Score: 8.5/10 Elephant Stone is a lo-fi troupe out of Montreal, a Canadian city six hours north of the Big Apple by car and planted pretty much squatly on its line of longitude. Now, this might seem like a random bit of meaningless trivia, but interestingly, listening to their distinctly concise and gorgeously textural new […]

Score: 9/10 I can’t remember how but somehow probably four or five years ago (it might have been from reading the L.A. Record, likely the raddest online music journal out there) I got to following this Burger Records imprint out of Orange County, which always, whether or not I actually like the music, seems to […]

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, […]