Popular Music

Album Review: Omar Apollo’s “Ivory” — Making Good on His Promise

May 16, 2022
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Ivory is at its best when Omar Apollo fully commits to taking adventures into different sonic spaces.

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Pop Album Review: Charli XCX’s “Crash” — Loud, Reckless, and Messy

April 15, 2022
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Charli packages existential angst and heartache in sly, self aware pop performances that manage to deftly fuse self-conscious artificiality with earnest passion.

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Album Review: Club d’elf’s “You Never Know” — Spontaneous Magic

April 4, 2022
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This is the quintessential Club d’elf album, smartly arranged and surprisingly accessible without losing any of the group’s improvisational edges or exotic breadth.

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Bluegrass Album Review: Molly Tuttle — Blurring the Boundaries between the Folksy and the Exploratory

March 29, 2022
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Crooked Tree is the Molly Tuttle record we’ve been waiting for, one that is firmly rooted in bluegrass, but imbued with her own sharp style as a guitarist, singer, and songwriter.

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Book Review: “What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language” — Finding Multitudes of Meaning

March 29, 2022
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To always be listening more and to therefore always be listening differently is of course the very nature of fandom, and to call What’s Good the work of a fan is not a putdown.

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Music Interview: Good News — The Wailin’ Jennys Are Back

March 22, 2022
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All three are singer/songwriters whose individual gifts mesh seamlessly with soaring harmonies and a like-minded empathetic view of the world.

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Concert Review: Billy Strings Blesses Roadrunner, Memorably

March 17, 2022
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Where Roadrunner goes from here remains to be seen, but Billy Strings did his part to open the room with a bang of a blessing.

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Rock Album Review: Black Country, New Road — An Ending and a Culmination

February 25, 2022
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Regardless of what’s to come, Ants From Up There represents a dizzying creative apex for Black Country, New Road.

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Rock Album Review: Big Thief’s Latest — Among 2022’s Best Albums

February 24, 2022
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Both experimental and welcoming, the double album proves more spontaneous in feel and expansive in style than past Big Thief outings.

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Rock Album Review: David Bowie’s “Toy” — Perusing His Back Pages

February 15, 2022
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David Bowie’s Toy is a solid, enjoyable, and buoyant effort from an artist who never failed to stay interesting and vital well into his later years.

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