Rating:
After a brief hiatus Grizzly Bear's Daniel Rossen has revived the Department of Eagles project, , enlisted some of his bandmates, and created a sprawling pop record (complete with guitars, piano, horns, banjo, and more) that evokes Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Sung Tongs, Van Dyke Parks, and Gene Clark. Ambitious and complex, it's stuffed with cocooning harmonies and shimmering, sunlight-smacking-the-Pacific melodies.
Rating:
Vivian Girls, an all-women trio who've become overnight sensations among critics and underground rock fans, deliver a lively, lovable debut album that taps fashionable aesthetic wellsprings from Phil Spector to C86 to Nuggets and, without risking pastiche, turns them into an armful of kick-ass songs.
Rating:
TV on the Radio's follow-up to 2006's Return to Cookie Mountain-- a dense and textural album with an optimistic core-- Dear Science is catchier, but thornier. Musically, it's shit-hot but also brainy and ambivalent, and more engaging for it. TV on the Radio remain a true Event Band, and the sign o' the times they capture here isn't audacious hope, or fierce revolution: it's confusion. They're the house band for a country that has no idea what'll hit it next, and Dear Science is a jagged landscape of self-doubt, Bush-hate, and future-fear.
Rating:
Sharing passing similarities with two of modern indie hip-hop's top producers, Madlib and the late J Dilla, Flying Lotus has constructed an album of static, texture, and rhythm that, at its most stirring moments, can be soothingly meditative, an accomplished blend of debris and warmth, b-boy head-nod and laptopper experimentalism. If Prefuse hadn't fallen off after One Word Extinguisher and continued to push the envelope with each record since, he might sound close to this in 2008.
Most Read Record Reviews
- Portishead: Third
- M83: Saturdays=Youth
- Weezer: Weezer (The Red Album)
- Coldplay: Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends
- Scarlett Johansson: Anywhere I Lay My Head
- Lil Wayne: Tha Carter III
- Death Cab for Cutie: Narrow Stairs
- Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes
- No Age: Nouns
- Cut Copy: In Ghost Colours
- Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend
- Sigur Rós: Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
- Girl Talk: Feed the Animals
- Beck: Modern Guilt
- Bonnie "Prince" Billy: Lie Down in the Light
- My Morning Jacket : Evil Urges
- Flight of the Conchords: Flight of the Conchords
- Radiohead: The Best Of / The Best Of [Special Edition]
- Tapes 'n Tapes: Walk It Off
- Madonna: Hard Candy
- Wolf Parade: At Mount Zoomer
- Nine Inch Nails: The Slip
- Titus Andronicus: The Airing of Grievances
- Spiritualized: Songs in A&E;
- Sun Kil Moon / Mark Kozelek: April / Nights
- Air France: No Way Down EP
- Spoon: Don't You Evah EP
- The Roots: Rising Down
- Islands: Arm's Way
- The National: The Virginia EP
- Crystal Antlers: EP
- Muse: H.A.A.R.P.
- Animal Collective: Water Curses EP
- Fuck Buttons: Street Horrrsing
- N.E.R.D.: Seeing Sounds
- Boris: Smile
- The Last Shadow Puppets: The Age of the Understatement
- HEALTH: DISCO
- Santogold: Santogold
- Liz Phair: Exile in Guyville (15th Anniversary)
- The Replacements: Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash / Stink / Hootenanny / Let It Be
- Frightened Rabbit: Midnight Organ Fight
- The Cool Kids: The Bake Sale EP
- The Notwist: The Devil, You + Me
- Silver Jews: Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea
- Atmosphere: When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold
- The Kooks: Konk
- Mates of State: Re-Arrange Us
- Free Kitten: Inherit
- Tokyo Police Club: Elephant Shell