Beyoncé and Wet Leg top Ken Tucker's round-up of 2022's best music

Beyoncé's album Renaissance celebrates disco rhythms and club culture, while the self-titled album by the Isle of Wight duo Wet Leg features intense, punk-influenced pop.

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'Emerald City Nights' revisits jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal in a series from the 1960s

When Jamal's trios visited Penthouse jazz club in Seattle in the '60s, they came to play. Now 92, the pianist has signed off on the release of a new series of live recordings from back in the day.

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With a bold debut album, Julia Bullock curates an unconventional career

The velvet-voiced soprano with a career on the rise chooses her projects, and the music on her debut solo album, with consummate intention.

(Image credit: Grant Legan/Nonesuch Records)

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These three new songs will help you grapple with romances of the past

After a decade, Caitlin Rose is "Getting It Right." Weyes Blood's "It's Not Just Me, It's Everybody" is an ethereal ballad. And Carly Rae Jepsen and Rufus Wainwright duet in "The Loneliest Time."

* This article was originally published here

Wizkid's 'More Love, Less Ego' is so relaxed it's nearly static

The Nigerian singer is among the biggest stars of a generation. Though pleasant, his new album refuses to keep pace with a rapidly evolving genre.

(Image credit: Fawaz Ibrahim)

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SAULT's 5-album drop deepens its long-standing communal values

The collective's new music — Today & Tomorrow, AIIR, Earth, 11 and Untitled (God) — suggests divinity void of control or coercion, in order to contemplate our common human needs.

(Image credit: Courtesy of the Artist)

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The personal apocalypse of Weyes Blood's 'And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow'

The singer-songwriter's fifth album is an ecosystem of intimacy, in its power to redeem and to destroy.

(Image credit: Neil Krug)

* This article was originally published here

SAULT's five-album drop deepens its long-standing communal values

The collective's new music — Today & Tomorrow, AIIR, Earth, 11 and Untitled (God) — suggests divinity void of control or coercion, in order to contemplate our common human needs.

(Image credit: Courtesy of the Artist)

* This article was originally published here

Album Review: 'Tu Historia' by Julieta Venegas

Julieta Venegas, a legend of Latin American pop music, released her first album in seven years, called "Tu Historia."

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GloRilla is finding her voice

Though it feels like a mere sample of what's to come, the Memphis rapper's new EP presents her as a singular talent using her instrument as a megaphone for provocation and inspiration.

(Image credit: Courtesy of the Artist)

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'Revival' captures drummer Elvin Jones as a nascent bandleader finding his voice

A previously unreleased live recording from 1967 finds the iconic jazz drummer experimenting outside the spotlight in a small New York club, assessing his next steps at a pivotal moment in his career.

(Image credit: Francis Wolff/Courtesy of Blue Note Records)

* This article was originally published here

In the devastation of climate change, Daniel Bachman captures what's left behind

In field recordings and fingerstyle guitar, Bachman's diaristic Almanac Behind documents cataclysmic weather as it becomes a larger part of our lives.

(Image credit: Aldona Dye/Courtesy of the artist)

* This article was originally published here

There's still no one like Santigold

On the startlingly direct Spirituals, and in headline-grabbing rebukes of music's trickle-down economy, Santi White is what she's always been: a forward-thinking alternative to pop's here and now.

(Image credit: Frank Ockenfels/Courtesy of the artist)

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Drake and 21 Savage are sore winners on 'Her Loss'

The duo trades threats and out-of-pocket disses of virtually everyone they've ever encountered on a new album. It's ugly, but it mostly works as a more targeted, focused version of Drake's whole deal.

(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist)

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'Wakanda Forever' hopes to replicate the success of 'Black Panther'

The sequel to the Marvel film Black Panther is in wide release this weekend. Wakanda Forever directly addresses the death of the character played by the late Chadwick Boseman.

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How country music allowed Jerry Lee Lewis to vary his wild-man persona

Lewis came up in rock, but proved his country chops on the 1968 album Another Place, Another Time. The music suited his piano style, and the lyrics fit the emotions he brought to every performance.

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Jazz trio Thumbscrew celebrates 10 years together on 'Multicolored Midnight'

From the beginning, Thumbscrew has had a thing for off-kilter rhythms and shifting accents. This new album is filled with idiosyncratic tunes — music befitting of the idiosyncratic band.

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Taylor Swift's 'Midnights' mixes late-night dreaminess with steely control

Swift's new album, which chronicles 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout her life, includes a bracing amount of clear-headed thoughts about love and life as a pop star.

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Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn find solace in color and motion on 'Pigments'

Pigments comes to terms with the aches that make us human and asks listeners to act in accordance with their bodies' instinctive reactions to change, fear, doubt and love.

(Image credit: Clifford Usher)

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MAVI's clearheaded songs of endurance

The Charlotte rapper's new album, Laughing so Hard, it Hurts, is more direct in thought and intention than his debut, more open and vulnerable, letting his observations guide his insights.

(Image credit: Wyeth Collins)

* This article was originally published here

On 'Blue Rev,' Alvvays finds euphoria in noise

The third album from the Canadian noise pop purveyors feels like a conversation between clarity and cacophony, creating an exhilarating tension.

(Image credit: Eleanor Petry/Courtesy of the artist)

* This article was originally published here

'The Loneliest Time' showcases Carly Rae Jepsen's versatility

Singer Carly Rae Jepsen has just released her latest album, The Loneliest Time.

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On 'It's Only Me,' stardom makes Lil Baby more anonymous than ever

The newly minted A-list rapper variously calls himself a legend, a hero and a boss on the album, but the songs never embrace that mythmaking or mold those labels into personas.

(Image credit: Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Coachella)

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In the haze of 'Midnights,' Taylor Swift softens into an expanded sound

On Swift's 10th and most challenging album, she and producer Jack Antonoff push her voice in new directions, rethinking the sonic rhetoric of first-person storytelling and shaking off old habits.

(Image credit: Beth Garrabrant/Courtesy of the artist)

* This article was originally published here

Saxophonist Bobby Watson brings the sparks on 'Back Home in Kansas City'

After decades in New York, Watson has returned to Kansas City. The core KC jazz values — a swinging beat, a personal style, and an earthy, bluesy sensibility — are firmly in place on this new album.

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Singer-songwriter Ashley McBryde gives voice to an imaginary town on 'Lindeville'

McBryde mixes passionate music with novelistic details on a concept album about the inhabitants of a small rural town, named after the songwriter Dennis Linde.

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Katie Crutchfield and Jess Williamson tell their truth plainly

Plains' I Walked With You A Ways, the collaborative debut from the Waxahatchee singer-songwriter and Williamson, combines wry wisdom with a classic country sound.

(Image credit: Miolly Matalon/Courtesy of the artist)

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Confronted with life's fragility, Wild Pink finds sanctity in stillness

The band's new album, ILYSM — made in the midst of cancer diagnosis — shares much with the genre of slow cinema: It asks the listener to lean in, pay attention and find providence in small details.

(Image credit: Mitchell Wojcik/Courtesy of the artist)

* This article was originally published here

'Searching in Grenoble' showcases the unique style of jazz pianist Mal Waldron

Nobody sounds like Waldron, a fact proved by a new 2-CD recording the artist made during a 1978 solo concert. Searching in Grenoble is a good introduction to the pianist's compelling sound.

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With '$oul $old $eparately,' Freddie Gibbs cashes in on his cachet

Forget what F. Scott Fitzgerald said about American lives and second acts, Gibbs is on his third or fourth. $$$ is a rewarding listen that sometimes labors under the weight of a forced progression.

(Image credit: Nick Walker)

* This article was originally published here

Fungi served as Bjork's latest muse in her new album, 'Fossora'

Bjork's Fossora peers down into the soil, in a love letter to fungi. "Bubbly and fun" is how she describes her new album.

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Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 'Cool It Down' is an exhilarating yet unhurried return

The band's first new record in nine years confronts environmental ruin and pandemic-era isolation, but ends at a vantage of hope — one that sounds like it took all the intervening time to reach.

(Image credit: Jason Al-Taan/Courtesy of the artist)

* This article was originally published here