Ella Langley – Dandelion [Columbia 2026]
Her confidence comes out more audibly on the ones that aren’t pulling from modern fad-genres, compare the forced enthusiasm on the snap-track “You & Me Time” to the clear-eyed tone on the track that follows which rumbles closers to the Nashville machine’s classic sound. That being said – she’s ordinary. No matter how well she may sound on chopped up TikTok edits showing pretty summer images, nothing on record strikes the heart like good country should outside of the 35 seconds her mentor Miranda Lambert features on and all but washes her. 3.4/5
Gorillaz – Humanz [Parlophone 2017]
Back from hiatus and it seems like Damon Albarn & co are still interested in the apocalypse as fascism meets with his eco-doom anxiety. The sound is more electronic/bouncy and party forward than before, like if “DARE” was sped up and done a dozen or so times. But there’s a real sense of distractedness here. Albarn himself shifts to a supporting actor role, often only appearing on a bridge or hook while god-tier soul singers are given minutes and minutes of time to wax vague lyrics of heartbreak that their solo work would never have. Somehow a project with Danny Brown, Pusha-T, De La Soul, and Vince Staples each energized from recent album cycles of their own seemed stunted. 3.6/5
D’Angelo and The Vanguard – Black Messiah [RCA Records 2014]
After 14 years of silence it’s a shock that anything came out at all, let alone an overweight addict auteur’s take on the blending of classical Black American genre traditions into something that sounds suspiciously like a great rock album. There’s two capital G Great tracks for me amongst a litany of fantastic others. The first one is the is-he-talking-about-drugs-or-a-women breakup opener “Ain’t That Easy” whose emotional complexity synthesizes poignancy, anger, mourning, acceptance, and humor over a syncopated rhythm guitar. The second is “The Charade” in which Black racial sorrow gets amplified by gospel backing vocalists and the hardest rhythmic attack that drummer ?estlove and bassist Pino Palladino have ever put to tape. Although you wouldn’t really notice the subject matter initially because D’Angelo has buried his voice so deep in the mix that it functions more like another melodic instrument than a source for his truth nukes. “Murky” is the word a lot of music writers have used about the sound and they’re right, but I’d also use “vague”. The sonic ambitions are there and they’re clear, cosmic, southern fried, broken hearted, broken in general – there’s a great many hats he wears and while the music and his vocals are pleasurable, to bury himself so deeply in his music serves two clear artistic statements. 1. He feel buried himself and wishes to reflect that musically and 2. He doesn’t feel confident enough to let his words do the talking. And so we bump and bounce and nod along. 4.5/5
Kacey Musgraves – Same Trailer Different Park [Mercury 2013]
The backstory on her is that she’s a native of the East Texas musical circuit, performing in bars, pageants, and fairs to drum up some musical intrigue before becoming a ghostwriter for her former babysitter Miranda Lambert. Now at the ripe old age of 24, a new star manifests itself with not just the usual lap steel and acoustic strum but big shiny choruses and a dusty timbre to the drums. Kacey Musgraves is a perspicacious ironist with empathy – meaning that she doesn’t just see past the everyday hypocrisies around her and the other characters she keeps stuck in their small towns, but that she conveys those hypocrisies casually, with wit and a raised eyebrow between drags on her ciggy. On the table are social obligations, road trips, addiction, idiocy, bullshit men, being gay, and the uncertainty of strangers in town. And like any good Southern songwriter she makes new metaphors seem eternal by carrying a world-weary sigh in her voice and conveys them in a forthright style that sticks with you. Por ejemplo: “If you wanna fill your bottle up with lightning/you’re gonna have to stand in the rain”, “Jack and Jill went up a hill/Jack burned out on booze and pills”, “Maybe I love you, Maybe I’m just kinda bored”. Tell me more, please. 4.3/5
Olivia Rodrigo – You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love [Geffen 2026]
In which the leading contender for Greatest Pop Star of Her Generation solidifies the artistic bona fides that her emotionally intelligent parents (a teacher and a therapist) instilled in her by releasing her Mature Album complete with a sound shift. It’s a move that could be seen as a brave culmination of spiritual growth or cynically as a calculated move to build a legacy that brings her to competitive commercial heights her hero Taylor couldn’t dream of. Old fart me? I see more of the former than the latter in it, especially when the product itself is so ready to stimulate my brain’s pleasure centers. The sound change is away from power chords on the loud ones to new wave synths and jangly guitars while the ballads are even quieter and more stripped down. Along the way she reveals bits of her own psychology that can be shocking, like the nurturing-yet-disapproving tone she takes when she calls him “Babyboy/Honeybee”, or poignant to a listener that knows better, like when she sees them “fight over who I’m hanging out with like a real couple”. Oof. But the way her sonic world is so vivid and so encompassing without the melodrama that many other artists of her stature lean on tells me that she cares enough to want us to take her seriously, and barring “my way”’s petulant brat freak out I do certainly. The word “masterpiece” in its modern usage means perfect, but classically it simply meant a work that demonstrates the skill of a master. Know what I mean? 4.7/5
Cosmic Hero 