If there’s a better pure songwriter than Phoebe Bridgers at this moment, I don’t know who it is. Punisher, Bridgers’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

Waxahatchee wasn’t a new act when the album Ivy Tripp was released, in 2015. Katie Crutchfield had been slinging tunes under that name for a few years and had a couple prior full-lengths. But Ivy Tripp felt major and new, … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Saint Cloud

Although it’s hardly a new debate, recent years have seen an uptick in snappish back and forth about the wisdom of separating artists from the art they create. Primarily driven, of course, by the near-constant lifting of heavy rocks to … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Miss Anthropocene

The first time Frances Quinlan released recorded music for the listening pleasure of a larger community, she did so under the guise of a band. I suppose the curious might have considered the moniker Hop Along, Queen Ansleis to belong … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Likewise

Thinking about the history of the Black Lips, it was probably always just a matter of time before the band flicked their hair grease onto some corn pone. Specialists in raucous, retro rock ‘n’ roll as raw as fingertips ravaged … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Sing in a World That’s Falling Apart

For her sophomore full-length release, FKA twigs strips her music down to a fragile, spindly framework. Five years after the English musician delivered the mind-spinning debut LP1, she offers Magdalene, which retains the sense of relentless innovation and pushes further … Continue reading The New Releases Shelf — Magdalene