Nathaniel Bellows’ The Old Illusions casts this acclaimed poet and librettist in a singer-songwriter mode reminiscent of Greg Brown. His lush, warm baritone

Now in its 12th year, New York’s Winter Jazzfest has become one of the preeminent jazz events in the country. Spreading the fest’s events out over a

Top 10 Albums

10. Algiers, Algiers (Matador Records)
This Atlanta band starts with the dark gospel heart that’s always been the engine powering rock & roll and adds noisy, choked guitar and keys over layers and layers of raw percussion. The sparseness of these arrangements makes the intensity of the songs almost unbearable, but intoxicating at the same time. Algiers is a magical record with …

Matt Bauer’s Dream’s End arrives just in time to echo and contest the dying leaves and sense of promise in the autumn air. Throughout the album, the listener

Anna von Hausswolff’s The Miraculous is a sprawling, glittering marvel of texture and architecture. It’s a questing, yearning record of a sometimes quixotic

Austin’s current kings of neurotic bummer-punk have put out their most confident and cohesive record yet, Dopers. Trading in much of their earlier treble

Amy Bezunartea's New Villain is a promising album. It reveals a voice confident enough to pare down the instrumental backing to the bone

Hierophants' debut full length, Parallax Error views the future as shattered, reassembled remnants of the past—Ballard by way of The Fall viewed through

Black Trip’s second LP, Shadowline , bristles with retro-metal enthusiasm. The project of Peter Stjarnvind of Entombed (guitars) and Joseph Tholl of Enforcer

Poster, the fourth LP by Long Beach’s Tijuana Panthers, arrives still glistening with a patina of historical punk afterbirth. It’s easy to go through the record and