Laurie Anderson's new album, Homeland, is the subject of an online feature from Newsweek, which opens with an appearance from her male alter ego, Fenway Bergamot, taken from the video series at nonesuch.com/media. The Newsweek piece suggests that Homeland represents a change of tone for Anderson, from her usual cool to a more overt frustration when approaching the critical issues she addresses in her new work.

"As befits someone with a career so indebted to randomness, Anderson has tended to sound bemused by all aspects of the world—even its drawbacks," says Newsweek's Seth Colter Walls. "That’s different now." He explains that on her new studio album, her first in nearly a decade, Anderson makes plain her critique of problems she sees plaguing society, even when, as she has said previously in the Village Voice, she does not necessarily have the solution.

"The good news is that Anderson’s newfound sense of polemic hasn’t poisoned her minimalist sensibility for arranging her music," Walls insists. "You could imagine a pissed-off Anderson overloading the mixing board with whirring, whizzing electronics to go with her stressed-out state of mind, but Homeland has an appealing amount of restraint to it."

Walls also looks at the various collaborators who contributed to Homeland, including John Zorn, Antony Hegarty, Kieran "Four Tet" Hebden, and Anderson's husband, Lou Reed, who providing invaluable support as she sifted through an endless array of files to create the finished album.

You'll find the piece at newsweek.com.

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The Philadelphia Daily News, in its album review, says "Anderson is up to her dry, droll and creative best on Homeland ... with material that touches on U.S. foreign policy, economic collapse, the erosion of personal freedom and medical malpractice." See the review at philly.com.

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PlayGround magazine says the issues Anderson addresses on the album, to which Newsweek and the Daily News refer, "never sound hackneyed or gratuitously provocative, but rather striking, threateningly lovely. That’s the most special thing about Homeland: this shadowy, burning intrigue that prevents us from entirely discerning what will happen in the next song."

Reviewer Cristian Rodríguez asserts that the album will undoubtedly remain fresh for years to come, just as past projects like Big Science and United States have done. "Erudite but never complicated, untiring and captivating, Laurie Anderson’s avant-garde still has that supernatural air that has always kept her ahead of her few potential rivals," Rodríguez writes. "Her ability to sound as powerful as banging a gong in the midst of silence remains perfectly intact."

Read the complete review at playgroundmag.net.