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Stephanie Zacharek

Reporter

  • Grace

    Jeff Buckley sounds like a man who doesn't yet know what he wants to be, and his uncertainty is the very thing that holds Grace, his debut album, together. It's a ballsy kind of uncertainty, the kind you find in star high-school athletes who seem to have all the confidence in the world even as […]

    • Music
  • Universal Mother

    On Universal Mother, Sinéad O'Connor tells us more about herself than we probably should know. It's record making as therapy, the byproduct of feelings still only half worked out, a bundle of self-revelations left suspended, twisting in the wind. It wobbles between being an awful record and a remarkable one, and maybe that's why it […]

    • Music
  • Pure And Simple

    What's great about Joan Jett is her refusal to accept things that just plain suck. You can hear it in past songs like "Fake Friends," about having to dump the phonies who glom onto you after you've made it big, and "MCA," a retooled version of the Sex Pistols' "EMI" that flips the bird to […]

    • Music
  • The Living End

    What you hear on The Living End, a collection of live material recorded on Hüsker Dü's last tour, in 1987, isn't so much a band breaking up as a band threatening to fly apart, like an amusement-park ride with a loose bolt. Hüsker Dü take the shaggy brilliance of their recordings and tear the sound […]

    • Music