Category: Music Reviews
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American Band, Drive-By Truckers (2016)
Honest political art must walk the line between ambiguity and conviction. Sloganeering, no matter how righteous the fight, eventually ends in middle-aged exhaustion. This is especially the case when the tribe is the cause. No song better exemplifies the success of American Band than “Ever South,” an odd mix of (Irish-)European pride and settler confessional.…
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I Have No Everything Here, Zomba Prison Project (2015)
Dostoevsky, in House of the Dead, wrote that the character of a society can be judged by entering its prisons. It would not be fair to lay the horrors of Zomba Central Prison—overcrowding, malnutrition, HIV—on Malawian society: it’s one of the poorest countries in the world, and the gap in well-being between free people and…
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Ola Wave, Zane Campbell (2017)
Zane Campbell is the real deal. A royal Appalachian music bloodline, a life torn apart by drink and drugs, undeniable lyrical genius, a refusal to conform to country-music-as-beer-commercial. What does it all amount to? Maybe nothing more sitting on a torn recliner in the yard with a scruffy guitar in hand, singing your heart out…
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Original Sufferhead, Fela Kuti (1981)
Few artists can credibly lay claim to inventing a genre. The genre Fela Kuti created, Afrobeat, remains difficult to define. The word connotes musical influences (Nigerian traditional music, Ghanaian highlife, funk, soul), instrumentation (horn-heavy, percussion forward), and a musical ideology (energetic, experimental, political). All of this is a reflection of Fela’s time and place: a…
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Rough and Rowdy Ways, Bob Dylan (2020)
All Bob ever wanted is for us to not forget the past. Not to excuse its crimes or stop moving forward, but to simply remember what we once were, how we once felt. Every Dylan record since 1992’s Good as I Been to You serves this kind of conservatism—the best kind of conservatism, one interested…
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Soul Journey, Gillian Welch (2003)
Critics generally regard Gillian Welch’s third album, Soul Journey, as an artistic lull. I disagree. The dominant themes of her other early albums—Revival‘s wistfulness, Hell Among the Yearlings‘ gothic grimness, Time (the Revelator)‘s nostalgic cool—rely on more powerful human emotions than the lightness of Soul Journey. But lightness can also be deep. It’s the sensation…
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Black on Both Sides, Mos Def (1999)
I hated my nose growing up. It was too big, too bulbous. I wanted a white nose: Roman, aquiline. The insecurity grew milder as I got older, but it wasn’t until I saw the album cover for Black on Both Sides, and then listened to the music, that I understood how thoroughly I’d been brainwashed.…
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The Complete Plantation Recordings, Muddy Waters (1941)
In 1941, the music historian Alan Lomax traveled to Clarksdale, Mississippi, hoping to record the legendary Robert Johnson. Johnson was dead, but locals pointed Lomax to another blues guitarist, McKinley Morganfield, better known by his nickname Muddy Waters. Over the course of two visits in 1941 and 1942, Lomax and the musicologist John Work recorded…
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RTJ4, Run the Jewels (2020)
RTJ4 dropped a week after George Floyd’s murder and a few months after COVID-19 hit the world stage. In retrospect, the most painful aspect of 2020 wasn’t the horrific events themselves. It’s the blinding realization that the world is just the same as it was before. No major legislation addressing police brutality passed; no overdue…