Album Reviews

French Montana has a knack for crafting au courant earworms that pay subtle homage to rap’s illustrious history. After cementing his rep as New York’s most in-demand mixtape maven (under the careful tutelage of ByrdGang iconoclast and self-proclaimed “wave God,” Max B), the Bronx MC topped the charts in 2012 …

There’s a certain kind of lyric that Will Oldham excels at writing and delivering, where he sketches out a vaguely unnerving scenario and allows it to hang there in the listener’s mind, offering no assurance whatsoever that everything will turn out OK. A potent example comes on “Not Fooling,” the …

The Who Sell Out was rock’s first perfect package of irony — a wry marriage of highbrow and lowbrow art disguised as a concept album where the only real notion was that the Who wanted cash. They linked the songs together with tongue-in-cheek commercials for deodorant and pimple cream and …

Brockhampton albums can be a lot of work for a listener. The group’s 13 members include a handful of rappers trading bars that can be shadowy and introspective. Always at least 45 minutes long, their six albums are no small time commitment in the era of short songs, rap loosies, …

Between vintage concert albums and recent ones excavated from archival tapes, it’s become easier than ever to track the onstage history of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. We can now hear Young and the band in its early, funky, Danny Whitten days (Live at the Fillmore East), breaking in Whitten …

Canadian heartthrob Shawn Mendes made his bones playing a version of boy pop that was more James Taylor than Justin Bieber — strumming his acoustic guitar and singing earnestly about the battle scars of romance. He was a dress-shirt-and-sport-coat guy in a sleeve-tat world, and on his self-titled third LP, …

The band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks cannot catch a break. Nearly two decades after the George W. Bush roast heard ‘round the world and the Chicks’ subsequent exile from Nashville, the bestselling Texas trio still have a bone to pick on Gaslighter, the group’s first studio release in …

On “Ordinary Man,” the lushly sentimental title track of Ozzy Osbourne‘s latest album, the Godfather of Heavy Metal has the audacity to sing, “I don’t wanna die an ordinary man.” It’s a puzzling lyric because for the past half-century he’s been anything but average — he’s been the Iron Man, …

A creative slump, a year-long stint in jail, the seizures, the bitter, prolonged label battle—the ‘10s were a tough decade for Lil Wayne. These trials have little bearing on the direction of his 13th studio album Funeral, in which he eschews introspection and sets out on a mission to bury …

When you’re already the biggest artist on the pop-adjacent edge of música urbana, the next logical place to look next is up. As such, for his third album Nibiru, Ozuna aims for the stars with a loosely sci-fi derived concept guiding his skywards path. Considering how vital and commercially successful …