Fresh from Austin's South by Southwest festival, The Black Keys are gearing up for a full-fledged US tour for their forthcoming record, Attack & Release, due out April 1. The new album, produced by Brian Burton (Danger Mouse), earns a perfect five-star review in the Guardian, which exclaims: "Attack & Release isn't just the best Black Keys album thus far. It's the best authentic trad-rock album in years."

The tour continues for k.d. lang with two stops on the East Coast this weekend before heading west for two nights in Seattle. The Seattle Times says her new album, Watershed, "feels both reverent and fresh." A culmination of the many styles of music k.d. has incorporated into her repertoire over the years, Watershed also features k.d.'s famous voice, here "delicately restrained, smoky and intimate," says the Times. "The result is faintly nostalgic, incredibly lovely and seemingly effortless." The Seattle Post-Intelligencer calls Watershed "a dreamy, laid-back exploration of romance and passion."

The Washington Post has reviewed a handful of notable new albums by artists with "the makeup of a chamber ensemble, the mind-set of a rock band"---the sort for which "Kronos Quartet paved the way." Kronos's latest, The Cusp of Magic, is "at turns luminous, frightening and unbearably lovely." It's music that "shimmers with the elusive delicacy of a dream ...  and evokes those transitional moments in life when the sharp edges of reality become blurred, and anything seems possible."

The Magnetic Fields are gearing up for the last two stops of their Distortion tour, with shows at Seattle's Town Hall set for Thursday and Friday and a six-show residency over three nights at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music the following weekend. In the review of Sunday's show in LA, the Los Angeles Times sees Distortion as a "delightful anomaly in the Magnetic Fields' catalog" for all its distorted fuzziness. At the same time, he says, the "tidy chamber-folk" arrangements the band performs in concert allow the audience "to admire Merritt's watertight song craft."

Last night, k.d. lang played the final performance of her three-night residency at New York City's Allen Room as part of Lincoln Center's American Songbook series. The New York Times posits that the Canadian singer's inclusion in an American-themed series may stem from the reputation she earned through her collaboration with Tony Bennett as "one of the two or three great under-50 interpreters of American popular standards." lang is "possessed of one of the world's most beautiful and steady pop voices."

Kronos Quartet's latest Nonesuch release is the premiere recording of Terry Riley's The Cusp of Magic, with Wu Man. Dusted credits the composer with having created an "enthralling work from a wide palette of diverse ideas and influences that might well have defeated a lesser composer." The review praises the performers for their ability to "engage and interact in ways that combine earthy energy and celestial delight with an underlying sense of gravity and dignity."

Argentine-born composer-pianist Fernando Otero performed at Joe's Pub in New York City last Wednesday, celebrating the recent release of his Nonesuch debut, Página de Buenos Aires, which the New York Times says "could be described as a heroically ambitious tango record, with a scope that reaches beyond the usual connotations of the style."

The Evening Standard gives Sweeney Todd a perfect five out of five stars, dubbing the film "Sweeney the Spectacular" and calling it "just about perfect." With melodies that "tiptoe under our skin and refuse to leave," says the paper, Sweeney brings filmgoers to a "heightened state" that once entered is difficult to let go.

"The Wire is not your average drama," says the Guardian, and "like every other element of The Wire, the music never lets you down." Music plays an integral role in The Wire's realistic look at inner-city life in an ever-struggling Baltimore. This leads the soundtrack to be "as real, or at least as electrifyingly lifelike, as anything else in the show." Advertising Age names the soundtrack the current "pop pick."

Sérgio and Odair Assad's Jardim Abandonado receives five stars from Audiophile Audition, which credits the brothers' "great artistry and amazing technical facility" with setting "new standards for guitar duos." On the new album in particular, "The sound of the duo is just perfect—rich and natural, with the separation of the two instruments just enough without being exaggerated ... A winning collection with very wide appeal!"

In a four-star review of The Wire soundtrack ... and all the pieces matter, the Independent declares: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that The Wire ... is the most consistently excellent tele-drama of this millennium," with its music "a large factor in the show's impact." In keeping with that high-set bar, the soundtrack itself offers "a compelling array of hard-hitting cuts."