The 10 Best Wynton Marsalis Albums
Wynton Marsalis is one of the most prolific instrumentalists of the last 40 years. A virtuoso in both jazz and Western classical music, he has recorded as many as 75 times as a leader.
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Top 10 Most Notable Career Suicide Albums
Career suicide albums fall into two camps: those that were released ahead of their time, and those that set new standards in awful. The best thing that could be said about the later category is that these albums are oftentimes just as fascinating as an artist's best work.
Director Thomas Bezucha on His Neo-Western, ‘Let Him Go’
Adapting Larry Watson's novel, director Thomas Bezucha sets the quest of a retired sheriff and his wife to the era of American society's fall from grace.
Good Bison’s ‘Scattered Storms’ Is Positively Sun-Splashed
With touches of reggae upstrokes and even Tropicalia, Good Bison's debut EP is positively sun-splashed, lending Pablo Alvarez's various crises and neuroses a slight touch of irony, even satire.
What You Want, Baby, Aretha’s Got It
From January 1967 to January 1972, Aretha Franklin, one of 20th-century pop music's towering geniuses, stood the pop world on its head with a run, inconceivable today, of 11 albums. Tony Scherman's biography in progress about the Queen of Soul covers those years.
What Was So Great About the Clash?
How does someone go from anti-nuke activist to serious foreign policy maven, student protester to mid-life bourgeoisie, and feel the same way about the Clash, aka “The Only Band That Matters”?
Between the Grooves: Elvis Costello – ‘This Year’s Model’
The latest Between the Grooves is a track-by-track deconstruction of Elvis Costello's malicious 1978 masterpiece, This Year's Model.
Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Irishman’ and the Gangster’s Reimagined Soul
Scorsese's The Irishman is not a masculine power fantasy, nor could its heavy underlying sadness ever be mistaken for delight in violence or criminality.
Black Country, New Road’s Debut Sets a New Benchmark for Experimental Rock
Black Country, New Road show us what a "rock band" or "rock outfit" can achieve on For the First Time. For those bands labeled as experimental, we now have an expectation and a new benchmark.
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Between the Grooves: lowercase – ‘Kill the Lights’
Between the Grooves examines lowercase's Kill the Lights, a great marriage of slowcore and post-punk: raw, angry, sullen, and very much alive almost all these years later.
Weezer Pull Themselves Out of a Rut with Help From an Orchestra
Fresh out of gimmicks, Weezer think outside the box and deliver their most sincere album in years with OK Human.
‘Some Kind of Heaven’ and the Ageless Pursuit of Fulfillment
Lance Oppenheim's documentary about a pre-fab retirement community in Florida, Some Kind of Heaven, is told with a compassion that I wish American society afforded all its elderly.