Album Reviews

The Lowest Pair is an American folk duo made up of Kendl Winter and Palmer T. Lee, known for their intertwined vocal harmonies and banjo-forward songwriting. Formed in 2013, the pair has built a dedicated following through records that balance traditional folk roots with plainspoken, emotionally direct lyrics. Having a particularly prolific run in their […]

Last August, thrash metal icon Dave Mustaine announced the end of Megadeth. After one final album, the band’s seventeenth, and a farewell tour, Mustaine is hanging up his Flying V guitar. This is partly due to issues with his hand, including arthritis and Dupuytren’s contracture, a painful condition that causes one or more fingers to […]

Inevitably, two camps will form over Lucinda Williams’ latest, World’s Gone Wrong. Some will praise her for taking on America’s socio-political crises head-on. The ‘shut up and play” crowd, on the other hand, will argue that we didn’t need Lucinda Williams to inform us of how chaotic things are. Yet, neither camp can deny that […]

The last time we heard from The Format, the pop duo of Nate Ruess and Sam Means, the world was a much different place. The band’s previous LP arrived twenty years ago in the summer of 2006, and if anyone ever asks what that summer sounded like, The Format’s Dog Problems is a good place […]

Justin Townes Earle, the deeply talented but sadly troubled folk/Americana musician, succumbed to an accidental overdose just over five years ago. Yet within the span of just weeks, an authorized biography—What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome—has been released, and musician Sammy Brue is issuing an album largely drawn from Earle’s journals. Aptly titled The […]

It’s hardly fair to say guitarist/composer Julian Lage saved his best work for Blue Note Records. After all, he released a handful of memorable albums, such as Arclight, prior to joining the iconic jazz label.  Still, there’s no doubt Lage has stretched himself since issuing Modern Lore and Love Hurts roughly a decade ago, and, for this fifth outing on […]

The Nottingham, UK-based Sleaford Mods’ newest offering, Demise of Planet X on Rough Trade, is a screed against modern society delivered with a thick East Midlands accent, slang, and a fed-up point of view, set to electro post-punk bump-and-grind.   The duo of Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn have been at this for a long time, and the group’s thirteenth […]

Nashville-by-way-of-Philly musician Langhorne Slim has released more than half a dozen records blending folk, Americana, and the occasional indie-pop song. But five years after Strawberry Mansion—a deeply personal, post-pandemic record that in part documented his journey to sobriety, delivered through often delicately beautiful musical movements—he has found his way to a louder amp and strapped […]

Renowned drummer Antonio Sanchez again finds himself in an unconventional trio after convening last year’s BEATrio with Bela Fleck and Edmar Casteneda. This time, Sanchez collaborates with conquero/vocalist Pedrito Martinez and the multi-instrumentalist leader of Snarky Puppy, Michael League, in a rare configuration that features two percussionists and League’s array of instruments. Their mission is to unite cultures and musical genres, […]

Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore, two of the more celebrated and beloved experimental composers in contemporary music, were put into a unique situation for Tragic Magic. The duo’s 7-song collaborative LP was created in just 9 days with producer Trevor Spencer at the Philharmonie de Paris, where rare instruments are collected. The duo was given […]

Minneapolis-based folk rockers, The Pines, have always been led by the insightful songwriting of David Huckfelt. On “I Was Born, But…”, we don’t get his songwriting; instead, we get inspired interpretations of mostly lesser-known works by a wide range of North American songwriters.  In some respects, the album reads much like Dylan’s Self-Portrait. In fact, both have a version […]

It is hard to believe that Oxis, the marine-based electronic singer/songwriter/producer, only started her series of self-titled releases three years ago. Her music reaches a level of intimacy and vulnerable storytelling that makes listening to it feel like a chat with an old, prophetic friend, someone you never forget but can never pin down for […]

It’s hard to believe that James Hunter has been recording for almost four decades now. His Off the Fence is his eleventh studio album and debut for Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound after years in the Dap Tone stable. Ironically, Daptone’s co-founder, Gabriel Roth, produced, not Auerbach. It’s refreshing to see an album without multiple […]

Mike Mattison & Trash Magic make it all sound easy on Turn A Midnight Corner.  A uniformly excellent explorative statement in contemporary blues, this Landslide Records effort is the flashpoint of experience and ambition at which the frontman only hinted by his efforts with his Scrapomatic band and his 2014 release Afterglow. The reputation Mike […]

At this point, we should treat singer-songwriter/poet/visual artist Courtney Marie Andrews’ music as evolving and taking on more polish with each release. Her previous release, 2022’s Loose Future, came with these words in our headline – “Breezier and Poppier.”  Her latest, Valentine, is not anywhere near as uplifting, but some of the vulnerability and fragility […]

Pink Floyd’s recognition of the half-century milestone of Wish You Were Here continues what, with period collections such as 2019’s The Later Years, has become something of a cottage industry for the now-defunct British prog-rockers.  Completists and collectors will no doubt be confounded by all manner of WYWH50 merchandise, not the least of which is […]

The south London-based post-punk outfit Dry Cleaning starts 2026 with a confident offering as their third studio full-length, Secret Love, successfully expands and polishes their sound.  The quartet of Florence Shaw, Lewis Maynard, Tom Dowse, and Nick Buxton stopped and started the project a few times, recording demos and jams everywhere from Chicago with Wilco […]

Alison Krauss & Union Station had already been together in various forms for more than a decade by the time their Live album was recorded in 2002. Krauss emerged as a prodigy in the bluegrass world, but Union Station became the vehicle that allowed her to broaden that tradition. With Ron Block on banjo, Dan […]

Rhino Records has issued some very expansive archival collections of the Replacements’ music, and, at least in terms of heft, this triple-CD set of Let It Be doesn’t quite measure up to 2019’s Dead Man’s Pop/Don’t Tell a Soul and the next year’s Pleased to Meet Me.  But that’s only because the vinyl iteration of […]

Juliana Hatfield is one of those truly great Gen X musical touchstones who remain as prolific and musically relevant now as she was at the height of her popularity in the 1990s. The longest stretch she’s gone without a solo album in more than 30 years was the four-year span between 2000 and 2004 (and […]