Halfway through Bay Area pop-punk heroes Green Day’s 13th album, Father Of All Motherfuckers, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong declares “I was a teenage teenager/ Full of piss and vinegar.” It’s a sentiment that aptly describes the band’s latest release, a no-nonsense amps-to-11 showcase of raw, old-school rock. Looking for a reenergized…

Minneapolis’ Poliça garnered acclaim from influential critics at its outset with albums like 2012’s Give You the Ghost and follow-up Shulamith. The group’s disappearance from the limelight in recent years was not the result of banal follow-up projects or selling out into trite poptimism. For Poliça, what was initially a brief break…

It’s a bit concerning that people still argue against electronic artists being “real musicians” considering the likes of DJ Shadow, Flying Lotus and of course Squarepusher. Tom Jenkinson’s 16 albums run the gamut of drum and bass music, intelligent dance music (IDM) and jazz fusion, but the latter influence…

Best known for her 2014 anthem to ampleness, “All About That Bass,” which currently has over 2 billion views on YouTube, Massachusetts singer-songwriter Meghan Trainor added futuristic synthesizers along with a roster of big name collaborators to her latest album, Treat Myself. Treat Myself Meghan Trainor Epic Records, Jan. 31 Trainor…

Pop songstress Kesha lived a life through the headlines beginning in 2014. Following a bitter legal battle with her former producer, Dr. Luke, and her prior record label—which involved several lawsuits—over allegations of abuse and sexual assault, she returned with a raw and stripped-back album Rainbow. Songs like “Praying”…

Dan Deacon came up in the indietronica scene in the late ’00s, and by the mid-’10s he had established himself within a fairly unique niche. His hallmark songs use pitched-up vocals, offbeat instrumentation and percussive timbres to craft layers of cascading sonic textures and psychedelic frolicking. By his fourth…

Drive-by Truckers’ latest release, The Unraveling, is a cathartic emotional release speaking to the present political and social moment addressing everything from school shootings to the opioid crisis. Musically, it’s not a far departure from the Athens, Georgia quintet’s past endeavors, though it’s a step beyond 2016’s American Band.…

Ethan Gruska spent his teen years as one half of The Belle Brigade. After that he built an impressive reservoir of behind-the-scenes work. Oh, and his grandfather is the John Williams. Since then, Gruska’s been bulking up his solo discography, first with 2017 album Slowmotionary, and now with its follow-up. En Garde…

In the classic 1980 film “The Blues Brothers,” musician Elwood Blues inquires of a bartender, “What kind of music do you usually have here?” and the bartender responds, “Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and Western.” Of course there are lots of other kinds of music, and…

Pet Shop Boys sounded futuristic when they broke onto the music scene in 1984 with their first single, “West End Girls.” The London duo used a relatively simple synthesizer, a Korg MS-10, to craft lush and sophisticated soundscapes, which singer Neil Tennant populated with the silky razor blade of…