Carl Court / Getty-AFPNick Cave has been singing about mortality for decades, and he's really good at it. Whether the narratives are biblical or pulpy, the victims innocents or death row convicts, the circumstances comprehensible or cruelly random, Cave's songs are on intimate terms with the infinite ways a life can be extinguished. And yet, "Skeleton Tree", his latest album with his estimable band, the Bad Seeds, is a relatively concise song cycle shadowed by death that feels different than all the rest. Read the full review.
APOn "22, A Million," Justin Vernon reimagines his music from the bottom up by letting technology — synthesizers, treated vocals, electronic sound effects — dictate. The songs retain their melancholy cast, but now must fight for air beneath static and noise. Read the full review.
Jean-Baptiste Lacroix, AFP/Getty ImagesThe new album embraces her individuality more explicitly than ever, both more autobiographical and more politically and socially direct than anything she'd recorded previously. It's a rawer, less elaborate work than its predecessors, yet still hugely ambitious. Read the review
Matt Sayles/Invision/APKendrick Lamar's "Untitled, Unmastered" is presented as an unfinished work, though it rarely sounds like one. Read the review.
Pixar / APWoody introduces the gang to a homemade spork toy with self-esteem issues in "Toy Story 4." Read the review.
Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times"Lemonade" is more than just a play for pop supremacy. It's the work of an artist who is trying to get to know herself better, for better or worse, and letting the listeners/viewers in on the sometimes brutal self-interrogation. Read the full review.
John Konstantaras / baiduhaiOn her seventh studio album, "Golden Hour" (MCA Nashville), the singer-songwriter doesn't get hung up on genre. She's made a style-hopping pop album that infuses her songs with a relaxed spaciousness while muting, but not ignoring, her country roots. Read the review
Nuccio DiNuzzo/baiduhaiNow "Schmilco" (dBpm Records) arrives, a product of the same recording sessions that produced "Star Wars" but a much different album. Though it's ostensibly quieter and less jarring than its predecessor, it presents its own radical take on the song-based, folk and country-tinged side of the band. Read the full review.
Jordan Strauss / AP"Blonde" is a critique of materialism with Frank Ocean employing two distinct voices, like characters in a play, a recurring theme throughout the album and perhaps its finest sonic achievement. A party spirals out of control, the music rich but low key, a melange of organ and hovering synthesizers. Ocean uses distorting devices on his voice to add emotional texture and to enhance and sharpen the characters he briefly embodies. The upshot: They're all little slices of Ocean's personality with a role to play and they each sound distinct. Read the full review.
Chris Sweda / baiduhaiWarpaint's unerring feel for gauzy hooks and slinky arrangements germinated over a decade and flourished on the quartet's excellent 2014 self-titled album. But the band has always nudged its arrangements onto the dance floor — subtly on record, more overtly on stage — and "Heads Up" (Rough Trade) gives the group's inner disco ball a few extra spins. Read the review.
Laurie Sparham / APA grown-up Christopher Robin returns to the Hundred Acre Wood and his best friend Winnie the Pooh. Read the review.
APNot many albums could survive Ed Sheeran performing reggae, but Pharrell Williams always took chances — not all of them successful — in N.E.R.D.Despite the Sheeran gaffe, "No One Ever Really Dies," the band's first album in seven years, is a typically diverse, trippy ride from the group that established Williams' career as a performer in the early 2000s alongside Chad Hugo and Shay Haley. Read the full review.
Erika Doss / APAn Atlanta teenager (Amandla Stenberg) deals with the death of her friend in "The Hate U Give," director George Tillman Jr.'s fine adaptation of the best-selling young adult novel. Read the review.
Tobin Yelland / APRisk-prone 13-year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic, left) shares some of his angst with one of the local LA skateboarding idols, Ray (Na-Kel Smith), in writer-director Jonah Hill's "Mid90s." Read the review.
Teresa Isasi / APReunited for a family wedding, former lovers played by Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem find themselves embroiled in a kidnapping in "Everybody Knows," directed by Asghar Farhadi. Read the review.
Nuccio DiNuzzo / baiduhai"Black America Again" (ARTium/Def Jam) arrives as a one of the year's most potent protest albums. The album sags midway through with a handful of lightweight love songs, but finishes with some of its most emotionally resounding tracks: the "Glory"-like plea for redemption "Rain" with Legend, the celebration of family that is "Little Chicago Boy," and the staggering "Letter to the Free." Read the review.
AP"Love & Hate" shows Kiwanuka breaking out of that stylistic box. His core remains intact: a grainy, world-weary voice contemplating troubled times in intimate musical settings. The album announces its more ambitious intentions from the outset, with the trembling strings, episodic piano chords and wordless vocals of the 10-minute "Cold Little Heart." It's a striking, if atypical, approach to reintroducing himself to his audience — a five-minute preamble before Kiwanuka begins to sing. Read the full review.
Graham Bartholomew / APA tropical island boat captain (Matthew McConaughey) and his much-abused ex-wife (Anne Hathaway) enter a vortex of rough justice and fancy riddles in "Serenity." Read the review.
CBS Films/Lily GavinPenniless, driven, the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (Willem Dafoe) regards his next canvas subject in "At Eternity's Gate," directed by visual artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel. Read the review.
Jonathan Hession / APIsabelle Huppert and Chloe Grace Moretz star in the thriller "Greta." Read the review.More Top Picks Ratings
Frank Gunn / The Canadian PressSound often says it all in Drake's world, but "Views" plays in a narrow range. The trademark hovering synths and barely-there percussion edge out most of the hooks, in favor of long fades and enervated tempos that start to drag about halfway through this slow-moving album. Read the review.
David Appleby / APElton John (Taron Egerton) lays down a track for his express train to super-stardom in "Rocketman." The musical biopic co-stars Jamie Bell as lyricist Bernie Taupin. Read the review.
WellGo USAChildhood friends and uneasy lovers played by Yoo Ah-in (left) and Jeon Jong-seo (center) find their lives disrupted by a mysterious man of means (Steven Yeung, right) in "Burning." Read the review.
APVanellope von Schweetz (voiced by Sarah Silverman) and Ralph (John C. Reilly) zip around the web in a mad dash to save Vanellope's arcade game, "Sugar Rush," in this wild sequel to the 2012 "Wreck-It Ralph." Read the review.
Armando L. Sanchez / baiduhaiIn contrast, "Junk" (Mute"), M83's seventh studio album, sounds chintzy — a bubble-gum snyth-pop album that indulges Gonzalez's love of decades-old TV soundtracks, hair-metal guitar solos and kitschy pop songs. Read the full review.
Steve Wilkie / APUnburdened by Batman and Superman, the DC Comics realm turns in a not-bad origin story buoyed by Zachary Levi as the superhero version of 15-year-old Billy Batson (Asher Angel). Read the review.
Patti Perret/CBS FilmsCystic fibrosis patients Stella (Haley Lu Richardson) and Will (Cole Sprouse) negotiate a tricky mutual attraction in "Five Feet Apart," directed by Justin Baldoni. Read the review.
Tatum Mangus / APStephan James and KiKi Layne play Fonny and Tish, expectant parents in 1970s Harlem in the new James Baldwin adaptation "If Beale Street Could Talk." Read the review.
Atsushi Nishijima / APThis image released by Fox Searchlight Films shows Olivia Colman in a scene from the film "The Favourite." (Atsushi Nishijima/Fox Searchlight Films via AP)
Mark Davis / Pioneer PressJeff Tweedy, lead singer from the band Wilco, is one of the artists tapped to record a 16 song album based on Carl Sandburg's "Chicago Poems."
Emily Aragones / APA late-night TV talk show host (Emma Thompson) faces falling ratings, personal crises and a blindingly white-male writers' room in "Late Night," co-starring and written by Mindy Kaling. Read the review.
AP"Everything Now" is a tighter but not better album. The heavyweight arena anthems of Arcade Fire's 2004 debut, "Funeral," are long gone, replaced by brooding lyrics encased in lighter music. Read the review.
Chris Sweda / baiduhai"American Dream" is a breakup album of sorts but not in the traditional sense. This is about breakups with youth, the past, and the heroes and villains that populated it. It underlines the notion of breaking up as just a step away from letting go — of friends, family, relevance. Read the review.
Chip Bergmann / APA high-powered ad agency executive (Tika Sumpter, right) takes in her ex-con sister (Tiffany Haddish, center) in "Nobody's Fool." Read the review.
Matt Kennedy / APWashington D.C. power brokers Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) and Lynne Cheney have a date with destiny in Adam McKay's "Vice," co-starring Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld. Read the review. Nomainted for: Best Picture, Best Actor for Christian Bale, Best Supporting Actor for Sam Rockwell, Best Supporting Actress for Amy Adams, Best Director for Adam McKay, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing,
Chris Sweda / baiduhai"Ye" isn't so much a musical statement as a 23-minute, seven-track therapy session. Read the review
Atsushi Nishijima / APQueen Anne's (Olivia Colman) court wrestles with the question of how to finance a war with France. Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz), the Duchess of Marlborough, uses her wits, her body and the queen's bed to coerce Anne into raising taxes on the citizenry in order to keep the off-screen battle going. Then the unexpected arrival of her country cousin, Abigail (Emma Stone), a noblewoman fallen on hard times. A dab hand with medicinal herbs, Abigail quickly rises above servant status to become the queen's new favorite. Game on! Read the review. Nomainted for: Best Picture, Best Actress for Olivia Colman, Best Supporting Actress for Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz, Best Director for Yorgos Lanthimos, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design,
AP"Peace Trail" — Neil Young's second album this year and sixth since 2014 — is occasionally fascinating. It's also not very good, a release that surely would've benefited from a bit more time and consideration, which might have given Young's ad hoc band — drummer Jim Keltner and bassist Paul Bushnell — a chance to actually learn the songs. But the four-day recording session sounds like a getting-to-know-you warmup instead of a finished product. Read the full review.
Daniel Smith / APGenie (Will Smith, right) explains the three-wishes thing to the title character (Mena Massoud) in Disney's "Aladdin," director Guy Ritchie's live-action remake of the 1992 animated feature. Read the review.
Armando L. Sanchez / baiduhaiOn their new album, "Existentialism," the Mekons turn their audience and the recording space into accomplices for the band's high-wire act. Read the full review.
Jessica Kourkounis / APCapping the trilogy started with "Unbreakable" (2000) and the surprise hit "Split (2017), Shymalan's treatise on superhero origin stories brings James McAvoy, Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson together for a plodding psych-hospital escape. Read the review.
APThe real stars of "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" are sound designers Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van Der Ryn. Their aural creature designs actually sound like something new — part machine, part prehistoric whatzit. Read the review.
Daniel McFadden / APIn "First Man," Ryan Gosling reteams with "La La Land" director Damien Chazelle to relay the story of astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. Read the review.
Ross Gilmore / Redferns via Getty ImagesOn "Here" (Merge), the band's first album in six years and 10th overall, the front line of Norman Blake, Gerard Love and Raymond McGinley once again trades songs (four each) and lead vocals, over sturdily constructed pop-rock arrangements. But the band has taken some subtle evolutionary turns to where it's now a faint shadow of its "Bandwagonesque" incarnation. Read the review.
APWhen Aretha Franklin recorded her bestselling gospel album in early 1972, director Sydney Pollack's camera crew shot many hours of footage, unseen publicly until now. "Amazing Grace" is now in theaters. Read the review.
NBCKanye West's "The Life of Pablo" (GOOD/Def Jam) sounds like a work in progress rather than a finished album. It's a mess, more a series of marketing opportunities in which West changed the album title and the track listing multiple times, to the point where the very thing that made West tolerable despite a penchant for tripping over his own ego — the music itself — became anti-climactic. Read the review.
APSix miles beneath the Pacific Ocean surface, a team of oceanographers and experts discover an entire hidden ecosystem laden with species "completely unknown to science." But Meg comes calling, attacking the submersible piloted by the ex-wife (Jessica McNamee) of rescue diver Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham). Read the review.
Carl Court / Getty-AFP
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Nick Cave has been singing about mortality for decades, and he's really good at it. Whether the narratives are biblical or pulpy, the victims innocents or death row convicts, the circumstances comprehensible or cruelly random, Cave's songs are on intimate terms with the infinite ways a life can be extinguished. And yet, "Skeleton Tree", his latest album with his estimable band, the Bad Seeds, is a relatively concise song cycle shadowed by death that feels different than all the rest. <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/kot/sc-music-nick-cave-skeleton-tree-ent-0916-20160916-column.html" target="_blank">Read the full review.</a>
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Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy and other musicians with Chicago ties will soon give some of Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago Poems” a new twist to honor the volume’s 100th anniversary, reports Vulture.
Vulture premiered the album’s first song, the Halloween-inspired “Theme in Yellow,” in a Tuesday performance by Tweedy.
Sixteen of Sandburg’s poems will be set to the musical stylings of the aforementioned Tweedy as well as alt-country artists Jon Langford, Robbie Fulks, Sally Timms and Kelly Hogan among others.
The upcoming studio album is based on musician David Nagler’s performances in New York, New York Jan. 7 and 8 which included a ten-person ensemble (drummers/percussionists, piano players, acoustic guitarists, accordion players, horn players, woodwind players and a string quintet) playing the sixteen song cycle. The performance drew on a wide variety of American music genres such as folk, jazz, rock, classical and musical theater, according to a post
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by New York’s The Public Theater.There is no word yet on when other songs on the album will be released.
Tribune reporter Steve Johnson wrote of the impact of Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” on its 100th anniversary in 2014.
Tweedy and Wilco will be performing Aug. 21 at Millennium Park. The band’s 10th studio album, “Schmilco” is scheduled to be released Sept. 9.
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Wilco says new album due out in September, releases two tracks
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