Album Reviews

This review was originally published in the April 17, 1980 issue of Rolling Stone. The other four New York Dolls usually looked like they’d been sentenced to be in the world’s weirdest band, but Sylvain Sylvain always seemed as if he were there by choice. He might have been you …

Paris Jackson spent the first half of her life hidden from public view. Until she was 11, her father, Michael, sheltered Jackson and her brothers, covering their faces with masks in public. After his sudden death, the superstar’s children were thrust suddenly into public life, even appearing on TV in …

“It’s hard to think clearly and then say what you mean,” Beach Bunny‘s Lili Trifilio sings on the band’s fantastic debut. It’s a line that’s striking in its innocent, unguarded honesty, just as the music is thrilling in its tuneful exuberance. Beach Bunny are four adorable Chicago emo kids in …

More than four decades after turning punk on its ear with their rumba rhythms, quirky melodies, and ridiculously short songs, Wire have slowly become their own brand of maximalists. Although the songs on their latest album, Mind Hive, aren’t symphonic, 45-minute “epics,” they uncoil with drones, quivering synths, and the …

Born Michael Peter Balzary, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist and spiritual adviser is the sort of rock star who begins his memoir, Acid for the Children, weeping at musical beauty in an Ethiopian church, blurting earnest declarations about his “endless search to merge with infinite spirit” and his surrendering …

Two and a half minutes of careening punk-metal bile, Binky Philips and the Planets’ “Splitsville for Bust” sounds like somethingthat could have been heard blaring out of a downtown New York club in the early Seventies. And there’s a reason for that: It’s a new and inordinately hooky rocker from …

“Be eternal.” That’s the advice Lizzo got from one of her first high-profile fans, Prince. And she lives up to the Purple One’s words on her legend-making Cuz I Love You, the breakthrough album where she finally claims her baby-I’m-a-star crown as a mega-pop queen. Melissa Jefferson can do it …