Score: 9.5/10 Like I imagine is the case with a lot of people, my introduction to Lucinda Williams was the critical and commercial 1998 breakthrough that was Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. New offering from this year Good Souls Better Angels travels along similar lines of country-rock hodgepodge but, I think, is more victoriously […]

Score: 9.5/10 Track three of Zeroh’s new album, “Metacine,” opens with a half-muffled spoken-word sound bite over ambient jazz: “Europeans have no woman god in their mythology / But we do / So what of the African mind in the West?” The track (I hesitate to call any of these events “songs,” much less “jams” […]

Score: 2.5/10 Pearl Jam happens to be a band I generally really like, having even I think blasted out a refreshing eruption of straight-ahead raw energy on 2013’s Lightning Bolt, so I’m going to be as brief, or as SIDELONG, as it were, as I possibly can here. But unfortunately there’s no avoiding the fact […]

Score: 10/10 Now, if I were gonna sit here and tell you the new Cornershop record is GOOD, that it’s not gimmicky, that it draws from a cross-section of Britpop from The Verve back to the post-punk of mid-era XTC, you’d probably have my head, and rightly so, perhaps. The malady is probably confounded by […]

Score: 9.5/10 Somewhat understandably, Grimes seemed to almost petulantly and adamantly retreat from the public eye for close to about half a decade or so, following the release of Art Angels, her poppiest record still and ergo one which would have theoretically garnered her the most non-musical exposure, or, attention to aspects of her having […]

Score: 9/10 Of all the “pitfalls” that could have theoretically affected this new Green Day album, “disorienting tendencies” probably falls closer to the realm of “good problems” than “father of all motherfu**ers,” as it were. Enter opening title track, then, apropos, which, after a brief burp of standard Green Day-issue guitar fuzz, pillows out into […]

Score: 10/10 Leave it to me to get on Ghostface Killah’s case for pewtering out a wimpy little 40-minute hip-hop album last year only to completely let it slide in the case of his New York cohort Navy Blue. But Ada Irin, which is rife with samples, deep with a guest appearance from Ka and […]

Score: 8.5/10 For how storied and how championed this band has been for a decade and a half as part of indie rock’s very elite, it seems jilting in a way that it’s only their fifth album we’re now getting in this year’s Thin Mind. The album comes from the band’s already standing record label, […]

Score: **`/***** Oh, Stabbing Westward — I mean you’ve gotta at least root for the guys, if you still love rock and roll. Bless their hearts, they certainly seem on a mission from Satan to revive music in the 2020’s, issuing their first new tunes this month since 2001, a high-energy EP full of dramatic […]

Score: 7/10 . Eminem has always made his living on two things: honesty and comedy. That is, you know when he’s bull-shi**ing and when he’s telling the truth, and when he’s being straight up, he’s capable of making incisive statements about America that few other people can, like that anthemic verse in “White America”: “So […]