rolling really good music reviews (not necessarily positive)

haha yeah

Mark Richardson is still a v good writer

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-war-on-drugs-a-deeper-understanding/

So yes, Springsteen, Dylan, Tom Petty, and Neil Young all made songs between 1983 and 1988 that sounded something like the War on Drugs, but they often had these booming gated drums, a technique Granduciel mostly avoids. Instead, he favors a steady, muted pulse evocative of krautrock’s motorik groove. The arrangement of “In Chains” hums and explodes but the drums plow ahead with barely a fill or an accent, precisely marking the passing time. The approach to rhythm highlights the glide of the arrangement, creating a long rope of sound bound together so tightly it could never be pulled apart.

here's a good one from John Bush at Allmusic:

In 1962, flush with the success of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Ray Charles signed one of his favorite singers, Little Jimmy Scott, to his Tangerine label with the purpose of supervising an album of ballads. He hired a pair of genial arrangers, Gerald Wilson and Marty Paich (both of whom had recently written charts for Charles), and requested them to aim for the soft strings and muted horns of classic Frank Sinatra performances recorded with ballad masters Axel Stordahl or Gordon Jenkins. With Charles himself offering sensitive interplay on his piano, Falling in Love Is Wonderful is Scott's best single LP -- charming in its earnest feeling, deeply pained as a set of torch songs -- and ranks with his "Everybody Plays the Fool" single as the best work of his career. Nothing here gets in the way of Scott's pure, angelic voice; he captures, like none other than Sinatra himself, a range of love-struck emotions, from the sheepish depression of "Why Try to Change Me" to the restrained hopefulness of "Someone to Watch Over Me." He's in the best voice of his career, holding his tight vibrato perfectly for as long as needed and making either his high or low register sound like the only natural choice on every occasion. In one of the great tragedies of recorded music, however, his former boss, Herman Lubinsky of Savoy, claimed that he still owned Scott's contract, and under threat of legal suit, the record was removed from the shelves less than a month after release. A prime collector's item for over 40 years, Falling in Love Is Wonderful finally earned a limited re-release in 2003 thanks to the boutique label Rhino Handmade.

old but gold, as they say