Album Reviews

“I can see myself inside your bloodshot eyes,” Julien Baker sings on her excellent third record, Little Oblivions. “Wondering if you can see yourself in mine.” It’s a moment of raw, bleary intimacy that gets to the heart of this 25-year-old Tennessean’s potent appeal. On two standout solo albums, and …

On August 26th, 1973, Joni Mitchell arrived at Studio Instrument Rentals in Los Angeles, where Neil Young and his band the Santa Monica Flyers were recording the boozy Tonight’s the Night. Joined by guitarists Ben Keith and Nils Lofgren, drummer Ralph Molina, and bassist Billy Talbot, Mitchell and Young tore …

About 20 years ago, Conor Oberst, the singer-songwriter who fronts Bright Eyes, sheepishly warbled his way out of Omaha to become an emo heartthrob and a baroque-folk New Dylan. But Oberst was never one for sitting still artistically, and he ping-ponged throughout the aughts, from synth–rock to punk to rustic …

One Los Angeles evening in 1975, Neil Young gathered a few friends together at the Chateau Marmont to play them some music. He had two new albums in the can, and wasn’t sure which one to release. Sitting inside the same bungalow that John Belushi would die in just seven …

The past decade in country music has been a boom time for small-town truth tellers — artists like Brandy Clark, Angaleena Presley, and Kacey Musgraves — who countered Nashville’s trucks-and-tailgates formula with stripped-down realism. In 2018, Arkansas native Ashley McBryde released one of the most striking country LPs in recent …

Even by Beatles standards, Abbey Road has always been an album full of mysteries. How could the world’s most beloved band make their sunniest, warmest, most charming music while they were in the middle of breaking up? How did John, Paul, George and Ringo come together to drop their all-time …

Melina Duterte (a.k.a. Jay Som) makes music that often gets lumped in with that intimately delicate, richly interior kind of indie-rock called “bedroom pop.” If that’s accurate, she’s got a pretty big bedroom. Few artists these days are so good at turning their private worlds into wide-open biospheres of pleasure …

Nine days before the new Lion King remake hit theaters, Disney released a clip from the “Hakuna Matata” scene in which a CGI-rendered Simba, Timon, and Pumbaa sing the beloved showtune with the facial expressiveness of a Real Housewives cast after two decades worth of intensive botox treatments. The clip …

The Head and the Heart have built their success the old fashioned way. The Seattle folk-rock band has evolved from a rootsy, homespun sound to a bigger, radio-ready one, earnestly finding their purchase in what’s left of the old old-fashioned pop-rock mainstream while exuding a tastefulness that makes their ambition …

Logic is more than a rapper — at least, that’s how he sees himself. This much became apparent on Tuesday, when he A) released Supermarket, his debut novel, which tells the story of a depressed 24-year-old deadbeat named Flynn who takes a job at a grocery store in his rural …