The Shins – Port of Morrow
A deep breath, then: James Mercer has returned to Earth. Port of Morrow, the Shins’ fourth studio album in 11 years, is a triumphant return from a project that once risked being reduced to an indie-went-mainstream tagline. It’s the perfect distillation of the Shins’ back catalog– the jangly, wistful airs of Oh, Inverted World, Chutes Too Narrow’s genre-resistant playfulness, Wincing the Night Away’s expansively detailed production. But in other ways, its colorful, detail-oriented approach sets it apart from anything Mercer’s done before. Read the full review on Pitchfork

The Hunger Games – Soundtrack
What’s the appropriate soundtrack for kids killing kids? That’s one of many tough questions that Grammy-winning producer T Bone Burnett had to answer while overseeing this set of songs inspired by the movie adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ best-selling novel about tweens and teens forced to fight to the death. Fans of the book might imagine its bow-hunting heroine, Katniss Everdeen, slinging arrows to the strains of something decidedly punk-rock. Personally, I’d like to think of her blasting Bikini Kill’s ”Rebel Girl” while she takes out Cato, Clove, Glimmer, and anyone else who underestimates her talent for ripping out tender teenage hearts and entrails. But what puts Burnett in the mood for some good old-fashioned child sacrificing, apparently, is…folk. Read the full review on Entertainment Weekly

Odd Future – The Odd Future Tape Vol. 2
The O.F. Tape Vol. 2 is a retrenchment, a return to the anarchic and nauseous lo-fi snarl-rap that introduced the group. No rappers or singers or producers from outside the group show up; the whole thing (aesthetically, at least) could’ve been recorded in Syd’s bedroom studio two years ago. The beats, mostly from Tyler and Left Brain, are queasy stumbling lurches that some out funky almost in spite of themselves. Tyler, obviously the crew’s mastermind and most visible member, doesn’t act as frontman on the album; instead, he’s happy to come off as just one important member of the collective. Hodgy Beats, actually, emerges as the MVP in some ways; he raps on 10 of the 18 tracks, more than anyone else. Read the full review on Sterogum

Anais Mitchell – Young man in America
The title should give you some sense of the scale of this album’s lyrics. It’s an appellation that wouldn’t be out of place on a thick novel by Faulkner or Steinbeck. The scale of the songs isn’t quite that ambitious, but Mitchell does set a wide-angle lens on the scope of modern American history. She uses the recurring image of the trust that children put into the hands of their fathers as an allegory about the lower and middle classes putting their futures in the hands of our government. The story of Abraham and the near-sacrifice of his son becomes a bitter view of the current recession on “Dyin Day”. She repeats the idea on the gorgeous “He Did” (“Your daddy didn’t leave a will/he left a shovel and a hole to fill”). Read the full Review on American Songwriter

Andrew Bird – Break It Yourself
Break It Yourself, his latest album, opens with a song that jumps right into these kinds of concerns. “Desperation Breeds” wrings more than a little haunt out of the precipitous loss of bee populations, and from there, we’re off to the races, winding through ruminations on the way death’s promised end point can inject meaning into life’s mundane moments (“Near Death Experience Experience”), to “Sifters”, whose point that the “moon plays the ocean like a violin” works both metaphorically and literally. Certain themes recur. One is the slipperiness of truth and memory– “Lazy Projector” throws itself straight into wondering how much of our memory is our own, while “Lusitania”, a duet with St. Vincent, transposes the thought to collective memory, capping a verse that touches on events from World War I and the Spanish-American War with the line, “We don’t study these wars no more.” Read the full Review on Pitchfork

Various Artists – New Multitudes (New Songs w/ lyrics by Woody Guthrie)
Recorded in 2009 with Centro-Matic’s Will Johnson and Varnaline’s Anders Parker, the album is part of a year-long centennial celebration of Guthrie’s birth that includes tribute concerts in all 50 states and an expanded boxed set release of Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Guthrie-derived Mermaid Avenue albums released more than a decade ago. Read the full article on Rolling Stone

Islands – A Sleep & a Forgetting
With honesty comes transparency. With lyrics like “I loved a girl and I will never love again,” Thorburn isn’t flirting with subtlety. Instead, the album depends on rich instrumentation and simple delivery to convey meaning. With the album’s narrative arc, more solemn blocks book-end the climactic middle, which has a lot of old Islands nostalgia bleeding through. Tracks like “Can’t Feel My Face” and “Hallways” are reminiscent of the feel-good Vapours. Even Thorburn’s characteristic voice is drastically different from some tracks to others. In “Can’t Feel My Face,” the vocals sound like they’re being projected to the audience, contrasting those of “Same Thing,” the closing track on the album which comprises of a much more soft-spoken Thorburn. Read the full review on Pretty Much Amazing

Amos Lee – As The Crow Flies EP
Blue Note recording artist Amos Lee will release a six-song collection of previously unheard songs as a CD, digital, and 10″-vinyl EP, entitled As the Crow Flies, on February 14th, 2012. The songs were recorded during the sessions for Lee’s critically acclaimed album Mission Bell, which was produced by Calexico frontman and multi-instrumentalist Joey Burns. The tracks on As the Crow Flies are also produced by Burns and feature musical backing by Burns and Calexico drummer John Convertino. Mission Bell debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums and Billboard Rock Albums charts when it was released in January 2011, earning the Philadelphia-born singer-songwriter the highest chart position and best sales week of his career. Read the full review on Exystence.net

Tennis – Young & Old
Simply put, Tennis’s cute gimmick beats every other band in the world’s cute gimmick, in that it seems to come from such a real place. Cape Dory certainly was gimmick, no matter the fact that husband and wife actually spent months on a boat, traveling and writing. The story was just too cute to deny, and going back to that same tone would seem to be too easy and worthwhile to avoid. However, being “the cute band” or “the sailing band” is to be typecast and isolated. The “cute” songs on this album are still the strongest, but the songs that show them stretching their wings are still worthwhile. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

Lana Del Rey – Born to Die
Will we ever be able to judge Lana Del Rey’s music by its own merit and leave behind any persistent thoughts of her mysterious/so-called calculated rise to popularity and Saturday Night Live performances that caused the Internet to explode a couple weeks back? Who knows — the dust has yet to settle ahead of the release of the 25-year-old’s debut Born To Die tomorrow. Most of the reviews of the album range from cautious or skeptical to downright scathing. Head below to see our roundup of what the critics have to say about Del Rey’s first big outing as a pop star. Read the full Meta Review on Idolator

Leonard Cohen – Old Ideas
While Cohen’s always played on the insistence of mortality, the album tremors with a sense of finality that leaves one to wonder whether this is the last batch of Cohen originals. This is certainly at least partially due to the assumption that he can’t keep doing this forever, but songs like “Amen” (which visually strikes like a conclusion to the grandeur of “Hallelujah”) with its graveyard horn solo and talk of the Lord’s vengeance strike that note too strongly to ignore. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

Gotye – Making Mirrors
with his newest release, Making Mirrors, Gotye has figured out how to remain sonically voracious while still giving his listeners a sturdy foothold. He finds room here for psych-rock, soul, earnest balladeering, creepy retro-futurism, electronic and Tropicalia touches, and, yes, scads of serious-minded 1980s pop. It’s in that last category that most of album’s best moments reside. Without ever settling in one spot too slavishly or lengthily to come off like a mere imitator, Gotye deploys his sincere, powerfully expressive voice (under-utilized on Like Drawing Blood) in evoking those bombastic 80s pop architects[…] Read the full review on pitckfork

Ani DiFranco – Which Side Are You On?
DiFranco will not be everyone’s cup of tea, and she seems to understand and accept that the audience she has gathered before her is the one who will still be there for the end of the show. “Amendment” is an angry, righteous sputter. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had an amendment to give civil rights to women?” she asks, then answers herself sardonically: “that’s just redundant. Chicks got it good now; they can almost be President.” On the brooding, Nick Drake-like “Zoo,” which closes out the set, DiFranco seems to startle herself with new insights. “I think I’m what they call sensitive and easily thrown off my game,” she acknowledges, almost apologetically explaining that she can’t keep up with television because “all that shit and pettiness just makes me feel drained,” finally adding that she walks “past all my old self-loathing like I walk past animals in the zoo, trying not to really see them in a prison they didn’t choose.” Read the full review on SoundSpike

Skrillex – Bangarang
Skrillex is back with his third EP (I don’t count More Monsters and Sprites, it was just remixes ), and without a doubt, he brought his A game. It’s a seven track EP, each stuffed to the gills with pure Skrillex amazingness. Sonny Moore’s production is utterly unique; a totally distinctive style that occasionally avoids transitions altogether, preferring to just smack you in the face with his instantly recognizable distorted wobble bass. Read the full review on Salacious Sounds

Chimes of Freedom – The Songs of Bob Dylan
he music of Dylan and Guthrie has been used prominently in “Occupy” protests across this country and at game-changing political uprisings in other countries. And these projects surrounding their work come just in time for what looks to be an exceptionally volatile presidential election year, one that comes on the heels of last year’s Arab Spring protests that toppled long-entrenched repressive governments in several countries and helped foment myriad “Occupy” demonstrations in the U.S. and abroad.

Plus, both the Guthrie and Dylan projects tap a broad swath of artists from the pop music world, efforts that will likely draw attention across disparate genres, social and economic strata, gender, race and geographical boundaries.

The pairing of artist and beneficiary for the “Chimes of Freedom” project is a natural: Dylan released his first album in 1962, a short time after Amnesty began lobbying on behalf of prisoners of conscience. Both were informed by the conflicts between forces of totalitarianism and freedom during World War II and the consequent politics of the Cold War. Both found inspiration and validation in the politically minded music of Guthrie as well as that of Seeger, the Weavers and other folk revivalists who came to the fore in the ‘50s. Read the full review on The Boston Herald