To distinguish between “old-school” hip-hop of the late 1970s and the “new school,” founded primarily by Run-DMC and LL Cool J, listen to Kurtis Blow’s…
Kodak Black’s “Moshpit” ends with the couplet “Fuck a protest / Let’s start a mosh pit in here.” At face value, this seems a bit…
There are so few worthy Detroit rap stars these days: You’ve got a complete and utter cornball in Big Sean, who has ambitions of being…
Florida crooner YWN Melly is largely concerned with two things: romantic woes and murder. For every “Murder on my Mind” that the 19-year-old pens, he…
SoundCloud junkies Paul Attard and Joe Biglin run down some rap releases from the months of December and January in the latest What Would Meek Do?.…
What’s changed for 21 Savage since the release of his debut commercial project, Issa Album? Well, as he puts it on the opening track of…
Sifting through the cultural detritus of a coming-of-age at the turn of the millennium, SBN3’s It’s Not the 90s is, evidently, a sequel to last…
The music of Ray Charles always sounded like freedom. On his early sides for Atlantic, he was a man unencumbered by the conventions of genre, gleefully innovating…
Standards albums are always a dodgy proposition. Few contemporary vocalists have the disciplined technical skill to sing standards with the same precision as the singers…
Now that country radio programmers have realized that the women of Little Big Town are pushing 50, and have soured on Lady Antebellum’s brand of…
Hayes Carll made his reputation as a wiseass — so when he came down with a serious case of the blues on 2016’s Lovers and…
Cassadee Pope fared slightly better than many of the countless would-be country stars Blake Shelton’s endorsed duringh his tenure on The Voice in that she’s…
It’s often said of dynamic live acts that their albums don’t fully prepare you for the concert experience. That’s undoubtedly true of Tedeschi Trucks Band,…
Our new monthly music feature, Rooted & Restless, finds country music aficionados Josh Hurst and Jonathan Keefe wading into all things Americana, expanding the definition…
For those who still associate Rivers Cuomo with the confessional and unabashed awkwardness of Pinkerton, an album of estimable emotions that seems to have been released…
All Summer Long signals the beginning of the end of an era for the Beach Boys: the soon-to-be pioneers hadn’t yet ditched their upbeat, California surf-rock,…
PJ Harvey had already infiltrated the mainstream by 1995, thanks to two of her early singles (“Sheela Na Gig” and “50ft Queenie”) earning medium rotation on…
As we expressed in our other major 2018 catch-up feature, it’s a fool’s errand to try and cover every worthy release from a particular genre in a given calendar year.…
A few months after the release of her self-titled debut, a then fresh-faced Madonna went on American Bandstand to perform one of her album’s biggest hits:…
Music to Draw To: Io is an hour-plus of carefully wrought, beat-light technical wizardry; it’s an album devoted to childlike wonder, so much so that it…