Like 2000’s “The Covers Record,” Chan Marshall’s second go at a (mostly) covers album imparts her unique, husky-voiced stamp on songs from such greats as Hank Williams, James Brown, Joni Mitchell and … Lil Wayne and the Hot Boyz. But rather than the stripped-down, bare-bones approach employed previously, “Jukebox” follows in the vein of […]
The dizzying tom-tom runs and shining buzz-saw guitar blasts that launch “Mission Control” opener “Like a Vibration” demand you sit up and take notice, but it’s the track’s pop-hook heart and Parker Gispert’s guy-next-door voice that make the two-and-a-half-minute sprint stick. Therein lies the beauty of the Whigs: Not only is the band mercifully […]
Yes, some of Natasha Bedingfield’s oft-delayed sophomore effort sounds like more fresh-feeling pitch music for women’s hygiene products (”A face without freckles/Is like a sky without the stars”). But all the tinkering — the album shares a mere five songs with the U.K. version released in April 2007 — gave “Sunshine” what her 2005 […]
Hands down, this bassist/composer’s newest is the primo jazz release of 2008 so far and promises to stand tall as one of the year’s best. It’s lyrical, colorful, edgy and teems with inspired exuberance. Conceived with careful architectural attention and grounded in the tradition of alchemic improvisation, Ben Allison’s music has all the earmarks […]
Not as aggressively experimental as 1999’s “Guerrilla” or 2005’s “Love Kraft,” the latest from this genre-bending Welsh band is largely a smoothed-out pop record, reining in some of Super Furry Animals’ more left-field tendencies and tenderly nurturing the catchy, chart-friendly hooks of Gruff Rhys and company. “Run Away” is an uptempo number about amnesia […]
Drive-By Truckers’ seventh album is a sprawling scorcher, and while these guys certainly aren’t strangers to long records, “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark” is one of the meanest, leanest 19-track albums you’ll ever spin. Yet where DBT usually hits the ground running, “Dark” is deliberately slower to burn, full of beautifully considered stories of soldiers […]
Patty Larkin has spent part of the past 20 years honing her chops while turning out one absorbing album after another. It’s no surprise, then, that she’s reached the point where she’s truly doing the solo thing in the studio. Larkin wrote all the tunes on this disc, produced it and played all the […]
Most pop music fans think they know Ringo Starr. And musically, it’s probably true. The fun-loving Beatle, now 67, is still full of nostalgia for the good ol’ days, and his humble appreciation for life and simple tunes is abundant on “Liverpool 8.” You’re not getting anything groundbreaking on a Ringo album. The titular […]
After releasing a pair of albums as frontman of quirky New Zealand pop/ rock act Betchadupa, Liam Finn steps out on his own with this self-produced solo debut. Here, he comes closer to the work of home-studio eccentrics like Beck than to the classically minded pop of his father, Crowded House frontman Neil. That’s not […]
Few acts have morphed more often than Mark Oliver Everett’s Eels. From the group’s earliest work with the Dust Brothers more than a decade ago through to recent acoustic singer/ songwriter forays, the Eels are ever changing. All of which makes “Useless Trinkets: B-Side, Soundtracks, Rarities and Unreleased 1996-2006″ an eclectic and difficult, but […]
While his by turns mournful and bombastic collaborations with Miles Davis, John Lee Hooker and Luciano Pavarotti might be this Italian star’s most obvious tickets to an American audience, they’re hardly the catchiest cuts on this economically culled, two-decade-spanning sampler. Where he really excels is with studio-pumped and gruffly passionate sort of middle-aged-lothario dance-rock–exemplified […]
Marvin Gaye’s most misunderstood album was a bittersweet venting about his divorce from wife Anna, the sister of Motown founder Berry Gordy. The 1978 record settled scores and ended his contract, humiliated his ex, was widely ignored by the public and buried, some say, by the label. Listened to with a bright new digital […]
Even while the Wu-Tang Clan was most active, Ghostface Killah was quietly establishing himself as one of the wickedest, least predictable MCs of this era. This is his third album in 18 months. But if there’s a bottom to Ghost’s lyrical well, he’s nowhere near it on “The Big Doe Rehab,” which is jammed […]
This collection of Thursday material well-serves its likely purposes of keeping the band top of mind in the fourth quarter while giving screamo fans a new favorite thing for Christmas. Three new songs and nine previously unreleased ones, plus a documentary/concert DVD, make “Kill the House Lights” worth exploring. Instead of throwing in anything […]
