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| Natalie Prass |
Jason Isbell's 2013 breakthrough album Southeastern was written and recorded in the wake of Isbell's newfound sobriety, and it often sounded and felt like a musical version of the Fourth Step, in which Isbell took a long, hard look in the mirror as he came to terms with the emotional wreckage he left in his wake during his years as a drunk...
Based in Nashville and a veteran of Jenny Lewis' touring band, Natalie Prass certainly has her share of Americana roots, something that's evident on her eponymous 2015 debut...
Wilco's 11th studio album, Star Wars, opens with "EKG," a 1:16 burst of skronky guitars that sounds like a few capable grad students imitating early Sonic Youth after a few beers, and if it seems like a goofy way to kick off the record, that's a big part of the album's charm...
Graduating from good weed to good-trippin' LSD, rapper A$AP Rocky tunes in, drops out, and turns down for what on At. Long. Last. A$AP, a positive and psychedelic LP that is -- due to the death of A$AP Yams -- touched with the hippie version of wistful...
Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin is the kind of artist you expect to keep evolving, even if exactly how he evolves on each album is unpredictable...
It's difficult to imagine a 1963 Columbia release from an artist whose look and sound echo 1911. In 2015, however, the thought of a young artist seemingly transported from a bygone era -- 52 years prior, to be exact -- requires no imagination whatsoever...
Carly Rae Jepsen was nearly a victim of her own success. Her breakthrough single "Call Me Maybe" wasn't just big -- it was one of 2012's definitive songs, with a presence so massive that it overshadowed just how good Kiss, the album that housed it, was...
The most prominent feature of Hop Along's stirring sophomore LP, Painted Shut, is certainly singer/songwriter/guitarist Frances Quinlan's stunningly emotive vocal performance...
After her simmering and intimate self-titled debut earned Torres comparisons to PJ Harvey, Mackenzie Scott joined forces with a couple of Harvey's crew for her ambitious sophomore album, Sprinter...
...thrillingly wrong-footing Congolese music
The western producer of this bustling new project from former members of Staff Benda Bilili eschews the respectful approach to African music – and it’s all the better for it ...
On their 2012 debut Boys & Girls, Alabama Shakes never hid that they were creatures of the New South -- a band with old-fashioned blues, soul, gospel, and country in their blood but raised on modern rock...
The third Unknown Mortal Orchestra was recorded during a tumultuous time in Ruban Neilson's life, when his ideas about love and marriage were blown apart, forever changed, and then carefully rebuilt...
Chvrches' impact on the pop landscape made itself known almost immediately after the release of The Bones of What You Believe -- in the years that followed, artists big and small were borrowing the Scottish trio's flair for heart-on-sleeve lyrics wrapped in soaring, synth-laden choruses...
California-based metal group Deafheaven's 2013 breakthrough album Sunbather was triumphant and uplifting, even as it dealt with harsh personal issues such as insecurity and alienation...
It's easy for artists in any medium to be seduced into believing their latest project must be more elaborate than what came before. On Depression Cherry, however, Beach House reject the notion that bigger is inherently better...
"The Agent Intellect" is a concept in medieval philosophy related to the division between form and matter in the human soul, and while such notions don't play much of a part in the lyrics on Protomartyr's third album, 2015's The Agent Intellect, it's not hard to imagine lead vocalist and lyricist Joe Casey as a philosophy professor at some Midwestern college taking the stage at a tiny bar off-campus and delivering a series of rants and/or free associations as a student band whips up a thick fog of guitars and drums that pours out behind him...
Looking like a combination of Kriss Kross and Das Efx while sounding like neither, Tupelo, Mississippi rappers Swae Lee and Slim Jimmy came on hard in 2014, taking Migos' bright style of trap music and adding a little of David Banner's sway to the bottom end...
The acclaim for Sleaford Mods' work grew nearly as quickly as their body of work: Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn recorded Key Markets around the time that Divide and Exit and Chubbed Up began appearing on "Best of 2014" lists...
Aptly titled with the off-putting I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside, Earl Sweatshirt's sophomore effort is a crushing confessional that refuses to get off the couch, even if it's beautiful outside...
Call Honeymoon the third installment in a trilogy if you will but there's no indication Lana Del Rey will put her doomed diva persona to rest after this album. Over the course of three albums, Lana Del Rey hasn't so much expanded her delicately sculpted persona as she has refined it, removing anything extraneous to her exquisite ennui...
Other people's songs have long been a staple for Bob Dylan, who first made his name in Greenwich Village by singing folk songs in the early '60s and often returned to old tunes as the years rolled by...
It's hard to think of a more fitting title for the Libertines' third album than Anthems for Doomed Youth. After all, youth is destined to end quickly way or another, via either death or getting older. Pete Doherty, Carl Barât, and the rest of the band managed to survive their twenties, and in the 11 years since they've made an album, they seem to have gained the knowledge that you can't just rehash the past...
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