Album Reviews

The first freestanding work for orchestra by film composer Danny Elfman has been recorded by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra with violinist Sandy Cameron.

Brightly inventive in the service of a dim mood, the songs on Beat Circus' 'These Wicked Things' smell of existential desperation. It's one of the cooler albums to cross my transom this year.

The noise and ache that stream through these songs recall the blues, and support literate and often poetic lyrics.

'Songs of Our Native Daughters' from Our Native Daughters is as rich and textured, and fraught with violence and emotional turmoil, as the history of Africans in the West.

8-Bit Heroes first album, 'Try Blowing In It', is pure pop punk alchemy that will make you feel better about contemporary music.

Inspired by California's giant sequoias, the new solo album from Jason and the Scorchers' Jason Ringenberg has its thumb on the pulses of our hurting planet and our aching human race.

The latest album from the celebrated English early music vocal ensemble Stile Antico, 'In a Strange Land: Elizabethan Composers in Exile,' is a beautiful sequence with works by John Dowland, William Byrd, and their contemporaries – and a decidedly melancholy affair.

This memorable set from Dizzy Gillespie's longtime drummer is one of the best small-group jazz albums of recent vintage, full of rhythmic play and meaty assertiveness with a Latin lilt.

If you pine for the heady days of Joni Mitchell and Poco, then Pale Mara should soothe your soul.

'Lake Placid Blue' is a gorgeously laid-back album with soft energy and grand lyricism.