#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