John Young

Lampchop, Kurt Wagner's ten-man Nashville clique, backed Vic Chesnutt on last year's The Salesman and Bernadette, a truly strange album featuring country, white soul and electronic droning played for emotional unreadability. For Nixon, the band has expanded to seventeen pieces for some solid tuneage. On its own, though, Lambchop is...

Orchestrated easy-listening pop is, by definition, supposed to be unambitious, soothing and relaxing -- or so many of us have been lazy enough to believe. But the hell with that: The High Llamas' Sean O'Hagan composes as if he's campaigning for his own chapter in Elevator Music, author Joseph Lanza's...

In Reverse is stronger -- and tougher -- than Sweet's offering of 1998, Blue Sky on Mars. Yet those who have found reason to regard his past work with reservation won't be swayed to let down their guard, as many of the elements that render Sweet a borderline annoying performer...

Robert Ashley has co-existed with Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass in that segment of the music world where the experimental impulse and a smirking fascination with theatre and opera take over. Ashley's career, though, hasn't achieved Anderson's brief pop success or Glass's cottage career as a composer of soundtracks and...

If you hope to greet the Void by hosting a rave on the rim of a crater (to paraphrase Henry Miller), the understated, rather sad-eyed Play might sound faint and indecisive compared to the multi-tracks and the single minds of the Prodigy or the Chemical Brothers. Yet Moby, the vegan/Christian/moralistic...