Part of an exploding network of L.A. visionaries, Kamasi Washington is the sax-wielding jazz guru on recent masterpieces by Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus. Now he’s made one of his own — a three-disc debut on FlyLo’s label with a 10-piece band, plus choir and strings. To be sure, it’s a… Source: RollingStone Link: The Epic
Meet the winners of this year’s All Other Band Names Suck contest: the boy-girl losercore duo Elvis Depressedly. Mathew Lee Cothran and Delaney Mills turn floor-hugging moods into lavish pop miniatures, evoking the Mountain Goats times the Left Banke. After a string of excellent low-fi releases, New Alhambra offers the… Source: RollingStone Link: New Alhambra
With Zedd behind the boards, even Tom Waits could make a feel-good summer hit: Everything the 25-year-old German producer handles, from his own 2013 smash “Clarity” to Ariana Grande’s “Break Free” last year, turns to candy-rave gold. True Colors, Zedd’s second LP, includes songs about love, breakups and seizing the… Source: RollingStone Link: True Colors
You know the feeling when your friend falls apart because she didn’t get invited to the cool party tonight, while you explain there is no cool party tonight? Finally, a punk-rock song to address this trauma: “There Is No Function Stacy,” just one of the gems on Joanna Gruesome’s fantastic… Source: RollingStone Link: Peanut Butter
Las Vegas newcomer Shamir works disco into a state of undress on his first full-length album. He isn’t operating in the same romantic vein as, say, Sylvester, one obvious predecessor — just delivering a healthy dose of real talk, set to clean cuts of vintage Chicago house grooves. On “Vegas,” the… Source: RollingStone Link: Ratchet
“Are we human or are we dancer?” Brandon Flowers once asked with the Killers. But as he proves on his excellent new solo album, he sounds most human exactly when he’s dancer. The Desired Effect is easily his strongest work since the Killers’ 2008 keeper Day & Age, and it’s… Source: RollingStone Link: The Desired […]
Even if he hadn’t been the mod-firebrand voice of the Jam, Paul Weller would be a British rock institution, an icon of high standards still challenged by the adventure in his nation’s Sixties and Seventies revolutions. Weller’s 12th solo album is a robust binding of the experimental tangents on 2008’s… Source: RollingStone Link: Saturns Pattern
When alt-metal pranksters Faith No More called it quits in the late Nineties, they were too weird for the headbangers and too heavy for Alternative Nation. Now, with indie rock and harder music crossing paths more frequently, the times have finally caught up with them. Sol Invictus, the band’s first… Source: RollingStone Link: Sol Invictus
Snoop Dogg’s 13th album plays like the flip side to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly: Where Lamar used funk to dramatize the struggles of a Compton native, Bush uses the genre’s rhythmic groove to portray Los Angeles as a smoky, sexy, sunshiny wonderland where every day feels like a… Source: RollingStone Link: Bush
The fourth live album to come out of Leonard Cohen’s 2008-2013 world tour is a fascinating glimpse into his creative process. More than half of its 10 songs were recorded in soundchecks, where Cohen and his band were able to test new tunes and refurbish standards like 1971’s “Joan of… Source: RollingStone Link: Can't Forget: […]