Her excitement is palpable: She’s just thrilled to be in love and to be in the presence of the one she loves. Perhaps the rapper’s approach is a nod to Travis, and by extension Yeezy, but more likely, he was attempting to summon the artistic energies that made both of those albums so successful. Eric Mason, With Walking Proof, Lilly Hiatt has emerged wiser and more confident than ever, and appears to have put some of her problems behind her. Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker generally responded well, saying that at its best, the album offers blunt, questing and decisive music bu… Interestingly, these collaborations represent a lineage of musicians who’ve inspired the Avalanches—like Johnny Marr, Tricky, and Mick Jones, specifically his post-Clash work in Big Audio Dynamite—as well as been inspired by them. Questions like “Why am I here?” and “What is the purpose of all of this?” were inescapable. “I’d like to meet myself and swap clothes,” he sings, a revelatory moment that finds Healy reaching for self-reflection in a way that feels distinctly real. Madonna herself even likened the album to music for aerobics classes and was eager to shack up with Chic’s Nile Rodgers and flex her creative muscle for her career-defining follow-up, Like a Virgin. With collaborations from today’s hottest Latin-trap heavyweights and legendary reggaetoneros like Daddy Yankee, the album solidifies Bad Bunny’s rightful place in the Urbano canon. 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This is, after all, the nature of sampling. From one moment to the next, epiphanies give way to self-delusion. Swift considers a casual, home-for-the-holidays hook-up with an ex on “‘Tis the Damn Season,” undercutting the bitterness of a years-past hurt with a pragmatism that dispenses with niceties and nostalgia. I'm here to tell you why AMERICAN LIFE is a great album, and one of Madonna's best. The viral “Safaera” is the best example of this audacious streak: Over an episodic five minutes, the track pivots between eight exhilarating beat changes, simulating the head-spinning pyrotechnics of a DJ club mix. It's American Life is Madonna's most underrated album. Madonna’s voice is left bare and unaffected—that is, when it’s not twisted and deformed until it sounds unrecognizable, even inhuman, like a Stepford wife on the fritz. Lyons-Burt, Key Glock bookends Yellow Tape, his fifth mixtape, with two tracks that dig a little bit into his personal life and family—with particular reverence for the grandmother who raised him. On “The Divine Chord,” the hook from the Shirelles’s “It’s Love That Really Counts” is pitched up and accelerated so that it almost sounds like its own distinct synth patch. The late Michel Colombier’s gorgeous string arrangements are sliced and diced. Even as Allison delves deep into heavy subject matter, she usually sounds more angsty than haunted. Twinkly keyboards and lush guitar infuse the song with wonder, as MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden lovingly reminisces about a past relationship, striking a bittersweet tone characteristic of the Avalanches. Just as the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed who we are at our cores, both good and bad, the best albums of 2020—some created prior to the crisis—reflect the simmering tensions that have been roiling beneath the surface of American life for years, if not decades. Their fifth album, Ultimate Success Today, continues this stylistic balancing act, with existentially oriented lyrics accompanied by ferocious guitars and frantic percussion that sustain a sense of anxiety. But ‘American Life’ also feels like an unnecessary sequel, a ‘Men In Black II’, made because hell, if it ain’t broke… And that’s just the trouble with Madonna these days. The album is entranced by the prospect of resurrecting forgotten ghosts. 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