Favorite Albums

Review: Poliça – Give You The Ghost

Give You The Ghost is a potent mix of double-drum heartbeats and agile melodies, and it strikes both emotional and visceral nerves.

Review & Stream: Dr. Dog – Be the Void

A vivid rendition of an ageless sound with fresh flourishes.

Review & Stream: Air – Le Voyage Dans La Lune

This is the album we’ve been waiting for, Air’s grand return to the cosmos, the proper follow-up to Moon Safari.

Review & Stream: Sharon Van Etten – Tramp

Sharon Van Etten’s tender third LP, Tramp, produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner, is the best of this young year.

Album Review: ScHoolboy Q – Habits & Contradictions

It would be difficult to come up with a better title for ScHoolboy Q’s second album, Habits & Contradictions. It’s a calming album at times, but leaves the listener’s pulse racing, even after 17 tracks and over an hour of music.

Album Review: Trailer Trash Tracys – Ester

With their debut Ester, Trailer Trash Tracys find that invisible median between analog and digital. How do they do it?

Review: The Weeknd – Balloon Trilogy

I tend to bristle at the indie blogosphere’s obsession with taxonomy, the impulse to create ridiculous subgenres that group artists under arbitrary categories. But Eric Harvey got it right when he coined the term “PBR&B.”

Album Review: The Roots – undun

It is the rare piece of music that can speak to many, yet speak to one.

Album Review: Korallreven – An Album By Korallreven

An Album by Korallreven is unfocused, funny and strange. And that’s why it’s a triumph. Korallreven aren’t afraid to have fun and try their hands at everything, and it’s refreshing to see a band not taking themselves too seriously.

Album Review: Drake – Take Care

In more ways than I can count, Take Care is a farewell to the up-and-coming mixtape Drizzy and the beginning of a 25-year-old veteran having full command of his verbal arsenal.

Album Review: Atlas Sound – Parallax

Atlas Sound rewards us with a harrowing sonic adventure that retains all the expected stark undertones with a greater penchant for incredibly lucid stream-of-consciousness.

Album Review: Florence + The Machine – Ceremonials

Ceremonials is at its core a stellar pop album draped in exquisite and perplexing cloths. Naked underneath is a major new Artist who is worthy of that capital A. Her remarkable new album is too.

Album Review: Björk – Biophilia

Every track is a rhizome teeming with poetry and waves of sound that connect back to a singular theme — nature and music are really one in the same.

Album Review: Feist – Metals

Feist certainly isn’t interested in producing tidy little pop songs we can all feel warm and fuzzy about while sipping our mocha frappucinos.

Album Review: Zola Jesus – Conatus

The power of Conatus lies in how it showcases Zola Jesus’ pop sensibility without losing or short-shifting her unique, considered sound in the slightest.

Album Review: Wilco – The Whole Love

The truth about The Whole Love is better than the hype: It is no more or less than a marvelous late-period Wilco album.

Album Review: Youth Lagoon – The Year of Hibernation

With The Year of Hibernation, Trevor Powers establishes Youth Lagoon as an innovative new voice in dream pop.

Album Review: Twin Sister – In Heaven

In Heaven is well worth the wait and what’s most intriguing about them is how frighteningly vulnerable and isolated they sound.

Album Review: Jens Lekman – An Argument With Myself EP

Do I have enough coins for a cab fare down Elizabeth Street? Where can I find Kirsten Dunst? Is any of this madness really happening? Welcome to the waggish web that Jens Lekman has woven on this short and sweet EP.

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