Of course Barn, named after the place where Neil Young and Crazy Horse recorded it, sounds rough and unpolished. That in itself isn’t a bad thing—the old Canadian émigré and his all-time greatest backing band have made a virtue of winging it since Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. Indeed,…

Like Orson Welles with Citizen Kane, The Darkness was both blessed and cursed to achieve perfection on its first try. Eighteen years after its release, Permission to Land still provokes belly laughs and horn-throws in equal measure. Its covert odes to head lice and onanism are Cole Porter compared…

To get a bead on In These Silent Days, the new album by Brandi Carlile, it may help to compare it to an LP that came out 50 years before it: Joni Mitchell’s era-defining and massively influential Blue. Carlile has had Mitchell’s classic work on her mind a lot in recent…

X Ambassadors, “The Beautiful Liar.” Don’t get it confused, kids: X Ambassadors’ The Beautiful Liar is a breakup album. Its bookending children’s audiobook conceit, its Jung-for-beginners Shadow figure and its incongruous satirical skits may gesture toward some kind of intellectual import. However, when you skip over this stuff, you’re…

Orla Gartland is so unflashy with her artistic gifts that more jaded listeners might overlook them altogether. The young Irish singer-songwriter’s debut album, Woman on the Internet, doesn’t have any in-your-face revelations. Her spare, elegantly quirky electro-pop will sound familiar to anyone who’s heard Imogen Heap, Sylvan Esso, or St.…

Over the past four decades, few—if any—rock bands have evoked Los Angeles and Southern California as warmly or vividly as Los Lobos have. Of course, their SoCal is not the SoCal of, say, The Beach Boys or ’80s hair metal. It’s not catching waves, having fun-fun-fun in the T-Bird…

It’s telling that U.K. post-punk band Desperate Journalist takes its name from a joke—specifically, a track from a 1979 John Peel session with The Cure, “Desperate Journalist In Ongoing Meaningful Review Situation.” Dubbed “The Perfect Diss That Nobody Heard” by Vice in 2014, it’s basically two minutes and 40…

The Mountain Goats’ latest album, Dark in Here, feels so timely that it’s hard to believe the band recorded it more than a year ago. According to the liner notes, John Darnielle and his bandmates bashed out these 12 tracks over six days in early March 2020. At that…