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 […]

Score: 9/10 . There would seem to be a confluence of forces tugging at the onlooker, discouraging him or her from examining this situation logically. One would be, of course, Colors, which sounded like the very definition of pop, least-common-denominator record label pandering. Another would be the jolting, bewildering contrast of styles from Beck album […]

Score: 9/10 . Boy, when El Paso’s Greg Gonzalez sat down and comprised the concept for his band Cigarettes after Sex, he must have really thought he was the best thing since sliced bread. He must have been like, wow, my sexual escapades really have an endless amount of poetic qualities and idyllic musical vistas […]

Score: 8/10 . I think I speak for everyone when I say every time I listen to a new piece of Jimmy Eat World material there’s part of me that wants to condescendingly call it cute and another part that’s like horrified that Jim Adkins is going to bare his teeth and take us on […]