Music
Rappers Talk Dirty: Future, Migos, Kodak Black, Cupcakke
2017 is shaping up to be a terrific year for hip-hop — better than 2016, I hope.
Lucas Fagen
Music
Drake Improves Despite Himself
Moody guys excel at mood music.
Music
Syd’s Pleasure Principle
Syd’s murmurs, exclamations, coos, and exhalations are layered with care and irrepressible delight — all so quietly you could blink and miss it all.
Music
Jens Lekman Cheers Up
All sad singer-songwriters are alike, but Jens Lekman is an exception.
Music
Solemnly Dinky High-Camp Bleepy: Chiptune Radio’s ‘Undertale’
Gliding and burbling, ringing and spattering and glitching, a lyrical escapism animates an album whose loveliness and silliness are inextricable.
Music
Reestablished Forms: King, M.I.A., Young Thug, Sheer Mag
Erotic sagas are always political. This applies to the four albums reviewed below, several political despite themselves, each of which messes with established forms while representing desire.
Music
Critical Distance: Car Seat Headrest, Solange, Danny Brown, Christine and the Queens
As most adolescents across the nation sit in their bedrooms and agonize over the eternal question, what do boys/girls like, some of us have more unfortunate and inconsequential concerns: what do critics like?
Music
A Tribe Called Quest's Communal Monument
A communal monument to one rapper that also celebrates community in the context of political horror (they didn’t predict the election either). Phife, inevitably, becomes a symbol. So does the whole Tribe.
Music
Frank Ocean Four Years Later
Blonde is a consistent, coherent, well-crafted album, but it feels anticlimactic. It’s a retreat.
Music
It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year: She & Him, Kacey Musgraves, Amy Grant, The Killers
Just like intimacy, holiday spirit exists simply because you believe it does. That’s why Christmas is so eternally rock & roll.
Music
Bon Iver Deconstructed
Vocal snobs had better get used to Auto-Tune, because it ain’t going away.
Music
Leonard Cohen R.I.P.
In addition to everything else he was — poet, wordsmith, conceptmaster, religious seeker, suave scruffy ladies’ man, Zen monk, belated concert fixture — he was also a major political songwriter.