Music Reviews

David Lee Roth might have a bright future as the replacement for William Shatner in Priceline commercials. The flamboyant vocalist and natural-born pitchman takes spoken-word turns on several occasions throughout A Different Kind of Truth, going into character with an exaggerated low-register timbre that harkens back to his narrative role on “Panama. Read More

The title of Leonard Cohen’s latest album—his first since 2004′s Dear Heather—applies not to his advanced age (the singer turned 77 in September) but to the musings on human frailty, religion, sexuality, and mortality that have defined his work since he gave up poetry for a music career when he was still in his 30s. Read More

“If tears were liquor/I would’ve drunk myself to death,” confesses a troubled Mark Lanegan on the allegorical “St. Louis Elegy,” a haunting organ-laced ballad that stands in as the second cousin to the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” and reinforces the afflicted moods coursing through Blues Funeral. Read More

Kathleen Edwards experienced a lifetime of changes during the past three years. She divorced husband and frequent collaborator Collin Cripps. She began a romantic and creative relationship with Justin Vernon, the Bon Iver namesake who helped produce and played on her new Voyageur. And, as detailed in witty fashion on the album-opening “Empty Threat,” she temporarily relocated to the United States from her native Canada. Read More

The Black Keys might be the only recession-proof thing Akron, Ohio has produced in recent decades. Even as the former rubber capitol—at one point in its history home to four major tire companies—struggles to reinvent itself, the blues-rock duo has continued its rise virtually unabated.

Since The Big Come Up first surfaced back in 2002, the group’s music has practically become ubiquitous in popular culture, with songs appearing in an endless stream of films and television commercials—a development singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney joked about on an episode of “The Colbert Report,” engaging in a “sell-out-off” with Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig that ended in a humorous, Warriors-style brawl. Read More

Gareth Campesinos!, frontman for the sprawling Welsh collective whose members, like those of the Ramones, all share a last name even if they don’t share familial blood, has always been infatuated with the way the human form reveals emotional wounds accrued through the years. “I cannot emphasize enough that my body is a badly designed poorly put together vessel harboring these diminishing so-called vital organs,” he sang on the title track to 2008′s We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed. Read More

As Kate Bush’s recording output has gotten more and more sparse—50 Words for Snow is only her second album of new material since 1993—so, too, have her arrangements gradually calmed. An artisan of the piano, Bush was always more chamber than concert hall. But 50 Words for Snow begs the listener closer, its hushed quality a cleverly crafted comfort to disguise the turmoil underneath. Read More

Allow, please, for a left-field link to Sigur Rós, the Icelandic rock band that celebrates the slow-build and mysterious. Listening to this double-disc live effort, a recording tactic employed by film composer Hans Zimmer—a cinematic cheerleader of all things loud and blatant—springs to mind. Read More