First, the bad news: This package tour from New York hip-hop superindie Definitive Jux could use a couple higher-profile names than it currently boasts. At a hometown launch last month, label star Aesop Rock put in a breathtaking appearance at the end of a marathon show; though his rapping was…

The two albums sturdily bearded Floridian film professor Sam Beam has released as Iron & Wine — 2002’s The Creek Drank the Cradle and the new Our Endless Numbered Days — are the kind perfect for putting on when you’ve just performed some sacred ancient ritual in the woods and…

“God bless this mess,” Khadijah Anwar proclaims at the top of Slicker’s We All Have a Plan, the third album by Chicagoan John Hughes III, a dude possibly better known for his ownership of Hefty Records (home of Telefon Tel Aviv and Prefuse 73 offshoot Savath & Savalas) than for…

Fans of the last several albums by Radiohead have been equally vocal in their praise of Thom Yorke’s songs and their admiration of the relatively abstruse sounds that have surrounded and sometimes enveloped them. Indeed, by the hyperbolic standards of select Kid A reviews, you’d think folks would be just…

Give English post-Radiohead band Elbow one thing — it succeeded in picking a name as unashamedly average as the music that’s filled the vacuum Thom Yorke and his mates created in U.K. guitar rock when they stopped playing guitars. (What, Coldplay was already taken? Oh, right.). Asleep in the Back,…

Extravagantly gruff-voiced Mississippi rapper David Banner loves the motherfucking shit out of cursing. On Mississippi: The Album, the first of three CDs he released in 2003, his swearing took the form of a mad-as-hell Southerner unable to decide between succumbing to the virulent misogyny and violence swirling around him and…

“Here, put this on.” Nearly everyone you met in 2003 came with a personal soundtrack. From the little middle school “sevvie” in your car pool who carried a personal mix CD in her backpack to the businessman in front of you at the ATM playing Dido just a little too…

Contemporary R&B singers can be divided evenly into two camps: the style-over-substance troupe, who believe in futuristic production tricks and outré hairdos; and the neo-soul crew, who cling to classical vocal dexterity and the warm ooze of the Fender Rhodes electric piano. Alternately, you could divide the field another way…

As a friend said while we were driving through New Orleans’ French Quarter listening to the rock critic Tom Moon calmly declare on NPR that numero-uno Southern soul man Al Green’s new album I Can’t Stop is an improvement over his early-’70s classics: “Motherfucker, you did stop!” Certainly, he did…

There are certainly worse ways to end a long and fruitful career at a major record label than compiling 31 hard-to-find B-sides, outtakes and other rarities. But it’s hard to imagine Pearl Jam, whose decade-plus relationship with Epic Records ends with the release of this new double CD, choosing any…

Because he is (or, like, was) a Fugee, seems to genuinely believe in the future of our children and once cut a joint with multimedia titan The Rock, there’s a tendency to forgive Wyclef Jean for the more ill-advised extremes of his apparent mission to make music appealing to all…

Oh, Inverted World, the sly, tender 2001 debut by Albuquerque’s The Shins, fairly upended my historically indie-rocking world. Blame it on a stint at college radio, or two-sedan basement tours through the heartland, or too many damn Guided by Voices records, but shaggy-guys-with-guitars had all but ossified into hollow shtick…

Achtung, baby: I’m one of those soulless cranks who likes Liz Phair’s new record. A few weeks ago I argued elsewhere that the album’s four Matrix-produced songs “demonstrate how much room there is inside radio-pop sheen for actual emotional content” — particularly with regard to “the everyday compromises of single-momhood.”…

Savvy businessmen familiar with the truism that more songwriting and production credits yield a more robust payday, the rainmaking Neptunes have done the entire album thing a couple of times. They’ve stretched their brittle candy-funk over the frames of Kelis’ Kaleidoscope and Clipse’s Lord Willin’ and juiced the live-band crackle…

Where do aging pop-rockers with little cultural currency and a hankering for actual currency go when the major-label system fails them but selling CDs without the help of brick and mortar is still kind of complicated and stuff? They flock to them there indies, of course, where young acts with…

Sean “P. Diddy” Combs is many things to many people: shrewd record-industry mogul, sharp producer, shiny-suited bon vivant, inventor of the remix. Yet the CDs that bear his name suggest that, above all, Combs is a master of organization, of corralling the right people to the right location at the…

It’s a testament to the natural-born, arena-bred talents of Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn that no matter how many well-worn formal elements, humdrum lyrical bromides or suspect views on gender roles the pair pepper their popular brand of country music with, they nearly always end up producing some of Nashville’s…

Now that emo has proven itself capable of selling more records than can fit into the back of a van, major labels are stumbling over one another to sign up as many young acts as they can, gambling that a small but loyal audience in New Brunswick or Santa Cruz…

Tricky’s ascension to worldwide critical acclaim and not-unimpressive commercial prosperity was one of the more unlikely success stories of the 1990s, since for all it shared with the down-tempo chill-out fluff it’s inspired, Tricky’s music was the singularly difficult and complex product of a singularly difficult and complex mind. Maxinquaye…

I’ve got absolutely no problem with the Y2K-pop model of producer-as-star: Timbaland; the Neptunes; Jermaine Dupri; shit, Jerry Finn–these folks practically guarantee a good time, with high-level artistry an occasional fringe benefit and brand-name consistency a handy way to organize skipping around the radio dial. But the Matrix, as much…