When I write about music, I rely on comparisons. After learning the mnemonic device that asserted that all well-behaved youths of the male persuasion merited a reward of a chocolatey dessert, every other bit of musical instruction that brave souls … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Live Forever

Blue Hearts, the new album from Bob Mould, opens with something of a fake out. “Heart on My Sleeve” is Mould with little more than his acoustic guitar, strumming a muscular but lean melody as he sings out a weary … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Blue Hearts

According to Lianne La Havas, she started writing songs for her latest album shortly after a breakup. That makes sense, because soul music is practically made for heartache. Or seduction, but the heartache brings out a sharper tang. The resulting … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Lianne La Havas

Well, the title is just about perfect, isn’t it? For their third full-length effort, Haim swing their broadswords straight at the identity shorthand that gets laid upon their music, defining their craft less by the sounds assembled and more by … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Women in Music Pt. III

If there’s a better pure songwriter than Phoebe Bridgers at this moment, I don’t know who it is. Punisher, Bridger’s sophomore release under her own name, comes after some productive moonlighting with pals in the groups boygenius and Better Oblivion … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Punisher

Realistically, only Bob Dylan could rhyme “Indiana Jones” with “those British bad boys the Rolling Stones” and make it sound profound. The unlikely lyrical couplet containing those pop culture references on “I Contain Multitudes,” the lead track of the new … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Rough and Rowdy Ways

Back in my college radio days, when I moved with a music-nerd crew that devoted our collective brain power to sussing every mystery of the artists we loved when there was no superhighway continually exiting information to us, one of … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — To Love is To Live

When I fell for Hope Downs, the debut full-length from Australian band Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, it was because I heard the college radio of my own personal era in the earnest, tuneful stylings. It wasn’t true retro, reliant on … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf —Sideways to New Italy

Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters is a deafening thunderclap of album. The music’s not loud, but the sentiments roar. There’s too much life in Apple’s art to think of the album as a culmination, but it feels like an … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Fetch the Bolt Cutters