
Soulwax Scare Us on ‘All Systems Are Lying’
The more you listen to Soulwax’s new album, the less reassuring and more frightening it becomes. It delivers its message in concentrated and relentless doses.

The more you listen to Soulwax’s new album, the less reassuring and more frightening it becomes. It delivers its message in concentrated and relentless doses.

Grant-Lee Phillips hasn’t lost his intuitive feel for a dreamy sort of Western and Southern American mythopoeia, as in In the Hour of Dust.

With Weird Rooms, John Andrew Fredrick and the Black Watch are at the late height of their powers and perhaps the end of their life as a group.

The Lemon Twigs’ A Dream Is All We Know displays scholarly mastery of the complex techniques their forbears invented. The sheer musicality is prodigious.

If you like Ty Segall, you’ll get plenty more of what you like about him on Three Bells along with drums used as a compositional tool and a rhythmic one.

In Euphoric Recall, the Replacements’ manager Peter Jesperson is often as drunk as the band is, little more in control of their careening path than they are.

Cat Power’s version of Bob Dylan’s 1966 concert with the Band in Manchester is reverential but not literal and honors the legend more than the facts.

Indie pop could use more queer icons, and Caleb Nichols has what it takes to become one of them as he shows on Let’s Look Back.

Tele Novella are more Brian Wilson than Hank Williams on Poet’s Tooth, a pop band with compositional sophistication waiting to get out of their Austin city limits.

In The Jewish Son, Daniel Guebel invokes Kafka’s “Dearest Father” to tell the story of a complicated father-son relationship.

On Where Were You? the Leeds of 1978-1989 sounds like the times, but not a particular place. In that sense, it’s true indie music.

The title Relentless encourages expectations of a youthful, hard-rock Pretenders album, but it’s dominated by lost-love ballads and slow-burn confessionals.