Rolling Stone Album Reviews

Those Darlins

Blur the Line Oh Wow Dang

7

The third Those Darlins record opens with a drunk shower in a "shit hotel." But it doesn't stay clean for long: "Flowing these juices/The weed has induced us," Jessi Darlin sings a couple of songs later on "That Man." Since starting out as trashy, fun-loving cowpunks, the twogirl/two-guy Murfreesboro, Tennessee, band has gone further toward gnarled garage rock with each album.

Avril Lavigne

Avril Lavigne Epic

Assisted on nearly every track by new husband Chad Kroeger of Nickelback, Avril Lavigne starts her fifth LP shouting out her own rocker credentials: On "Rock N Roll," all the Auto-Tune in Sweden can't keep her bad reputation from battling "hipster bullshit," and "Here's to Never Growing Up" advocates "singing Radiohead at the top of our lungs" even if Radiohead's fans never would. In "Bad Girl," she and Marilyn Manson get their industrial-glam cartoon kink on.

The Wanted

Word of Mouth Island

4

The Wanted are a boy band with a man's disposition: They drink, they get into arguments, and they tend to see women as passive creatures waiting around in heels to be redeemed or get their hearts broken. They cloak their casual misogyny in trying to look sensitive, alternating rakish club pop like "Walks Like Rihanna" with post-Coldplay ballads in which everyone gets a chance to brood.

Lady Gaga

Artpop Streamline/Interscope

6

Lady Gaga is at her peak when she's playing the neon queen of all the world's outcasts. And with her constant prodding, her Little Monsters have filled the biggest big tent in modern pop. But in the five years since Stefani Germanotta's arrival, weird has become the currency that overwhelmingly fuels pop culture – from seapunk Tumblrs to American Horror Story. So for Gaga to stay on top in 2013, she has to keep cranking up the cray.

The Beatles

On Air – Live at the BBC Volume 2 Apple/Capitol

8

This was social media in Great Britain in 1963, during the first flash flood of Beatlemania: George Harrison singing "Do You Want to Know a Secret" for Deanne and Jenny in Bedford; Paul McCartney belting "The Hippy Hippy Shake" for a student at the bassist's old grammar school in Liverpool; Ringo Starr stumbling over names on a request card from Yorkshire.

M.I.A.

Matangi Interscope

7

If Maya Arulpragasam has a persecution complex, she's earned it. "Let you into Super Bowl/You tried to steal Madonna's crown/What the fuck you on about?" she spits on "Boom Skit," conjuring her haters: generic racists, critical magazine profilers, and the NFL litigators reportedly suing her for $1.5 mil for her bird-flip during her 2012 halftime performance with Madonna.