Arcade Fire’s ‘Funeral’ Still Amazes As a Conceptual Statement
On Funeral, Arcade Fire found catharsis in music while processing grief for the loss of loved ones. As a result, they shifted the course of indie rock.
baroque pop
Moses Sumney’s Self-Aware Icarus
With 2017’s Aromanticism, Moses Sumney negotiates the self as body and spirit and attempts to reconcile his emotions and sexuality with his religion.
The Decemberists’ New LP Offers a Unified Whole
The Decemberists’ As It Ever Was, So It Will Be indulges the right indulgences (mostly) but makes space for the group to speak with tenderness and gravitas.
The Decemberists’ New LP Is a Return to Form
The Decemberists straddle between the exotic and quotidian, the real and imagined, to reveal that existence is most interesting when lived in a liminal state.
Baroque Pop Songstress Margo Guryan Immortalized in New Boxed Set
With her keen feel for tone, phrasings, tension, presence, and lyrics that cut, Margo Guryan is synonymous with the most sophisticated 1960s songcraft.
Beth Gibbons Ventures Out on ‘Lives Outgrown’
Lives Outgrown seems like an outgrowth of where Beth Gibbons’ mind and talents have taken her in the past decade, which is to ruminate on how life is a vapor.
Jackie West Dazzles on the Stunning ‘Close to the Mystery’
Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Jackie West effortlessly transcends genres and generations on her outstanding debut album, Close to the Mystery.
New Album Takes the Lemon Twigs Into Pop’s Golden Years
The Lemon Twigs’ A Dream Is All We Know displays scholarly mastery of the complex techniques their forbears invented. The sheer musicality is prodigious.
The Last Dinner Party Hypnotize Listeners with ‘Prelude to Ecstasy’
The Last Dinner Party committed an act of mass hypnosis, swiftly securing the top spot on many lists of 2024 indie darlings. Let’s figure out how they did it.
Beirut Returns to His Baroque Pop Origins on ‘Hadsel’
Beirut has turned inward on Hadsel and it’s an affirming, warm kind of music to serve as a soundtrack for the next valley surely coming for us all.
A Portrait of Rufus Wainwright As a Gay Pop-Rock Prophet
In 1998, Rufus Wainwright seemed like someone new: a pop-rock performer on a major label who didn’t have to come out because he had never been in the closet.
A Man Out of Time: On Scott Walker’s ‘Scott 2’
Scott Walker is a funhouse version of David Bowie. He carved out his own space in music, one almost stubbornly unfashionable but also indispensable in the way one-of-a-kind things often are.