Album Reviews

There are some takes that don’t pass the test of time. For centuries, the human race believed that the sun revolved around the earth. We all got over that. People thought tomatoes were fatal to eat, leeches were quality health care, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Read anything published about …

Given Jason Isbell’s frightening talent for writing songs that make grown people weep, it is sometimes overlooked that he and his longtime band the 400 Unit are also wickedly skilled musicians whose live shows range from hushed intimacy to epic rock grandeur. Those chops are foregrounded on Georgia Blue, an …

Chrissie Hynde proved the bona fides of her Bob Dylan fandom decades ago. She sang “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” with him onstage at Wembley Stadium in ’84 and serenaded him with her own jaw-dropping, gospel-tinged rendition of “I Shall Be Released” at his 30th anniversary concert in ’91. …

Ever since the dawn of Jack White, artists who hunger to reassert the power of rock in a rockless age have tended to sound like reactionary young coots. But Greta Van Fleet — three brothers and a drummer from Frankenmouth, Michigan — set themselves apart by playing Seventies classic rock …

Part of Alice Cooper‘s enduring appeal has been the fact that, unlike many of his Seventies FM-radio peers, he always rejected the notion that rock & roll should be Serious Art. “School’s Out” is just a distant cousin of Chuck Berry’s “School Days,” and “I’m Eighteen” is inherently funny since …

A bittersweet truth of this pandemic, among many, is that the “quarantine album” has rapidly become its own genre. While the music industry as a whole has had to make do with recording albums remotely during lockdown for the past year, a distinct sonic concept for many of these releases …

Willie Nelson has now been releasing music for over seven decades, since the 1950s. Yet his enthusiasm for finding great songs remains unmatched: See “The First Rose of Spring,” the title track of his new album, written by Nashville pros Randy Houser, Allen Shamblin and Mark Beeson, a perfectly-crafted love …

Another apocalypse; another side of Bob Dylan. The man really knows how to pick his moments. Dylan has brilliantly timed his new masterwork for a summer when the hard rain is falling all over the nation: a plague, a quarantine, revolutionary action in the streets, cities on fire, phones out …

If any artist has encapsulated the past decade of pop, it’s Kesha. Her journey through the 2010s was a long, hard road, but she always reflects the times, from “Tik Tok” to TikTok. On the excellent High Road, she fuses all her passions together—the road she’s traveling in the title …

In 2011, a few months before his career exploded and he took the mantle as the world’s most successful busker, Ed Sheeran put out an EP calledNo.5 Collaborations Project, a series of duets with established artists from the UK’s grime scene. Eight years, three multi-platinum albums (Plus,Multiply, andDivide), and hundreds …