Blues harp maestro James Cotton was 77 at the time of this album's release. He can barely sing anymore, and the years of playing and touring have left his voice a hoarse croak, but make no mistake, he can still play the harp, and his stunning, overdriven blasts on the instrument are as powerful and as immediate as ever. He's the living embodiment of the Chicago blues, and one of the genre's last surviving founders of it, having mentored with the great Sonny Boy Williamson, and he recorded, played, and toured with Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters, cutting his first sides at the age of 19 for Chess Records. He's done this a long time, and as this delightful, joyous, stomping, and vibrant set shows, he doesn't need to sing to command the stage. . . . . Cotton may be cruising in on 80 years of age, but he's just released one of the best albums of his career. -- 4 of 5 stars AllMusic Guide
. . . Devotion -- an album of uncommon depth, a sophisticated but stimulating hybrid of pop, soul, and adult contemporary. . . . Ware's voice is an instant draw. Her whispers are as powerful as her wails. Whenever the lyrics read like they're aiming for the profound but appear hollow, she rescues them with elegance and power impressive enough to astound any of the elders to whom she has been compared -- Alison Moyet, Annie Lennox, Sade Adu, and Lisa Stansfield included. . . . If this isn't the album of the year, it's at least the art-pop album of the year, or the neo-sophisti-pop album of the year . . . 4.5 of 5 stars AllMusic Guide
My one-sentence review of Eat Your Young is "the soundtrack to an astral projection over a syncopated beat." But Eat Your Young is more complex than that. Eat Your Young is art. Art is subjective and personal to the artists involved. Eat Your Young is also the headphone record of the year! Throw on the headphones and let the atmospheric waves wash over you. It may be the best way to get an accurate feel for the complexity within. The little nuances and gentle effects - the layers upon layers of harmonies and lush instrumentation - are brushstrokes that can only be fully realized when you're enveloped in the album's sound. . . . Eat Your Young begins with delicate strings and raw vocals and ends in a burning, screaming crescendo that feels like a near death experience. Within the album's ten tracks, you'll hear the best work of Solid Gold's career thus far, steeped in atmospheric syncopation, harmonies, dancefloor burners and moodiness. -- Barb Abney, The Current
Spawned from some of the Twin Cities' seminal modern-rock groups of the 70s, 80s and 90s, The Badinovs have transformed a lifetime of love of music into an amalgam of the boundless inventiveness of Beatles-like pop mixed with modern, passionate, intelligent indie-rock. Their sound spans the sound of both sides of the Atlantic: from harmonious to raw, radiant to intense, and tender to jagged. . . . The Badinovs like to walk the tight-rope act of writing and performing complex, clever pop-rock that is equally catchy, lyrically captivating and fun. . . . -- ReverbNation
Known mostly via the Brothers Johnson's smash version of his psychedelic-soul fantasia "Strawberry Letter 23," R&B renegade Shuggie Otis recorded with heavyweights like Frank Zappa as a teen but fell out of favor with the music industry by his early twenties. This reissue pairs his metaphysically funky 1974 masterpiece, Inspiration Information, with a similarly spacey unreleased LP cut between 1975 and 2000 that positions this multi-instrumentalist as a missing link between Sly, Jimi, Stevie, Prince and Frank Ocean. Start with "Aht Uh Mi Hed," a beatbox symphony so uplifting you may feel your feet leaving the ground. -- 4 of 5 stars Rolling Stone
On Love Has Come for You, Martin's third album for Rounder Records, Brickell's lyrics bring those gracefully easy melodies to life, stretching them into likewise graceful songs with a sparse, whimsical, and artfully open-aired narrative style. Her singing sounds relaxed and unpressured, just like Martin's easy-rolling banjo lines, and the two of them together are no novelty act. . . . This is a sweet-sounding album with subtle depths, not really bluegrass, but a precisely gentle folk album that grows more graceful and revealing with each listen. -- 4 of 5 stars AllMusic Guide
. . . Beautifully and organically produced and engineered by Daptone co-founder Gabriel Roth, and completely self-written, Minute by Minute is Hunter's most consistent collection of songs. . . . Hunter digs deep into the fabric of each tune to wrench every ounce of meaning from it lyrically and emotionally. The smoky horn backings never overwhelm that voice but highlight its many nuances. . . . His intelligent lyrics and melodies inside the arrangements of these beautifully crafted songs underscore the integrity and passion in his trademark voice. This is inarguably his finest album. -- 4.5 of 5 stars AllMusic Guide
On first spin, most listeners won't be able to tell that gutsy soul singer Charles Bradley's Daptone debut wasn't recorded in the late '60s and dusted off for release in early 2011. Subsequent plays reveal subtleties in production and instrumentation that might tip off some, but for the rest, this is a remarkable reproduction of the sound of classic Southern soul. Its combination of Stax and Muscle Shoals grease and grit are captured in what can only be called "the Daptone sound." Horns, percussion, background vocals, vibraphone, and rhythm guitar form a cozy, often sizzling blanket that Bradley wraps himself in. His grainy, lived-in vocals are straight out of the James Brown/Wilson Pickett school; comfortable with both the gospel yearning of slower ballads but ready to make the leap to shouting, searing intensity without warning. The yin-yang between Bradley and his players would be impressive even if the material wasn't as top-shelf as these dozen songs are. All three working in tandem yield a perfect storm of an R&B album, one with clear antecedents to the genre's roots with new songs that are as powerful and moving as tunes from the music's classic era. . . . Even if the concepts appear shopworn, the music and performances are vibrant and alive with arrangements that are innovative yet informed by their roots. Retro-soul aficionados who claim they don't make 'em like they used to will obviously be thrilled with this, but even contemporary R&B fans can't help but be moved by the emotion and passion evident in every note of this riveting set. -- 4 of 5 stars AllMusic Guide
Born in northern Niger, Bombino is an ethnic Tuareg, a nomadic tribe spread out across the Sahara Desert, and if he inherited a steady urge for going, it shows in his guitar playing, which is informed by the fluid, melodic, and graceful style of so many great African guitarists. But he's also listened and studied the playing of Jimi Hendrix and Mark Knopfler closely, and maybe a little of J.J. Cale . . . Bombino emerges as a sort of Dick Dale of the Sahara, with a guitar style that is uniquely all his own. For this, his second album, Bombino traveled to Nashville to record with the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach, and the result is a marvelous set, full of grit and funky elegance, a kind of mesh of Tuareg rhythms with Deep South delta country trance blues, and psychedelic, too, as if Jimi Hendrix and John Lee Hooker somehow got spliced together. It's a wonderful listen from start to finish, with heavily echoed vocals, and layers of snaky, sinewy guitar lines that build and weave, separate and expand as each track goes on, until everything seems to burst transformed into the immense sonic space of an ocean, or a desert, for that matter. . . . -- 4.5 of 5 stars AllMusic Guide
An institution of slowcore, one of indie rock's more bittersweet subsets, Low began making huge and haunted sounds out of the most minimal means in the early '90s. The Invisible Way finds the trio 20 years into its craft and returning to parts of its roots while at the same time branching into new sounds. The most noticeable shifts in the band's sound come with the production of Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, working with the band for the first time here. While much of Low's work clung to a formula of reverb and echo that their earliest records took to extremes, the 11 songs here are roomy but not obscured by cavernous sounds. . . . With its brilliant production values and carefully curated arrangements, The Invisible Way shows a band decades into making music but still in a very real state of evolution. . . . Low give us a definitive chapter for where they are presently, and present it with more clarity and joy than we've heard from them in some time. -- 4 of 5 stars AllMusic Guide
The self-titled Wolf Lords release is essentially the third album in Wolf's career, following her 2009 folk-pop debut, Sweet Prudence, and her 2012 avant-pop follow-up album as A. Wolf and Her Claws with her new band of the same name. In this latest development, we see Wolf in a role she knows quite well - fierce frontwoman with razor-blade vocals - and [Grant] Cutler settling comfortably into the background as producer. The notable difference this time around, for both artists, is that it seems the two have finally found their sweet spot. . . . there is no mistaking what sort of album it is: sexy, synthed-out electro-pop. The end product meshes early-'90s Sade and Beach House, with an added measure of R&B beats. At a time when electronic music is either really, really bad or really, really good, it's a relief to have Wolf Lords contributing to the latter. . . . As Wolf Lords floats atmospherically past, Wolf's dynamic vocals recreate those emotional experiences with a wisdom that's as catchy as it is true. It's the kind of thing that sounds good in almost any context, from earbuds to car stereos to expensive speakers. Wolf Lords might be the accidental end product of a partnership that's been long in the making, but when all is said and done, it's been well worth the wait. -- City Pages
A play on German anatomist/surgeon Julius Wolff's theory that a human or animal's bones will adapt to the stresses imposed upon them, Wolf's Law, the second studio album from The Joy Formidable, finds the Welsh trio building upon its already gargantuan sound with remarkable aplomb. . . . With arena-sized scope and meticulous attention to detail, the band works with a larger arsenal on Wolf's Law, which pairs all three members' well-honed weapons of choice with a full-on string section, most effective on stunning opening cut "This Ladder Is Ours" and epic closer "The Turnaround" . . . 4 of 5 stars AllMusic Guide