John Floyd

Like a zombie in a shopping mall, impervious to the bullets fired at its heart by the desperate and weary, the tribute album continues to stomp across the landscape of rock, pop, and soul, destroying all in its soulless, heartless path to destruction. The latest victim is Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen's...

Like the earliest Warner Brothers and Max Fleischer cartoons, the screwball charm of Devo's early home-baked recordings has held up amazingly well over the decades. And make no mistake, Devo was nothing but a cartoon, from its silly-ass theory of de-evolution to the yellow suits, flowerpot hats, and plastic pompadours...

How to explain this staggeringly dull compendium of ancient folk and blues standards done up by one of altcountry's founding fathers? Dave Alvin does it for you, in the liner notes to this loving nod to his record collection: "They are in the public domain," he writes of the material...

Give or take an occasional oddity such as For a Few Dollars More or The Godfather, Part Two, sequels seldom work as well as their predecessors. The stories they offer are generally nothing more than mere embellishments of an already established theme; the worst of them are utter travesties conceived...

Robert Belfour What's Wrong With You (Fat Possum) The scope and depth of North Mississippi blues are amply documented on the latest releases by the Oxford-based Fat Possum label, the highly touted indie responsible for breaking the likes of R.L. Burnside and the late Junior Kimbrough, among others. T-Model Ford's...