I first stumbled upon Youth Lagoon’s Wondrous Bughouse as a single, streaming, hour-long track. “Youth Lagoon must be jumping on the proverbial bandwagon of edginess with this album-song,” I thought, assuming that this time around, Trevor Powers (the young Idahoan behind Youth Lagoon) had decided to forgo individual tracks. I later discovered my error –…

Comparisons to Radiohead are inevitable when listening to “Amok,” the long-awaited debut album from Thom Yorke-fronted supergroup Atoms for Peace. They’re inevitable, and for that reason, justified. It’s impossible for Yorke’s solo work to step out of Radiohead’s monolithic shadow, but this is less a testament to our myopia than to the sheer scale of his…

  When The Strokes released the first song off their upcoming album, Comedown Machine, set for release in March, shocked fans wondered if the band had veered into…well, 80s pop territory, A-ha style.  In ‘One Way Trigger’, fast-paced keyboards underlie frontman Julian Casablancas’ straining falsetto as he shifts through inevitable but satisfying pop changes.  Some…

To some degree, anybody who’s going to buy this knows what to expect from having heard Dylan’s last few albums—Dylan growling gamely over clean, rootsy, impressively-played tracks. So the word on this album, other than “Dylan is old and his band is good,” is repetition. “Scarlet Town” repeats the same verse (24 seconds long) for 7…

On the new album Elysium, by the most cunning synth-pop group of the 80s, there is one great song: “Everything Means Something,” which boasts a taut, suspicious minor-key verse and a 12/8 chorus of pentatonic grandeur. So, does this album mean something? Unfortunately, beyond this one addictive track, the album’s a poor effort. Granted it…