Yep, there’s irony in the title of this showcase for pop vet Darlene Love. It sounds like what you’d expect from producer Steve Van Zandt: like the E Street Band updating Spector’s Wall of Sound. Love comes at it like a wrecking ball, husky alto thrillingly intact, channeling girl-group passion… Source: RollingStone Link: Introducing Darlene […]

Metal’s most fanciful band has gilded its 16th LP with the usual tales of kings, battles and foolhardy missions to the sky — but while those topics might sound like old hat, the veteran Brits indulge their whims without ever getting tiresome. Their three guitarists wield an endless arsenal of galloping… Source: RollingStone Link: The Book […]

Kanye West has called himself the greatest living rock star, and his latest pupil seems to be taking that idea as gospel. On his major-label debut, Travis Scott — a 23-year-old from Houston who’s usually shirtless if he isn’t wearing all-black – doesn’t rap so much as scream, moan and yelp… Source: RollingStone Link: Rodeo

The Velvet Underground are a durable rock-band model, one that Hoboken’s Yo La Tengo have plumbed over 14 LPs, suggesting where that noisy, lyrical, short-lived group might’ve gone. The latest is lean, hushed and mostly covers, including a take on Yo La’s own “The Ballad of Red Buckets.” Georgia Hubley… Source: RollingStone Link: Stuff Like […]

Images on this 20-year-old New Yorker’s debut flicker by like broadcasts from a battlefield or texts from a party: the man with his hands around a pretty girl’s throat, the rich kid with a designer bag full of airplane liquor bottles, the father putting his fist through a wall when… Source: RollingStone Link: Badlands

Don’t let the title fool you: Rob Thomas remains a known quantity on his third solo album. While that means there aren’t many surprises, the good news is he’s still the same consummate pop-rock craftsman who has been making it all sound so smooth for years. Reunited with Matchbox Twenty… Source: RollingStone Link: The Great […]

Back in the Nineties, you didn’t need a Ph.D. in Wu-Tang Clan science to get with Method Man, the Staten Island crew’s laid-back, approachable, gravel-voiced pop star. Meth has found success as an actor in the 2000s — most famously as Cheese on The Wire — but he can still bring the… Source: RollingStone Link: The Meth […]

Jordin Sparks has made a career out of age-appropriate pop — catchy enough for the charts, tame enough for your parents. The 25-year-old star’s first new LP in six years sees her becoming sexier, sassier and shadier with time. Taking cues from R&B upstarts like Tinashe and Jhené Aiko, Sparks focuses… Source: RollingStone Link: Right Here […]

Last year didn’t go the way Future planned. The Atlanta croon-rapper’s much-ballyhooed, underperforming Honest failed to make him the Trap King of Pop, and his relationship with R&B star Ciara fell apart. To regroup, Future went back to the strategy that drove his 2011 come-up: flooding the market with mixtapes,… Source: RollingStone Link: DS2

Chelsea Wolfe is an L.A. singer-songwriter with a taste for black veils and other unabashed goth affectations. But her fifth LP shows she’s much more than a gimmick. Her voice is more confident than it’s ever been, whether it’s bathed in industrial noise on the opener, “Carrion Flowers,” or backed… Source: RollingStone Link: Abyss