Trailblazing partners Missy Elliott and Timbaland function as musical time travelers, teleporting in every few years to show hip-hop what its future looks like. With their latest collaboration, Under Construction, the future might morph into its barely distant past. The album’s musical tracks begin with something almost blasphemous to the…
The Bronx’s favorite boricua Fat Joe finally saw platinum this year after more than a decade of toiling behind his brand of raw hip-hop. But it took some sex appeal, a pop glossover and some marketing ingenuity to put him over the top in the form of “What’s Luv,” a…
“God knows how I adore life,” Beth Gibbons whispers at album’s dawn, before it gives way to 10 songs that suggest the opposite; “so tired of life,” she sings one track later. The singer, late of the lamented Portishead, and Paul “Rustin Man” Webb, ex of Talk Talk (wha?), have…
Creed doesn’t really suck. Yes, they are traveling down a galling road many a Journey and Chicago have traveled before. The right combination of showy power-chording, handsomeness and warm, engaging looks into the audience is a time-tested tradition. But the soft mush of the mainstream always cries for the comfort…
The dissolution of Squeeze opened a new musical world for Glenn Tilbrook. Suddenly a solo artist, without a label, touring alone with nothing more than an acoustic guitar, Tilbrook hit the road as hard as at any time in his career, first plunging into covers, then supporting a solo debut,…
Diamond Rio is the only group to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry since 1984 (others have made it solo), perhaps the strongest indication that these neo-traditionalists are as Nashville as Nashville gets. Judging by the assault of the Twains and the Hills and the Womacks on country…
While it’s Texas billionaire David Bonderman’s prerogative to pay the Rolling Stones nearly $7 million to play a 40-minute set at his birthday bash, you’ve got to wonder what real “Satisfaction” he derives from the exchange. Does he imagine the Stones having a preshow huddle in his honor, collectively deciding,…
It wasn’t quite Captain Kirk vs. Ricardo Montalbán in tights, but Commander Angel Nova considered it a successful intergalactic mission. “[We] had planned to commando’ the 2002 Vans Warped Tour [i.e., perform in the parking lot] in San Francisco, but when we started setting up in front of the show,…
Calvin Johnson is an indie rock legend. Not that casual observers would know it, which is the way the unassuming Johnson seems to prefer it. The singer, songwriter and executive released his debut solo album — the stark, soulful What Was Me — earlier this year after nearly 20 years…
The confessional Tori Amos of the past has made a move toward a more ruminative songwriting philosophy. The newer contemplative gestures make Scarlet’s Walk, Amos’ newest record, a meditative stroll through American landscapes. Some of the metaphorical places Amos visits in Walk aren’t new, but they are laced with new…
“Whoa, this sounds like disco, huh?” Precisely, my Funkytown-fearing friends. These SBLs are here to say bass and drum are out — Sturm und Drang is in! Purging the system of two founding members has left Ramin Sakurai and Geri Soriano-Lightwood free to explore their individual impulses and make use…
Christina Aguilera’s problem has always been overcompensation. On her debut, the young waif was so eager to show off her pipes that she mostly sounded horribly overwrought and warbly, like Mariah Carey hopped up on diet pills. On her sultry new second album, Aguilera is just as eager, only now…
Talib Kweli has a welterweight’s agility, and Jay-Z has a middleweight’s saunter, but the rappers have claimed the heavyweight titles in their respective rings. After defining the parameters of underground hip-hop in 1998 as half of Black Star, Kweli has since dedicated himself to shredding those parameters, renouncing the asceticism…
Ladytron makes music simultaneously from decades past and decades yet to come. Their layered beats and hovercraft grooves suggest the morning radio of an anonymous metropolis circa A.D. 2804 or the most forward-looking synth-pop of 1982. Which brings us to some place in the middle of that continuum: The group’s…
Poignancy, it appears, still has a place on the country music charts. Not the jingoistic type that made anthem-spiked heroes out of Toby Keith (“The Angry American”) and Alan Jackson (“Where Were You”), but the real poignancy of honoring loved ones, making deeply felt confessions of the Merle Haggard variety…
Theory of a Deadman revels in the powder-keg dynamics of grunge, continuing the string of admirers that followed Soundgarden and Alice in Chains to the FM dial — put Days of the New, Nickelback and this band in a pickle barrel and dare to tell the difference. That’s likely no…
They’ve always been enamored of glam metal, but on their first major-label record and fifth release, Spend the Night, in-your-face punk hotties the Donnas manage to sound more like Mötley Crüe than Mötley Crüe has since, like, Girls, Girls, Girls. “We’d watch MTV and see Mötley Crüe on Headbanger’s Ball,…
Beck Hansen is now a communicator, a breakthrough that has led to the year’s most startling music. Beck may not stand as the artist of the 1990s. Change that: Some of his music from that decade is unlistenable. To Beck’s credit, however, he was an artist of the ’90s. His…
The acolyte will deride the obvious misses amid this collection of hits; the casual fan won’t even notice, since the casual fan skipped most of the band’s ’90s output anyway. Still, it’s amazing that U2 could fill two discs this go-round, since there were half as many albums to choose…
More of a political movement than a band, Godspeed You Black Emperor! is Montreal’s collection of commune-dwelling, hard-core-loving psychedelic anarchists. And God bless them for it. Somebody has to be the voice of the opposition — even if they don’t actually speak. A near-orchestra (multiple drums, guitars and basses, plus…
Tracy Chapman’s songs are comfort food for the eternally dejected. With her dusky voice and spare arrangements, the former street busker has built a career on tales of heartache and pain (“Fast Car,” “Give Me One Reason”), little of it more starkly expressed than on Let It Rain, her sixth…
Once upon a time, Pearl Jam seemed to live for a reaction, a trait that catapulted it to the forefront of grunge. The band blazed its brand of arena rock for the sole purpose of shoving it in listeners’ faces. Their faithful hung on every power chord and deep Eddie…
