Not unlike Cowboy Carter hitching herself to the Wild West imaginary, Britpop opens a practical portal between Cook’s old universe—hard, bright, aggressively contemporary—and a seductively oppositional dimension of folklore, fantasy, fuzz rock, and magic.

The album naturally lacks the shock of the new, the jolt of Boy in Da Corner-- instead, it's a consolidation of his strengths, lyrically and sonically, and a more satisfying listen than its predecessor.

The power of Frank’s work often comes via extreme transparency, but he’s not writing diaries. It’s about how he’s able to locate the crux of any situation, or expose undue artifice, or peel things back to their naked core.

Like a Ribbon is lush and engrossing, the rare Big Indie debut that outstrips its own hype.

On a record whose lyrics can be unintelligible, I normally wouldn’t spend so much time dissecting the words, but Agriculture so often directs us toward closer analysis, deeper listening, fuller understanding.

The Bad Seeds sound even edgier and more sophisticated on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, providing a fitting pulpit for their bandleader's ravings.

The one negative of this project is its inaccessibility. Rhino only manufactured 1,969 box sets; each one retails at $799.98, and there are no plans to make the 38-disc version available on streaming services. For those with smaller budgets, the 10xCD version is still worthwhile. ... What the 38-disc box set succeeds at is not just righting the record, or presenting a mammoth set of live songs, but in creating an environment that effectively transports the listener to that muddy pasture in upstate New York.

Rather than sounding like an epitaph, though, Angel Tears arrives as a beacon of hope and change. The lightest and most playful of Strom’s recorded work, it signals new vistas ahead, ones that sadly will now have to be explored by others.

It may not be their definitive show of force, but it’s a dazzling spectacle nonetheless.

Southeastern is easily Isbell’s best solo album--his most richly conceived and generously written. If it’s not quite the album that lives up to his considerable talents, it’s mostly the music that’s to blame.

You can hear the sideman straining to push past Davis—the man primarily responsible for realizing that Coltrane could be Coltrane. In turn, Coltrane’s stratospheric rise would soon lead Davis to raze his sound to its foundation and build it up anew in the years to come.

Four years later, Flatland still sounds ahead of its time, but Cocoon Crush is leagues beyond it. It shows a total disregard for club music’s strictures, concerned primarily not with floor-filling, but world-building.

Henki might be Richard Dawson’s strangest album to date. But his ideas are fertilized by these songs’ peculiar twists and turns; the more Dawson and Circle lean into their eccentricities, the more their music resonates.

Disc One gives us the final studio album, remixed and scrubbed fresh so we can avail ourselves once more of its glorious shadows and submerge ourselves in its delicious mood. The remaining four discs—two of unreleased outtakes, one previously available, and a live set—repositions Time Out of Mind as a rebirth rather than a farewell.

For all its wholesome ingredients and folk-on-sleeve earnestness, Out of Sight settles into a space out of time, one immediately adjacent to our own, where perhaps the ancient magic hasn’t dissipated.

caroline 2 offers a profound listening experience. But it also offers a reminder that walking through the English coastline, chatting on Zoom, jamming with your mates for hours on end—these experiences can all be equally profound if you just pay attention.

Her music speaks loudest in its calmest moments, and Reward is an album most remarkable for how it fills its space.

The Dirty South is more consistent and cohesive song-for-song, its wide scope more public than personal.

Daughters’ accessibility is directly proportional to their uncompromising compositional choices—hypnotic dissonance, martial drums cranked to incapacitating volumes, scathing vocal repetition, all rendered through impossibly vivid production. This is not music interesting in growing on you: it consumes and dominates.

The whole album is bolder and brasher than previous L’Rain records, every harmony, loop, and skit engorged with verve. Cheek has figured out how to maintain her slippery, impressionistic style while also letting it be known she’s got that dog in her.

Forfolks, however, never feels showy or vain; it’s joyous, Parker delighting in the ideas he unearths as he plays along with the sound of himself. The results often feel dazzlingly complicated, as though these songs were built through some greater studio sorcery, like cobbling together various takes or recording the layers one at a time.

With each member given ample room for individual showcases, and each coming up with indelible songs and melodies, Feel Flows offers new insight into a creative peak.

In its gentle violence, for you who are the wronged functions like a kind of sweet and delicate surgery. Joseph lovingly lulls you into anesthesia while prodding at your most vital pain, and then delivering you back to yourself: poison extracted, powerful, clean.

What sets Woodland apart from the rest of the duo’s remarkable catalog is its quiet adventure and clear empathy, qualities that give the sense that Welch and Rawlings are building a new structure upon an old foundation.

The free-flowing and intuitive nature of the sessions is apparent in the recordings, which have the amiable looseness of first takes. You get the sense, sometimes, that they are figuring out a song’s ideal arrangement as they track it.

For as bullish and dramatic as the music seems, the songs here often escalate for several minutes before making a point you think they’ve already made, like a series of false floors that open to bigger and bigger rooms.

Iyer and his cohorts have spun the piano trio format into great art here, acknowledging their contemporaries and their musical ancestors.

While REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE may not embrace an explicit narrative framework like Owusu’s first two records, it charts a linear journey from dystopian despair to cautious optimism.