This two-disc set comprises 45 songs that capture not a sound, but rather an attitude. These artists island hop across labels and genres and, in doing so, create vital songs worth unearthing now.
Forty-plus years later this little-known Terry Allen album deserves a larger audience, a new and much bigger set of listeners to puzzle over this eccentric classic.
This is an unabashedly fierce and often violent novel that owes as much to Graham Greene's Brighton Rock as it does to Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone.
Pile, the new album from Austin's A Giant Dog, can remind us of other moments in rock music, but this is not revivalism. Instead, it reshapes those pasts into the band's own present.
On his excellent new album, Aesop Rock plays with autobiography as a construction. Rock tells some version of his story brilliantly here, and it doesn't matter what is and isn't fact; it all rings true anyway.
Festivals can and should be transactions, but not of capital or codified cool. They should bring people into a space so they can see what it's about and let them add something to it. NC's Phuzz Phest does this well.
Harvey's ninth album buzzes with energy, but her stories, for the first time, often make her sound like a tourist unable to scratch the surface of the places she documents.
Felder, Jan St. Werner's latest solo record, is impressively expansive. But for all its challenging experimentation, the album is surprising comforting listen.