Album Reviews

Courtney Barnett’s 2015 debut, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, was the sound of a young artist with the melodic chops of a power-pop whiz, the storytelling skills of a good novelist, and the wit of a highbrow sitcom writer. Barnett could’ve built a career coasting …

No platinum rapper is quite like Meek Mill. The lifelong Philadelphian often sounds like a throwback, a hardcore East Coast shouter in an era overstuffed with Autotune-sweetened melodicists. His best tracks – “Dreams and Nightmares,” “Tupac Back,” “Levels” – are as profoundly memorable as any his megastar peers have produced. …

How does someone like Ariana Grande follow one of pop’s greatest, boldest break-up albums? With a horny, campy collection of R&B slow jams, of course. In all its naughty glory, Positions doesn’t teach us anything new about Grande: she’s always had a penchant for both subtle (“Imagine”) and not-so-subtle (“Side …

After a nearly 30-year gap between records, Los Angeles’ punk laureates X have dared to make a new album. As recently as three years ago, they said they would never even try to record something new. Even though the four musicians that recorded their landmark Los Angeles album had been …

John Anderson has never gone away. The Eighties/Nineties country hitmaker behind songs like “Seminole Wind,” “Swingin’,” “Straight Tequila Night” and the immortal “She Just Started Liking Cheatin’ Songs” has trudged along in the 21st century, releasing four albums between 2001 and 2015 that largely landed under the radar. On Years, …

The fourth album from Alabama sibling duo the Secret Sisters is the stunning country-soul opus their talent has always promised. Laura and Lydia Rogers have been at it since 2010, making solid LPs with high-profile producers (T Bone Burnett, Dave Cobb) while lending their Southern church harmonies to legends like …

At one point, the working title for the new Neil Young and Crazy Horse album was Pink Moon. It describes the eleven days the band spent in April, hunkered down in a studio at an elevation of 9,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains, recording their first new record in seven …

Santana launched their career half a century ago with a cover of Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji’s “Jingo” and now, for their 25th album, they’ve created a love letter to Africa. Although Africa Speaks sounds undeniably like a Santana album, with Carlos’ fiery guitar bursts and reedy-voiced singer Buika’s Spanish-language exclamaciones, …

There have been times throughout Bruce Springsteen’s career when California has called. He named a song for the state after his parents moved there in 1971, and he’d return to it, in life and writing, repeatedly, chasing his dreams like Steinbeck’s Tom Joad.Western Stars (out June 14th) is the latest …

Wearing an Atlanta Braves jersey, with her auburn hair tucked under a visor, Faye Webster cuts a distinct figure for an indie-folk singer-songwriter. She’s the kind of person you wish would crash your summer barbecue, where she’d probably hang out in the corner, spinning a yo-yo and coolly surveying the …