Longtime Jayhawks leader Gary Louris has been saying he wanted to get his bandmates more involved in songwriting and singing lead than they have been on the band’s last several releases. XOXO The Jayhawks SHAM/Thirty Tigers, July 10 8/10 That has now happened, to highly satisfying effect, on XOXO,…

London has cultivated a popular and distinct hip-hop scene. Its eventual merge with the city’s underground electronic music scene in the 2000s led to grime, with its choppy rapid-fire lyrical patterns and accelerated tempos. Mike Skinner the creative force behind of The Streets, is one of the best established…

Rules are meant to be broken, or so the saying goes. Rufus Wainwright has spent the better part of 20 years ignoring the rulebook and forging his own musical way. Gloriously bon vivant one moment and stunningly heartbreaking the next, Wainwright has a poet’s style of making the rough…

Icelandic-U.K. trio Dream Wife is back following its 2018 self-titled debut. Sophomore album So When You Gonna… finds the band on both ends of the pop-punk spectrum. From loud, screamed anthems to poetic mellow ballads; Dream Wife tries a little of this and that without venturing too far outside its wheelhouse.…

Paul Weller is practically royalty in his native Britain. The former frontman for the punk band The Jam, and the more musically sophisticated The Style Council, sits in the pantheon of British rock gods alongside David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Roger Waters, universally acknowledged as a musical legend. On…

For millennia, humans set their course by the stars. These fiery celestial lighthouses that burned with such eternal constancy served as a compass point for our major journeys. At 86 years young, country legend Willie Nelson still burns brightly enough to set our course. First Rose of Spring Willie…

On her fourth studio album, Jessie Ware looked to tap into the club sounds that inspired her. The result is What’s Your Pleasure?, a musical time capsule of sorts that chronicles decades of house. This ode to the ’70s-, ’80s- and ’90s-era club sounds fuses together under the watch…

Those who appreciate the clean singing on Bell Witch‘s past few albums have Erik Moggridge of Aerial Ruin to thank. The neo-folk artist’s contributions to the Seattle funeral doom bass-and-drum duo’s sound trace back to 2012’s Longing. He also played a substantial role in Bell Witch’s 2017 magnum opus, Mirror Reaper. A full-blown…

Let’s get this out of the way first: Mordechai, the third album from Khruangbin, is very good. It’s better than the trio’s first two for a variety of reasons we’ll get to in a bit. First we have to attempt to describe the band and its sound. Mordechai Khruangbin Dead…

The sax solo that rings in the opening notes of Women In Music Pt. III, the third album from Haim, sets an immediate tone for the trio as it embarks on an alt-pop journey. The Haim sisters may have needed to push the album back in the midst of the…