#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