Album Reviews

Metaphorically and otherwise, things are falling down everywhere on the New Pornographers eighth LP: statues (“Colossus of Rhodes”), lovers (“Falling Down The Stairs of Your Smile”), performance conventions (“the 4th wall is falling on us” chime the worried singers on “Need Some Giants”), and especially people’s spirits — like the …

On album six (six, six), Slipknot remain metal’s premiere charm school for misfit clowns. Frontman Corey Taylor still sounds like he’s vomiting bile as he sings and raps about tussling with life’s indignities and throws in the occasional non-sequitur one-liner (“We’re all dressed up with nobody to kill,” on “Birth …

America’s most acclaimed new electronic composer scores a piece by choreographer Wayne McGregor with her cutting-edge synthetic textures and brain-blendering pinball beats. It’s somewhat of a departure from her two critically acclaimed albums – 2015’s Dark Energy and 2017’s Black Origami – where experimental electronc textures met Chicago’s polyrhythmic hurricanes …

When Slash put out his first solo album – It’s Five O’clock Somewhere, under the name Slash’s Snakepit, in 1995 – he encouraged fans to ask, “What if?” about the music – “What if this were a Guns N’ Roses song?” “If I write something, my first and foremost priority …

Voivod formed in 1982, and after only five years, the Quebec thrash-gone-prog quartet was pretty much impossible to mistake for any other band. Their now-classic late-Eighties albums — including 1988’s Dimension Hatröss, which ranked at number 78 on Rolling Stone‘s Greatest Metal Albums list — were like portals into a …

The disco-friendliness of New York’s gloriously over-the-top Scissor Sisters and the increasingly electronic nature of their output obscured a simple fact: Beneath their righteous camp, lead singer Jake Shears has always been a traditional and sometimes even serious pop-rock craftsman, as Elton-y sing-alongs like “I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’” — …

This Melbourne band Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’s full-length debut is a minor marvel: 10 perfectly pitched guitar-pop songs, not a dud among ’em. There are echoes of other bands – generous handfuls of R.E.M. and the Cure, mostly, with a little New Order and Television thrown in – but they …

The mythic image of Johnny Cash as country music’s most iconic outlaw doesn’t always jibe with the fact that the Man in Black was also a sensitive, nuanced literary craftsman. That misconception may be corrected by Johnny Cash: Forever Words, a collection of Cash’s poems, lyrics and letters set to …

As rock star origin stories go, Alicia Bognanno‘s may be the only one that begins like a LinkedIn testimonial. “If everybody worked as hard as Alicia then everybody’s records would be Number One hits,” her old boss Steve Albini said toNMEin 2015, after she interned at his Electrical Audio studio. …

Hitchhiker marks a pivotal moment in Neil Young‘s ongoing series of archival releases: Instead of a live classic-songs set, this is a buried-treasure mother lode – 10 newly unearthed studio recordings, cut in one acoustic session, on August 11th, 1976. Young wasn’t exactly swept up in the country’s bicentennial spirit …