Lana Del Rey – Born to Die
Will we ever be able to judge Lana Del Rey’s music by its own merit and leave behind any persistent thoughts of her mysterious/so-called calculated rise to popularity and Saturday Night Live performances that caused the Internet to explode a couple weeks back? Who knows — the dust has yet to settle ahead of the release of the 25-year-old’s debut Born To Die tomorrow. Most of the reviews of the album range from cautious or skeptical to downright scathing. Head below to see our roundup of what the critics have to say about Del Rey’s first big outing as a pop star. Read the full Meta Review on Idolator

Leonard Cohen – Old Ideas
While Cohen’s always played on the insistence of mortality, the album tremors with a sense of finality that leaves one to wonder whether this is the last batch of Cohen originals. This is certainly at least partially due to the assumption that he can’t keep doing this forever, but songs like “Amen” (which visually strikes like a conclusion to the grandeur of “Hallelujah”) with its graveyard horn solo and talk of the Lord’s vengeance strike that note too strongly to ignore. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

Gotye – Making Mirrors
with his newest release, Making Mirrors, Gotye has figured out how to remain sonically voracious while still giving his listeners a sturdy foothold. He finds room here for psych-rock, soul, earnest balladeering, creepy retro-futurism, electronic and Tropicalia touches, and, yes, scads of serious-minded 1980s pop. It’s in that last category that most of album’s best moments reside. Without ever settling in one spot too slavishly or lengthily to come off like a mere imitator, Gotye deploys his sincere, powerfully expressive voice (under-utilized on Like Drawing Blood) in evoking those bombastic 80s pop architects[...] Read the full review on pitckfork

Ani DiFranco – Which Side Are You On?
DiFranco will not be everyone’s cup of tea, and she seems to understand and accept that the audience she has gathered before her is the one who will still be there for the end of the show. “Amendment” is an angry, righteous sputter. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had an amendment to give civil rights to women?” she asks, then answers herself sardonically: “that’s just redundant. Chicks got it good now; they can almost be President.” On the brooding, Nick Drake-like “Zoo,” which closes out the set, DiFranco seems to startle herself with new insights. “I think I’m what they call sensitive and easily thrown off my game,” she acknowledges, almost apologetically explaining that she can’t keep up with television because “all that shit and pettiness just makes me feel drained,” finally adding that she walks “past all my old self-loathing like I walk past animals in the zoo, trying not to really see them in a prison they didn’t choose.” Read the full review on SoundSpike

Skrillex – Bangarang
Skrillex is back with his third EP (I don’t count More Monsters and Sprites, it was just remixes ), and without a doubt, he brought his A game. It’s a seven track EP, each stuffed to the gills with pure Skrillex amazingness. Sonny Moore’s production is utterly unique; a totally distinctive style that occasionally avoids transitions altogether, preferring to just smack you in the face with his instantly recognizable distorted wobble bass. Read the full review on Salacious Sounds

Chimes of Freedom – The Songs of Bob Dylan
he music of Dylan and Guthrie has been used prominently in “Occupy” protests across this country and at game-changing political uprisings in other countries. And these projects surrounding their work come just in time for what looks to be an exceptionally volatile presidential election year, one that comes on the heels of last year’s Arab Spring protests that toppled long-entrenched repressive governments in several countries and helped foment myriad “Occupy” demonstrations in the U.S. and abroad.

Plus, both the Guthrie and Dylan projects tap a broad swath of artists from the pop music world, efforts that will likely draw attention across disparate genres, social and economic strata, gender, race and geographical boundaries.

The pairing of artist and beneficiary for the “Chimes of Freedom” project is a natural: Dylan released his first album in 1962, a short time after Amnesty began lobbying on behalf of prisoners of conscience. Both were informed by the conflicts between forces of totalitarianism and freedom during World War II and the consequent politics of the Cold War. Both found inspiration and validation in the politically minded music of Guthrie as well as that of Seeger, the Weavers and other folk revivalists who came to the fore in the ‘50s. Read the full review on The Boston Herald

The Black Keys – El Camino
In his review of The Black Keys’ sold-out Minneapolis show in support of Brothers, Star Tribune writer Chris Riemenschneider commented, “The set they did play was tight, masterfully executed and had zero filler. Is 85 minutes of perfection better than two hours of varying quality?” El Camino, The Black Keys’ seventh studio album, answers that question with slightly less than 40 minutes of blistering affirmation. With producer Brian Burton’s featherweight, yet telltale, touches, vocalist and guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney have polished each track to the high standards of “Tighten Up”. Recorded almost immediately after the aforementioned Brothers tour, El Camino distills its predecessor’s high-octane fumes and high-profile influences into very nearly the Platonic ideal of rock and roll. Like the wood-paneled minivan that adorns the album cover, each track is big, brash, and classic. El Camino reminds The Black Keys’ audience that they deserve that extra five minutes to themselves because not a bar, verse, or lyric is wasted: They are all, in fact, “masterfully executed.” Read the full review on consequence of Sound

Amy Winehouse – Lioness: Hidden Treasures
The album opens with Winehouse’s 2002 reggae-tinged version of Ruby & The Romantics‘ 1963 hit “Our Day Will Comes,” and with good reason. It’s the track where Winehouse sounds most coherent. It’s a lively, jaunty remake that showcases Winehouse’s love and connection to the singers from the ‘50s and ‘60s and her uncanny intuitiveness when it comes to capturing the sassiness and longing so prevalent in the female pioneers. Read the full review on Hitfix

The Roots – Undun
The Roots’ latest studio album is an artful melding of experimental jazz, ’70s R&B, guitar rock flourishes, wall-shattering beats and rhymes that take a scalpel to the existential angst of the hip-hop generation. It’s both bleak and unexpectedly beautiful. Read the full review on LA Times

Sigur Ros – Inni
Inni attaches real people to this totemic image: At the heart of it all, it’s four guys playing music and singing, with all their naked humanity on full aural display. And that, for me, is the one downside to this live album. Ironically, it’s also the best thing about it. Inni brings Sigur Rós and their music down from Olympus; it reminds us that they are mere mortals after all. Towards the end of the album, the band does provide a few “seeing God” moments of apotheosis, complete with the crescendo and climax that form the essential component of their best songs, restoring them to demigod status. “Festival”, the centerpiece of their most recent album, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, rears its fire-breathing head even more fully with Dýrason’s frenetic drumming in full force. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

Childish Gambino – Camp
If you have only enjoyed “Heartbeat,” the LP’s first single, get the whole album. Because although it’s one of the album’s strongest tracks, there are better displays of Gambino’s talent on “Camp.”

The single’s catharsis is matched and exceeded in the album opener “Outside,” which uses stadium-sized posturing in production to showcase self-consciousness, regretful notions about death, heavy nostalgia. If this sounds like familiar – like Kanye, for instance – then you’re only partly right, because although he nods toward his contemporaries, Gambino does his own thing. Read the Full review on Death and Taxes Magazine

Tegan and Sara – Get Along
Sara Quin, one-half of the Canadian duo, said she hopes the intimate look into their lives will show the world there is a low-key side to their quirky personas.

“We’re just normal people and I didn’t want it to be too over-the-top funny, or too over-the-top rockstar-y. I just wanted it to be normal, middle-of-the-road,” Quin deadpanned in an interview with Wired.com. “We should’ve put that on the package: ‘Middle of the road. Not very funny. Not very intense.’” Read the full (sorta) review on Wired

The Beach Boys – Smile Sessions
But part of the allure of SMiLE will always be the pieces, and the deluxe box has a lot of them. There’s almost a full disc of “Heroes and Villains” fragments and another entire CD with bits of “Good Vibrations”. Given the nature of this release, the extras are illuminating, arguably more essential than most outtakes included with bonus albums. Having source materials hints at roads not taken, and also offers insight into the difficulty of actually creating a record on this scale, given how much we’ve heard about all the bouncing and layering that SMiLE entailed (the complexity of which is partly to blame for the project’s being late and ultimately abandoned) and how many of the basic tracks were recorded live in the studio with a dozen or more musicians at once. There were only four and eight tracks to work with on the tape of the time, so one of them would need multiple instruments just to have voices and overdubs added later. Read The Full Review on Pitchfork

Atlas Sound – Parallax
There’s a couple ways to approach Parallax, the latest and greatest heart-pouring from Bradford Cox’s home-recording project Atlas Sound. The first is without the context of who Bradford Cox is, without knowing he is diagnosed with Marfan syndrome, without knowing he’s disseminated hundreds of songs on his blog, without knowing his role as frontman of the far more accessible psych-rock group Deerhunter, without a bead on his mercurial, tortured, and aching lyrics of past projects, and without a sense that Cox is becoming the premiere artist who combines his self and his music to create an unparalleled artistic symbiosis. Without that context, Atlas Sound can feel insular and difficult to penetrate. Read The Full Review on Consequence of Sound

Youth Lagoon – The Year of Hibernation
I guess what is so appealing, to me at least, about Trevor Powers and his Youth Lagoon project, is how believable it all is. This is just some fucking kid from Idaho (much like Arrange is just some fucking kid from Florida). And I don’t mean that in any derogatory way whatsoever, despite my callous and idiotic usage of the F-word. What I mean is that when you listen to the far-off then jittery electro treat “Posters,” and hear lines like, “When I was nine years old / I had a poster…/ I knew what I wanted to be / Never was the same,” it’s trite and childlike and not all that complex. Sure. What it is, in fact, is everything we wish we could say. But instead we spend too much time obsessing over what our words might be perceived to mean; Powers connects because he isn’t trying to. I’m speaking for him like a dickhead, but The Year of Hibernation would be just as successful if nobody ever heard it. At least for him. Read the full review on Absolute Punk

Lou Reed & Metallica – Lulu

Lulu was first previewed with an especially repellent 30-second tract of “The View” that confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions of the project– namely, that Reed’s crotchety, atonal poem-rants would be wholly incompatible with Metallica’s fidgety riffage. The clip’s most prominent lyric (“Throw it away/ For worship someone who actively despises you!”) seemed to mock both artists’ most forgiving fans for even clicking on the link. By the time “The View” was released in its full, five-minute ghastliness– with Hetfield variously professing himself to be a table, a 10-story building and, possibly, the premier member of Philly hip-hop band the Roots– the Internet had all the evidence it needed to preemptively crown Lulu the Worst Album of All Time. – Read the full review on Pitchfork

The Decemberists – Long Live the King

A collection of outtakes from the King Is Dead sessions, Long Live The King finds inspiration in the Grateful Dead, whose gently rollicking “Row Jimmy” gets covered in spirited, surprisingly boozy fashion. Similarly, Long Live The King is a loose, almost ramshackle record; the songs, particularly the home-recorded demo “I 4 U & U 4 Me” are as catchy as ever, but they’re like snapshots of a band living in the moment, without regard for whether everything is falling exactly in the right place.  Read the the full review on AV Club

Florence + The Machine – Ceremonials

On her follow-up, “Ceremonials,” Welch has struck a fantastic and necessary balance. She’s found a way to honor her Bjorkian appetites for lavish orchestral spectacle while finding the depth and subtlety of her voice. She’s become a better actor, a keener listener and still manages to let it rip on occasion. But she also knows when to hush up, like at the close of “Spectrum,” when Tom Monger’s harp gorgeously flutters and dips around her. Read the full review on LA Times Blog

Tom Waits – Bad As Me
Tom Waits may pay the mortgage as a musician, but he clearly has the heart of a junkman. With Waits, you get the sense that nothing ever truly gets thrown away—maybe pushed deeper back or buried beneath but never completely discarded or forgotten. On Bad As Me, Waits’ first collection of entirely new material since 2004’s clanging, scraping Real Gone, the once inebriated lounge act turned beatboxing junkman picks through the scrap metal and tire piles of his nearly 40-year career and shows that a shine can be salvaged from even the rustiest pieces. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

Coldplay – Mylo Xyloto
After a short instrumental intro, Mylo kicks off with “Hurts Like Heaven,” a driving homage to LCD Soundsystem and a nice kick in the formula. (Coldplay’s members are expert formula-repeaters.) But from there, it’s a different recipe, with a series of songs that almost beg for a verse from Jigga. “Paradise” is the biggest, most obvious one, with its saccharine—but somehow acceptable—lyrics (“life goes on, it gets so heavy”) and loping breakbeat. If Martin hasn’t lined somebody up to throw down some rhymes on a remix, he’s missing out on some serious crossover potential. “Princess Of China” serves up a major player, though: Rihanna duets with Martin on a massive bit of pop-ready melancholia that should find a home on about six different radio formats. Read the full review at Chicago Sun Times

Bonnie Prince Billy – Wolfroy Goes To Town
Wolfroy Goes to Town is a hushed, hallowed, humble work; with a reverent air that borders on religious, and a congregation of backing singers —including the glorious warble of Chicago songsmith Angel Olsen— employed like choir to his preachin’. This suits a lyrical motif that is filled with references to the divine.

Early in 2011, the Bonnie “Prince” issued a seven-inch, “There Is No God” b/w “God Is Love,” which at the time seemed like a lark; especially given the giddy, drunk-country ramblin’ of the former jam, which found Oldham caroling “that which puts mouth on cock and vagina” with glee. Here, there’s the same lyrical predisposition —God that is, not genitalia— only delivered with far more gravity and grace.

Just as on Willy O’s first-ever album, the 1993 Palace Brothers LP There is No-One What Will Take Care of You, God is present, in some form, in every song; usually by name, often in spirit; a panoply of perceptions coloring an often-stark set of songs, God rendered various shades of loving, cruel, absent, omnipresent, bearded, feminine. Oldham explores notions of faith and religion, pitting belief in a deity against the way humans force their own narratives, their own agendas, onto some imagined man in the sky. “Good God guides us/Bad God leaves us,” he carols on opener “No Match,” and that mixture of sly humor and solemn profundity holds across the whole album.

As the songs roll out mournful and melancholy, Oldham still can shoehorn in the lyrically bizarre (like: “as boys, we fucked each other/as men, we lie and smile”; or: “fat men smiling, bearded men/with blue eyes shining, light within”), but they don’t play like jokes. The effect is sad, somehow; like back in that old Palace era, when a song called “You Have Cum In Your Hair and Your Dick Is Hanging Out” was so beautiful it could make you cry. Read the full review on AllMusic

M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
M83 have never stood for half measures in any aspect, but Gonzalez is absolutely going for it here in a way that sheds new light on known tricks: The hair-triggered drum rolls of “New Map” recall Before the Dawn’s searing car-crash fantasy “Don’t Save Us From the Flames”, but Gonzalez’s nervy punctuation at the end of each line sells the idea that he’s along for the ride this time rather than being a passive observer. Dead Cities’ “In Church” was the sound of blissful acquiescence, but amidst the swaggering synth-metal of “Midnight City”, Gonzalez hollers, “The city is my church!” empowered and present, finding a voice for the evangelical zeal always implicit in his work. Read the full review on Pitchfork

Real Estate – Days
In contrast with the self-titled album’s stoned, friendly vibes, Days simply exudes confidence. They’ve clearly stepped up their production values in every respect; this time around, Etienne Duguay’s drums don’t sound so smothered or submerged, Matthew Mondanile’s guitar glides through each track with a sense of reverberating nostalgia clearly influenced by his solo work as Duktails, Alex Bleeker plays base with steadier and simpler purpose, and Martin Courtney’s vocals are layered and harmonized with more care and complexity than they ever were before. Then there are the tinier details that get the opportunity to shine through, like the subtle bells on opener “Easy,” the soft backing keyboards on “It’s Real” and “Out of Tune,” and the distant tambourine-woodblock combo on “Kinder Blumen.” The fact that Real Estate would even choose to include these embellishments in the first place suggests a willingness to grow, while their restrained use reflects a band that doesn’t feel the need to prove their growth; as the saying goes, they show us that they’ve expanded their sound instead of just telling us. Read the full review on 130BPM

Class Actress – Rapprocher
Like most acts that attempt to reclaim glamorous early-‘80s New Wave, Class Actress lives in a completely different era. Like Neon Indian’s first album, the somewhat lo-fi production values and vintage instrumentation never get in the way of the songs, but instead manage to stand alongside them hand-in-hand. This has to do mostly with the fact that the songs themselves on Rapprocher are just infectiously catchy. Whether its the insatiable choruses of “Love Me Like You Used To” or “Weekend,” Class Actress clearly has little interest in the washed-out vocals and melodic inaccessibility of other lo-fi acts. Read the full review on Paste

Zola Jesus – Conatus
There has always been something almost subliminally idol-killing about the Zola Jesus project, and it really comes into focus here. Danilova’s childhood opera aspirations are subverted into something nearly opposite. Opera singing is narrative and flows smoothly from deep within. Danilova is more allusive and tortuous. Her voice keeps getting caught in her throat, where it’s stressed and twisted by transient emotional surges. Though the theatricality and the epic-pop trappings may evoke artists like Dead Can Dance, the vocals have the passion of blues singing. Danilova is equally iconoclastic when it comes to industrial influences like Throbbing Gristle, finding ways to make abrasion as musical as possible without sacrificing tension. Her touchstones have been digested into a personal style that is much more substance than reference. Read the full review on Pitchfork

Mastodon – The Hunter
The Hunter sees Mastodon taking a much more riff-heavy approach — shorter songs, more bombast — without compromising their epic feel. A purist raised on the literary universes encompassed on the band’s last three albums (Leviathan, 2004; Blood Mountain, 2006; and Crack the Skye, 2009) could pine for the 13-minute cosmic journey, but The Hunter is just as expansive as any of Mastodon’s earlier efforts, despite the lack of Hawkwind-style noodling. Having a pop radio producer at the helm seems not to have diminished the band’s determination to push boundaries, but rather to have made that desire more concise, more focused, and somehow more powerful. The shine given to The Hunter is definitely worthy of Warner Bros. (the parent of Reprise), and a measure of rock-radio friendliness hasn’t been a barrier to metal bands in the past. Read the full review on Tiny Mix Tapes

St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
Describing Annie Clark’s work as St. Vincent comes down to a toss-up between cinematic and clever. Both in the studio and in her videos, Clark is captivating, expansive, and yet undemanding. She slyly earns your attention with bombastic hooks, witty turns of phrase, or by mentoring a kid who just got a merit badge for “mind sandwich” (all done together in the video for “Jesus Saves, I Spend”), and then she reels you in further. She convinces you to take another step closer to the difficult subjects she intends to work out. Many were drawn in by the title track of her debut, Marry Me, for its cute power, the smoky vocals, the pretty girl singing directly to you with stark emotion. But what sticks in the end are her clever twists (“Let’s do what Mary and Joseph did… without the kid”) and the huge scope of such a simple song. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

Wilco – The Whole Love
“The Whole Love,” a 12-song effort that’s way more “Summerteeth” and “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” than more recent efforts: The band is having fun not only with sound but with structure, without sacrificing catchiness. Nearly every song contains some tangential surprise, odd hook, sonic back flip or midsong redefinition. The first single, “I Might,” sounds like ? and the Mysterians covering Radiohead and is the closest thing to a simple rock song on the record (rivaled by “Dawned on Me,” which suggests Electric Light Orchestra). “Sunloathe” is a surreal, psychedelic piano ballad carried forward by Kotche’s miscellaneous noise and layers of intricate countermelodies. “Standing O” sounds stolen from Elvis Costello’s “This Year’s Model.” Read the full review on LA Times

Nirvana – Nevermind (Deluxe Edition)
Twenty years later, here I sit swamped again in that riotous cataloguing of disaffection and narcissism, thanks to Nevermind’s big-event two-disc reissue. First comes the original album, at once unchanged and alien. The choruses strike me as ridiculously effective: pop sing-alongs hidden in the outsider sneer of punk. That radioactive pop core can’t be contained – not by dank effects, fragmented lyrics or even a mocking self-awareness about underground rock bands making major-label debuts. Butch Vig’s radio-glossed production has taken its share of lashes – and certainly the faint echo on Kurt Cobain’s voice during ‘Breed’ seems silly now – but he brings out the crossover potential of these songs even when they’re infected by groggy angst and vague sentiments. Like those loping verses and ravenous choruses, Vig’s pro sheen is a roadworthy vehicle for Cobain’s musing-venting-musing streaks. Read the full review on the Vine

Dum Dum Girls – Only In Dreams
Dum Dum Girls in particular had a way of reminding you that there was more to it than that. They had fun with irony; artifice; and winking, revisionist takes on musical history (Kristin Gundred’s Ramones-nodding stage name Dee Dee; Richard “My Boyfriend’s Back” Gottehrer’s co-producing credit on both full-lengths) that reminded you of the simple, triumphant facts: these women were all pretty excellent pop songwriters, and this thing they were part of was the most visible all-female front in indie rock since the riot grrrl movement in the early 1990s. Read the full review on Pitchfork