Mascis is the father unable to leave his child, Barlow is the returned prodigal son.

In Glendale is almost too earnest for its own good.

IV is a massive Western of a record, one that feels capable of anything.

This album is a projection on the wall of your psyche.

Small Black deviate little from their established template.

[xrr rating=4.0/5]As the principal architect and primary voice behind Bon Iver, Justin Vernon is rightly associated with the wintry, pastoral feel of their music. After all, the band’s lore originates from the self-imposed isolation Vernon subjected himself to following a breakup and illness, a seclusion that gave birth to his classic debut, For Emma, Forever Ago, not to mention Bon …

[xrr rating=4.0/5]The members of Viet Cong are working with a large shadow cast over them, even if they have smartly refused to acknowledge that fact. With one-half of the brilliant-yet-short-lived Women in their ranks, anything that Viet Cong does will inevitably draw comparisons to what was and what could have been. Viet Cong appear to not give a fuck about …

[xrr rating=2.25/5]First things first: this album is a mess. Foxygen’s newest release…And Star Power is a bloated, unwieldy, frequently incoherent mishmash; no one should be expected to sit through the 24 tracks (stretched out over 82 minutes) and think of it as anything but a slurry of half-baked ideas and abandoned musical concepts. But second things second: is it any …

[xrr rating=3.75/5]It’s not a secret that Sharon Van Etten has been done wrong. Tramp, her exceptional 2012 breakthrough, detailed the breakdown of a relationship that found Van Etten eventually fleeing Tennessee in the middle of the night. That record was about breaking up, escaping control and ultimately moving on, or at least trying to, conveyed through intimate confessions in a …

[xrr rating=3.25/5]Justin Vernon’s voice can be polarizing, but the meticulous crafting that has gone into his songs can’t be denied. Songs like “Perth” and “Holocene” were serene beauties. With Vernon’s bandmate Sean Carey releasing his second album, we can be sure that Carey’s hand was in some of the orchestrations on Bon Iver . Range of Light is an occasionally …