Leave it to Paul Simon to look back not with anger but with fussiness. Timed to coincide with his farewell tour, In the Blue Light finds Simon rifling through his back catalog and remaking ten cuts from his post-Garfunkel albums. Given how notoriously meticulous he’s always been, you’d think Simon …
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On their debut LP, this fantastic L.A. band envelops singer Natalie Carol’s bracingly afflicted, mountain-vaulting dream-country yodel in scrappy, sprawling guitar poetry. Carol can evoke anyone from Grace Slick to to Neko Case to Florence Welch to Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries, giving the band’s California roots sound a kind …
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Since 2011, Texas-Berlin producer Lotic has been sculpting experimental club music from noise swarms, microscopic samples and mutated bass rumbles, making fans of Björk, Ben Frost and more. 2015’s EPHeteroceteraand short mixtapeAgitationscreated mutating nightmares from, respectively, Penderecki-esque howls of microtonal noise and revvingTransformersgrind. However, with the release of their first …
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Meek Mill’s legal battles and subsequent advocacy for sentencing reform has made him a folk hero. Yet even before the “Free Meek Mill” T-shirts, the Philadelphia rapper born Robert Williams earned a reputation for perseverance, whether it was weathering the mockery that ensued after his 2015 rap battle with Drake …
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The elevator pitch for My Morning Jacket, very roughly, has long been the Allman Brothers retooled as Radiohead. So it’s cool that to hear frontman Jim James reverse-engineering his steez on his latest solo LP. A loving tribute to old-school shit spiritually informed by the hippie bible The Whole Earth Catalog, …
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Neil Young‘s latest LP with heartland-rock band Promise of the Real opens with “Already Great,” where the guitars cut like rusty plows and anti-Trump invective becomes bitter tribute: “You’re the promise land/The helping hand/No wall. No hate. No fascist U.S.A.” That sense of cranky rage and ageless idealism are all …
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