It happens every now and again. A pure pop performer, completely unabashed in their rejection of arty, anguished pretenses, flares up with a handful of songs that makes the cool, snobbish music aficionados decide the artist is briefly acceptable to embrace. Sometimes there’s a hint of irony to it, a genial protestation that insists a rule-proving exception is afoot. Kelly Clarkson had her dance on that particular floor several years back, when “Since U Been Gone” took up residence between Death Cab for Cutie and Decemberists on all the proudly scruffy mix CDs. These days, Carly Rae Jepsen is the … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Emotion Side B

Let’s face it: punk isn’t known for its subtlety. So why not call the new album from the Julie Ruin, the band fronted by Kathleen Hanna, Hit Reset? The scorching performer has consistently taken charge of her own iconography ever since the days she and her band Bikini Kill punched back at grungy rock boy self-importance in the early nineteen-nineties, defining the fleeting but forceful riot grrrl movement in the process. Following an extended layoff from performing, necessitated by a humbling bout with Lyme disease, Hanna returned to the stage just last year. Officially the second full-length album from the … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Hit Reset

Puberty 2 opens with “Happy.” Against delicate, intricate music, Mitski sings, eerie and ethereal. Initially, the lyrics seem settled in the mundane: “Happy came to visit me, he bought cookies on the way/ I poured him tea and he told me it’ll all be okay.” If it’s the contrast between the spooky and the plain that initially grabs the attention, the track insinuates itself further with its lurking abstractions, led by the anthropomorphizing of a highly coveted emotion. The music introduces itself as fairly standard aching indie rock. Then it drills to a deeper level. The fourth full-length from Mitski Miyawaki, … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Puberty 2

To Paul Simon’s credit, he knows what he’s up against. The singer-songwriter with decades of fame in his rearview recently told Rolling Stone, “To get people to listen with open ears, you have to really make something that is interesting because people are prepared for it not to be interesting.” Comfortably into his seventies and already the multiple recipient of the sorts of lifetime achievement awards that imply creative ossification, Simon can either approach a new album as a listless valediction or a chance to prove something. On Stranger to Stranger, he opts for the latter. Striving for the new doesn’t … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Stranger to Stranger

As the recording industry continues to get hacked into splinters by a rapidly changing media environment the powers that be resolutely refuse to understand, it’s reassuring to discover that an album can still arrive and truly, deeply matter. Granted, it would be myopic understatement to term Beyoncé’s Lemonade as simply an album. It is a full-on cross-media event, complete with an HBO special, an enormous world tour, and an expertly catalyzed supporting campaign of gossipy chatter and rash reaction think pieces. Delivered as a surprise, as Beyoncé is wont to do, the album is cunningly designed to capture attention, filled as it … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Lemonade

It probably makes sense that Polly Jean Harvey has reach the point of full-on art installation, like Björk at MOMA. Disastrous as that particular exhibition may have been, it was indicative of a certain truth in the notion that the Icelandic performer in her overt and unyielding multifaceted creativity had reached the point where the standard progression of record and tour followed by another record and another no longer seemed sufficient. Similarly, when Harvey released the exemplary, transcendent Let England Shake, it really did seem that she’d come to a creative endpoint, exhausting all the possibilities of the album format. And … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: The Hope Six Demolition Project

On Silver Age, Bob Mould reclaimed his history after several years that could reasonably be characterized as messy (which doesn’t mean altogether bad, but his explorations sometimes verged on aimlessness). He followed that with Beauty & Ruin, expanding the scope of his productively nostalgic creativity to deliver music that sounded like every skipped stone ripple of his career gathered together to formulate something just new enough to turn heads anew. Now we come to Patch the Sky, which feels like the end of a trilogy. This time, Mould is settling into a comfortable mode, or as comfortable of a mode as his somewhat … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: Patch the Sky

Operating with the mixed blessing of a highly distinctive voice — in every sense of that word — Thao Nguyen could presumably get along all right taking an easier, less deliberatively disruptive course. She could probably make a string of records laden with relatively straightforward, folk-tinged rock songs and keep herself and her band, the Get Down Stay Down, in regular music biz work for some time. Instead, she ties composition into tricky knots, constantly seeking the challenging dynamic, as if enough effort in that direction will finally create the song that can surprise her in midstream. As a listener, it’s … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf: A Man Alive