Jackson Browne
Jackson Browne “sounds as if he’s fallen in love with music all over again,” said A.D. Amorosi in Variety.com. The soft-rock singersongwriter doesn’t record often anymore, but his first album since 2014 delivers
“more gusto and smart lyrical interplay than anything he’s mustered in the last 20 years.” At 72, the 1970s heartthrob isn’t in the business of “fishing for new fans,” said Alexis Petridis in TheGuardian.com. He spends most of the record “doing precisely the kinds of things that septuagenarian songwriters of a certain cast tend to do”: fretting about younger generations, dabbling in global music, and facing mortality. “Browne is good at all this stuff,” though, and his “well-crafted” album deftly balances the personal with the political. “Downhill isn’t a radical entry in his catalog,” said Timothy Monger in AllMusic.com. “It’s a pretty good one,” though: “a delight of tasteful guitar work, folk-rock charm, and perceptive lyrics” about embracing one’s golden years. “It has the heart and craft of an artist who has little to prove but a bit more to say.”
Emma-Jean Thackray’s first full-length album “has so much potential to go catastrophically wrong,” said Joe Muggs in TheArtsDesk.com. The London-based jazz composer, bandleader, and producer—a white woman in her 30s—positions herself as a sonic heir to “some of the most revered Black musicians in modern history: Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, and more.” Her music is also “audaciously cosmic,” committed fully to “third-eye-open omnitheistic spirituality.” Thackray, though, is a “phenomenal” talent, and “even the most jazzaverse” will hum to her “devilishly memorable” melodies and smile at Yellow’s sense of “giggling fun.” The opener, “Mercury,” is “vintage space-jazz,” said Ludovic HunterTilney in the Financial Times. “Green Funk,” arriving a few tracks later, “revives the glorious controlled chaos of Funkadelic and Parliament.” Some of Thackray’s chanted mantras about universal love “come close to pastiche,” but the music, in its “openness and dynamism,” serves as “an inspired act of consciousness-raising.”