KT Tunstall turned heads in 2004 with just the power of her voice and her guitar, but the intervening years have found her showing little interest in being just another worked-up folkie. On her third album, Tiger Suit, she leavens sleek pop songs with her warm-whiskey rasp, clawing against the …
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What'd you expect, "Folsom Prison Blues"? Lil Wayne has released his eighth studio album while still incarcerated on New York's Rikers Island, serving the final weeks of a sentence for attempted criminal possession of a weapon. But gritty jailhouse music this ain't. I Am Not a Human Being, which Wayne …
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Bob Dylan wrote most of Desire with a playwright, but collaborations between musicians and literary figures are usually pretty painful. This one isn't without promise: Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity is a music-geek classic, and Ben Folds is great at turning wordy lyrics into crafty pop. But formal knowledge works …
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Eric Clapton basically makes two kinds of solo albums. There are his escapes from the strict letter and law of electric blues: the brisk white soul of 1970's Eric Clapton; the cruising-speed funk and reggae on 1974's 461 Ocean Boulevard; the 1992 smash Unplugged. Then there are the homecomings, like …
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The album title cuts to the chase. Like all good DJs, Mark Ronson is first and foremost a collector, the kind of guy with untold 45s lining his loft. In his production work for Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse, he proved to be one of music's wonkiest wonks, bringing encyclopedic …
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