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Free from their strict Pentecostal father, Kings of Leon’s Followill brothers (plus cousin Matthew) spent their first two records establishing themselves as horny Nashville youngsters with a neo-garage-rock style that got them tagged as the “Southern Strokes.” Nowadays, the Kings are feeling a different sound: Like last year’s Because of the Times, Only by the Night is long on astral, arena-ready largeness, with blippy keyboards, droney guitars and whoa-oh-oh backing vocals. Frontman Caleb Followill cranks up his Allman Brothers howl, turning out big choruses with sometimes tough-to-parse lyrics and deep-feeling melodies reportedly influenced by pain meds he began taking after shoulder surgery. The revamped sound doesn’t always work: Cuts like the slow-burning murk-fest “Cold Desert” feel like sub-John Mayer soul — bland and overly ponderous. But when the Kings find a gussied-up groove with teeth — like the effects-laden Zeppelin stomp of “Crawl” or the pulsating, Read the rest of this entry »

Reunions rarely rival history. But with this collection of burbling grooves, these Senegalese legends recapture the Afro-Cuban bliss of their 1982 classic, Pirates Choice — imagine the Buena Vista Social Club weaned on motherland polyrhythms. The secret weapon remains Barthélemy Attisso, a guitar giant with a touch as delicate and melodically sublime as Jerry Garcia’s. His lines on “Nijaay” and “Cabral” are so chill they’ll buckle your knees.

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Nothing gets folks on your team like losing your fiancé to a Hollywood bombshell. So just imagine what Alanis Morissette has been doing since her ex, actor Ryan Reynolds, traipsed off with Scarlett Johansson. Writing about post-romantic stress disorder isn’t new for Morissette, but her latest album doesn’t rage like “You Oughta Know” — it sounds more like grief. Producer and co-writer Guy Sigsworth (Björk) frames Morissette’s candid lyrics with a vaguely New Age grandeur — electro beats, Eastern percussion, orchestral arrangements — amping up the drama on her octave-hiccuping catharsis. On “Citizens of the Planet,” the production alternates between ringing tablas and head-banging guitars for an oddly stirring Enya-meets-System of a Down opener. “Moratorium” uses swirling synths and Read the rest of this entry »

These New York dance rockers are definitely not virgins. Their debut screams debauchery, with its funk- and disco-spiked odes to oversexed debutantes and every club kid’s favorite meal, “cocaine brunch.” Such subject matter has inspired some bad records over the years, but the Virgins have a knack for songcraft — scrabbling funk verses that surge into singalong rock choruses — and a charismatic frontman who delivers stellar aphorisms and insults. “Maybe if you change your hair/You’d be good enough,” Donald Cumming sneers in “Fernando Pando.” He knows of what he sings: Cumming has been a fixture of New York’s downtown demimonde since he was 16, making films and modeling for hip young photographer Ryan McGinley. But he’s done plenty of book learning, too, drawing on Lou Reed and the late-Seventies Rolling Stones: “She’s Expensive” lifts its groove from “Miss You.” Cumming has the swagger Read the rest of this entry »

Right now, no band displays the ranting soul, haunted heart or diseased liver of the American rock myth with more truth and empathy than the Hold Steady. The Brooklyn band’s fourth set — their most adventurous yet — shows their loser-outlaw storytelling and classic riff propulsion in full flower. It’s a punk-weaned, 21st-century version of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle.Per the title, Stay Positive is remarkably optimistic. Of course, the Hold Steady’s optimism is usually stoned and unreliable. “We’re gonna build something this summer!” Craig Finn hollers on the jet-engine opener, “Constructive Summer.” But when the mob-chorus shouts, “Get hammered!” it’s clear the season may not be so constructive after all. By “Sequestered in Memphis,” the singer is in trouble Read the rest of this entry »

Indie rock is undergoing a folk renaissance, which has spawned some great harmony singing. Case in point: Fleet Foxes’ debut opens with a woozy a cappella that’s part sacred-harp-choral tradition, part Beach Boys, and it resolves into a Celtic-flavored march with a searing Richard Thompson-style guitar line. The 11 songs are mostly pastorals — the sun rises, snow falls, spring comes, birds fly and, on “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song,” the “tall grasses wave/They do not know you anymore.” (Dis!) This style is what critics used to label “freak folk” before the term became verboten, though plain freakin’ lovely is more to the point. A lower-dosage Animal Collective, the Foxes stuff their free-form songs with rich, swirling melodies; billowing clouds of organs, tom-toms, bells and assorted stringed instruments cloak Read the rest of this entry »

“Is my viciousness/losing ground, ground, ground, ground, ground?” croaks Trent Reznor on “Discipline,” the propulsive new single from Nine Inch Nails’ The Slip. It’s a question more than a few rock stars are asking themselves these days. Pop divas and hip-hop producers command the musical zeitgeist. The iPod long ago made albums, those supreme rock-era icons, seem as dowdy as Victorian whalebone skirts. In these dire times, what’s an old-fashioned Dionysian with a guitar and a messiah complex to do to stay relevant?Give away his music for free, apparently. “This one’s on me,” reads the note on Nine Inch Nails’ Website, where visitors can download The Slip in a variety of file formats — for nary a red cent. Reznor has been sticking it to the Man with distribution gambits for a while now. In 2007, he urged fans to Read the rest of this entry »

In the Eighties, thrash metal wasn’t a scene, it was an arms race: riffs kept speeding up, drum kits got bigger. But with 1991’s Black Album, Metallica opted for unilateral disarmament, slowing their tempos, shortening their songs and smelting their chugging guitars and piston-powered drums into armor-plated pop hooks. After that, the band rushed from one reinvention to another, starting with the Southern-rock infusion of 1996’s Load and culminating in the muddled, bizarrely produced group-therapy session of 2003’s St. Anger. No longer: Death Magnetic is the musical equivalent of Russia’s invasion of Georgia — a sudden act of aggression from a sleeping giant.

Just as U2 re-embraced their essential U2-ness post-Pop, this album is Metallica becoming Metallica again — specifically, the epic, speed-obsessed version from the band’s Read the rest of this entry »

On last year’s Cassadaga, Conor Oberst left his home in New York to wander the country’s byways. On his latest album, recorded in Mexico, the Omaha, Nebraska, native is still drifting, having ditched both his Bright Eyes moniker and longtime producer Mike Mogis. A rough-hewn, death-haunted travelogue, this set proves that while you can run from home, you can’t run from yourself. And sometimes that’s OK. Largely, this is the introspective folk rock of Bright Eyes, though there’s some welcome shift away from autobiography: “Danny Callahan” is about a doomed child, and “I Don’t Want to Die (In the Hospital)” is a piano-driven rave-up whose narrator could be Oberst’s grandfather. The sketchbook Read the rest of this entry »

From the beginning, U2 aspired to profound ecstasy. But it took Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. a while to get there. Two of U2’s first three albums are undeniable classics: 1980’s precociously magnificent Boy for its proudly spiritual optimism in the thick of post-punk nihilism and for the Edge’s reveille-treble guitar; 1983’s War for its arena-rock muscle tone (honed over three years of touring) and the matured blend of soldier’s ardor and pop wile in the singles “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “New Year’s Day.” But those albums were transitional achievements on the way to the complete victory of The Joshua Tree and U2’s brassy Berlin-techno makeover on Achtung Baby, and the second discs in these deluxe reissues — including the rushed, middle runt of the litter, 1981’s October — are honest, Read the rest of this entry »