#682 Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

I've found some of Dylan's songs impressive, a few even enjoyable, but for the most part he's always seemed wildly overrated. Meandering songwriting, abrasive singing, passable guitar work, and an occasionally terrible sense of pacing and showmanship all conspired me to treat checking off each 'essential' Bob Dylan album as an exercise in eating my cultural vegetables.

Things make more sense here though: not yet fat on his own legend, Dylan sings plainly, clearly, spilling out, touching on cultural moments that resonate even 50 years later. Here he is something he never was on his other records: likable. Even when the affair waxes pompuous, it somehow feels earnest, as Dylan is as small as us all, railing against power and injustice.

When the music is this simple, the way it is sung and the persona that sings it is all that matters, and that works here. A heart beats behind this record, still felt at ground level. Dylan as a seedling, more effective at inspiring empathy and hope and fear from below than he ever would towering from above. Still don't like Bob Dylan though. So 3.5/5

#681 The Rolling Stones - The Rolling Stones (UK)

The Stones' debut is one of the missing links between roots rock and R&B and the explosion of 60's popular rock; here's an album with some swagger and bite, but that's more tribute than transgression. The great majority of the songs are covers of the likes of Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon (performed irreverently, but faithfully) and the originals don't fall far from their inspirations' tree. The result is enjoyable enough, packed with retro charm with fleeting flashes of promise in the crannies 4/5

#680 Alexander Spence - Oar

Haunted singer-songwriter tunes that drift through fields and houses at night, with shades of everything from Cash's creaky defeatism to Radiohead's forlorn phantoms. At times altogether straightforward in structure, and then suddenly wildly unconventional: consider the groaning tempo changes of War In Peace or the endless, tribal, possibly brilliant post-rock pulse of Grey/Afro.

Alexander Spence fits easily alongside the likes Nick Drake and Roky Erickson, a troubled troubadour who stumbled through songs, leaving behind affecting echoes of himself seemingly on accident. We stumble across them in turn 3.5/5

#679 Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left

All of Nick Drake's songs take place at night, if not in subject matter then in tone and feel and tenor and color. Here the nights are blue and cool, with watches of cloud and wave. Everything is infinite, folded in Drake's velvet delivery, couched in reed-bent acoustics, glistening with steel and string and wind, with sadness below the surface. Maybe that's the same sadness we'd get dragged into on the comparatively hopeless Pink Moon. Darkness creeps in again and again, but at least here the moon is clear, glowing spaces around the shadows 3.5/5

#678 Blind Faith - Blind Faith

Sounds more or less like you'd expect a band made of members of Cream and Traffic to sound, with a bit more of Humble Pie's softerer-edged soaring. The odd-numbered tracks follow a particular pattern, chugging along feel-good before plunging down a scary/fun psychedelic hole to somewhereanother. Can't Find My Way Home and Presence of the Lord provide sunny breaks in between, but the closer is something else. 15 minutes long, its not so much a jam as a deconstruction, predicting the negative space of Can, bottoming out into drum-dusted spaces and ambient noise and less and less in between repetitions of the main chorus/hook/refrain. Its a curious experiment, one of the earliest to go this far, but generally it kills the momentum of a record that is otherwise actually pretty tight.

That misstep notwithstanding, this is a perfectly good entry into this basic category of hard, jammy rock. Less hooky than Humble Pie's record, but with more depth, take your pick based on your groove and mood 3.5/5

#677 Joni Mitchell - Blue

Female singers mewling out inflected confessionals is one of my least-favorite trends in modern music, and this is the earliest example of that basic style I've found. Everyone from Joanna to Adele to that mealy-mouthed warbler from the Heineken commercials* owes something to Mitchell. Heck, its not even just the girls; the Smashing Pumpkins' Adore certainly owes something to this album's bogdeep moonlit soul.

Mitchell herself, though, mostly pulls it off, riding a certain earnestness and some funky chords and tones to victory. It's not my scene, and her high notes grate on my brain, but I respect the bare sentiment and the Nick Drake nightworn wonderment and fear 3.5/5

* Clairy Browne, sez Google. Is that not the perfectly over-inflected name for an over-inflected mewler?

#676 Stevie Wonder - Innervisions

Funky is the word for it, a silky, nuanced album dominated by Wonder's voice and wonderfully warm, wobbly bass. The rhythms are irritable (particularly the unstoppable roll on Jesus Children of America), everything syncopated enough to keep you forever tripping forward, building up to an album-scale high, higher and higher. The only missteps are the few overslow songs, like the criminally second-sequenced Visions, which kill the momentum.

There's something unplacably futuristic about this record, evoking Hancock circa headhunters, Beck at his smoothest, and Squarepusher at his most listenable. And by futuristic, I don't mean ahead of its 1973 release, I mean ahead of now, ahead of all time. There's a confidence here that can only be found in fearlessness, a fearlessness that can only come from knowing what's next. Stevie's a seer. He's seen the future and everything's going to be fine. As Stevie says, don't you worry about a thing 4/5

#675 The Smiths - The Smiths

The Queen is Dead is an undeniable masterpiece, but The Smiths' debut shows little signs of the magic to come. This is purely the Morrissey show, his warbling gravied generously over some pretty thin, largely forgettable guitar jangle. Oftentimes the tremulous crooning seems altogether disconnected from the actual song. For example: album closer Suffer Little Children sounds like a hastily tracked demo, like some proto-indie mashup where Morrissey wanders over beats intended for another song altogether that chime on and on aimlessly. It's emblematic of the problem with the entire album.

The first few songs show some structural chops and punk bristle, but the dominance of that hyperinflected moaning is numbing before you know it, the second half of the album almost impossible not to accidentally tune out. Absent the relentless guitar energy and texture and tunefulness that marked their masterpiece, replaced instead with more and more and more Morrissey, this is a flat, often annoying album. Influential, sure. Brave in its subject matter, probably. Hastily underestimated and ill-served by my first-impression format, possibly. But a first listen and a half wasn't any fun at all 2/5

#674 Alt-J - An Awesome Wave

It's not that I mind inflected vocals, reverbey arpeggios, (slightly) tweaked rhythms, and synthy washes, its just that those are so often crutches for really boring music that has nothing else to offer. Washed Out and The Drums are the most obvious recent offenders that come to mind, but there are dozens of bands making the same indistinct, mushy, sub-Animal-Collective stone soup without bringing anything new to the table.

So as Alt-J's album unfolded, I felt the hammer cocking in my mind as each trope received its checkbox in turn. But then, lo and behold, the band actually did something interesting with those parts, building a completely different model than the Indie Kit instructions dictated. The dynamics are back in indie rock, with parts dropping in and out for dramatic effect, setting the stage for moments of fearless clarity. Finally a band bold enough to put a melodic line out there and shine a light on it, to darken the entire house and hit a key moment with a blazing spot, to give musical moments their close up instead of hiding them in a bustling ensemble cast.

Which isn't to say this isn't busy, but it's more The Life Aquatic, with its awe-inspiring setpieces, than the comparitively muddy, plotless Tenenbaums that other similar bands put on offer*.

Hooky, inventive, surprising: remember when this stuff was common in indie rock and roll? Maybe there's a little life in the old girl yet 4.5/5

* I've surely retained less than 10% of people with that, losing the 50% who don't know those movies well enough to get my point, and the 40% who inexplicably prefer Tenenbaums to TLA.

#673 Mary J. Blige - What's the 411

Big-beat, big-synth R&B, full or full-throated yearning and a small cast of male guests, many of whom seem to be there to lavish affection on Blige and lend legitimacy to her effort. Yes kids, she's a girl, but we're boys, and we approve, so its ok. Like her! The endless, tuneless, endless, endless intro in particular is the greatest offender, just a bunch of people saying how great the album you're about to hear is.

Can't a record just stand on its own, rather than containing its own marketing campaign? Maybe not. Maybe that kind of complaint is a crass failure to understand the plight of a female R&B artist in the 90's. But if you had to do that to get the record sold, that's not my problem - I've got to listen to what you put on wax, and the album itself is weirdly self-conscious, like the arrogant-but-insecure guy at the party that drops the names of all the people he knows and all the countries he's visited and the mountains he's summitted.

As for the actual music? The production's spacy and inventive, the actual singing is good, but the subject matter is too one dimensional to keep my attention: love love love, want it have it need it get it, love love love, baby baby baby, love love love.

Not my scene. I'm sure this is influential, it might even be good, but given the substantial distance in culture, age, space, time, gender, race, priorities and interests between Blige and I, I just can't relate to her as a person, and if all we're going to talk about is love, I need to relate to you and your quest for it. On one hand, this is my failing; its a failing to step outside myself and reflect upon this work as an objective reviewer. On the other hand, I don't feel like Blige makes any attempt to meet me halfway, to expand her message beyond love love love, baby baby baby, love love love. If your subject matter is that one-note, you risk missing someone who wants something more, and then 2/5

#672 Emerson, Lake and Palmer - Tarkus

This is kind of what's wrong with prog. I like prog, but this is reaching for bombast, nothing humble and human about it, looming theatrical and distant, arrogance blinding you to actual appreciation of actual virtues.

The shorter, jauntier songs like Jeremy Bender fare better, but the album is dominated by the impression left by its 20-minute opener and the (titular?) batshit Armadillo-tank that graces its cover. And what's going on with are You Ready Eddy? a song so stripped down it seems almost like a sarcastic sneer in the direction of good old-fashioned rock and roll.

Attitude matters. Again, I like prog, and I even like ELP from time to time, and this is complex, sometimes-compelling music, but it crosses some line, failing the "band I'd like to be in" test with a thud, and the result almost is no fun at all 2.5/5

#671 Augustus Pablo - King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown

Normally I can't get into reggae at all, just finding it too listless, to repetitive, too narrowly composed to be all that interesting. This manages to make the core instrumental dub sound fresh though, Pablo's melodica infusing it with sunny energy, dusting in just enough changes over time to keep the proceedings from waxing soporific. Shortish song lengths help too, keeping the pacing lively. Surprisingly enjoyable 3.5/5

#670 Mott the Hoople - Mott

Back in the day, Bowie took these guys under his wing, and it shows, as this aches with much of the same glammy, Ziggy-era longing and desperation. The fact that Ian Hunter sounds more than a little like David Bowie certainly doesn't hurt either.

On the other hand, there's also a more straightforward element, with piano and backbeats that evoke goodoleboy rock from the likes of Thin Lizzy or early Bruce. This is feelgood glam, exceptionally sunny for a style that largely slunk in beerlight rainslick shadows, and that gives it a flavor all its own.

Despite those pleasurecenter checkmarks though, there's something just missing here, a lack of magic, a subtle drag in the pacing, an absence of clear melodic lines through the business. Guess we can't all be Bowie.

Heck, even Bowie was barely Bowie 3.5/5

#669 Swans - The Seer

BIG. Here's an album that goes for it in every way there is to go for it, in terms of album length, in terms of song length, in terms of volume, in terms of volume changes, in terms of hugeness of sound, in terms of massiveness of thematic heft - large in every dimension there is.

Along the way there's artfulness in texture and sound and structure, but the entire thing is such an enormous, crushing monolith its hard to even take in, petroglyphically defiant of the scale of your perspective.

That makes for quite an achievement, only modest fun, curiously compelling, but work-y to engage with 3.5/5

#668 Patti Smith - Horses

One of the strangest punk albums ever made, strange in Smith's otherworldly delivery, strange in its sprawling structure spun around half-silences, strange in its spacetime-bending musings. The finest moments are the upbeat, culture-wielding songs, including the raucous opener and closer and the velvety eternity of Land. In between are sunny dirges that drag you into the depths, and sometimes just drag, and that sometimes smack of self-indulgence, but this is an undeniably original work, a defiant slash of voice and will, and that's worth something. That's possibly worth more than anything 4/5

#667 Shellac - Excellent Italian Greyhound

Shellac's debut was a bit one-note; here the evolution doesn't involve adding new notes, but spaces between them. The songwriting has moved past punishing post-punk thrash and into art-rock expanses of uncomfortable silences, passive-aggressive intonations, and ominous notes held as long as every note on At Action Park combined. It results in an album that is decidedly more interesting, if only marginally more enjoyable, and decidedly more successful as art than rock 3.5/5

#666 Youssou N'Dour - Immigrés

World music gets a bad rap, deservedly or not. I don't think there's any shame in admitting that a lifetime of 4/4's and 12-tone scales has left you a little cool on obscure Melakartas and polyrhythms. There's a lot of momentum there, and you don't have to kill yourself to undo it.

This though, is a nice transition, decidedly outside Western tradition, totally listenable, providing sunflecked atmosphere without baking your brain. N-Dour's personality shines through, making an album that is accessible without feeling impure (unlike, say, his later collaborations with Peter Gabriel, that feel comparatively whitewashed) 4/5

#665 Frank Zappa - Joe's Garage Parts 1, 2, and 3

Frank Zappa was pretty weird.

You might know that, but unless you've really done your homework you really don't know how weird he really was, how many different kinds of weird he was, how many screwed up directions he went careening in, and therefore how really goddamn brilliant he was.

You might have come across the bent do-wop of We're Only in it for the Money, the batshit pre-post-psychadelia of Freak Out, the frantic jazzy jamming of Hot Rats, and more. And then you still might not know about the depraved genius that is Joe's Garage, an epic that careens between styles, touching on Thin Lizzy feelgood raveups, through frenetic funk, into loungy languisher, past dubby downbeat jams, through future-fucked-euro-new-wave, before exploding into cyber funk that would make Midnite Vultures-era Beck wince and shrug.

The whole thing is wrapped around a loose narrative, full of satiric bile and bite, about the perils of rock and roll, taken to ridiculous extremes. Its sex and sluts and STD's, and that's all before things start to really get freaky and there's motor oil in orifices and worse.

Strange, brilliant, possibly awful, certainly demanding of further attention, with a solid half-point deduction for the intrusive, incessant spoken interludes that prevent this from being a remotely smooth listen 4/5

#664 Talking Heads - Fear of Music

Talking Heads always trucked in alienation and subversion, but here the message is less about shaking things up than about an insidious injection of perspective.

Perspective comes in the form of eroding heaven's appeal, in chipping away at human superiority to animals, as reminders about the first-world nature of our problems, at undermining escapism's promise of change. Little by little, you're lowered into the warm bath of existence as it is, even as it grows cold. Even album-opening I Zimba's non-Wester polyrhythms, while musically a red herring, are decidedly in line with this theme, dropping you outside your comfort zone, if just for a moment.

Musically, the mix is dark and rich, with few of the popping new-wave angles, settling into a simmering region of post punk, grappling rather than punching, pulling you to the mat, and blurring the line between a submission hold and a firm spooning, as you drift off to a tough love sleeper hold slumber 4/5

#663 Human League - Dare

If you know Don't You Want Me, and I think you do, you get the basic idea, but three things to know if we're using that as a starting point:

• That song is actually better than you might realize, painting a curiously complex narrative that you could have missed if you dismissed it past the hook.
• That's the last song on the album, a truly unusual place to slot it and a truly strange way to end the album. Strange, possibly brilliant, evoking the uncharacteristically poppy songs that would later close albums like Loveless and Emergency and I.
• The rest of the album is a lot stranger that song might lead you to believe. A lot stranger and a lot better.

This is arty new wave cusping into synthpop, icy and detached and strangely listenable, still exciting, sending shockwaves informing Britpop's disinterest, Madchester's dancy edge, and 10's 80's revival bands like Cut Copy.

The central conflict here is between detachment and longing, between alienation and an irrepressible alien heartbeat. It's all summed up in the album's best known track, pushing you away and then asking, absentmindedly, don't you want me? The conflict and complexity belies the term synthpop: this is music that still, always, strives for more 4/5

#662 Shellac - At Action Park

Another Steve Albini act showcasing his penchant for raw, thunderous post-punk.

Everything is bone-dry and huge.

Any reverb gated beyond gated, with clipped instant decay on every drum hit and guitar screech, every note swiping from the darkness and gone in a flash. The exception is the clattering, dry bones bass, landing somewhere between The Giddy Motors and Korn's excesses. The vocals are similarly deadpanned, Falling from Albini's mouth in lumps. The result is an album that is both aggressive and aggressively disinterested, hooky and headbobbable, but almost by accident.

The problem is the sameness of the sound, exhilarating at first, wearyingly familiar after as few as 3 tracks, with no standout moments outside of the occasional clever lyrical turn. Maybe this helps explain why Albini's had greater success as a producer than a frontman: songwritingwise he's something of a one trick pony, better served when someone else's ideas are the object of his considerable production chops 3/5

#661 LFO - Frequencies (UK Version)

Fuck this is boooooooring.

I don't care if acid house is supposed to be repetitive, or that its about feeling, or that this was a formative album, or any of that crap. There's tons of acid house that manages to evoke emotion, create mood, create something, it's out there in droves, but this is just loops and loops with no head, no heart, no soul, no purpose at all.

Listen to You Have to Understand and explain to me why that's not one of the worst songs you've ever heard. Just lazy looping, amounting to nothing, evoking nothing, while being actually actively annoying with its shrill, vacant vocal sample bleating again and again and again. Imaging your friend made this song and played it for you. How good a friend would that have to be to listen to it and smile blankly for its entire 4 minutes. I'd assume they were taking the piss. I would spend every second of that four minutes trying to come up with something nice to say, and I'd come up dry and it would be awkward and that friend wouldn't play his music for me anymore. Which is just is well, because this hypothetical friend is not very good at making music that I want to listen to.

Maybe I just don't get it, man. This isn't in my wheelhouse. I admit it.

But I call bullshit on this. This is boring, amateurish music and there's a long line of things I'd listen to first even if I was in the mood for this kind of thing 1.5/5

#660 Chic - Chic

Disco sucks!

Or so I've heard.

I'm not convinced this is really a disco album though, this sounds like funk to me, even if its smoothed-out slightly douchey funk*.

And you know what, it's actually pretty good; maybe it got in during some hair's-breadth pure phase of disco's weird mayfly-fast lifecycle. The band wants you to dance ("Dance, Dance, Dance" AND "Everybody Dance" as song titles) but its pretty classy about it, full of hush and coo. Sau Paulo in particular rolls on sunset horns with cloudstrip strings, all on top of some pretty darn clever bass, sounding like a great lost Air b-side.

There's hints here of things that could be terrible when blown out of proportion (something Chic themselves would do in an album or two) but here the restraint actually gives it a good dose of something you don't associate with disco: it's actually kind of cool 4/5

* and what is Falling in Love with You doing on this album? That is a goddawful song that isn't disco or funk or anything I want to hear.

#659 Big Black - Atomizer

Steve Albini has a way with sounds, producing some of the sharpest, harshes guitar records in mainstream-ish alternative 90's rock (including, probably most famously, In Eutero). Here's his some of his earliest, self-created music: honed to a noisy industrial edge, with a hellbent guitar sound that soars like Loveless's evil twin.

The real key is the nasty, hissing drum machine that whirs at the album's heart. This isn't the bum-bum-bip-bum Casiotone looping you might expect, this is lurches and lunges with sinister energy. Its a heck of a sound; ugly, yet strangely inviting, heavy, but exhilarating instead of exhausting.

This is as pure as Albini would cut his particular brand of scathing rock and roll, decidedly worth hearing once if you're any kind of student of the era 4/5

#658 Ultraísta - Ultraísta

A curiously Garbage-like project, with producers Nigel Godrich (most famously working with Radiohead) and Joey Waronker (most famously working with Beck) fronting their band with an unrelated, undertalented female singer to make slightly soulless, reasonably compelling, electronic-tinged rock.

If you're any kind of fan of recent Radiohead this will sound familiar, and the album is mostly interesting as a referendum on Godrich's role in that band's recent sound. Similar buzzy, 5 on a flat tire bass and unknown square wave poltergeists rule the songs, and Waronker's clipped, precise beats even evoke King of Limbs-era post-post-punk skitter.

The problem is Laura Bettinson's singing, which simply don't have the Yorkeian personality to stand up to the production, landing somewhere between Broadcast* and Dirty Projectors on the mewling female inflection scale, providing vocals but little voice. Consider Easier, where she swoops the titular word up an octave or so as the main hook: the result is so baldly just a note, there's nothing to the delivery that constitutes performance as a frontwoman.

Interesting, but rarely compelling; for my money I'd rather just wait for whatever Nigel and the Radiohead boys cook up next 3/5

* good call, Dusted

#657 Big Boi - Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors

There's a new wave in hip hop, and if My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy didn't start it, it was certainly the most prominent standard-bearer. Its an era where it's ok to try to do weird, experimental things, to dabble in electronics and rock and sounds beyond time, without being labeled a sellout. It's an era where making something truly beautiful is an achievement. And perhaps most crucially, rappers are allowed to be vulnerable, to be brought down by the same everyday problems that plague us all, crises of confidence and troubles with love and the ghosts of the mistakes we've made.

And all of that applies here, with noisy, emotionally resonant production driving you into yourself, providing escapism through rhymes and rhythms and textures and the feelings they evoke alike. It's some Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness shit, disarming and diverse and curiously affecting if you let it in.

Phantogram produces three songs and they're the album's best and most representative, swirling perfect bass and humm and synth and female vocals and chops into something unreal, with a backbone of right solid rapping to hold it all together. Elsewhere, She Hates Me delivers a post-Runaway autotuned confessional, matched only by Tremendous Damage's stutterstep, heartbroken R&B for quiet desperation.

The album is overlong, as rap albums so often are, but its stuffed with enough ideas that it might, believe it or not, justify its length. Mellon Collie indeed.

Is it too late for Outkast to get back together? There's a simmering longing for those days under the surface here. With all the growth as an artist Big Boi has shown, maybe he could take the lead and take some of the pressure off Andre. Dré as sidekick to Big Boi's future-blown masterey? It's just crazy enough to work 4.5/5

#656 Frank Black - Frank Black

People call Trompe Le Monde the first Frank Black solo album, straying as it does from the Pixies' alterna-punk roots and eschewing as it does the barest songwriting contribution from Kim Deal. Under that conceit, this is pretty standard, solid, sophomore album material, as the surfier, more melodic sound of the Pixies' swan song is explored and expanded.

Only the barest vestiges of Black's screamy days remains, here he rises the a creaky caw at best, mostly swooping over crunchy acoustic chords and reverbey electric plucks: this is reaching more for Where is My Mind's buzzy grace than Debaser's hellbent rage.

It's all perfectly good. These are good songs with excellent melodies and enjoyable textures and sounds, but... there's something missing. There's no edge, nothing quite penetrates the heart and barbs into place,  everything buffed solo-act smooth. One of the joys of an actual band is that the personalities grate against each other, leaving pitts and pockmarks on the songs, the disagreement assuring that good-enough is achieved without blowing past it into actually-worse just-right. This is exhibit A. Also, man, something happened to Black's voice at some point, he just can't deliver like he used to. Here he sounds like a limp impression of himself,* further undermining the songs impact.

Add the Pixies to the list of bands that just had that magic, too beautiful to live, that just couldn't survive the moment they exploded from 3/5

* and it only got worse, have you seen him try to do the screamier Pixies songs since their reunion? Yikes double yikes yow. Bad scene.

#655 Ty Segall - Ty Rex

My love of Ty Segall is pretty well documented around here, and I'm a pretty big T Rex fan, so what's not to like about the already retro-minded Segall doing an EP of T Rex covers?

The result is more or less what you'd expect, as long as you expect Segall to take ample liberties. There's nothing as scandalous as his blistering take on Diddy Wah Diddy here, but if you'd never heard of T Rex, you'd be forgiven for assuming this was an EP of originals. The thundering, fuzzy bass, shredded vocals, and garagey production are tempered by only the barest glammy sheen. This sounds straight out of an alternate reality where Marc Bolan had been closer to Iggy Pop than David Bowie, and where he went for it even harder than The Stooges did.

Well, when he goes for it, that is. The even-numbered, faster tracks give Ty room to kick his legs out and really show the 70's what he would've been made of, but on the slower tracks he seem weighed down by the ghost of Bolan, aping a soaring, balladic style that's outside his wheelhouse. Maybe Ty's a victim of his own success: he's so adept at slamming out a few dozen songs like this a year that he scarcely needs the blueprint, and it becomes a burden.

The result is a must-hear-once artifact for fans that fall into that center slice of that Ty / T Venn diagram. After that first listen, just pluck the best tracks for your mixes of scuzzy, glammy glory 3.5/5

#654 Phoenix - United

Phoenix would later make a splash with big soft Ratatatesque guitar-as-synth hooks, full of precision-crafted tones and mostly-unadventurous songwriting. Everything in its right place.

It's a bit surprising then that their debut is such a weird, sprawling hodgepodge, complete with disco revival, string-laden Air instrumentals, crunchy alt-rock riffs, spooky 80's synths, and a 9-minute autotune honkytonk/hip-hop clusterbomb as a cherry on top. Everything is still plenty overproduced, with that weird French sheen, but its a reversal of their previous work: the songs individually aren't all that memorable, but the album as a whole is so wildly adventurous that it gets your attention. United plays like a mixtape: the flow is solid, the overall tone is consistent within a certain space, but you're hearing something a little different around ever corner. If you're having a quiet, slightly funky, slightly intimate night, it might just do you right 3.5/5

#653 Larry Keel - Journey

Bluegrass, full of lazy drifters and devilborne lightning guitar work, with Keels gravelly croak crooning its crippled way over top with surprising grace. The fretboard fireworks on the first track might lead you to expect a more frenetic affair, but its actually all rather soulful, and eventually the tickettape fingerwork fades into the background.

It's hard to say if this album is simple or complex, and maybe that's its strength, the ability to be both and reap the twin benefits of being interesting and soothing all at once. Keels voice occasionally loses its stage presence without gaining the gravitas of vulnerability, hovering in a weirdly inelegant place, but those moments aside, this is a strangely compelling album that a surprising number of folks might enjoy if they dared let themselves 4/5

#652 Speedy Ortiz - Sports EP

Check it out free here!

I keep dinging these LocalMusicBoston bands for having albums that don't live up to their live shows, but its my way of giving them their due while giving an honest impression of good-but-unspectacular albums. Speedy Ortiz won me over with their frantic, precise post-Nirvana thrash, a live show bristling with bottledup electric energy.

This EP's opener gives you your best taste of what to expect, with 90's dissonance, skitterey drumming and deft start-stop blasts of guitar noise. It's exciting, in that kind of "I'll be these guys are awesome live" kind of way. Good. Your instints are good. They are.

But then everything else sags by comparison, swaying instead of juking, riding Built to Spill bend and chime instead of more straightforward riffage. Which is fine, I just think their strongest suit is scalpelstorm aggression and its a shame not to see more of that here. The other exceptions are the infernal closing segments to Silver Spring and Suck buddies, which turn the backhanded Built to Spill comparison on its head, evoking the euphoric highs of the closing sections of songs like Some or Carry the Zero. Now just make one that closes like Kicked it in the Sun and we're good.

So if you like the 90's at its underground precision pretty noise best, you'll find a lot to like here. I just came in expecting too much. Who's fault is that? Stop being so good live, Boston 3.5/5

#651 Daft Punk - Discovery

I love it when an album just goes for it on an album level, when the record as a whole represents a gesture beyond the sum of its parts, coalescing into a narrative, a rumination on themes, an emotional arc or just a cohesive, flowing, 30-90 minute or so listening experience. That's something that happens here, augering Daft Punk's peerless live shows / albums, a pinnacle of flow and experience.

While I found Homework rather icy, Kraftwerkian in its robotic detachment, this is full of downright human notes, a real sense for beauty and emotional ebb and flow, evoking later acts like The Avalanches and Girl Talk that would spin cohesive listening arcs from even more disparate parts. From the disco pulse of Voyager, to the weird proggy interlude of Verdis Quo, to the honest to god Jamiroquai via Hot Chip ravers that close the album, there is interest in well-measured affirmation and subversion of expectation at every turn.

My only quibble is actually One More Time, which sets things off on a Stereotypes-on-The-Great-Escape-level unduly ugly party vibe, but once you get part that it's some laser-smooth sailing, straight on through 4.5/5

#650 Charles Mingus - Pithecanhropus Erectus

Boppy jazz buoyed by Mingus's driving bass, sounding mostly upbeat. The exception, and most noteworthy track is A Foggy Day, creating a cityscape of honks, foghorns, whistles, and squeals out of horn sounds - a rather nice trick that evokes chaos and unease and now sounds well ahead of its time.

Not much fun to actually listen to though. So it goes with experimental music, in rock and jazz alike.

The highlight, unsurprisingly, is the man with his name on the record, and the bass is expressive, nuanced and impossibly deft, rewarding close listening. Nice enough record from a genre that I make no secret of knowing fuckall about 3.5/5

#649 Brian Eno - Small Craft on a Milk Sea

When you first put this on you'll get what you likely expect from Brian Eno: carefully crafted, visual-evoking soundscapes that split the difference between his truly minimal ambient work and his rock-oriented solo-era ambient pieces. Everything is rather soft and nice (I challenge you to hear Emerald and Lime without seeing a sunrise).

And then Flint March charges in like an attacking army and it is all tension, nearly unbearable, full of decidedly modern hits and ticks and clicks, whirring, basal noise, followed by Horse, continuing the assault, sounding like the apocalypse itself, sounding like impossibly massive machinery crumbling, like the sky turning red, like swarms of cockroaches descending, and suddenly you remember this is on Warp and feel like you should have known it wasn't going to be another Another Green World. It is actually stunning, especially the way it comes on so suddenly and powerfully, there is a real sense of landscape and narrative.

We are in Atticus Ross territory, where the noise is dense and menacing and ever-shifting. I could list visual metaphors for hours. Its all sounds unknowable of source, and then suddenly, in the middle of track 3 of the blitz an honest to god guitar rings out and descends like a world-crushing blade from the sky and everything ends.

Things get less epic, but no less weird, where Bone Jump rings like the dub version of the overworld theme from a long lost Fight Club nintendo game, Dust Shuffle streaks like a cybernetic jaguar, and Paleosonic drowns guitars in glitch, and we are decidedly not in ambient terrirory anymore.

But then we are, and everything gets a bit quieter, but in an ominous voice, one that can't forget what it's seen.

Which is all to say that this is an expansive, massive, adventurous album where Eno has thoroughly considered where experimental music has been and used its best moves in his own ways. Its not a lot of fun to listen to, brutal and terrifying and effective, but its a work worth hearing that will likely reward repeated and close listens 4/5

#648 Kendrick Lamar - good kid, m.A.A.d city

A staggering album in ways I still can't get my head around, as a loose, half-remembered, remorseful tragedy unfolds, possibly in reverse, over decidedly retro-inspired beats. This is the kind of narrative, tough-life big beat hip hop that I can't get into, but there's something curiously compelling about this. I could go do some research (look at the size of this wikipedia page!) and figure out what it's all about, but I think most of what I like about the album is the mystery and the promise of figuring it out. There's the suggestion of richness here. I'll get into it and get back to you.

In the meantime, the actual production is too minimal to move me, and the actual rapping is uneven at best, falling into that trap of repeating its most annoying moments (Backseat Freestyle is more or less unbearable), but the promise of an overarching premise keeps me interested 3/5

#647 The Dying Falls - Driftwood

Listen free here!

Disclosure: I like these guys, they're good dudes and they put on a good, taut show.

Also Mark's parents are pretty cool.

So I say it with nothing but love that these guys sound like a lot of bands. Look, we live in a post-girl-talk world, its ok to wear your influences on your sleeve and to combine them in new and fun ways. I say this all with great sincerity: these guys sound like a lot of my favorite bands, and that's ok.

The huge echoey slapping claps and ticks that punctuate Teenage Affliction are purely original, giving distance and space and stormtunnel transgression to a song that evokes a midtempo Tokyo Police Club song decorated with Modest Mouse wobble guitar paeans.

Entertainment rides Strokesey chug, but elevates it with punches of Unicornsey soft-square synthy melodies.

And look, a lot of people have made songs that sounded like Where Is My Mind, its no crime that Old Prisoner's Song goes there so strongly that it turns out to be a nice little tune. Also, I never get tired of across-the-room backing yelps.

Injury sounds like some combination of My Yellow Country Teeth, Bloc Party and (again) Tokyo Police Club, but comes across as bright and fun as anything any of those bands put out.

I'm sure this all sounds very backhanded and namedroppey and wiseassey, and I acknowledge that these are compliments laced with accusations of copping sounds, but for me copping a sound is no crime, and worth it if the song comes out like something I want to hear. For the well-listened indie rock fan, this is how you're probably going to hear these guys: they sound like a fun mashup of a lot of your favorite bands, expertly performed and produced. There's not a ton you haven't heard here before (though Teenage Affliction is a nice start), but doesn't seeking that get exhausting anyway?

If you're not familiar with all my little backhanded wiseass namedrops? Well, hear this first and it will be your new favorite album. Then go check out all those bands, and be warned: you will find they do what these guys do better and be a little sad. But you'll also find things you miss, that The Dying Falls do that none of those bands bring to the table. And you might find their collections of songs aren't actually as generally solid (I'm looking at you Bloc Party, and you post-Lesson-in-Crime Tokyo Police Club). Its like hearing Smash Your Head and going, man Biggie's a great rapper, and then realizing how dead fucking boring the production on Ready to Die is. Where's my Tiny Dancer at? Then you go listen to Smash Your Head and give it the respect its due 3.5/5

#646 Frog Eyes - Paul's Tomb: A Triumph

Would you believe The Folded Palm was my #1 album of 2004? Beating out Funeral, even. Sacrilege. That unhinged energy was just irresistible, so reckless and fearless and bold.

Here the band doesn't reach those highs though. Mercer yelps and howls, but he feels defeated by comparison. The tunes don't quite rollick. This is a more Serious album. This is mournful music from after the war, and is a pale shadow of the fight and fury the band showed when the sky cracked and the land streaked black and red and when their lives seemed to depend on proving whatever it was they had to prove 3/5

#645 The Chemical Brothers - Exit Planet Dust

Relentless.

This rides huge, block-rocking beats and the same basic squonky techno sound in loops and loops, peppers in drum fills, beat drops, synth builds, all on the same basic relentless backbeat backbeat backbeat backbeat. This is music for raving the fuck out to, and it pulls no punches for six tracks

Then, suddenly, you get your chillout comedown circa the airy Chico's Groove, into the downright downtempo One Too Many Mornings, and on through some more experimental, buzzy, samply, vocally territory.

Decidedly a two-sided album, with the first half being the stronger, serving as an unflinching bareknuckle mission statement. The second half shows some nice tricks, but ones that were bettered by their later albums (disclosure: I've always had a weird soft spot for Surrender). Come for the huge beats, wander out during the comedown set whenever you're ready to start partying again 3/5

#644 Daft Punk - Homework

Weird what albums you assume you've heard but never did.

If you've only heard Da Funk and Around the World, you'll know roughly what to expect here, but understand that those are the most lithe, muscular bits on an otherwise skeletal album that runs very minimal in places, very repetitive in others, and rides extremely basic, perfectly crafted analog-sounding synth lines really hard. There's something primitive about this - its electronic music, but you can feel the synthesizers working together, you can feel the machine moving - this wasn't made in a computer. Or if it was, it was done in the spirit of more raw, primitive electronic music.

If you come in expecting bangers like the two main singles, you're going to be bored. If you're willing to roll with some expansive, minimal house stretches and endless, blistering techno knob-turning, willing to let the whole huge, awkward, lumbering thing breathe and move, its actually pretty good as new school old school electronic fuckery 3.5/5

#643 Jorge Ben - Força Bruta

I liked his earlier album pretty good, except for those damn cuicas. Well, they're back, though they're not quite as annoying here, lower in the mix and less common. The overall vibe is still sunny, samba cool, with a bit more of an upbeat, rock edge, with some harder hits, some use of tension and release and a general willingness to jerk the leash a bit.

There's something timeless here, everything just wafting by like the wind, something that makes it special.

I prefer the harder-edged Tropicalia, but this is among the nicest and most interesting of the softer stuff. Still don't love those fuckin cuicas though 3.5/5

#642 Radio Control / Rabbit Troupe - Split 7'

I do like me some Radio Control, and here's two more flinty blasts of frenetic, carefree garage punk. The Waiting Game in particular delivers great, soaring riffs and perfectly-balanced vocals. There's a subtle production trick at play here, where the vocals echo quickly and harshly, as if off of cinder blocks and dirt and pipes, giving the songs the spontaneous energy of a batshit basement show.

Rabbit Troupe prove a savvy choice for this split EP, bringing a similar live energy, opting for near-shoegaze levels of guiar pileups and reverb, but stopping short of becoming another '10's everynote tragedy.

This is good rock and roll, offering nothing stunningly inventive but delivering what it promises with heart and energy and soul 4/5

#641 The Coup - Sorry to Bother You

The Coup are potentially pretty brilliant.

The first half of the album is a broadside of obnoxious, indie-party rap, sporting hard-edged Outkast-via-Oakland rhyming over drunken synth loops, buzzy bass guitar, and huge clipped beats, landing somewhere between Spank Rock and Andrew WK. It's fun, in its fucked up way, but it comes on so strong you might be tempted to turn it off and never come back.

Don't. First of all, it'll grow on you. Second of all, you'd miss one of the strangest, most perfectly executed second-half about-faces I've heard in a while. One moment you're listening to the minimal-maximal stomp and chant of Land of 7 Billion Dances, and you've barely notice that its tone's changed as it burbles itself to sleep. Then lithe strings come in, unexpected but natural, and a heartfelt, beautiful little spoken word serenade emerges, complete with perfectly-delivered female backing. It's something straight out of Broken Social Scene circa You Forgot it in People.

Its like waking after the party where you partied way too hard for the third night in a row. Not the morning after, when you're hung over and swearing never to do this again. That day is awful. This is like skipping that day and waking up the morning after that, when you wake up feeling great, and knowing you mean it this time, and maybe things will change. After Violet's dulcet tones waft off This Year rides upbeat Go Team! ready motivation horns and "all rights!" and We've Got a Lot to Teach You Cassius Green delivers a bizarre, sincerely parable of identity.

Then there's Long Island Iced Tea Neat, which is just my goddamn jam, the perfect bass riff, the perfect clattering beat, the perfect flippant fuck-you delivery. I walk faster just thinking about it.

Usually a fun album is superficial: you know what you're getting and what to do with it right out of the gate. This is a rare, richer album that demands a bit of listening before you realize what an interesting playground it's built for you 4.5/5

#640 Neil Young - Le Noise

Neil Young IN SPACE. Just Young and his Guitar, echoing and repeating in phases outside of echo, swirling around, looping and tripping on loops.

Which is to say, this isn't Neil Young and his guitar in the way you might expect. Not in like the Muddy-Waters-and-his-guitar way, not in the purest form of stripped down rock kind of way. This is heavily produced in that production-as-an-instrument kind of way.

The result is a strange, rounded unclear thing, sounding silverey and out of time, but mostly compelling. The production is subtle and rarely makes itself known, feeling like an organic jam between Neil Young and future Neil Young and bizarro Neil Young, singing with one voice in a poorly synched qunatum resonance chamber. Pretty sci-fi shit for a crunchy, no-frills rockanroll man. Young is angry and resigned and scared and lost, and it will infect you, and leave you feeling much the same 4/5

#639 Neil Young with Crazy Horse - Psychadelic Pill

You'd never guess the dude could still put an album this solid out there, but here it is, epic in scope, stuffed with good guitar solos, adventurous within the space it outlines for itself. There's crunch and bluster straight off of Everybody Knows this is Nowhere, with resigned ackonwledgement and dismissal of the times and the ways they are a-changin'. Scarcely a step's been lost.

The three epic-length songs are the highlights, giving themselves room to breathe, wielding repetition and evolution to build expansive spaces, Walk Like a Giant and Drifting Back laying claim to huge tracts of space and time, respectively. Despite the length of the songs and the album itself, the listening experience rarely drags - the band is tight and they know what they're doing. They're indulgent, but not self-indulgent. They're indulging you.

Of course there's still Young's voice at the heart of it all, and if you didn't like it 40 years ago you won't like it now; it's changed surprisingly little. For me, it's a miss a lot of the time, just too reedy and strained, but I can suffer it in the name of some vintage jams 4/5

#638 Streight Angular - Everyone is Synchopated EP

Love these guys to death, one of my favorite local bands, but this EP does little to showcase what they're really about. The title track is the highlight, but the power it wields live just isn't captured here, and the other songs just aren't particularly memorable. There's some clever combinations of rock styles, sure, but there's a lack of punch in the performance and the production that hamstrings their energy. If I'd never heard Streight Angular live I can't say this would inspire me to check them out, but you should. That's where they bring the heat 2.5/5

#637 Mouse on Mars - Parastrophics

Mouse on Mars has always been a tease, for every Actionist Respoke there was an album's worth of stuff that was chopped and noisy and adventurous in its way, but that just wasn't any actual fun to listen to.

This hits a good balance though, with great energy and strangeness, but convinced to dance, all elliptical movement, all lightcycling ahead, sounding prefuse chopped and dubstep bent and lcd thumping and aphex vulnerable and glitch spare, all in turn, inventive and colorful and fun.

It's still pretty annoying at times, downright stressful in most cases, reasonably awful actually, but when you hit that sweet spot, when you find the right way of listening, let the right parts of your brain turn off, it's a jagged limegreen pin jammed in your pleasure center 3.5/5

#636 Prins Thomas - Prins Thomas

Hypnotic, krautey music that lies somewhere between spacy post-rock and trancy electronica. Thomas describes his music as Space Disco, which is a nice way to describe the overlap of Air-like astral elements and dancepunk basslines that form the album's backbone. As with Krautrock, this is music best suited to motion, to drawing the eye to passing rhythms, to providing atmosphere multipliers to atmospheric situations, lending timeless weight to your everyday journey. Take a long walk while it snows, or a drive past where the houses are, and the world shimmers with a little something extra 3.5/5

#635 Philip Glass - North Star

It's important to give albums their due respect and to try to take the on the terms they present, but holy shit is this boring. Just downright annoying. High art I guess, maybe, but just unlistenable. The exceptions are the organ tracks, which get a nice warm sound with subtleties in the crannies that somewhat justify the repetition. Ik-ook, in particular, is propulsive and satisfying and presents interesting ways of hearing via its segmentations of its repetitions.

As I just mentioned, Glass does repetition. That's kind of his thing around this time. Some call it minimalism (referring to composition not to sound), and that's fine. The problem isn't even necessarily in the minimal compositions, its the actual sounds from which the songs are composed: in so many cases their actual tone isn't pleasant, ringing slightly dissonant. This is maybe revolutionary work as far as synthesizers, but they just sound bad. Listening to something bad again and again isn't good.

Important, maybe. but only listen if you feel like you need to eat your cultural vegetables 1.5/5

#634 Various Artists - Rework: Philip Glass Remixed

Do you like repetition? I said, do you like repetition? I can't hear you!

You better, because its Glass's stock in trade and here his work is used as an outline for a variety of modern, mostly electronic, artists to play with. Fact is, that's about all I know about Glass and his role in this project, and I've never heard any of the originals of any of these songs, so I'm gonna have to take this at face value.

At face value, its all pretty darn good actually. Hypnotic, but interesting, the familiar artists sounding familiar but new through this lens. All things considered, most of this isn't all that indulgent, with reasonable song lengths and approaches to making music. There is surprisingly little that is unlistenable or boring given Glass's reputation for demanding patience.

This is perhaps because of the curation by Beck, perhaps the most straightforwardly pop-minded of the contributors found here. He also houses the main exception to the aforementioned restraint, resulting in a 20 minute, comparatively narrative track that is possibly the album's best.

Starting off with the click and rhythm and buzz of a city coming to life, the songs opens like sun rising through low clouds on a cold morning. The small details fall away and we're awed by monoliths of concrete and steel and before we know it we're on a train out of town, and then a train through the history of the city itself, maybe time itself, before coming to rest in a quiet reflective moment, maybe on a park bench. Maybe everything maybe nothing. This all nearly wordlessly, with Beck's voice echoing through space, a glorious, insane extension of his artiest moments, like the 3-part closer to The Information. I'm tempted to explain how this whole odyssey could be mapped onto Kubrick's 2001, but let's not get ridiculous. It's stitched together from 20 or so Glass tracks, so its hard to know who exactly to give credit to, but the result is something of a masterpiece.

The rest of the album is compelling enough, but there is nothing this narrative or groundbreaking, mostly serving to ride a single idea or groove in a more traditional style. The rest of the tracks are probably worth a three and a half or so, but the Beck track alone is easily enough for a bump to 4/5

#633 Ty Segall - Twins

I've said it before, but Ty Segall is the face of rock right now, dragging garage rock revival into hellish new places it never wanted to go, giving it sardonic post-punk swagger and a scuzzy modern edge, his output has been impossibly diverse and downright solid given its volume.

Speaking of volume, things are still loud, with that signature colossal buzz bass and frantic fill-filled drums riding under flayed guitars playing the best scum-punk hooks this side of Raw Power.

Listen to They Told Me Too and you'll hear all you need to know, that unstoppable, galloping beat, that shitkicking bass riff, that soaring guitar, sounding written and recorded in about seven minutes and blasted onto the world as a homemade grenade. Or Who Are You, riffing on Are You Gonna Go My Way, and by extension You Really Got Me, and Are You Going to Be My Girl, and by extension Lust for Life, and by extension Motown, and by extension probably half  dozen other songs, running them into each other into something offkilter and uncanny, whipping inspirations beyond their limits.

We've got ourselves a modern-day Robert Pollard here folks, but one who's interested in a decidedly modern approach to appropriate-and-wrench songwriting, one who's interested fucking up the production in altogether different ways, one who's got his song-spitting chaingun pointed in a far darker direction. Strap in, goin' down 4.5/5

#632 Handsome Furs - Face Control

Dan Boeckner doing his thing, the result sounding not unlike his work with Wolf Parade, but with some icy distance and electronic edge courtesy of a trip through Eastern Europe. This isn't exactly Berlin Trilogy or Liars' self titled territory (Station to Station at most on the infection-by-frigid-European-distance scale), but its a shift. The wooly, star-burning woods are traded for headlight flickers and apartment windows and isolation. Where Wolf Parade felt connected to the our deeper desires, this album connects to our deeper inhibitions, simmering instead of running wild.

Still, the texture and tunefulness are in place, the energy and hope and promise still lurk around every corner, and the vocal hooks are still some of the best in the ravaged-throat howler wing of house indie rock. Whether he's in a blackout or the black of night, Boeckner's got a knack for lighting a match 4/5

#631 Wolf Parade - Expo '86

Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary was one of the finest indie rock albums of the 00's, perfectly paced, nearly filler-free, with about as strong a closing set of 4 or so songs you're gonna find put to plastic. This doesn't hang together quite as flawlessly on the album scale, but its grandfather's* peer in its ability to deliver unstoppable songs full of propulsive beats, scathing guitars, buzzed-out bass, and hysteria-laced grasps at the infinite, all laser straight or knuckleballing headward, as the situation demands.

Its that combination of relentlessly, energetically straightforward, peppered with little unpredictable bursts, that is at the heart of Wolf Parade, where relentless, anthemic calls to arms like Palm Road provide relief from the herky-jerky histrionics of Cloud Shadow on the Mountain, followed by What Did My Lover Say? which takes turns at both, sometimes at the same time. Expo 86 swings a bit too close to the anthemic side and doesn't take as many chances as I'd like to see a band on its third album taking, but it does the sound justice. Doing what you do well, when what you do is this broadly defined and interesting, aint such a bad thing 4/5


* apparently greatness skips a generation, as sophomore effort At Mt. Zoomer was a murky mess by comparison

#630 Skinny Bones - Little Meat

Listen free here! (update: not anymore :(

An album full of warmth and hope and regret, pulling off a balance of electronic sheen and human touch that can't help but evoke Twin Shadow. And while this doesn't quite reach Lewis's timeless highs, this might actually be a more roundly enjoyable album, bristling with Wolf Parade's creaky, detuned energy and desperate pop ravings. And just when we're a song and a third deep in straight up Modest Mouse wailing, A Sudden Blame cracks open into doubletime shuffle and stomp, putting its own stamp on the sound.

As far as I understand it, this is a solo project from an affable guy named Jacob from local band The New Complainers, and I gotta say, the production is rock solid. Clear, warm, rich, beyond what you'd expect from local-band-solo-act-album. An impressive start, here's hoping he sticks with it 3.5/5

#629 Big Joe Turner - The Boss of the Blues

Big, but in the jazzy tradition where the horns do the backing and the horns do the solos, and the guitar isn't even really a meaningful part of the equation. Turner is a big, bold blues shouter in the most traditional sense, and his voice is round and powerful, but a bit bland - this is performance of good music, not of wrestling with personal demons and desperation put to tape. That's probably because this, even in 1956, was a retrospective, recreating early boogie and R&B songs in the studio.

Without that immediacy, without that guitar, without that desperation, this is missing too many of the things that make for a good blues and early rock recording, reading more as blues-flavored big band, which isn't exactly what I, for one, am in the market for just now 3/5

#628 David Bowie - Station to Station

Call it vampire soul. Plastic soul makes this music sound too warm, sounding pliable and colorful. If start with the Plastic label, understand that this is hard plastic, this is harsh lines, this is solid shapes. It is a detached alien overlord exiled too long on earth, too tired of inhaling and fucking everything he can find. He limps with great grace through nightclubs connected endlessly by doors to one another, out the backdoor and into the next, constant movement past downheaded dukes, desperate youths and lie-low beerlight, flashes off of glasses. The doors connect again and again, and there are no streets in between and there is no slowing or stopping, there is no progress, and nothing is lost and nothing is resolved and the only thing that is gained is the incremental experience, the drip of another step through life familiar with barest hope-flecks in the details, the barest glimmers of the new.

Like Iggy Pop and Marc Bolan, Bowie comes out the other side of glam finding that the world hasn't changed, that it can't be changed, that only he can change, but he's nowhere left to change. So the beat plods on, he makes music full of life and soul, and drinks of it in the night, and staggers onward with grace undiminished, with the cool perspective of the undead, the charming grace of one who takes without seeing to need, who has much to tell but would rather wield the promise than the reveal.

And you yourself are charmed, by the promise and the grace and the vision and the intoxicating lack of need. Bowie plays it like the brooding boy, the black sheep you can save, the man your mother warned you about, the one who don't need nothing, who plays hard to get without seeming to play, and you're drawn in 4/5

#627 Sonic Youth - EVOL

You can't talk about Sonic Youth without talking about noise. Dissonance and racket are at the heart of their MO, though their exact relationship with the guitar and the noises it can make has changed over time. Here is their first attempt to make an actual rock album, as the band takes wet, leaden lumps of noise and shapes them into ten vaguely song-shaped objects. It is clumsy and primitive, less interesting than something noisier, less listenable than what Sonic Youth would do in the following years, compelling mostly as a history lesson in the band's progression 3/5

#626 The Unicorns - 2014 EP

Here's The Unicorns in microcosm: three tracks (plus a demo version of the title track) that outline their style, each a chorusless, manic little blast of pop. 2014 builds tension on the backs of noisy synths and future disco skitters before breaking out into joyous raveup desperation. Emasculate the Masculine marries funk guitar chug so post-punk guitar crunch, frosted with squonky square wave solos. Finally, Evacuate the Vacuous gives us a taste of the whisper quiet bomb shelter crooner Unicorns, breaking into sunlight only briefly before retreating into darkness, maybe forever.

The first two tracks would have been standouts on a second Unicorns album, the one that never came. 2014 itself, despite bearing some of the Unicorns hallmarks, served to take their sound in a strange, dancy new direction, one we'll tragically never see fleshed out. So we're left to pick over scraps and bones. Such pretty bones. Miss these guys 4/5

#625 The Breeders - Last Splash

A decidedly 90's album, but one that's a lot more solid, with much better flow, and a much deeper bag of tricks than you might expect. There's hard rockers, some stuttering meandering weirdnesses, some Sonic Youth guitar crush, and some straight up Pixies jams (most notably S.O.S.) (though less than you might expect). And then there's Divine Hammer, which is just a fucking great upbeat 90's pop rocker classic. Heck, even cliched Country-tinged closer Drivin' On 9 is way better than it should be.

For an album that was readily discarded as Cannonball + filler, this is actually a damn solid piece of twisty rock and roll that deserves better than its reputation 4/5

#624 Tame Impala - Lonerism

Everything runs together in a swirl, colors emerging, guitars and synths and voices and their reverberations and refractions interweaving. Its one part psychadelia, one part shoegaze, and extra dollops of Of Montreal, The Flaming Lips, and The Olivia Tremor Control's strangest melodic moments. It sounds like the 60's as filtered through most of the 00's favorite filters. Which is to say this has been done before, at least twice, and has all the trappings of a mushmouthed style I've railed against repeatedly.

And yet it works here, for two main reasons. First, it pulls out the most uncommon and essential trick in music: great songwriting. The particular structures and swirls and highs and lows and repetitions and deviations therefrom are expertly chosen to give a lilting, gorgeous experience that hypnotizes without lulling to sleep.

Second, the bass. It is the one thing that is pure, undoubled, undiluted, running Harrison-pure, giving backbone to the pulsing shapes that run rampant across the record. The bassline is what you follow, and everything else is the landscape you follow it through. That one trick lets this album rise above the swirly everynote muck that pollutes so much of modern indie rock. That and the crackerjack songwriting 4.5/5

#623 Metz - Metz

Rock and roll done up super raw, too rough, too fast, full of analog energy and realness and fear and rage, recent favorite Ty Segall's sound done even harder, but still done so enjoyably, melodically, tunefully, catchily that it barely even hurts to listen to. This is one of the most immediately catchy really heavy albums I've heard in a while - sounding not unlike Nirvana or The Pixies at their loudest, or maybe even Pavement at their Blacktick thrash pinnacles. There's something special and elemental here that I can't put my finger on, something swirling ever-closer to an oncoming, savage garage-rock revival, something that sparks hope for modern rock and roll 4.5/5

#622 Converge - All We Love We Leave Behind

Speedmetal thrash done up with razorwire punk production, with the occasional moments of beauty. Seen alongside the Car Bomb album this approach seems to be a burgeoning thing.

This is chopsville USA though, done up in the grand metal tradition of "how fast and precisely can you play". This is flower-in-the-wasteland rock done with deathmachine hyperspeed efficiency.

And yes, these dudes can play fast, and they can play with precision, and that does result in some moments of severe rock power. But its just too much noise to move me, too quickly desensitizing, the moments of beauty that give it context too far between. Good go to if you're into this kind of thing 3/5

#621 Car Bomb - w^w^^w^w

Noisy. Pure thrash with scant few punches pulled, pull bore screams from hell, chuggachuggachugga fills, wailedupoon guitars, the whole 9 yards, wrung around angular and precise as I've heard done before, landing somewhere between a heavier Dream Theater and a more listenable Lightning Bolt. But then a twist, up sprout these those weird, sweet melodic moments, where vocals and instruments alike relent and show shimmering underbellies, not quite like anything I've heard on an album like this before. They're great moments.

But then, are these moments really that great or are they just rendered beautiful by their contrast with the wasteland from which they've sprung? A moment like Finish It's little closing "woo!" are remarkable in their ability to change the whole tone of the album in one second, a nightmare beast with a little gold star on its forehead. It's these moments of proof that Car Bomb could be pretty and fun if they wanted to be, but withhold in the name of mindcrushing, that give them a strange credibility.

And at least the aforementioned wasteland is a compelling one, full of undulating purple hills and aquamaroon skies and jagged creatures burned black by the end of endless lives. Not anywhere you'd want to live, not even anywhere you'd want to visit again, but a place whose very existence nests in the back of your mind, skittering around now and again 3.5/5

#620 Killer Mike - R.A.P. Music Instrumentals

The album itself featured a solid helping of heavy, sharp-edged rapping, and this instrumental version helps draw the ear to the buzzy, bigass boom bap that gave that rapping its body. With songs so thoroughly dominated by their hard-hitting vocals, this is more welcome than usual as a way to see what makes them tick.

Standing on its own, this plays a bit limp, not quite hooky enough for background music, not quite interesting enough to demand listening. The best tracks are the more melodic; Anywhere But Here plays like songs off a lost great Air album and Willie Blake Sherwood could just be a delightfully offkilter M83 outtake.

A curiosity, and more worthwhile than your average instrumentals album, but that's not saying much 3/5

#619 Ornette Coleman - The Shape of Jazz to Come

Hey fellow jazz laymen, what do you think of when you think of free jazz? That's what this sounds like, as horns whip up and around and don't quite congeal into much. Which isn't to say that this is without structure: melodic themes emerge, there are riffs and interplays and moments of convergence, but it never becomes a thing you can hold in place, it never quite becomes what you'd call a song in any traditional sense. It is an event, wound woolly over time.

All things considered though, this isn't that radical; its innovations are in the discarding of the piano and chords as backbones, things that we folk aren't liable to much pick up on in any conscious sense. We just know it sounds even more chaotic and unknowable than usual, a bit more catnip in these cats, a bit wilder and more transgressive. For better or for worse, depends on your mood. For the most part, I found it more interesting than enjoyable, and not all that interesting 3/5

#618a Feed Me - Feed Me's Escape From Electric Mountain

I went into this EP with an irrational love for Feed Me's Big Adventure, which was nominally dubstep, but without all the drops and noise and jocky bullshit. It's a shame that this is a Feed Me album built on that kind of stuff.

The biggest problems are Trapdoor and One Click Headshot, which are just embarrassing, with their sub-Evanescence bitchy rage samples shitting on the entire track. The rest is actually reasonably solid: Trichitillomania is an ok banger kind of made guilty by association, Embers doesn't lean too hard on its ladysamples and has some transportive swerves, and Relocation is a nice housey meanderer. But on a six track EP two garbage tracks is a lot to overlook. As a full album listen, no better than 2.5/5

#618 Sonny Rollins - Saxophone Colossus

Punchy, propulsive sax-driven jazz that jukes and feints, start-stop, full of sudden runs, hard notes and the silences in between. It's jazz driven by showmanship, by demonstrating the horn player's mastery over his horn, with the combo serving mostly to build the stage for that mastery, only occasionally rising to the fore for a piano solo, drum flourish or the like.

The actual playing is exciting and playful and worthy of close listening, but as someone who knows just this side of fuckall about jazz, its all a bit lost on me. I hope to someday know enough about this stuff to kick myself for not rating it more highly. Hating on your past self is growth 3.5/5

#617 Sam Cooke - Sam Cooke (Weton-Wesgram, 2009)

Strange 3-disc Dutch compilation of Sam Cooke's stuff that I stumbled into somehow.

The first disc is the real Sam Cooke I came looking for, full of deep soul and mourning and love and hope. Cooke's voice is legitimately graceful, more full-bodied and powerful than many of his better-known contemporaries. This is downright listenable, if occasionally goofy, largely unadventurous stuff.

Then its two discs of Jesus Jesus Jesus. Cooke did love him some Jesus. It all sounds samey as hell, and I know its not the singer's fault that it was compiled this way, but its downright unbearable by the end.

I came for a taste of Sam Cooke and I got it. And then I got way too much more. It's like he invited me over to watch the game and then spent 4 more hours talking about the Lord. Gotta judge the whole album, and that's a full third of it. Sorry Sam, I'll try to find something else of yours and give you a fair shake 2/5

#616 Miles Davis - Birth of the Cool

Melodic runs runs runs, sometimes a horn, sometimes two in unison, sometimes two different pairs, following, splitting off, coming back, like ribbons behind dancers, like children looping paths across wheatfields.

The sound is carefully orchestrated, as befits a band of nine trying to double each others' voices in a series of pairoffs and squares. There are solos, but nothing extravagant. This is a tight series of songs moving freely, looping and swooping like a flock of birds, and then one wheels off for a solo, but is back before long, and the flock finds a tree and alights 3.5/5

#615 Gene Vinent and his Blue Caps - Blue Jean Bop

I loved Vincent's second album, and the first one delivers many of the same thrills. This album lacks the menace that made his self-titled followup to exhilarating, and the overall tone is smoother and sweeter, but there's still an edge: notes hit harder than they needed to be, words sneered out when lesser singers would have smiled, and the whole thing lit up by some jigsaw guitar work.

Doing some research reveals the key to these two albums' greatness, especially relative to other similar records of the time. Unlike, say, Elvis, who used session musicians to fill out his early records, The Blue Caps were a band out playing shows night in and night out, and this was them slamming their set down in the studio. The result is a surplus of that energy that makes this era of rock and roll so incandescent. Vincent and his Caps remain the best act out of the era that I've found so far, and while its followup is a stronger, tighter outing, this is likewise simply essential 4.5/5

#614 Battles - Dross Glop

A lurching, murky Night of the Living Dead nightmare of a remix album.

Every song is drained bloodless, rendered uncannily detuned, dragging dubby footsteps, repeating unliving patterns in morbid parody of its previous existence. Where Gloss Drop was made lively by unexpected moves and spontaneous production, its evil twin is all sociopathic menace, all cold efficiency, made up of the same parts, but with no light behind the eyes 1.5/5

#613 VA - The First Rock and Roll Record

Just go get it.

If you have any interest in the history of rock and roll, in where it came from and how it inched into being rock and roll, this is the best crash course there is. Get this triple album compilation epic, like rightnow. Unless you are a one-in-a-million obsessive who has heard ever album ever, with massive Ghost-World level tendrils through old rock vinyl, you'll learn a lot and have a lot of fun doing it.

This collection starts off in the 20's and winds its way forward towards the 50's, playing songs from folk, blues, country, jazz, R&B and countless subslices in between in chronological order, spiraling closer and closer to its core of "Rock and Roll", whipping past its various spokes in turn, pieces sliding into place.

It serves to exemplify how knotty that question of "what was the first rock and roll record?" really is, and its an interesting activity in its own right, asking as each song comes on whether that's "rock and roll", and why and why not, the why slowly becoming easier to answer as time moves forward, the why not getting harder and harder to justify. Heck, there's even some interesting bits of hip hop history hidden in there, as you hear elements that rap songs call back to (Kanye's sampling I've Got a Woman, Outkast's references to 60 Minute Man) and elements that would define the style (Ella Mae Morse And Freddie Slack's House Of Blue Lights practically raps its delivery, and even drops a "homey" in there).

The sounds are too diverse do describe in much more detail, spanning 3 packed discs and 3+ decades as they do, but bears repeating that this is no dry aural textbook but a damn fun listen. The songs hop and swoon and swing and croon and bop and even rock, most sounding dusty and classy and timeless for good measure. One of the best, most interesting finds of this whole project, one I'll return to again and again 5/5

#612 Guana Batz - Held Down to Vinyl...At Last

First-wave British psychobilly, with all of the punk rock intact. Gone are The Meteors' Sci-Fi trappings and mock-horror stylings: this is just nasty, sneering punk done up with fast bass and guitars to give it that retro edge. Here it reads as more of a gimmick, a way to stand out as a punk band, than an actual homage to rockabilly roots. You won't feel a love an reverence for rocks burgeoning rebellious streak, just a twist on punk ugliness. As punk, its fine, but nothing special 2.5/5

#611 Kitchen's Floor - Looking Forward to Nothing

Australia is just dripping with scuzzy, couldntgiveafuck punk these days. Megaphone overblown, overloud, repetitive doomy droners with this propulsive pump and strange, stoned glimmer of hope straight out of Wavves. Jagged guitars reverbing to forever, songlength organ notes, and yet, strangely light somehow. A good trick, one that I'll bet works even better live 3.5/5

#610 Bob Dylan - Bringing it All Back Home

Bob Dylan, romping and stomping, not yet drunk on his own legend, just going for it, singing like he might never get another chance and like this chance will last forever with a backing band that's got a million years to spend in the studio but they're gonna use the first take anyway, unhurried at making this rather fast song, unworried about these rather heavy words, just stumbling along with a great lifelong urgency.

This is less mindblowing than Highway 61's endless expanses, less heartfelt than Blood on the Tracks, but this is the blueprint, this is the house that the highway and the tracks and the Nashville Skyline itself all pour from. This is the house Bringing it all Back Home calls home.

Which is to say that it is seminal, pure Bob Dylan, pure unlistenable yowling, pure guitar jangle and slide and twang, straddling genius and madness and nonsense, and a strange timeless soul; more so than any of his albums, that singular moment soul 4/5

#609 Blind Lemon Jefferson - Blind Lemon Jefferson

This is old blues. Old as dust blues, dust blowing off of a creaky record player old, Jefferson's trembling wails rising from dust-covered timeline floorboards.

The emotion carries, less in word than in feeling, in the jaunty, jumbled plucks offset by that endless wail. Minimal and elemental, pre-band, pre-rock, dang, pre-jazz, damn near pre-music somehow, harkening back to a place that stepped out of time.

You'll need a real specific setting to want to put this record on, but if you find that time and place you best not be without it 4/5

#608 The Hollies - In the Hollies Style

Very much a product of the time, seemingly taking the Beatles' exact same tack on harmony-heavy versions of early rock and roll from the likes of Buddy Holly (who they named themselves after) Chuck Berry (who they cover here). Everything is a bit too Love Me Do smooth, providing a limp version of a style that was already done pretty well, and that didn't have a lot of room for exploration.

There's a very slightly different flavor here, a certain twangy oddball quality to the original tracks that evokes The Mint Chicks and Of Montreal in a way that The Beatles don't. And Set Me Free has a rollicking, too-fast energy that I'd love to heard more of - instead things are pretty predictable, buffed to too much of a familiar shine to be all that interesting 3/5

#607 The Flaming Lips - With Lightning Bolt

This, compared to the Prefuse collaboration, shakes with the impact of the two bands, sounding like something beyong what either would create on their own. In short, it sounds the way an EP like this should.

It's a natural pairing, especially as the Flaming Lips have become willing to get denser and heavier and more out there and more generally like worldcurshing meteor, and Lightning Bolt have sent the occasional quizzical tentacle out of their murky underworld.

The Flaming Lipsiest track is the heavy, strangely brilliant (and brilliantly-named) I'm Working At NASA on Acid, which booms and whoops and wobbles out of space and time, one of the first truly adventurous new prog songs I've heard in ages.

The I Wanna Get High / I Wanna Get Damaged pairing splits the same too-heavy-for-Lips/too-human-for-lightning-bolt balance pretty evenly, the latter adding an extra layer of dissonant guitar noodling that somehow sounds borne of both bands, the former panning out better thanks to its singular focus on the car crash lope of a bassline.

And on the far end of the spectrum we have NASA's Final Acid Bath which really just sounds like a Lightning Bolt track shined up a touch, altogether skipping the tunefulness that the Lips attach to even their strangest tracks.

And that's about the level of success of the collaboration, in decreasing order. Lightning Bolt only really works in small doses and draws most of its strength from its unflinching brutality, but The Lips benefit from the kick in the ass they get here. The result is still mostly unlistenable, but undeniably compelling in its deep dark deep space way 3.5/5

#606 The Flaming Lips - With Prefuse 73

Those approaching this EP expecting to hear Prefuse's signature manic chopped beats underneath Flaming Lips will be disappointed. Instead what we get is Only She Chapters-era prefuse, applying ambient layering and smearing to wishy washy guitar washes and Conye croons. The only exception is the Convinced of the Hex buzzy-bass of *ahem* Supermoon Makes Me Want to Pee, but even that does little to evoke the microcut master that theoretically guests here.

Frankly, these sound like they could just be Flaming Lips b-sides, packed in some kind of Aphex Twin remix bait-and-switch. Which isn't such a bad thing, and is a testament to how wild the Lips have gotten, but I can't help but be disappointed. Then again, Prefuse reads the Books was disappointing too, maybe he's just not a really assertive collaborator, but rather a behind-the-curtain producer? Anyway, judged for what it is, this is a fairly interesting, mostly tuneful set of songs, but nothing that will blow you away as much as either artist's best stuff 3/5

#605 Mr. Bungle - California

The word for this album is bent. Musically it's detuned, rhythimically it's desynched, thematically it's deranged, nothing is a straight line, nothing done without extra angles and approaches.

The sound is generally loungey, with Mike Patton crooning in a way that kind of puts your teeth on edge, over sounds that just sound like they're coming from a dimension near ours, trying to mimic ours, but landing in some phase-shifted uncanny dissonant realm.

There are moments of true beauty, as Pink Chreschendo swirls and swoops towards heaven. But then, of course, in comes an arrhythmic beeping over the coda, effectively ruining the moment. It's as if Patton just can't help himself. He's like a kid at a ballpark when the PA announces a moment of silence, and everyone bows their heads. And the kid realizes, I can ruin this. I have that power, it would be so easy! And the kid hesitates. But then mistakes the will to overcome that hesitation as a marker of courage, and yells "poop!"

That's an overstatement - Patton isn't childish, in fact he's really talented. But he seems to make strange shit just for its own sake, and I'm not sure that that constitutes bravery. This album is really and truly headache-inducing, for no good reason.

Golem II works best, since it's nothing but playful noise, arranged gleefully, rather than used to subvert music.  And there's Ars Moriendi, which swerves wildly from speed metal to soundtrack swoon to mariachi via klezmer, to everything in between so quickly that the seams blur to nothingness. It's a cool trick.

But when the album holds a note its almost always held against another note that it doesn't belong next to, grinding them together, hoping to sand them into place, to erode the listener's will to desire actual proper harmony and tunefulness. It's exhausting, and I can't hang with it except in the smallest doses 2.5/5

#604 The Meteors - In Heaven

Psychobilly progenitors present a sneering, horror-driven approach to rockabily, cranking up the menace and mania past even Gene Vincent's previous pinnacles. This is essentially punk with a driving backbeat, upright stumbledown bass and guitars that stab and romp and rollick right out of control, dipped in a strange, drive-in flicker of morbid panache.

It's a lot of fun, if a bit samey by the end, combining fuck-this, loose defiance with fuck-yeah, tuneful talent, always a tricky balance in punk rock 4/5

#603 Buke and Gase - Function Fails EP

Now with a newly minted spelling of band name! Presumably to emphasize pronouncability over smush-accuracy.

Once again, the focus is on the rhythmic crunch and unique electronic-via-organic textures of the eponymous hybrid instruments, with Arone Dyer's pretty/awkward keening leading the way. This is a solid, hooky collection of new songs, perhaps benefitting from the short running time though, allowing the band to put together some hooky, droney jams and move on without demanding an LP-length stretch of the sound. Even more so than on previous albums, there is a simplicity-in-macro-complexity-in-micro paradox that makes the songs fun to explore, wielding repetition to give you time to find the surprises in the crannies, nestled between notes.

The Blue Monday cover doesn't do anything to overcome the original, and sounds more or less like you'd like, not doing much to rise beyond the gimmick. That's not a problem with the rest of the album, which justifies its unique sounds with a unique sound, but I still feel like I wanted something more.

EP's are often teasers and testing ground for new sounds, and I hope that's not the case here. This is a bit too similar to their previous work, and I can't help but hunger for Arone and Aron to attempt a leap as big as the one they made with their initial choice of instrumentation 3.5/5

#602 Busdriver - Arguments with Dreams

Busdriver has had a hell of a couple of years, putting out a batshit mashup mixtape, a noisy Dibiase-produced collaboration with Nocando, and one of his greatest, weirdest albums ever. The first Computer Cooties mixtape in particular seems to have snapped the driver out of his middling-album funk, and now he's off out there just going for it, doing whatever weirdass thing strikes his fancy. The immediacy has been refreshing and exciting.

This follows the same basic line, with plenty of nasty 8-give-or-take-a-bit production and endless, effortlessly clever lines. The collision with Das Racist is unsurprising, and this has a bit of their carefree smartest-dumb-guys-in-the-room swagger. It's a fine line between Das Racist's winking irreverence and lazy churlishness for its own sake though, and hooks like "You're my bottom bitch!" "It's so squishy!" and "I'm the big dog you're the fire hydrant" dip into the later, evoking the flattest moments off of 10 Haters.

When Busdriver smarts up though he's unbeatable, so casual in his reference weaving, particularly on closer Werner Herzog. This misses the highs of his last full length, but is still solid enough to justify his new bluesky spitball crusade, sounding like he can keep em coming forever. Here's hoping 4/5

#601 Radio Birdman - Radios Appear (1995 Remaster)

Decidedly solid, shouty punk with great propulsive pacing and the occasional serious guitar chops, sounding like a faster, richer, more melodically-inclined Clash. The album pulls off a nearly-impossible punk move: sounding fun, smacking of effort, while still remaining completely credible as dontgiveafuck scuzzbuckets, working in hints of rockabily, surf, and more with a sneering smile.

Key detail, though: this album was recorded before The Clash had released a thing, so give em credit for that, arriving at a similarly legendary sound all on their own and pulling it off at least as well (sometimes better!) Not that this was altogether original (is anything in rock?): there are shades of KISS-esque fist-pumping rock, and the band doesn't hide its inspiration by similarly-talented near-punks like The 13th Floor Elevators and Iggy Pop, ending the album with a cover of each*, but this is not derivative stuff, full of inspiration and energy 4/5

* though only one of each of these appeared on the album's initial Australian and international respective releases.

#600 Otis Redding - Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul

An album of mostly covers*, this was recorded (mostly) in a 24 hour period. That fact is crucial to understanding the energy of this album, complete with Booker T. and The M.G.'s tight, punchy backing and sprightly horns, everything sounds immediate and alive.

The real star is, of course, Redding himself, who tears into each song with reckless aplomb, plowing into the original's intentions, overwhelming those not strong enough to survive. His cackling shouting compelling reaction, Otis pulls no punches: an approach that works better on the fast songs than the ballads.

Individually, the songs don't always better their sources, and the insistence of the vocals precludes any kind of atmospheric listening experience, but the whipcrack immediacy of the recording makes it all worthwhile 3.5/5

* and one of the few originals, Respect, was largely outshined by its Aretha Franklin cover anyway

#599 Roky Erickson and The Aliens - The Evil One

Lurking somewhere between the monster movie ghoulishness of psychobilly and the devil-obsession of lightweight metal, The Evil One goes for soaring, but mostly ends up plodding. The tempos are just behind a beat, Roky's delivery a little too uninspired, the lyrics a little to repetitive to anything more than simmer: the songs mostly, show their hand, let it play out, and then end without any twists or turns or surprises or changes.

Arguably, this simplicity and low menace and lack of flash is part of the appeal, but it mostly left me flat. The main exception is the Click Your Fingers Applauding the Play which has an understated, unnamable tunefullness that sounds right out of Guided By Voices, and If You Have Ghosts achieves a similarly hooky transcendence. But for the most part, there's simply not enough actually going on here, a compelling backstory and attendant cult appeal notwithstanding 2.5/5

#598 Royal Wedding - Transmigration

Somebody's been listening to The Fall!

Most of the same tricks are here: stark, taut, one-note (sometimes literally!) sheetmetal guitar jams, overlaid with distant-megaphone commands and complaints. Add a dash of Funhouse-era Stooges, a touch of Liars at their artiest and take out any concession in the direction of uptempo; you're pretty much there. Not enough here that hasn't been done 2.5/5

#597 Chuck Berry - Is On Top

Berry's 3rd album is basically a collection of his early singles, and it all comes together as a defiantly slapdash slash of rock and roll, doublefast tempos and missed guitar notes and strained vocals lending liveliness and life. There's also plenty of originality, particularly on the slithering menace of Jo Jo Gun, the pre-punk swagger of Anthony Boy, and the proto-surf rumble of Blues for Hawiians.

Also, easily forgotten is the fact that Johnny B. Goode is actually a crackerjack fucking track.

An aside about race: before this early rock and roll kick I was well aware of Elvis and other white rockers' leveraging of black artists' methods, but never gave much thought to other racial currents' effects on the music of the era. In particular, I'd never considered that Berry had overtly built upon country and folk, primarily white styles of music. As allmusic puts it, nothing got Berry's black audiences going like "the sight and sound of a black man playing white hillbilly music". Berry himself noted "Curiosity provoked me to lay a lot of our country stuff on our predominantly black audience and some of our black audience began whispering 'who is that black hillbilly at the Cosmo?' After they laughed at me a few times they began requesting the hillbilly stuff and enjoyed dancing to it." This is not to take away, in the least, from Berry's considerable talent, originality and influence, but it's another fascinating reminder of the complex racial, cultural, economic, and musical backanforths that combined to make rock what it is today.

Oh right 4/5

#596 Ray Charles - Ray Charles (1957)

A real two-parter.

The first seven tracks are downright down, rhythm and blues and outright blues with shades of mournful gospel, all the lord's grace and the woman's flight and the man's woe, with capable, cavernous howling from Charles over shuffle drums and piano runs.

And then suddenly, right at the halfway mark, everything comes to life, with the bouncy horn stabs of Hallelujah I Love Her So. It bops around for a couple of joyous moments and then, at the very end of the song, Charles mutters "I'm a little fool for you, little girl", harkening back to the title of the previous song that, by now, sounds an age away. Is this the same girl? Has he gotten her, changing everything? It's too perfect a pivot to be coincidental, and quite a neat trick.

Aside: there's a trend lately in hip hop towards two-half albums. It had been striking me strange, coming as I do from a rock album structure background, but maybe this bipartite idea has a longer history, via R&B, than I realized.

Continuing through the album we get into the peerless Mess Around and a whole slew of upbeat rockers, beats a-bristlin, horns a-stormin. Love has been found, and it saved us all. The latter half is definitely the draw here, and solid enough for 4/5

#595 Hank Williams - Beyond the Sunset (as Luke the Drifter)

Legendary country crooner (inspired by Roy Acuff, in case you were curious) does an album as his saintly, god-praising alter-ego, conversationally laying out one simply-structured rhyming ballad after another.

And, that's about it. There's not a ton of wit here, not a lot of musical wizardry or energy, just Williams laying out the tales, going on about the lord and morality and tales of warning and tragedy and woe. Some of it is done with a gallows-humor wink, as on the "my wife is gone, my dog is dead" style country wanderer Everything's Ok, but this is humor about as winning and the music as inspired as on Pixar's Boundin', surely the least-charming of their shorts.

I've been impressed with how well a lot of this old rock and roll and roots stuff has held up, how relevant and vibrant it still sounds in 2012, but this is an exception, sounding hokey and dated and well left behind 2/5.

#594 Bo Diddley - Go Bo Diddley

Diddley's soaring voice, playful guitar, and shuffledup beat are still here on this, his second album after the similarly-titled (and excellent) Bo Diddley. Some of the tricks backtrack over some pretty familiar territory: Oh Yeah apes I'm A Man, Willie and Lillie copies Hey Bo Diddley, You Don't Love Me steals the chorus hook from Bring it to Jerome, Say Man samples Hush Your Mouth, and Don't Let it Goes more or less outlines the platonic Bo Diddley song with its call-and-response backing, tinkling guitar and signature beat. The man had a sound and he rode it.

Its also a curiously adventurous album though, jaunty, sprighty, and generally more fun, wit more crooning and Do Wop gestures. Not to mention the weirdly prescient "Yo Mama" jousting on Say Man, portending hip hop's one-upsmanship to come and the bizarro, throwback violin solo on The Clock Strikes Twelve, giving the entire thing a foreboding, haunted house stomp.

In short, it may have come out in 1959, when albums were sometimes just loose song collections rather than unified statements, but this is the classic second-album album: tweak the sound that got you here just enough to be interesting without alienating your fans, copy your biggest hits, take a couple of chances scattered throughout the album and see how it fares.

For me, the moments of adventurousness are joyous, but the familiarity and lack of cohesion keep it from rising to the heights of Diddey's debut 4/5

#593 Roy Acuff - The Essential Roy Acuff (1936-1949)

Classic, old-timey country music, full of fiddles, plucked guitars, harmonies, sadness and resignation.

At the heart is Acuff's voice, a soaring, majestic, wind-wisp'd thing, an ancient eagle circling its range on its ever-last autumn day. There's an important detail about this era that's easy to overlook, but crucial to understanding its sound: as a country or blues singer, you had to be able to sing and be heard over a band, often without amplification. This gives rise to blues shouters like Big Joe Turner and country callers like Acuff alike, giving the music much of its desperation and urgency and power. Now, or course, much of this is music being made during The Great Depression; this was music of hard times and The Lord was just about the only thing keeping most folks going, so a certain amount of desolate, defiant reaching is to be expected. But that practical detail fostering such a blessed side-effect is one of rock and roll's most fascinating pieces of backstory.

For those wondering what to expect, this is decidedly in line with the well-regarded O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack, but there's also shadows of Carey Mercer's hooting, swooping cries, Blitzen Trapper's dusty underbelly, and heck, The Beatles' Rocky Raccoon. You have to look to see the connections all the way into rock as we know it, but they're there, dusty and waiting 3.5/5

#592 Screamin' Jay Hawkins - At Home with Screamin' Jay Hawkins

You probably know I Put a Spell on You, and that's basically the one sound Hawkins has going for him, put on display again and again here, for better or for worse.

The man's voice is an imposing baritone when he chooses to sing, but mostly you get a chaotic, gutteral, sputtering rant, shout-sung out of a mouth as big as the world. The words are slurred, seemingly pulled out of the air: see in particular the free-association (and I Put a Spell on You carbon copying) on Hong Long and I Love Paris. This works especially well when the initial structure is in needing of some punching up, as on the I'm a Man / Bad to the Bone blues of Yellow Coat, which Hawkins heaves maniacally beyond good taste and right on to brilliant.

The unhinged delivery is fun, but the flipside is that the whole thing is kind of sloppy in a bad way too. This is especially true on the ballads, which generally don't work for me, the booming vocal power on display notwithstanding. What you end up with is at best a series of highlights that sound a bit like eachother, but at least together they sound like something you've never heard before 3/5