Like many an impassioned singer/songwriter before her, Joan Osborne loves to confront injustice head-on with her music. To that end, all ten songs on Trouble and Strife (Womanly Hips/Thirty Tigers), her tenth studio album, tackle ...

Follow the muse. It’s a musician’s mantra that’s easy to say, but often hard to do. Some bands continue kowtowing to corporate strategies that override their better creative impulses, while others—like veteran British progressive giants ...

Marrying catchy pop melodies with keen jazz constructs is but one of piano prodigy Norah Jones’ many fortes exercised in full across all 45 minutes of Pick Me Up Off The Floor. Jones has often ...

Yes, indeed—here’s yet another vinyl remaster of Yes’ seminal, identity-defining fourth studio album, November 1971’s Fragile. This time, it’s Mobile Fidelity’s turn, resulting in two 180-gram, 45rpm UltraDisc One-Step LPs making up a 7,500-piece limited ...

Let’s begin!” These two seemingly innocent words gleefully open the 1992 Nonsuch track “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead,” yet another notch in the sonically pleasing crown of the British new-wave collective known as XTC. Vocalist/guitarist ...

Robbie Robertson has always taken a distinctly cinematic approach to his multicultural melting-pot style of North Americana songwriting, a narrative attribute well in place due to the indigenous Canadian’s weighty workload with The Band long ...

Call it “Revenge of the Nerds.” Vilified by the music mainstream and critical cognoscenti for decades, Rush became the prime beneficiaries of some clear-cut revisionist history and ultimately a 2013 berth in the Rock and ...

Like Bizarro World Frank Sinatras on acid, the Flaming Lips have always done it their way. This longstanding alt-rocking Oklahoma collective consistently paint their music outside the lines of sonically acceptable society, and they’re at ...

“Who’s kidding who? . . . Miles smiles?” So queried Anthony Tuttle in the original 1967 liner notes to Miles Smiles, but the sophomore outing from Davis’s second prodigious quintet configuration is anything but a ...

Following his creatively rewarding experimental late-1970s Berlin period collaborating with Brian Eno, David Bowie pulled up his tent to once again recalibrate his sonic milieu in the wake of the burgeoning 1980s MTV era. Not ...

The best, most affecting singers tend to meet us at the intersection of Nuance and Intimacy Street, a corner the folk-leaning vocalist Meiko has clearly made her home. For this tight-knit collection of an even-dozen ...

Like the ever-shifting sands of time, the Rolling Stones continue to, well, roll on. In fact, the World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band wrapped up their most recent No Filter tour in the U.K. in ...