Alone with my headphones and immersed in experimental hip-hop veteran RJD2’s latest release, the eclectic and soulful odyssey Dame Fortune (RJ’s Electrical Connections), my mind drifted to photos I’d seen a few months earlier. The reverie occurred somewhere between track two, a two-and-a-half-minute burst of frenetic then gliding Afrobeat-inflected funk, and track three, a stirring and emotive soul cut featuring the vocalist Jordan Brown.

They …

Swans’ sprawling discography, spanning 1983 to present, is often assessed by epochs. Early Swans is sludgy and scary, a slow

Still Got That Hunger, the sixth studio release from The Zombies, marks the first time in nearly 50 years that the British invaders have cracked Billboard’s Top 100

Emerging from Los Angeles in the late ’70s, X, along with groups like The Gun Club and The Blasters, infused Americana into three-chord rock to create a unique country-punk hybrid. Steeped in an appreciation for poetry as well as folk music traditions, Exene Cervenka and fellow lyricist John Doe inverted the trope of a shiny, happy city of angels on their debut album, Los Angeles…