Much like the rugged, yet refined quality he brought to The Walkmen, Peter Matthew Bauer’s debut solo album has that sort of grit you want to plunge your hands into. Brushed drums and colorful spreads of reverb paint Liberation!, modestly complimenting trills of Petty-esque vocals. The lyricism, according to Bauer, aims to confront that paradox of finding light within seemingly endless darkness. While the album spawned from Bauer’s Hinduism and his childhood growing up in various ashrams, the spiritual influence on Liberation! is still rather light. A dash of otherworldly sounds give the otherwise good album that extra oomph on tracks like “Istanbul Field” and “Philadelphia Raga,” but the...

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The title of Sharon Van Etten’s fourth record is missing a critical punctuation mark on purpose. Are We There is the sound of an iterant career musician in the middle of an emotionally trying period. Thankfully, Van Etten’s introspective rock tunes are still sifted through the ’70s singer-songwriter roots of previous recordings. (Trivia note: Some of the instruments on this album were used by John Lennon and Patti Smith.) Are We There’s best track by a long shot is “Your Love Is Killing Me.” The raw-nerve lyrics are pretty clear-cut: “Break my leg so I can’t walk to you/Cut my tongue so I can’t talk to you/Burn my skin so I can’t feel you/Stab my eyes so I can’t see.” All the verbs...

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Swans are not a mainstream band; their music has only been heard by a minute percentage of the population. This is a travesty, for Swans are mind-blowing, and should surely be experienced at least by the number of people who are subjected to Nicki Minaj on a daily basis. To the uninitiated, the (currently) six-piece experimental New York–based noise-rock band can perhaps be broadly described as “a moody-voiced guy ominously droning/yelling over the sound of extremely loud, ambitious performance art. With explosions.” But Swans are also oh so much more. On their new opus, the over-two-hour-long To Be Kind, Michael Gira and his very serious men, with occasional support from a number of...

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It’s hard to listen to album opener “Show Me Love”—a haunting a cappella composition of morphed vocals and arching harmonies—without making a knee-jerk comparison to Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek,” but listen a bit more and you’ll forget about that overplayed and over-parodied song altogether. It functions like a lullaby that draws you, eyes glazed, into a dream of a record. The front half of The Moon Rang Like a Bell is a tapestry of complex percussion that resists locking into a solid rhythm (à la James Blake), ethereal synths reminiscent of Hail to the Thief’s sonic landscape, and singer Nicole Miglis’s delicate and fluttering yet forceful voice. The back end gets more accessible,...

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Props to Mastodon for deviating from the well-trod metal path of making every new album heavier than the last. Continuing down the road they embarked upon with 2011’s The Hunter, America’s most mainstream metal act has doubled down on melody, harmony and verse-chorus-verse, and crafted something of a sister album, albeit with less adventure. Every song on Mastodon’s sixth album cops at least a little from the band’s past material—sometimes a lot. And while Sun has a sinister tone à la Blood Mountain or Crack the Skye, it doesn’t take the risks that those masterpieces did. “High Road,” “The Motherload,” “Asleep in the Deep” and “Halloween” are keepers, but they don’t quite put Sun in the...

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