Archive for the New Stuff / What’s On Sale Category

After finishing You Want It Darker, which was released just 19 days before his death in 2016, aged 82, Leonard Cohen still wanted to add to his tower of song. Thus, he kept on writing and recording as life ebbed away,

With their second album, simply titled The Band and released in 1969, the quintet – Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson – basically invented modern Americana, tying their inherent musicality to a sound and aesthetic rooted in century-old history

Her new album, Magdalene, invokes Mary of Magdala as a kind of apostle of the overlooked. It’s a breakup album, written in a period of upheaval not only limited to the artist’s romantic life.  Magdalene is an effortless braiding of high-brow electronic art-pop, carnal soul music, and lurid modern dance,

A solo concert from Keith Jarrett – recorded at Munich’s Philharmonic Hall on July 16, 2016, on the last night of a tour – finds the great improvising pianist at a peak of invention. Creating a spontaneous suite of forms in the moment with the intuitive assurance of a master builder – interspersing touches of the blues and folksong lyricism between pieces of polyrhythmic and harmonic complexity

Young’s voice, an acquired taste for more than half a century, sounds exactly as it did when he excoriated the killing of Vietnam War protesters at Kent State University on the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young classic “Ohio.” His intensity has only grown since, as you can hear on “Help Me Lose My Mind,”

The overarching theme of The Wanting is Cody’s personal struggles with inner demons and the rigors of stardom. Isn’t it refreshing when so much of modern country involves braggadocios self-aggrandization that Cody Jinks is willing to speak unflinchingly about his fears and vulnerabilities?

Two Hands is a showcase for all of Big Thief’s instruments, recorded raw and closeup. But Lenker’s undecorated voice is the most arresting of them all as it swoops from whisper to cry. On the writhing lead single Not, she sings each bruised word with real pain on the line “It’s not the hunger revealing / Not the ricochet in the cave”, before filling up the space her words evoke with a howling guitar solo.

Those who know Olsen from the stripped-down intimacy of Burn Your Fire For No Witness may be startled by the near-Björkian-grandeur on display here — although her 2016 My Woman clearly showed an artist whose trajectory had yet to be fully measured. Here, songs alternate vast orchestral landscapes with similarly-cinematic band tracks,

Ever since Sturgill Simpson was anointed the second coming of Seventies country with his 2014 release, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, the 41-year-old Kentucky Navy vet has spent the past half-decade making a show of his discomfort with any such label. Simpson followed up that career-making record with

Eleven albums in as many years suggest MC Taylor has no issues with writers’ block, that he must be in a constant state of productivity. Yet Terms of Surrender arrived not through clarity,