Liesa Goins

Blur 13 (Virgin) In the well-worn realm of "theme" music, there is precious little new to be said about a handful of mossy topics -- love, loss, drugs, and death spring immediately to mind. On its sixth album, 13, Blur disregards this truism and attempts to say something memorable about...

Olivia Tremor Control Black Foliage: Animation Music (Flydaddy) Picking a song out of an Olivia Tremor Control disc for critical examination and singular praise is like choosing your favorite spot of color in a Seurat painting. To narrow your focus is to lose sight of the bigger picture. You can't...

Various Artists Fit For Kings: A Compilation of Peripheral New Zealand Music (Drunken Fish) Birchville Cat Motel Siberian Earth Curve (Drunken Fish) Like the weirdest, wildest practitioners of '60s free-jazz, the avatars of the busy New Zealand noise scene have spent the better part of a decade deconstructing music until,...

Lhasa La Llorona (Atlantic) Like seasoned songsters more than twice her age, Lhasa evokes an idyllic past that's tucked away in the folds of our collective musical consciousness. Borrowing from the vocal styles of jazz singers, cabaret divas, and traditional balladeers, the 25-year-old, Mexican-American singer brings to mind the likes...

U2 The Best of 1980-1990 (Island) U2 is no stranger to division. During its early days, the band engaged in an internecine dispute over whether its sound should hew to the punk or Christian genres. (Thankfully it's fully neither.) The religious split in U2's homeland has clearly inspired the band...