Tag Archives: music-album-reviews

Two years ago, Willie Nelson delivered God’s Problem Child, a tragicomic heart-stopping meditation on the singer’s rapidly advancing age. A year later, he released an equally sturdy follow-up (2018’s Last Man Standing), and after detouring with his collection of Sinatra standards, the 86-year-old legend is back with Ride Me Back …

“I don’t want people to know me as a reggaeton star,” Maluma told Rolling Stone last year. “I want them to know me as Maluma, the star.” With the 2018 release of his Latin Grammy-winning album, F.A.M.E. — as well as charting hits with Shakira, and the late, controversy-ridden rapper …

Warmer is the Amnesiac-like companion album to Tweedy’s 2018 solo LP Warm, recorded during the same Chicago session and released in a limited run of 5000 vinyl copies for Record Store Day. If you liked Warm, you’ll like Warmer. It’s Tweedy at his most self-findingly laid back, low-key and ruminative, …

“Tried everything to set me free,” Townes Van Zandt sings in the opening line to “All I Need,” “but my chains keep playing tricks on me.” On Sky Blue, the new archival release from the Van Zandt estate, those twin emotions — mournful hope and self-harming despair — are on …

Back in the day, before it was pruned, the genre was called “Country and Western music.” But cowboy songs and border narratives have always been essential to its roots, not to mention sartorial sense. Colter Wall actually hails from Saskatchewan, in Western Canada. With production help from period-conjurer Dave Cobb, …

More than a decade before Drive-By Truckers released their first album, singer-songwriters Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood formed a fledgling North Alabama band called Adam’s House Cat. The group, which included Chuck Tremblay on drums and a revolving door of bassists, was more openly influenced by its mid-late 80’s indie …

As he reminds us album after album, decade after decade, few songwriters have laid out their lives in song as graphically as Loudon Wainwright III. By chronicling his years from post-adolescence to senior citizenry in real time, he’s not only pushed the boundaries of confessional songwriting but allowed those with …

Kandace Springs, a gifted 29-year-old singer signed to the jazz bastion Blue Note, is torn between two impulses. On the one hand, she gestures towards the contemporary: Her debut EP involved the illustrious R&B production duo Pop & Oak; she released a house single this year with renowned dancefloor maven …

Husband-and-wife duo Michael and Tanya Trotter overwhelm with a message of positivity and love on their debut. Produced by Americana luminary Buddy Miller, Healing Tide centers the Trotters’ joyous, gospel-style harmonizing with superb country-soul arrangements and powerful statements of devotion like “Are You Ready to Love Me,” where they happily …

With its eternal ties to awkward post-adolescent angst, pop-punk is not a genre that’s meant to carry a band through a full career. So it’s not surprising that on their third album, 5 Seconds of Summer have already aged out of the sound that built their success. Instead, Youngblood goes …