Rest assured: No song on this album will ever make its way into the public consciousness. Its first single, “Born Free,” pretends to be a sample of or homage to Suicide’s “Ghost Rider,” but it is almost indistinguishable from the original, except M.I.A.’s pseudo-political karaoke dropped on top. I wanted to...

Though it’s already being lauded as her most accessible album, Have One on Me isn’t necessarily Joanna Newsom’s most listenable. A two-hour-long, triple-disc set is a lot to ask an audience to absorb in the age of download-the-songs-you-like-and-ignore-the-rest. Musically, finding a middle ground between her...

Charlotte Gainsbourg’s near-death experience following a water-skiing accident in 2007 resulted in countless unnerving hours spent in MRI machines, a realization that we all may be living on borrowed time, and Gainsbourg’s most personal and cohesive album to date. While not a songwriter herself, Gainsbourg knows how to pick her creative partners. Her first album, recorded when Gainsbourg was just 13, was conceived...

After Dave Grohl announced in a 2005 Mojo interview that his project with Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones “wouldn’t suck,” most fans of hard-hitting rock would’ve found it difficult to question such a statement. Four years later, said project finally released, it’s...

The last decade has brought about a rush of rock nostalgia, from the latest Beatlemania resurgence and unprecedented success of tribute groups like U2 Zoo and The Musical Box to the multitude of reunions from the likes of The Police, Pixies, Pink Floyd, Phish, even Pavement...

Braxton’s second solo album, the first since forming the hugely successful math-rock super-group Battles, won’t necessarily appeal to all the scene kids who found themselves at house parties engrossed in that group’s epic, grind-inducing “Atlas.” But those who temper their Crystal Castles records with Frank...

It’s hard to imagine Fruit Bats being anyone’s favorite band: It’s taken Eric D. Johnson four years of playing sideman in bands like The Shins and Vetiver to return to recording—and if you’re going to take that long to put out a record, you’d better be Pink Floyd or The Flaming Lips or someone dropping a dramatic bomb of an album...

Remember when bands cared about albums as an art form? Instead of slapping together a dozen tracks because, hey, they'll just end up on everyone's iPod shuffle anyway, musicians considered how their songs might congeal as a whole or form some sort of dramatic arc. Allow Grizzly Bear to reintroduce you to...