To listen to Stevie Hawkins’ take on "A Song For You" is to have a conversation with a ghost in a dimly lit room after the show has ended. Hawkins, long the rhythmic engine for the song's originator Leon Russell, steps from behind the drum kit to the microphone, and the space between these two roles compresses decades into four and a half minutes....

There is a specific kind of cold that burns, like dry ice pressed against a fingertip, and that paradoxical sensation pervaded my entire weekend spent listening to the latest output from CMD.EXE, their debut full-length album "love.language.model". This collaboration between human musicians and machine intelligence hits with the weight of a pressurized cabin decompressing. It sits in that bruised, purple twilight between Electronic Rock...