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Stream of the Crop: 6 New Albums for Heavy Rotation 3/25
New albums from Mount Eerie, The Jesus & Mary Chain, and Craig Finn top this week's list.
A Crow Looked at Me[…] is an unmitigated and unflinching examination of grief and an unapologetic statement of anxiety for the future. It asks the hardest questions many of us will ever face and quietly, resolutely admits that there may be no satisfactory answer. For some, it will be a work of great recognition and understanding, a transmission from someone who has stared into the same broken mirror and come back to talk about it; for others, it is a necessary lesson in empathy, a chance to understand pain that seems beyond our relatively innocent imagination.
Grayson Haver Currin, A Conversation with Mount Eerie's Phil Elverum on His Devastating New Album
Remarkably, they've managed to preserve a lot of what made them cool in the first place. Yes, they're now a lot older—pushing 60, in fact—and they no longer generate the ear-bleeding feedback of the Psychocandy days, incite riots at their gigs, stir up controversy (there is a lyric about killing Kurt Cobain, but even Courtney Love will likely keep her response to an eye-roll emoji), but Jim and William Reid still sound, look, and write songs better than most of your favorite old indie bands that have reunited after 20 years. Fuck, they're better than most of your new favorite indie bands. All hail The Jesus & Mary Chain, forever kings of cool.
Cam Lindsay, The Jesus & Mary Chain Are Forever Kings of Cool
Finn's Americans are beyond politics. Barflies and hopheads, petty criminals unlikely to kill or maim, working stiffs with a hustle on the side, fuckups milking disability checks and insurance settlements, the musical lifers who bleed into all these categories—none of them are kids anymore, and of course, neither is Finn. My personal interest in this demographic has never been all that personal and continues to wane—I wish a few of his antiheroes had kids. But he sure can sing a sad story if you call that singing. And there's no denying the wah-wah hook of the opener, the musicality of the spoken-word "God in Chicago," the unrequited love at first sight of "It Hits When It Hits," or the secret love of "Rescue Blues."
Robert Christgau, Expert Witness
Raekwon is one of the few older rappers who sounds just as sharp as if not sharper than he did 20 or 25 years ago, and he's one of the only people alive who can pull off a series of rhymes with the word "Schenectady" and not sound like a dick.
Kyle Kramer, A Year of Lil Wayne, Day 185