-
6 days ago | 
shepherdexpress.com | Jon Gilbertson
Without background knowledge of the players, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow initially comes across as bucolically modest: 18 decidedly old-time songs played on banjo and fiddle and captured, along with chirping birds and outdoor breezes, with the simplicity of a field recording.
-
1 week ago | 
shepherdexpress.com | Jon Gilbertson
The roots of plants, from the lowliest weeds to the mightiest redwoods, are wrigglingly alive, and roots music should be just as alive and growing as plants are. Valerie June understands this, and on her fourth studio album, Owls, Omens, and Oracles, she continues to be a cultivator rather than a preservationist.
-
2 weeks ago | 
shepherdexpress.com | Jon Gilbertson
Brandi Carlile and (Sir) Elton John balance deference and challenge on Who Believes in Angels? This would be impressive for any two strong-willed musical collaborators, much less a highly lauded singer-songwriter who keeps increasing her stylistic range and an elder statesman of adult-contemporary pop.
-
3 weeks ago | 
shepherdexpress.com | Jon Gilbertson
The term “jazzy” can feel pejorative, especially when applied to successful female performers from Sade and Cassandra Wilson to Diana Krall and Norah Jones. When applied to a younger woman, it can feel even more so.
It doesn’t have to feel that way, though, as the above artistes have proven. Maya Deliliah, a 24-year-old English singer, songwriter, and guitarist, strides toward very strong if not incontrovertible proof on her debut full-length, The Long Way Round.
-
1 month ago | 
shepherdexpress.com | Jon Gilbertson
The fourth Japanese Breakfast album bears an artistically true title. Frontwoman and songwriter Michelle Zauner folds her indie-pop petals into protective desolation after the award nominations and commercial success of 2021’s Jubilee brought her blossoming into bright light and then withering under its glare.
-
1 month ago | 
shepherdexpress.com | Jon Gilbertson
American music and science fiction have combined very memorably: jazz explorer Herman Blount called himself Sun Ra and claimed to be from Saturn; Funkadelic’s members often portrayed themselves as Flash Gordon’s soul brothers and sisters; and didn’t Prince sometimes look and sound like a parallel-universe version of himself?
The rap collective Clipping.
-
1 month ago | 
shepherdexpress.com | Jon Gilbertson
In 2020, Bob Mould released his 14th solo album, Blue Hearts. He also, with the mammoth boxset Distortion, gave an overview of the rest of his solo career up until then, including his electronic projects and his fronting of the alt-rock band Sugar.
In 2025—a mere 37 years after he left Hüsker Dü, the punk- and alt-rock band that influenced and inspired, among others, Nirvana and Green Day—Mould reaffirms his late-career potency with his 15th solo album, Here We Go Crazy.
-
1 month ago | 
shepherdexpress.com | Jon Gilbertson
Montreal’s music scene apparently cherishes odd combinations and the oddballs who create them—the plastique funk of Chromeo, the incandescently human electronic pop of Majical Cloudz, the potentially infuriating indie-rock of Arcade Fire—and Yves Jarvis is experimental and different enough to belong among them.
On his newest long player, All Cylinders, Jarvis experiments with more conventional songwriting: hooks, choruses, brevity, prettiness.
-
2 months ago | 
shepherdexpress.com | Jon Gilbertson
With the Southern-rock band Drive-By Truckers undergoing considerable interior reassessment—on record with 2022’s Welcome 2 Club XIII and on tour with last year’s revisitation of the 2001 double-disc Southern Rock Opera—co-founder Patterson Hood is clearly in a pondering mood.
For Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams, his first new solo LP since 2012, Hood turns much of his gaze back and inward.
-
2 months ago | 
shepherdexpress.com | Jon Gilbertson
In the three years between Horsegirl’s first album, Versions of Modern Performance, and its second, Phonetics On and On, the indie-rock group’s members—drummer Gigi Reece and singers and guitarists Nora Cheng and Penelope Lowenstein—have shifted well into college age and moved from Chicago to New York City.
Those are not small changes, and a brief return to Chicago to record the second album is not a backward step, at least not with Cate Le Bon helming the production.
