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| Thee Oh Sees |
"Long-awaited returns by the Long Ryders, Redd Kross, and Josh Homme's Desert Sessions series served as welcome blasts from the past, while Charly Bliss, Big Eyes, and Amyl and the Sniffers injected some youthful energy into the rock world.
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Thee Oh Sees - Face Stabber / Psy-Ops Dispatch
Oh Sees' 2017 album Smote Reverser seemed at the time of its release to be just about as far as the band could push their combination psychedelic-metal-prog-jazz-garage sound before it might split into a million pieces. It was hard to imagine that John Dwyer and company could twist, fold, or mangle things any more than they were or that they could add more elements without capsizing the rollicking ship entirely. Face Stabber puts a lie to those preconceptions -- not only does the band take another step further out into space, they tumble through the abyss with an energetic fury that most bands can never conjure, much less one on their 300th album...
Claypool Lennon Delirium - South of Reality / South of Reality
On paper, the pairing of Les Claypool and Sean Lennon doesn't quite fit. From inside and outside Primus, Claypool has specialized in technically exacting rock, while Lennon favors a fuzzier approach, leaning on vibe and soft-focus melodies. The two approaches appear to be contradictory, but the Claypool Lennon Delirium proves they're complementary: Claypool sharpens Lennon's trippier elements, while the guitarist pushes the bassist toward melody. South of Reality, the duo's second album, crystallizes the benefits of this collaboration...
The Long Ryders - Psychedelic Country Soul / Psychedelic Country Soul
...All four members of the band -- vocalist and guitarist Sid Griffin, guitarist and vocalist Stephen McCarthy, bassist Tom Stevens, and drummer Greg Sowders -- contributed to the songwriting, and the sound and feel of the music is a joyous re-creation of what they've always done best, while the performances are crisp and energized, as taut and passionate as ever. And Ed Stasium's production is smooth but natural, flattering these musicians without intruding on the natural punch of their music. In 2019, the Long Ryders have an awful lot to say, and on Psychedelic Country Soul they're sharing their message with the heart and soul that made them great. It was real nice of Dr. Dre to give them a chance to put it all on tape.
Brittany Howard - Jaime / 13th Century Metal
Jaime is the name of Brittany Howard's sister, a sibling who died from a rare cancer when she was 13 years old. Howard began reckoning with the enduring ramifications of her loss when she started writing a memoir, an exercise that eventually led to her 2019 solo debut Jaime. Running a tight 35 minutes but containing a lifetime's worth of drama and insight, Jaime is bracing in its adventure and generosity. Trace elements of Americana can be heard -- there's nary a trace of the rockabilly roar of her ferocious Thunderbitch side project -- but Jaime could never be mistaken for an Alabama Shakes album. It's too funky and too fluid in how it embraces noise, art, and soul: witness "13th Century Metal," a collaboration with jazz keyboardist Robert Glasper where an organ stutters like a broken synth, the rhythms are as tight as a loop, and Howard recites her spoken verse with abandon...
Redd Kross - Beyond the Door / The Party
Considering that Redd Kross have been around in one form or another for 40 years, it's surprising that they haven't released many records. This is only their seventh, and since 2012's Researching the Blues was recorded in 2007, it means Beyond the Door is the first album in a decade for the McDonald brothers, Jeff and Steven. Working with guitarist Jason Shapiro (late of Celebrity Skin) and drummer Dale Crover (of the Melvins), they don't do anything much differently than they ever have. Crunching guitar riffs, bubblegummy melodies, and pop-culture-heavy lyrics are still the order of the day; Jeff's vocals are still rock & roll perfection and the group play with an equal amount of swagger and joy...
Rival Sons - Feral Roots / Back In The Woods
Since debuting in 2009 with the self-released Before the Fire, Long Beach, California's Rival Sons have been on a tear, delivering a refreshingly unfussy blast of blues-blasted hard rock on an almost yearly basis... with Mike Miley's Valhallic drumming leading the charge, as does the greasy "Back in the Woods," the latter of which sets the narrative tone for the sea change that follows...
The Raconteurs - Help Us Stranger / What's Yours Is Mine
Reconvening after a decade's absence, the Raconteurs resemble nothing less than a guild of craftsman united by taste and work ethic on their third album, Help Us Stranger. Ever since their debut, the quartet displayed a shared love for the rock and pop made before the advent of MTV, and while they've never abandoned an aesthetic steeped in FM radio, they've gotten livelier with each passing LP. Which isn't to say Help Us Stranger is a slack, loose affair. One of its considerable pleasures is how Brendan Benson encourages Jack White to stick to a strict outline and color within the lines, trends the latter largely abandoned on his willfully obtuse 2018 album Boarding House Reach...
Olivia Jean - Night Owl / Siren Call
Olivia Jean takes the production reigns on Night Owl, her second solo album. Arriving a full five years after her 2014 debut Bathtub Love Killings, a record where she played nearly every instrument but found herself produced by Third Man Records head Jack White, Night Owl maintains an allegiance to all the groovy sounds that powered her first album...
Mikal Cronin - Seeker / I’ve Got Reason
After releasing the impressive classic rock-leaning MCIII in 2015, Mikal Cronin pivoted to spending a few years playing and recording with his old friend Ty Segall's band. When he did turn back to his own muse, he spent time holed up in a cabin in the California hills reflecting on recent heartbreak and writing songs. With the help of producer Jason Quiver of Papercuts, Segall and members of his band including guitrarist Emmett Kelly of Cairo Gang, Cronin set about putting them on tape. Much like the expansive, dense music on MCIII, Seeker isn't anything close to resembling his early power pop in the garage sound. This is huge, imposing music that's clothed in full arrangements of layered guitars, swelling background vocals, various keys and orchestral strings with Cronin singing with fierce passion and rueful regret...
Desert Sessions, Vols. 11 & 12 / Far East For the Trees
Josh Homme always meant to get back to the desert, it just took him nearly 16 years to do so. Homme never officially put his Desert Sessions project on ice, but Queens of the Stone Age kept him busy, as did domestic duties, so the call of the wild remained muted for year after year, until the collective finally returned in 2019 with Desert Sessions, Vols. 11 & 12. Time changes everything, including the tenor of the Desert Sessions. Where previous excursions into the arid netherworld relied on overpowering volume and nocturnal menace, Desert Sessions, Vols. 11 & 12 is concise and colorful, a blast of madness and mischief...
Charly Bliss - Young Enough / Hard To Believe
The follow-up to their 2017 debut album, Young Enough leaves behind some of the grungier corners of Guppy while doubling down on caffeinated alt-rock anthems. That's to say they don't abandon distortion and animated rock drums, but prominent synths and a more extroverted and aerodynamic front land a little closer to No Doubt than the Breeders while remaining on that continuum. Following albums with acts including Morrissey and the Front Bottoms, Joe Chiccarelli produced the record...
Big Eyes - Streets of the Lost / Try Hard Kiss Ass
2016's Stake My Claim was the first Big Eyes album to feature two guitar players, and it changed the band's direction. Kait Eldridge's group had a sound that was tough-as-nails garage punk with a nasty edge and a nice line in hooky tunes. Her guitar playing was whip-smart and left a mark. With the addition of Paul Ridenour on guitar, the duo began to explore the possibilities of having two guitars trading punches and ending up in a tangled heap. The album was a fine start down the road to rock & roll Valhalla; on 2019's Streets of the Lost, they grab the rock & roll horns with both hands and wrestle them to the ground. The twin guitar attack of Eldridge and Ridenour reaches its full potential here on tracks that capture the low-slung heroics of Thin Lizzy, the new rhythm section of bassist Jeff Ridenour and drummer Scott McPherson is rock solid and punchy as hell, and Eldridge's songs have a newfound bite behind the catchy melodies...
The Regrettes - How Do You Love? / Has It Hit You?
Take the title of the Regrettes' second album as something of a promise. How Do You Love? finds the band -- or, perhaps more specifically, its leader Lydia Night -- exploring the ramifications of the titular question. It's a bit of an autobiographical quandary for Night, who fell madly and deeply in love sometime after the 2017 release of Feel Your Feelings Fool! The relationship didn't survive, but it inspired the song cycle of How Do You Love?, which traces the rise and fall of Night's first great romance. Chronicling an affair isn't a new concept. Other artists have cut their own song cycles about faded love; the Regrettes tackle this shopworn warhorse with the enthusiasm of youth and the urgency of a broken heart...
Amyl and the Sniffers - Amyl and the Sniffers / Some Mutts (Can't Be Muzzled)
With an energy befitting a tiny tornado, Australian punk crew Amyl and the Sniffers deliver a series of punches to the jaw with their rollicking self-titled debut. Clocking in at less than 30 minutes, Amyl and the Sniffers is an absolute thrill, the ideal soundtrack to a sweat-and-beer-covered bar brawl. Here, black eyes and bruises are a welcome trade for the fun and complete abandon within, which owes much to the band's electrifying vocalist, Amy Taylor. Channeling the spirits of forebears Wendy O. Williams, Karen O, and Poly Styrene, she is a riotous force...
The Yawpers - Human Question / Child of Mercy
On their first album, 2015's American Man, the Yawpers sprang out of the gate as one of the best roots rock bands to emerge in ages, with tough but literate songs and a potent take on acoustic country and blues. They aimed for something bigger and more ambitious on 2017's Boy in a Well, a picaresque concept album that was adventurous in a way that dwarfed their debut, both in material and execution. So in some respects, 2019's Human Question feels like a step back, a set of straightforward tunes that focuses on the band's skills as an electric trio rather than reinventing their stylistic wheel. But it sure doesn't sound like a band that's treading water -- Human Question is a superb rock & roll album, full of heart, soul, drive, and smarts...
Wild Billy Childish & CTMF - Last Punk Standing.../ Journey to the End of the Night
When the name Billy Childish shows up on the sleeve of an album, it's a guarantee that the contents will be raw rock & roll played with feverish purity and sung with the passion of a madman. He's had numerous bands over the years, and CTMF is on par with the best of them. Over the course of a handful of albums they've established themselves as keepers of the punk rock flame, undimmed by commercial concerns and undeterred by the lure of flashy stylistic diversions. Last Punk Standing... is another fine addition to their CV; the trio whip up some thrilling noise as they power through raging rockers, pounding punk polemics, a surf instrumental, and the occasional love song...
The Gotobeds - Debt Begins at 30 / Twin Cities
...Some bands lose focus when too many other musicians join them in the studio, but on Debt Begins at 30, the Gotobeds sound as strong and defiant as ever, as the guests reinforce what they do rather than distract from it. On their first two albums, the band sounded like an inspired amalgam of the Fall, Pavement, and early Sonic Youth filtered through the perspective of a smart but utterly unpretentious garage band, and here they've added a few more ambitious angles without spoiling the formula or losing sight of their strengths...
Bob Mould - Sunshine Rock / Sunshine Rock
At the end of the '90s, Bob Mould declared he was done with guitar-based rock & roll and he was looking for a new focus for his creative impulses. Two decades later, Mould has not only had a dramatic change of heart about that, he's making some of the best and most powerful rock of his career, while fronting what is arguably the best band he's ever had. The biggest difference between Mould's albums from 2012's Silver Age onward and his iconic work with Hüsker Dü and Sugar is that his songwriting has developed an emotional honesty and personal gravity that, as strong and passionate as his earlier work was, he never quite found before. And in bassist Jason Narducy and drummer Jon Wurster, Mould has discovered an appallingly good rhythm section who can hit hard without losing sight of the melodies, and when they lock in, they're as tight and sympathetic as anyone could wish...
Juliana Hatfield - Weird / Do It to Music
A year before Weird, Juliana Hatfield delivered an album-length Valentine to her childhood pop idol Olivia Newton-John. Appropriately, some echoes of AM pop linger on Weird -- it's there in the occasional wash of analog synth and the insistent hooks, and it's there in exuberant closer "Do It to Music," a love letter to the complex joys of pop -- but the album is barbed by design, a return to the ornery personal pop that's been Hatfield's métier in the 21st century. The album title alone hints at what Weird is about: the feeling of not quite fitting in with the world at large...
Jenny Lewis - On the Line / Little White Dove
Consider On the Line as the companion to its predecessor The Voyager. It's not simply that the cover art invites such comparisons. Jenny Lewis once again works with producer Ryan Adams for a good chunk of the album, reuniting with a number of familiar players on the SoCal circuit, such as keyboardist Benmont Tench and Beck, while finding room for cameos from Ringo Starr, Don Was, and Jim Keltner. It's a high-end set of professional players, a supporting cast that lends On the Line the feeling of a low-key Hollywood jam session: everybody is in place, doing their best to make the star shine...
Duff McKagan - Tenderness / Don't Look Behind You
...On McKagan's third solo album, Tenderness, he turns towards gentle country-tinged songwriting, but his punk spirit emerges in the unexpected form of social consciousness. On the Shooter Jennings-assisted album, most of the 11 songs center around political critique, social unrest, and even perspectives on gun violence, homelessness, and the #MeToo movement. The album followed a time that found McKagan rejoining Guns N' Roses for the "Not in This Lifetime" world tour and writing his second book, entering his fifties as a sober family man and a lifetime away from the debauchery and recklessness of his early years....
The Who - Who / She Rocked My World
It's not billed that way but given the Who's productivity since their initial split in 1982, it's difficult not to view 2019's Who as the band's final album. It's only their second album in 37 years, and if it takes them another 13 years to complete a third -- that's the length of time separating Who from 2006's Endless Wire -- both Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey will be well into their eighties, a seemingly unlikely age for new work by rockers... After all these years, it becomes clear that the relationship between Daltrey and Townshend -- the singer serving as the songwriter's best interpreter and editor -- is at the core of the Who, which is why Who feels like a Who album: The two still bring out the best in each other.
