Press play and the room changes temperature. 'Make The World Stand Still' by Kaitlin Corbett Jones comes in with piano, strings, and a voice that sounds ready for the balcony seats and the person crying quietly in the back row. This is big-feeling music, but it is not messy for the sake of drama. Kaitlin Corbett Jones has the training to go massive and the...

Listening to Shotgun Driver’s new EP, “Jester Privileges”, is like finding a glitter bomb in a padded cell. The four songs present a disorienting, strangely compelling contradiction. On the surface, the alt-pop framework pulses with an upbeat, almost defiant energy; this is the slick, rock-tinged anxiety of a Machine Gun Kelly track built for open-road brooding. But beneath it, the narrative, carried by those...