“There’ll be no revival/there’ll be no encore,” sings Robbie Robertson in a raspy voice — a voice rarely heard in the Band — on “Once Were Brothers.” It’s a sing-speaking voice here, like latter-day Leonard Cohen with less gravitas, or Robertson’s old boss Dylan with less insouciance. A narrator’s voice, …
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“Now, a woman’s life ain’t just a list of the worst things she has done,” sings Tanya Tucker on While I’m Livin’. The line arrives during “Mustang Ridge,” the sing-along mission statement that opens Tucker’s first album of new material in 17 years.There’s a reason Tucker wants to make that …
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Has there ever been a rocker more comically perpetually unsatisfied than Gordon Gano? Nearly 40 years have passed since the Violent Femmes debuted their freaky, silly hybrid of folk and rock, and these days they’ve settled comfortably into a style that’s a bit like Bob Dylan meets Monty Python (or …
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It’s been 10 years since Rammstein‘s last industro-metal jaunt and, if their latest album is any indication, it sounds like they’ve been stockpiling aggression the entire time. The Berlin rockers start things by dropping an atom bomb on Germany’s modern history with “Deutschland,” a deceptively catchy number with lyrics about …
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The writing’s on the wall, so bright it’ll sear your retinas: Reggaeton and trap win streaming. So if you’re an artist over 30 and you hope to stream successfully, adjust accordingly. This is true for Latin stars — check out new songs from Ricardo Montaner, Olga Tañon and Alejandro Sanz …
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Aldous Harding uses oddness as both lure and armor. You can see it in her performances, which suggest a neurodiverse lexicon of emotions in her facial tics and physicality. And you can hear it in the language of Designer, her quizzically beautiful third LP, where she pivots artfully from folk …
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Taken line by line, the conversational lyrics of Natalie Mering, aka: Weyes Blood —pronounced “Wise Blood,” a moniker taken from the Flannery O’Connor novel — seem straightforward, sober, and frequently inspirational. We hear from someone who “drank a lot of coffee today,” who recognizes that “some of us go astray,” …
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