Ken Tucker

West has been busy in both the music and gossip worlds: He's just released a new album, titled Yeezus, and fathered a child. Rock critic Ken Tucker says West's constant blending of his public life and his music makes his new record all the more striking -- and a t times problematic.

The singer-songwriter has said, as he was writing his new album Still Fighting the War, that "a theme of perseverance through hard times revealed itself." Rock critic Ken Tucker says the record is no downer and that Cleaves finds complex sentiments and wittily phrased ideas in many of his new songs.

Isbell is a singer-songwriter who came to prominence as a member of the Southern rock group Derive-By Truckers. He left that band in 2007, in part because of the substance-abuse problems he describes on his new solo album, Southeastern.