Music reviews: Jack Harlow, The Black Crowes, and Kim Gordon

‘Monica’ by Jack Harlow

★★

Jack Harlow’s swerve into muted R&B turns out to be “at once easy to mock and easier to enjoy than expected,” said Jeff Ihaza in Rolling Stone. The 28-year-old white rapper, who scored back-to- back No. 1 hits in 2022–23, has returned three years later with a 10-song set that contains no rapping at all. But while he’s taken hits for a prerelease interview in which he described himself as getting “Blacker” by turning to R&B, the album is “one of Harlow’s most coherent projects,” a collection of songs that “rely on texture, pacing, and arrangement—muted keys, unfussy bass lines, drums that never push too hard—to create a sense of intimacy he can slide into.” His fine backing musicians give the record “an easy warmth.” So here he is, three years after trying to rap like Drake, “sounding like Robin Thicke without the vocal chops,” said Peter A. Berry in Okayplayer. That’s not the insult it may seem. “By his own admission, Jack is a limited vocalist,” and some of these tracks “kinda go, to be honest.” Still, the album proves “a bit drab in spurts,” and because the star is trying to write more mature lyrics, “the incisive wit he’s been known for really isn’t there.”

‘A Pound of Feathers’ by The Black Crowes

★★★

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It’s a “miracle” that a band this far into its career could still make an
album “this daring and defiant,” said Tim Sendra in AllMusic. Written and recorded in just 10 days, the Black Crowes’ follow-up to their strong 2024 comeback release is “loose and gritty,” the work of a decades-old band eager to “kick up some serious rock ’n’ roll noise.” On the punkish “Do the Parasite!” the Crowes come across “like a Southern-fried Hives” while “Doomsday Doggerel” finds them dipping into Zeppelin-like psychedelia. A couple strong ballads are mixed in; elsewhere, singer Chris Robinson is “at his strutting best” while guitarist Rich Robinson “sounds like he’s having a blast tossing off molten lava riffs and lightning-fingered leads.” In these toxic times, the Black Crowes are “dancing toward doomsday,” said Matt Melis in Paste. At the same time, the band “finds a natural balance between raucousness and reflection,” invoking in the album’s title and the record’s first single the old riddle, What’ll you have, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead? “As the Crowes remind us, it’s really all about how you choose to shoulder that pound.”

‘Play Me’ by Kim Gordon

★★★

“Chill vibes are in short supply on Kim Gordon’s third exhilarating collaboration with Charli XCX producer Justin Raisen,” said Victoria Segal in Mojo. “Immersed in the helter-skelter currents of modern life,” the latest songs from the 72-year-old Sonic Youth alum capture “the high-wire panic of daily existence.” In Gordon’s “stress-fractured” vocals, we hear an artist “whose nerve endings are uninsulated” as she highlights “both the absurdity and the seriousness” of our current political predicament. Meanwhile, the “brutalist, slabby” tone of the music is tempered by “the distinct sense of joy taken in its creation.” On every level, Play Me is “the most populist music Gordon has ever made,” said Emma Madden in Pitchfork. At less than 28 minutes, it’s “addictive and brisk,” chugging forward with “modulating bass lines and a steady krautrock influence.” But too often Gordon forgoes her signature ambiguity. The title track is simply a recitation of imagined Spotify playlists, and once the joke lands we’re not left with much. “In an era defined by un-subtlety, simply pointing at the surface can feel indistinguishable from scrolling through it.”