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 …

When the Black Eyed Peas returned from years of silence last spring with the cool jazz flow and defiantly political lyricism of “Street Livin’,” they caught the music world by surprise. Finally, many of us collectively thought: the real Black Eyed Peas are back, the true-school trio who once turned …

“History repeats the old conceits,” Elvis Costello sang thirty-six years ago on Imperial Bedroom, his finest hour of versatile pop mastery. But even back then, he was rarely interested in repeating himself – going from the angry, young almost-punk of 1978’s This Year’s Model to the literate, political New Wave …

Electronic producers’ mad dash to work with Latin stars continues: After David Guetta released a pair of collaborations with J Balvin this month, DJ Snake made “Taki Taki,” a rush-hour-traffic-jam of a single that includes Ozuna, Selena Gomez and Cardi B, and Dillon Francis has a new album, Wut Wut, …

Producing Clutch is an “ain’t broke, don’t fix it “proposition. Over the past quarter century, these Maryland road dogs have gradually honed a sturdy, compact sound that’s immune to drastic change: bluesy, riff-centric hard rock with hints of psychedelia and punk, topped off by the gravelly roar of wildly charismatic …