album reviews
The Breeders
LSXX: Last Splash: 20th Anniversary Edition 4AD
On 1993's Last Splash, former Pixies bassist Kim Deal pulled off a shocker: a record as good as anything by her old band that was also a pop success. With sister Kelley on guitar, Deal churned out sweet, slothy ballads, put a feminist spin on blues cliché and even had a Top 40 hit with the looped-out surf-rocker "Cannonball." This three-disc reissue adds a raft of cool demos, a 1994 concert and four EPs, including two doozies, 1994's Head to Toe and 1992's Safari, where ... | More »
Daft Punk
Random Access Memories Columbia
French duo Daft Punk helped create our current stadium-shaking, Coachella-dominating dance-music moment, and their new album is by far the year's most anticipated EDM set. The only issue is that it sounds almost nothing like EDM. Random Access Memories is full of WTF moments: Julian Casablancas delivering maybe the most emotive vocals of his career through a vocoder-style haze; dance godfather Giorgio Moroder waxing nostalgic on an electro-jazz-funk epic; pop-schmaltz guru Paul Williams... | More »
Deap Vally
Get Deap! Cherrytree/Communion/Interscope/Island
L.A. guitar-drums duo Lindsey Troy and Julie Edwards play trashy blues-rock with a wink—a modern tradition rooted in music made 40 years ago. There's plenty of White Stripes in their style, but their sound has a blown-out quality less Vintage Tube Amp and more Cheap Boombox Cranked to 10. Misspelling their own name is an attempt to play dumb, which only smart bands like them can do well. "Come on take a breath now," Troy wails in a witchy cackle on EP highlight "End of the World." ... | More »
Spacehog
As It Is on Earth Hogspace
Last time we heard from this jumpy glam outfit, on 2001's The Hogyssey, it seemed weird Spacehog were even still around; by then, singer Royston Langdon was mostly famous for dating Liv Tyler. Turns out the Hog picked a great decade-plus to take off; their loopy, Bowie-meets-Queen fist pump ( "Gluttony"), chill ballads ("Cool Water") and really long opening songs (seven minutes of trippy "Deceit") sound both kinda classic and really rockin' next to the Lumineers at one end and Anima... | More »
Frank Turner
Tape Deck Heart Xtra Mile/Interscope
The onetime singer of U.K. hardcore band Million Dead, Frank Turner is a grown-ass Englishman who turns out highly quotable, sometimes deliriously catchy rants about life after punk. His fifth LP blooms with crisply enunciated patter about bandmate bromances and childhood memories of cutting himself, with liberal squirts of acid: "Fuck you, Mötley Crüe, for charming us with access and with excess," he croons sweetly in "Good & Gone," a tune so pretty you can hear the dimples. St... | More »
The So So Glos
Blowout Shea Stadium/ SSG Entertainment
The So So Glos are punk-rock kids from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn – like if the Ramones really were brothers. Their second album is their gloriously high-speed manifesto, as the Glos declare war on everything boring ("I'm done ruling the world from the tip of my thumb/And tapping on my telephone for fun") and dive into the dirty big-city kicks of "Wrecking Ball" and "Son of an American." The songs on Blowout have a classicist confidence, reaching all the way back to the Clash and the Kink... | More »
Hanni El Khatib
Head in the Dirt Innovative Leisure
Like hundred-dollar sandblasted jeans, the grit and grain on Hanni El Khatib's second LP feels less like the product of time and more like careful craftsmanship. Produced by the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach, this is desert-burned blues rock boosted by punk, soul and hip-hop – music that has a retro heart but couldn't have been made before 2013. He's less convincing as a badass ("Family") than as a guy who fights desperation by partying ("Low"). The Motown-esque "Penny" i... | More »
Various Artists
The Sun Country Box Bear Family
The most revelatory of a three-volume survey of Sun Records (see also Blues Box and Rock Box), this six-CD set comes via Germany's Bear Family, which has arguably done more to preserve country-music history than any U.S. label. As detailed in the set's 148-page book, Sam Phillips launched Sun with country as well as blues. And while Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins show up here, less-famous labelmates started their own fires by rubbing blues and country together in differ... | More »
Shuggie Otis
Inspiration Information/Wings of Love Sony Legacy
Known mostly via the Brothers Johnson's smash version of his psychedelic-soul fantasia "Strawberry Letter 23," R&B renegade Shuggie Otis recorded with heavyweights like Frank Zappa as a teen but fell out of favor with the music industry by his early twenties. This reissue pairs his metaphysically funky 1974 masterpiece, Inspiration Information, with a similarly spacey unreleased LP cut between 1975 and 2000 that positions this multi-instrumentalist as a missing link between Sly, Jimi... | More »
Ghostface Killah & Adrian Younge
Twelve Reasons to Die Soul Temple
This "groundbreaking concept album" (as the press release calls it) tells the story of an internecine mafia war, which erupts when Ghostface Killah's alter ego, Tony Starks, an aspiring member of the Deluca crime family, falls in love with a woman from the Delucas' circle – and I'm falling fast asleep trying to recount the ludicrous plot. Focus instead on Ghostface, whose shaggy, breathless flow remains one of pop's most transfixing sounds. Composer-producer You... | More »
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