Album Review

Dorothy McGuire, the middle of three singing siblings who performed together as the McGuire Sisters, died Friday in Paradise Valley, Ariz. She was 84. The McGuire Sisters had more than 30 hits on the Billboard pop charts beginning in the mid-1950s. The group was best-known for its harmonizing on hit ballads such as "Picnic" and "Something's Gotta Give," both of which are embedded below. Dorothy, who sang with her sisters, Christine and Phyllis, had Parkinson's disease and dementia, her daughter-in-law, Karen Williamson, told the Associated Press. From Middletown , Ohio, the McGuires were harmonizing at church performances at a young age and were discovered by an agent who heard them sing at a revival meeting in Dayton.

When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs began making records in 2001, it would've been difficult to imagine the band someday doing a song as "Like a Prayer"-ish as "Sacrilege," the first track on its new album. "Falling for a guy, fell down from the sky," frontwoman Karen O sings over a descending guitar figure, "Halo round his head, feathers in our bed. " Later in the tune a gospel choir shows up -- as one did last weekend during the group's performance at Coachella, where it's to play again Friday night -- and pushes "Sacrilege" into true-blue power-in-the-midnight-hour territory.

Drawing conclusions on the music of Tyler the Creator based on his shocking way with language is like trying to explain the plot of a comic book by noting how much red ink is used. It's not only unfair, but inaccurately draws the Los Angeles-based rapper and founder of the Odd Future crew as one-dimensional, which he most certainly is not. On "Wolf," Tyler's third solo album, the producer, rapper, comedic actor and storyteller revels in his many dimensions, and has released his best album to date - even if it's too long and too sonically flat to confirm his place as a top-rate producer.

With two platinum-selling records and a Grammy Award for album of the year, the fast-rising folk-rock blokes in Mumford & Sons have already entered their inevitable object-of-scorn phase, at least among mouthy young successors such as Jake Bugg. He's the 19-year-old English singer-songwriter who recently told the Guardian that Marcus Mumford and his mates "look like posh farmers with banjos. " Bugg's implicit criticism - that Mumford & Sons come by their rootsy vibe dishonestly - is of course balderdash, to use a term the artisanal folk-rock crowd might appreciate.

Eminem "Recovery" Interscope/Aftermath Two and a half stars Ever since Kanye West looped Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger," the hip-hop zeitgeist has tilted toward techno. Skinny-jeaned stars Wiz Khalifa and Kid Cudi have rapped over Alice Deejay and Robert Miles, while Power 106 keeps house DJ David Guetta in heavy rotation. Admirably, Eminem has always ignored evanescent trends. Despite an over-reliance on gross-out gags and tired pop culture riffs, his last album, "Relapse," further plumbed the weird depths of his psyche, stringing together Hannibal Lecter fantasies and byzantine rhyme schemes to create something singular but scattershot.

Aesop Rock “Skelethon” Rhymesayers 3 stars Hip-hop has gone feral lately, with MCs transmitting freaky, woozy hip-hop through the Internet's outer orbits. But what to make of the weirdos who have always been with us? Ian Bavitz, the San Francisco MC who performs as Aesop Rock, was a leading light of a late-'90s/early-'00s strain of hip-hop that made a virtue of its flinty independence, sonic experiments and often inscrutable wordplay. “Skelethon” might be the album that takes those core aesthetic traits and spins them into whatever counts for stardom in today's underground rap world.

A Devendra Banhart album is akin to an art exhibit of miniatures, the rewards contingent on the viewer's/listener's commitment to exploring each tiny detail in his microcosmic mise-en-scènes. Those rewards here more often are moments of smiling "ahhhhs" than of wide-eyed "A-has!" The indie folk darling's brand of Latin- and electronic-tinged pop yields a broad range of musical and sonic textures here. The lyrics range from snippets of ideas, such as the title track's brief rumination on acceptance of a missed opportunity to a slightly more elucidated homage to a musical hero ("Fur Hildegard von Bingen")

"New York City," the third song on Christopher Owens' debut solo album "Lysandre," is kind of an opposite-universe version of Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side. " It's a sax-soaked tale of turning tricks in the big city, but zips along a major-key melody with a mix of hope and devastation. That blend has been the hallmark of Owens' writing since his time fronting the indie-rock band Girls. "Lysandre" isn't much of a departure But it does broaden the range and refine the writing that made him a troubadour of millennial drifters (and those who go to bed with them)

Admit it. You thought you had Cat Power's Chan Marshall pegged - and maybe grown a little nervous that her smooth, smoky voice and increasingly carefree demeanor had settled into a blue-eyed soul groove that would soundtrack hipster dinner parties through the next decade. But "Sun" will prove you wrong. A big, confident, and captivating pop album that's so far removed from her Memphis-inspired previous album of originals "The Greatest" (In between, she released an album of covers called "Jukebox")

Dan Deacon "America" (Domino Records) Two and a half stars (out of four) It takes nerve to title a record “America,” a loaded word if there ever was one, and acclaimed electronic music performer Dan Deacon is embracing the challenge. Deacon, whose middle-of-the-crowd gigs, in which he sets up his gear in the pit and rocks hard along with fans rocking hard to his music, are some of the most frenzied and inspiring shows I've seen in recent years. He's also a video artist and combines his frantic neon-colored mantra clips with like-minded music to create a modern-day A.V. overload writ large.

Shakespeare put many of his most trenchant observations about the human condition into the mouths of comic characters - jesters and fools - knowing that wisdom is disseminated more effectively with a spoonful of humor. Country music triple threat Brad Paisley ratchets up his Bard-like savvy on "Wheelhouse," perhaps his most ambitious album to date, taking on such hot-button topics as spousal abuse, Southern provincialism, racism and social justice alongside characteristically well-crafted mainstream country fare.

Drawing conclusions on the music of Tyler the Creator based on his shocking way with language is like trying to explain the plot of a comic book by noting how much red ink is used. It's not only unfair, but inaccurately draws the Los Angeles-based rapper and founder of the Odd Future crew as one-dimensional, which he most certainly is not. On "Wolf," Tyler's third solo album, the producer, rapper, comedic actor and storyteller revels in his many dimensions, and has released his best album to date - even if it's too long and too sonically flat to confirm his place as a top-rate producer.

Coachella just got a bit less grizzled. Citing "unavoidable complications," Lou Reed announced Tuesday that he has canceled his planned appearance at next month's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, scheduled to bring artists including Blur, Phoenix and Red Hot Chili Peppers to the Empire Polo Club in Indio. The annual weekend-long festival is to take place April 12-14 and again April 19-21. FULL COVERAGE: Coachella 2013 Reed, a founding member of New York's influential Velvet Underground as well as a prolific solo artist, also called off several other West Coast dates around Coachella, including an April 17 gig at L.A.'s Orpheum Theatre.

He didn't quite hit the million-sold mark, though he came awfully close. Capping a whirlwind promotional run that included hosting "Saturday Night Live," performing on five consecutive episodes of "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" and playing an intimate club gig at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, Justin Timberlake enters the Billboard 200 album chart this week at No. 1. Billboard reported late Tuesday that "The 20/20...

Deke Richards, who as part of the songwriting and production team known as the Corporation was responsible for many of Motown Records' signature songs, died Sunday at a hospice in Bellingham, Wash., of esophageal cancer, according to a statement from his record label. He was 68. Born Dennis Lussier in Los Angeles, Richards helped launch the Jackson 5 to stardom by co-creating -- alongside Alphonzo Mizell, Freddie Perren and Motown founder Berry Gordy -- the family band's first three No. 1 hits: "I Want You Back," "ABC" and "The Love You Save.

Elton John. Dave Grohl. Trent Reznor. Those are just a few of the guests set to appear on "...Like Clockwork," the new Queens of the Stone Age album which the California rock band announced Tuesday will arrive in June. In a statement, frontman Josh Homme described the disc, the group's first for Matador Records following a long stint on Interscope, as "an audio documentary of a manic year. " The band previously offered England's NME a more colorful description : "You're running in a dream in a codeine cabaret, then your alarm goes off and you wake up. That's kinda what our record sounds like.

It's not hard to figure out why Justin Timberlake has been pushing an old-school vibe in the run-up to his third studio album, "The 20/20 Experience.” He performed at the Grammy Awards and more recently on "Saturday Night Live" wearing a tuxedo, leading a similarly clad band stationed behind Art Deco music stands. "As long as I got my suit and tie, I'm-a leave it all on the floor tonight," he sings in "Suit & Tie," the snazzy lead single from the album, due out Tuesday. "All pressed up in black and white, and you're dressed in that dress I like.

When Christina Aguilera and Cee Lo Green announced last fall that they'd sit out the current season of "The Voice" -- which premiered Monday night on NBC with Shakira and Usher as the new judges -- both singers said they planned to spend more time focusing on music. Yet three months after they vacated their red-pleather judges' chairs, the two don't have much to show for it: Aguilera's "Lotus" album bombed (despite an awesomely freaky performance at the American Music Awards), while Green is starring in a coolly received production at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas.

He's already hit the top spot in the United Kingdom, where "The 20/20 Experience" entered the album chart Sunday at No. 1 -- and in the process became the fastest-selling disc of the year so far there. Now Justin Timberlake is almost certain to repeat the feat in the United States when Billboard reveals its new charts on Wednesday, reflecting U.S. sales through Sunday night. But can the pop superstar sell 1 million records in a week? REVIEW: Justin Timberlake's "The 20/20 Experience" Writing Sunday in Billboard , Keith Caulfield said music-industry sources were estimating that first-week sales of "The 20/20 Experience" will wind up between 950,000 and 975,000.