on which Cornell seemed to find his own …

When Alicia Keys made her debut nearly 20 years ago, the primary engine of her music was musicianship itself — her ability to passionately yet effortlessly elide the distance between classicism and modernity, entwining genres and eras in her playing, singing, and writing. Over the years, as we’ve gotten to …

“As long as I am strong, I am young,” Frederick “Toots” Hibbert, the reggae architect whose deified, six-decade musical career helped popularize the genre, toldRolling Stoneearlier this year. The ska-reggae legend sounds stronger than ever onGot to Be Tough, his first album in more than a decade. Co-produced by Zak …

It’s been 10 years since Katy Perry’s mega-blockbuster Teenage Dream set an almost stratospherically high bar for modern Californicated pop bliss in the 21st century, becoming the first album to land five songs at the top of the charts since Michael Jackson’s Bad. That’s a tough act to follow, and …

Although 45 minutes of Middle-Aged White Male Aggression may feel out of pace with the current national moment, Lamb of God frontman Randy Blythe has always written more open-minded and inclusive lyrics than many of his peers — you just have to strain your ears to make sense of his …

Could it be that after decades of self-flagellation Greg Dulli is ready to cut loose? On Random Desire, the latest solo outing by the Afghan Whigs and Twilight Singers‘ resident tortured poet, he sounds like he’s at least willing to try. The album opens with a spry, buoyant bass line …

Selena Gomez told us she would learn to take better care of herself on 2015’s Revival. On Rare, she puts that promise into action. Her third solo album is an act of divine ruthlessness: Gomez dances out the toxins weighing her down and breathes in loads of post-Lizzo “fuck you, …