The Old Church felt like the perfect way to experience Beth Orton’s new songs, the audience huddled in pews with an imposing pipe organ behind the musicians.

Raymond Roussel sets the cool pyrotechnics of Scandinavian guitarist Terje Rypdal against a backdrop of fractured rhythms, boiling dissonance and saw-toothed electronic processing.

Music Is Invisible is both the last album by and an homage to Jon Hassell, the American trumpet player and composer, which will be most appreciated by boundary-pushing jazz fusion enthusiasts and fans...

The comprehensive Joy Division collection Eternal reintroduces the band behind the myth: hardworking, dynamic performers who crafted a new sound while captivating audiences.

A dud from the Bush is worth two hits from most artists.

This version was mastered from the very original analog master tapes and is limited to a one-time pressing of 5,000 numbered copies.

Though Mike D’s performance was mildly cacophonous and messy, Portland’s Crystal Ballroom show commemorated the rapper’s past while showing the performer moving forward in the best way possible.

In this episode, David Harris, Holly Hazelwood and Eric Mellor are joined by special guest, Richard Edwards, to talk about his love for Pre-Code movies.

The Go-Betweens’ generosity in uninhibited truth, devoid of irony and filter, returns at the perfect time for younger fans of their sound and era to backfill their catalogs.

Swinging wildly between positive moments and passages that fall short to land just north of the middle ground, Digger is far from a masterpiece but never awful for very long.

A dud from the Bush is worth two hits from most artists.

The Japanese legend's 23rd album unfolds as an intimate, understated love letter, trading grand architectural gestures for quiet domestic warmth.

By performing an unconventional concert, Tricky is proving to fans that he is uncompromising in his vision, happy to float about in the shadows and never get in the way of the music.

Though Stone Garden doesn’t often differentiate its sound from more popular ‘60s contemporaries, psych rock fans will likely enjoy a few tracks from the band’s latest reissue.

An intense live performance at an experimental movie theatre shows Sonic Youth simultaneously at their most cerebral and most primal.

Hotel Usona is the perfect accompaniment for Protomartyr's dark themes. It's a calculated mess, grandiose pomp in squalid decay, a steely examination of the modern moment.

Despite band member Dave Ball’s death right before release, Soft Cell’s Danceteria is flush with electricity, nervous energy and thoughtful introspection, thus becoming a fine curtain call for the duo...

Though he no longer carries the New Order name, Peter Hook and the Light truly are the carriers of this legendary music. Thankfully, he is still willing to go out there and play these songs, year in a...

After a daring and impressive ninth album, Miley Cyrus rebrands by going back to basics with a boring, cliched release that’s often unpleasant to listen to.

While Sunshine successfully bottles a cohesive mood, the album’s primary limitation across these 11 tracks is its reluctance to depart from an established formula.

With more confidence, sparseness and sharpness, Julia Jacklin’s The Gem features some of her most direct and affecting songs yet.

Experimental artist Oren Ambarchi’s Cooked may be an acquired taste, but inexperienced listeners will still enjoy it if they are willing to give the album the multiple listens it requires.

We’ve listened closely to Kate Bush’s songs—all 146 of them—and in the weeks to come we’ll be working our way from the least successful to the most.

Hila delves further into a synth-constructed chasm, eschewing pop almost entirely while still seeking to ground her explorations in something tangible and real.

We’ve listened closely to Kate Bush’s songs—all 146 of them—and in the weeks to come we’ll be working our way from the least successful to the most.

Primetime, through its structure and style, avoids typical biopic pitfalls. We are with Chris Hansen during his rise and potential fall, but Lance Oppenheim and Robert Pattinson don’t allow us to get ...

The premise of A Story of Floating Weeds, in which a band of outsiders coalesces around a shared sense of desperation but struggles to form a durable social unit, is an earmark of early Ozu, and the g...

Kele Okereke is less interested in letting us in than he is in just airing things out, and the experience is about as pleasant as that sounds.

If Sonic Nurse is a reaction to Murray Street, it’s a reaction to finally feeling comfortable and stable enough to just record some killer songs in peace.

A deluxe set of an underappreciated post-punk legend's odds and sods is full of fascinating obscurities.

On her fourth album, beabadoobee has taken some of the alternative influences that have always been present in her music and pushed them further.

You Had to Be There is a fascinating documentary about the assembly of a theater troupe so significant it paved the way for the creation of Saturday Night Live and SCTV.

There is surely room for a movie like Without Blood, which values conversation and confrontation, but the unassuming minimalism of this one reveals that there just isn’t much to these characters or th...

Though Howe Gelb’s ‘Sno Angel Like You wasn’t treated with the same reverence as its contemporaries and didn’t reinvent the singer-songwriter’s music, the album still shows Gelb improving his songs, w...

Kristin Hersh delves deep into memory and place on Sugar on Blackstone delivering songs whose emotional impact is as powerful as their lyrics are elusive and mysterious.

In his effort to make a coming-of-age dramedy about kids with cancer, George Jaques rarely strikes anything that approaches authenticity in Sunny Dancer.

It’s a shaggy film, distant and perhaps too cute to some, but Almereyda is ultimately successful in becoming, as his mentor would say, the termite to the more bombastic Kenneth Branagh’s white elephan...