Album Reviews

A decade after Best Coast released their indie-pop breakthrough “Sun Was High (and So Was I),” the band has cleaned up its act. Four years have passed since its last LP, California Nights, and frontwoman Bethany Cosentino has sobered up and turned her life around. It’s a commendable feat, but …

Your old high school journals are probably full of thoughts you would rather burn than let the whole world read. For Tegan and Sara, the lyrics they wrote together between ages 15 and 17 prove to be worth a thrilling return and revamp. This is the basis of the twins’ …

Ever since Sturgill Simpson was anointed the second coming of Seventies country with his 2014 release, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, the 41-year-old Kentucky Navy vet has spent the past half-decade making a show of his discomfort with any such label. Simpson followed up that career-making record with 2016’s A …

During the mid Eighties, the relationship between Keith Richards and Mick Jagger hit a historic low, as Jagger tested solo waters. “Mick started to become unbearable.” Richards wrote in his 2010 memoir Life. You could hear the rift: 1983’s Undercover and 1986’s Dirty Work often sounded like lackluster attempts at …

Twenty-five years after “Buddy Holly,” Rivers Cuomo still remains peerless in his ability to get you humming a line like “leave a five star review and I’ll leave one too” until the only way to un-hum it is by stabbing yourself in the thigh with the nearest sharp object. The …

From the opening lines of her 2016 debut, Julia Jacklin showed a knack for translating everyday memories into young-adult revelations. “You were taller than my bedroom door frame,” she sang. “Hit me hard when I found height don’t make a man, no.” On the Australian singer-songwriter’s second album, Crushing, those …