#1083 Wavves - Afraid of Heights

By now Wavves's discarded most of the scrappiness that made Nathan Williams a readymade Pitchfork darling circa '08. Gone are the drone-on experiments, the shitcan production, and most of the frantic guitarwork, now Wavves takes its cues from the similarly-themed Surfer Blood, making tuneful, swooping crunchrock in the Weezer* vein, with streaks of Green Day sneering and Unicorns seeking. It's a perfectly pretty, fun little album, but much of the personality's been airbrushed out, the lyrics reduced to generalisms like "I'll always be on my own!" and "everything is my fault!".

Every once in a while Wavves peeks out from behind the mask, say on the frenetic clap-clap streaking of Beat Me Up, on the whirring frenzy of Lunge Forward, but for the most part it sounds designed to capitalize on some bizarre sweet spot of twentysomethings who think Weezer hasn't been good since the Red Album 3/5

*Williams is a self-professed Weezer fan and he really goes too far on the title track that swerves cringeworthily close with its "woke up, found Jesus" line

#1082 Death - For All the World To See

No, these guys aren't the lost first punk band*, but they are a band that made a wildly fun, inventive, hard-rocking album in the vein of the the MC5 and the Stooges (and, retroactively, Bad Brains). It's a legitimate lost gem of rock and roll.

If you haven't heard the hype, well you're in for a treat. Short version: three black brothers banged out 7 kickass rockandroll songs in the mid 70's, did a tiny run of a single single, and disappeared for decades. And now we have those 7 songs on an album and they're goddamn great, full of insights, riffs, swerves, and just straight up killer instincts about how to use rock to pump people's blood. Brilliant, proto-punk full of life and spontaneity, finely aged and righteously ready to enjoy today 4.5/5

* here's the easy argument against that storyline: is punk about playing loud and fast or about rejecting traditional notions of musicianship and quality in rock and roll? If it's the former, the Stooges and MC5 did everything Death did first, and they're the first punk bands. If its the latter, then these guys don't qualify, and the Ramones and Sex Pistols retain the crown: these guys are decidedly trying to make good music. And they succeed! There's nothing fundamental these guys did first, they just happen to be super fucking good at making vaguely punk-flavored music, and they were completely unknown until recently. And isn't that enough as a storyline goes?

#1081 Peter Gabriel - Peter Gabriel III

You get the sense that Gabriel listens to his own records, that they represent some kind of therapy for him, some externalization and disarming of his deepest apprehensions. They're listenable, and by his 3rd self-titled solo album downright pop in places, but there's something about their particular tone that feels bent inward to scratch itches the artist can't reach any other way.

Here its Eno-via-Low atmospherics, Springsteenian bombast (check that sax solo on Family Snapshot), and Casiotone twilight backbone, all shuffled together into paranoid themes, even the brightest moments greased with desperation and concern. It's an interesting artifact, bristling with subtle ideas and psychological crannies, but not really any fun as pop and not quite able to commit to pure concept. You can take a listen, but it isn't for you 3.5/5

#1080 Heart - Dreamboat Annie

The "lady Zeppelin" thing really does hold: its not just the spot-on-similar vocals and guitar touches (see Soul of the Sea (!)), its the overall scope of the songs, full of grasps at the infinite and crunches into the details via songs long and tall and broad.

But, while nothing on here is Black Dog-thunderous in terms of riffage, Heart bests the boys in plenty of other ways. The tonal and rhythmic cleverness of Magic Man is stunning, the frenzy of Crazy on You is unmatched, and the overall tone is massively more personal and approachable. This is music made by people for people, not just an abstract monument to the gods of rock, listenable, peaceful, exciting, and fun in ways 70's classic rock seldom was 4/5

#1079 Aphrodite's Child - 666

It's fitting that 666 recounts the book of revelations: Aphrodite's Child is more religion than band, aiming for nothing less than the elevation of humanity, utterly committed to its own convictions, off and running on a grandiose, mad musical crusade, defying song structure, length, tone, and all other yardsticks of good taste, taking proggy rock excess back to basics and up to the heavens all at once.

Along the way there are some legitimately beautiful passages, some catchy riffs, some engaging experiments, all aswim in some truly pretentious scope that vastly outreaches its grasp. The result is a difficult, occasionally boring, but mostly rewarding listen. If you're the type who can tolerate some self-important, somber spoken word, some aimless dronescapes, and monumental conviction to an artsy vision, this is a Babeling pile of tower worth a topple from 3.5/5

#1078 Feed Me - Calimari Tuesday

Feed Me's still tops at wielding the meaty squonk of dubstep while (Electric Mountain aside) avoiding huge drops and general brofisty bullshit, and he shows off a lot of tricks here. Some of it works: the clipped cutting of Short Skirt, the casiotone brass and breakdown on Ophelia, Orion's sweeping expectation-defying scope. But its all pretty bloodless, more Orbital than I'd like, and far too infested with trancy female vocals. Orbital's actually a good point of reference: this doesn't commit to bangers (Short Skirt and Chinchilla aside), and doesn't quite pull off chinscratching intricacy, and ends up being a vaguely homeless album of "work music".

Feed Me's managed to keep outside the box in a genre that's already died Dancepunk-fast. Good job knowing what not to do, and good job on the still-untouched Big Adventure, now he's just gotta decide what he is gonna do that's going to get him to the next level 3/5

#1077 The Mamas and The Papas - If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears

Get yer harmonies here! Get em by the dozens! Each guar en tee'd to have at least 3 voices in both genders! Why have one person singing when you could have 2, 3, even 4? Why have a mama when you could have mamas? Why have a mamas when you could have mamas and papas? Listen to this demo of the MnP technique, harmonies shooting high and low, fast and slow, all over folky songs ranging from trippy to psychedelic!

Frankly, the whole thing's is so forced, so slathered in singing and singing and look at all of the singing we're singing that it's impossible to salvage the songs themselves, steak drowning in sauce. I'm not even sure there's steak down there. It's damn near unlistenable 1.5/5

#1076 Peter Gabriel - Peter Gabriel II

Somewhere the magic got lost. Gabriel's 2nd solo album follows the same blueprint as its predecessor, right down to the sharp art-pop of the respective opening tracks, but it's missing that overarching pull, those perfect barbs, that made his debut work. The best moments are when the vocals stretch just to breaking, like on the heartcrusher chorus of Mother of Violence and on the final track's desperate climax. But the rest of the time Gabriel sounds under control, playing it safe, with only token toes outside a slightly-funky radius, creating an album that's undeniably interesting, but lacking many memorable moments 3/5

#1075 Roky Erickson and Okkervil River - True Love Cast Out All Evil

Look, I like Roky. Dude puts on a mean live show to this day, and his story can't help but inspire, but he seems like the weak link on this collaboration. The album's finest moments are in its atmosphere, check the stunning, haunting opening track. Even the best songs, those that sound like regular old Roky solo stompers, soar on elements that're Okkervil all over. John Lawman especially works because of all that beefy baritone sax, Iggy piano plinking, and fucked up guitar squall, not necessarily because of Roky's workmanlike, shouty singing.

The weakest moments, meanwhile, lie mostly in the vocals, where the lines are clunky (Please Judge) or just clunkily delivered (Ain't Blues Too Sad). Erickson's croak gives the songs character, but he's no Cash when it comes to driving timeless pathos into modern sounds. The album's got soul, and its earnest clumsiness is charming in places, but it lands in an awkward middle ground between earthy grit and highly-produced swooning, never quite winning you over via one or the other 3/5

#1074 Ty Segall - Sleeper

Modern guitar god Ty Segall goes acoustic! Are his songwriting chops up to the task of justifying an album's worth of songs, absent the massive force multiplier that his garage armageddon guitar sound brings? Eh. The lyrics still twist about, simplicity lightly barbed, all about the general and the universal and life and love in abstraction. And the riffs are kind of there, with that start-stop immediacy. But its telling that the album's second best moment is the throttling one-chord electric beating that leads into the climax of The Man Man. Without that guitar energy, Segall's reedy voice and good-not-great songwriting just don't have any punch to them and they fail to get the blood pumping.

One exception: the best moment on the album is its entire last song, a gorgeous, chord-perfect, treasure of acoustic guitar longing. Stuff a bit more of that on the next one and you might be onto something - in the meantime, don't quit your day/night/where-do-you-find-the-time-to-be-this-fucking-prolific job 3/5

#1073 Peter Gabriel - Peter Gabriel I

A quietly strange pop album, full of hooks, vocal turns, and a dozen seeming mainstream concessions that still manage to sound alien and intriguing. Crooning and stamping like Bob Seger, Billy Joel, and Nick Lowe in turn, the basic model is certainly of the lone, clever singer songwriter: this is no Genesis album. But it still feels like a natural transition from Lamb, with synthy twists, vocal distortion, and a comfortably queering atmosphere.

It drags in places, and Gabriel has little charisma himself, acting more of a conduit for the albumlength vision. But that vision, it do come through. Each song does its own thing, and collectively they make for a nuanced, easy, mildly thrilling listen, with an emotional arc that readily spurs that onemorelisten 4/5

#1072 Def Leppard - Pyromania

I'll get the good out of the way. The guitars are fun, the album's packed with shredding solos, but there's two problems with this album. First off, it's mostly damned boring. Its all one of two tempos, all the same beat, all the same structure, damn nearly all the same key, all the same whiny trippledup vocal wheezebagging.

Second, it's profoundly uncool: these guys flunk the "would I want to be in this band?" test and their ridiculousness is doubly damning because they seems to think they're fucking RADICAL. That's what Chad Wasser and I used to call being a twonce. Every once in a while you go "hey this is kind of fun!" and the album goes "isn't this fuckin' FUN!!?". Every time you start to accept it as goofy frivolity it reminds you that this is dead serious business.

By the official Def Leppard FAQ's (?) unapologetic admission, songs were made up of dozens and dozens of takes, and it shows. As an album, it's completely overproduced into mediocrity, boring with occasional flashy moments that are mostly undermined by its sub-AC/DC posturing 2/5

#1071 The Byrds - The Notorious Byrd Brothers

A psychedelic album with the corners of the Byrds' folky past and country future poking through, full of honkytonk touches, lush vocal harmonies, and early synth flourishes. It's the kind of barely-there, overlayered album that I'd normally blow off, but it all works so damned well, making just the right number of stylistic swerves and tempo transitions, melting into and making animate; even the hitchy time signatures feel like part of the fabric. This is a completely composed forehead-of-god album from a band that I'm increasingly realizing I've been criminally underrating 4.5/5

#1070 Iron Chic - The Constant One

Pop punk in the Japandoids shouting-at-the-night vein, with more pop, more punk, and more existential thrashing. The Constant One's album full of songs for those believing that if we confront our mortality and smallness head on, all at once as a crowd, with riffs and swearing and huge all-shouted-together-shoutalong choruses, maybe then we can feel like we're safe, like everything's going to be ok, just for this one night. It's Garden State: The Album, with riffs in place of Shins and shouting in clubs in place of shouting in quarries, with everything played too fast to resist, too fast to think, whipping by like birthdays.

It just may be as purely and relentlessly as this particular strategy has ever been undertaken, and its fun in small doses, but too one-dimensional to work as an album: all climax, all catharsis, all the time for 11 songs and 40 minutes. Brute force cheer. For those who can handle it it might be the best album you've ever heard in your life 3/5

#1069 Blue Oyster Cult - Tyranny and Mutation

BOC's 2nd album is hard rock in transition, holding onto the vestiges of stonesey, sneering swagger and whipping everything up to 80 miles an hour, filling every cranny with ripping guitar solos, and sounding presciently like the kind of goodtimes metal that would fill the next decade or two. It's ambitious, surprisingly sprightly rock and roll, too fun to be truly menacing, too metal for party music, but occupying some slanted, addled space in the night 3.5/5

#1068 Fuzz (David Streit) - Sparkle Vision

An endearingly sloppy maximalist electronic hosedown from Fuzz (not to be confused with Ty Segall's band of the same name). With Justice-big synth riffs, a touch of Prefuse glitchy beat clipping, plenty of quadrupledup dubstep bass metabuzzes, and a spattering of analog squiggles, its a spooky, hooky trip through an electronica buffet. Nothing here stands out, and nothing hits as hard as any of its influences, but its a fun trip for electronic music fans without purist baggage 3.5/5

#1067 Hawkwind - In Search of Space

Space rock! It's theremins, synthesizers, swirly guitars, moaning vocals; psychadelia's unworldiness stretched to prog rock proportions, with all the indulgence and spectacle that implies. There's little in the way of big solos, little in the way of aggression, this is proto-post-rock, above it all and outside it all, chugging with Krauty atmosphere and propulsion. In 2013 there's nothing here that sounds all that groundbreaking, and it's unwillingness to rouse you from your spaceland reverie keeps it from really baring its claws, but its a rich, strange trip as rockandroll-fueled trips go 3.5/5

#1066 The Beta Band - Heroes to Zeros

The Three EPs was a certified classic. The rest of the Beta Band's stuff less so, as they seemed to lose interest in stretching themselves, churning out formless, charmless churners. While it's not exactly a return to form, H2Z is the Betas' tightest album, and their most inventive since their debut. Within those tidy 3-and-change runtimes, the songs pack some minor hypnosis and invention, a slash of horns, a clatter of drums, a wash of organs, all atop brushed rock repetition that suggests long meanderers without actually doing anything superfluous. Beta Band condensed, this is their most readily listenable album 4/5

#1065 David Bowie - The Next Day Extra

An extra 10 tracks for Bowie's underwhelming latest album. The main draw here is definitely the Love is Lost remix, a 10-minute James Murphy-produced epic that stretches through time and space, with a nod to Clapping Music along the way. It's a legit LCD-caliber microraveup and a match made in heaven.

The rest is all pretty limp though. There's some highlights among the bonus tracks: Atomica's a nice little stomper of 80's art pop, Born in a UFO is an offkilter, swooping trip and I'll Take You There clips along with purpose. But even the punchy, faster, better tracks blow their tricks within the first few bars, never veering off of their initial trajectories. Bowie's heart doesn't seem to be in trying to impress, he's just making little songs, nocking the tempo, singing for a bit, and clocking out at 3:00 or so. Which is fine, if that's all you expect 3/5

#1065 Band of Skulls - Sweet Sour

When the hell would you listen to this? Who would you even recommend this to?

The first track comes out fist-immediate and you're jazzed and jammed, and then everything gets all whispy and dripped in cooing girls and twisted up in forced little harmonies with their intricately planned little entrances. I'm all for branching out, but this sounds like the worst mixtape your brother ever gave you, an album that jackknifes between punk couldntgiveafuck and we-can-do-it community theater effortfest. It's so jarring as a listen that even its best moments (that opening song, the gorgeous little closer) get lost in the chop 2.5/5

#1064 Jagwar Ma - Howlin

A bristly-bright record of samply, housey indie electronica. There's shades of Manitoba and even Surrender-era Chemical Brothers here, but the songs are a bit more apt to shift, to evolve out from under themselves, making for a complex album that's moreinteresting, but that sacrifices a certain hypnotic purity to get there. Becky, Yorkey vocals sometimes intrude (the songs would be better served speaking for themselves) and the pacing drags on the second half, but its an enjoyable little curiosity of beats, melodies, and swishes in between 3.5/5

#1063 Fuzz - Fuzz

Ty Segall finds a way to put out more records than anyone, and his work with this band doesn't fall far from the tree. The sound is richer, the brattiness dialed down, and the songs focused on big, thick, buzzy acid rock riffage, but underneath there's that signature Segall sense of melody, unpredictability, and plain old rock power. Guitars are the focus, but don't miss that rollicking bass that gives the best riffs a killer one-two punch. A powerfully listenable, occasionally thrilling album for any lover of Black Dog-style pure riffs 4.5/5

#1062 The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request

A psychedelic record wrapped in psychedelia, reaching as deeply into the idea of being psychedelic as an album can. That kind of record. After an intro that leaves no mystery as the the album's preferences on the state of your mind, its a swirl of songs that sweep and wash, and after its over you won't remember a single melodic moment, not a single line of lyric, just a memory of sensuality and Jesus and a lot of sitar and such.

The sound is rich and the conceptual commitment is admirable, there's something unconvincing about the music. On reflection it seems like a record about psychedelia, showing all the things it can do, without really doing any of them well, inspired by the greats of the 60's but not altogether inspired 2.5/5

#1061 Ted Lucas - Ted Lucas

A quiet, thoughtful set of Plain and Sane and Simple Melodies, right out the opening track's title. Lucas is Nick Drake for the fairly happy, for the slightly weary, for those who want soothing rather than wallowing. Elemental tuneful tunes with minimal accompaniment, some with only tape crackle for a rhythm section, open like empty streets on crisp mornings. The second side focuses on two longer live tracks, meditative and meandering, with flecks of American Blues and Eastern mystery, acting as an echo of the simple whisps that came before. One of the most plain, pretty, truly folk records around 4/5

#1060 Jim Sullivan - UFO

Rolling bass, washes of strings, skitterey drums and then, over top: Sullivan's unstoppable voice. This is singer-songwriter music with a little muscle. This guy could have been a blues shouter if he'd wanted, but instead he makes lush, effortless, folk-flecked pop rock; Nick Drake without the wispy wistfulness, Van Morrison without all the overexertion. There's nothing altogether original here, nothing that will move you to to tears, but its a hearty soundtrack for dark, lonely nights 3.5/5

#1059 Dillard and Clark - The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard and Clark

A lush, intricate, harmonious country rock record that goes down smooth as a well-worn quip on a hot summer's night. The vocals are creaky and weathered, rolling over every gravelpock and hopeful weedy upshoot, then swooping into lensflare sunshine forever. Plucky, textured, rich, absolutely undeniably pleasant music 4/5

#1058 Silver Apples - Contact

On their second album, Silver Apples made the leap: they turned their buzzy, blowing oscillations, their loopy, droney degredations of pop, into actual songs. They went from experimentation to realization in one year, and while the world did a lot of catching up from 1968 to 1969, the Apples aren't running on pure originality on this album: these are hooky, strange rock songs that actually rock, all underpinned by those revolutionary, masterful, primitive synthesizer cycles. You and I is unbeatable with full pre-TKOL skitterey menace, and I Have Known Love is goddamned beautiful, a tragically, completely overlooked masterpiece of trippy 60's pop. A legitimate hidden gem for lovers of strange, inventive, unexpectedly catchy rock and roll 4.5/5

#1057 Silver Apples - Silver Apples

It's all about the actual quality in the listening. Being the first to do X with Y instrument only earns you some historical-value bonus bump on your base does-it-rock score on this blog. But jesus christ, these guys were first, a full on minimalist, looping, electronic, drone, post-rock, found-sound salvo in 19fucking68. Analog electronic tones pulse in earthy mathy cycles, skitterey drums prick structure, and psychedelic, dissonant harmonies weave patterns over top. There's nary a chorus, little movement or structure or movement, everything happening according to its own, truly strange devices. This is Can, this is Atticus Ross, this is The King of Limbs. 1968. Goddamn.

It's not altogether listenable, too strange, too off, too disinterested in the listener to be much fun; its not quite cool; it's just barely good. But its fucking fascinating to hear something this different, and it's a historical value bump with some real force: something this alien could only have been created by leaping wholly outside the approaches of the moment. This is an album that could only happen because there was no roadmap, grinning with thorns and bristles from a ravenous romp through the untracked 3.5/5

#1056 Hot Molasses - Machinery Making Animal

Listen here!

A quick hit of rollicking good indie rock fun, with Los Campesinos brattiness alongside decidedly Mass Romantic poppy richness, and a little Jenny Lewis prickle and croon. They're a tight little band with some whip-quick ideas, deft guitar work, good instincts and one of the strongest female singers in Boston. Eager to hear a fulllength (and their set as part of an unfuckingbeatable lineup at TT's on the 4th: Hot Molasses, Dying Falls, Peachpit, and Vundabar. Good god, Boston) 3.5/5

#1055 The Troggs - Trogglodynamite

Cover songs were the bread and butter of the early British rock era, but there's a right way and a wrong way. These are the kind of covers that make you say, before you know that they're covers, wow this song is really ripping off Bo Diddley / Chuck Berry: the kind of covers that don't exactly put their own stamp on things. Even the originals are pretty pale, like the singsong Small Faces-lite of No. 10 Downing Street. A strangely bloodless, by-the-numbers collection of early garagey rock songs - you'd be better off mining the sources 2.5/5

#1054 Dananananakroyd - There is a Way

Dananananakroyd cinch up their sound on their second album, weaponizing their formless exuberance into a sharpened slice of spastic, mathy post-punk, with some Future of the Left sneering, some Dismemberment Plan vulnerability, some Go Team propulsiveness, and a touch of straight up jagged disco guitarwork. It's less fun than Hey Everyone!, with nothing approaching the joy of Some Dresses (though Reboot might be a grower), but its a tighter, better album - worth a listen if you're into tight-wound, angular rock 3.5/5

#1053 Fleetwood Mac - Tusk

An album of lovers under white comforters, all silky motion and suggestion and shudder and curve, with dramatic lurches on the bookended strangeness of The Ledge and Tusk. A beautiful, understated epic that seeps in subconscious, softening any moment of beauty, spiking it with curious power. Settle in for long walks and nights without purpose and let it unfold at its own pace 4.5/5

#1052 The Blank Tapes - Vacation

Things start off promisingly enough - Uh-Oh's a bright, funky little opener, but then the album unfolds to reveal a band short on ideas trying to make a diverse album. The route to diverse involves some trite ideas ("Double Rainbow", a song about "a ringing in my ear" called Earring), some thin concepts (general plumbing of Oh No, Oh My! reediness, limp riffing on Tropicalia via Beck on Brazilia), and plenty of songs that show their hand in the first 8 bars and then have nowhere much to go, but keep going for 3 and a half minutes because, songs. And do I count 3 songs that mention rainbows on the first side alone? Ok, ok! Very sunny! But it's all Island in the Sun, a lukewarm drive past scenery painted on a backdrop downtown 2.5/5

#1051 Team Spirit - Live at the Knitting Factory

Why the hell would you release this? This is the kind of performance that leaves you telling people "but they're not that good live" for months afterwards, why would you put it out there for everyone to hear?

This EP's a reordered run through the 5 tracks on Team Spirit's debut EP, and it's a clumsy set, played too fast: guitar solos are half-there; lines are delivered like a checklist, the singer struggling too hard to keep up to bother putting any particular feeling or nuance in them; the whole thing gives the impression of a band that considered playing these things live an afterthought. Completely missable, even for fans of their thrilling debut 1.5/5

#1050 Monster Rally - Return to Paradise

More of Monster Rally's slurry, blurry minimalist electronica, twisting a few languid samples and beats around eachother to make little time-diluted spaces. This works better than his previous stuff, with better hooks, more inventive angles, and more evocative kaleidoscopic tropical soundscapes. Still, this too minimal to really engage with, every song packing to go to someplace it never sets off for. More damningly, it isn't pleasant enough to really disappear in, everything a little detuned and warped, a little uncanny and wobbled. Whether that's an artifact of imperfection or a grasp at evoking some stoned state hardly matters: there aren't any songs here and it works too inconsistently to work as an album 2.5/5

#1049 The Circle Jerks - Group Sex

Everything classic punk should be: straightforward, fast, hooky, dumb, clever, spiteful of all things in an early 80's California with plenty of things worth directing spite at. Songs in and out in a minute or two, album over in 25 or so, no fat, no frills, noisy, nasty fun 3.5/5

#1048 Thee Oh Sees - Help

One of the limp Oh Sees releases, too much tuneless crooning, meandering chugging, art rock grasping somehow combined with lazy songwriting. The guitar tones are solid and fuzzy and nuzzly and ragged as ever, but there's little of the drive and melody and rage that marks their best stuff 2.5/5

#1047 Daedelus - Denies the Day's Demise

A more consistently-paced, ethereal, subconscious take on the Daedelus sound, fitting for the loose Nemo's Dream theme. Telling that only the opening track has a real crisp central vocal sample to grab onto, and then its all chopped beats and strings and washes and sounds. Agreeable, but considerably less exciting than his later, more diverse stuff 3/5

#1046 Arcade Fire - Reflektor

Aren't we due for another disco bubble to burst? Daft Punk and Arcade Fire aren't exactly the Bee Gees, but they're your-dad's-heard-of-em big, and they've had two of the most hotly anticipated releases of the year, both indebted to disco, nicking its fundamental backbeat and icy cool without providing any particular dancability. At least the short-lived dancepunk thing of 10 years ago knew to emphasize energy over trappings. This is like post-dancepunk. ugh.

Like RAM, Reflektor is a bloated, compelling, frustrating listen; aloof and hollow and majestic. It's important. Professorial. The kind of album that would have statues of mythological people on the cover. The kind of thing a band with a show dress code would put out. When the big beats kick in on Here Comes the Night Time, you're expected to dance. And you'll want to! Its a great moment! But it feels like a directive more than an invitation, one many from the magistrates of rock.

When Butler mutters "do you like rock and roll music...?" at the start of Normal Person it feels like a taunt. What kicks off next is the only great song on the album, a thrilling stomper full of offkilter guitar lines, a slinky Bowie-worthy verse or three, and even a Blur-worthy skitterey kickout. It's one of the few moments when you feel like you're listening to a rock and roll band instead of a dissertation on rock and roll. "I don't know if I do..." Butler demures. Well no wonder.

Musically the album's overloaded and unfocused, but sure, so was Funeral and I liked that one just fine. And frustratingly, as a whole, its a pretty epic listen that will hold your interest for an hour or so. But there's no songs on it (Normal Person excepted), no heart, no voice you'd want to hear. It all goes back to the "would you want to be in this band?" test. Good god I bet this is a miserable joyless tour going on right about now, just look at the stage patter that drips from the opening of that one good track. Look. These guys put a fake live intro on one of their songs and intentionally made it sound like they didn't even want to be there. Maybe that tells you everything you need to know right there 3/5

#1045 Moon Duo - Circles

Repetitive clipclip beats keep time as the rolling bass and big guitar washes and muttered vocals roll in. This goes beyond Strokes / Interpol NYC post-punk and into a dampened Big Black territory, motoring along like listenable Velvets via Jesus and Mary Chain via A Place to Bury Strangers (see especially Sparks), but with some of that Roadrunner endless runner running. An exercise in repetition and atmosphere that never really takes any big chances, but ends up being an agreeable, trancy listen 3.5/5

#1044 The Outsiders (Dutch) - Outsiders

The Dutch band, not the British or American Outsiders, who banged out galloping, stuttering, Stonesey rock in the late 60's.

There's a strange little stunt at the heart of this album. The first side's a rollicking set of live songs packed impotent Roky Erickson mania; everything's a dozen BMP too fast and tense and falling all over itself, and it kind of just slips through your fingers, only occaisionally striking sparks. Woah, these guys were kinda loose, frantic motherfuckers live , you reckon.

So you flip the disc and the studio side's got the exact same problem: everything a 35th beat behind itself and under itself and the band's wheels feel like they're coming off, and new wheels are appearing from some secret compartment, and coming off, and some other compartment opens and wheels, gone, constantly, for 2 and a half minutes at a time. Is this a choice? You Won't Listen's as prescient of punk as the 60's got, Don't You Cry can't seem to keep up with itself, and its all, a bit off.

It's intriguing shit - their tense, batshit approach to tempos is either the thing that keeps them from being any good or the only thing making them great, and damned if I can figure out which. Skip the live side's thin mix and check out the studio side that'll clench your grimace into a smile 3.5/5

#1043 Todd Terry - Resolutions

Pretty fundamental stuff from the breakbeat innovator: the big bass, the looping synths, the one big vocal sample and those skitterey breaky beats, hard hitting-stuff that augers the Chemical Brothers. Each song sticks to its guns, works its samples over, drops in, drops out, punches the right beats, and solid pacing puts up a good albumwide listening. Some tracks overextend their samples (Merdahrah! Merdahrah! Merdahrah! Merdahrah! Merdahrah! Merdahrah! Merdahrah!), but the occaisional guest rapping and toasting keeps it from getting too predictable. Pretty good shit 3.5/5

#1042 The Range - Nonfiction

Evoking the emotive instrumental hip-hop of the late 90's, the melodic minimalism of footwork, and the lush perfection of Darkside's latest, this is strangely affecting stuff. Each song deconstructs a single sample as its backbone, chopping it into useable parts to plant seeds and nurture micro-scale nostalgia, while squiggled beats and gloaming synth evolutions outline the contours. There's nothing here that happens only once, and nothing quite happens twice. Look at Jamie, a cut that crafts the impression of a full fledged song out of strikingly few seconds of actual sounds, hyperchorus with the impression of movement, a hip hop Praise You.

That minimalism's nothing new, but its rare to see it packed into forms with so much emotional heft, all of the weight and space and majesty of an M83 track circa Dead Cities built from nothing but echoes, carefully generated, redirected, and rendered solid 4/5

#1041 The Godz - Godz 2

Roughly the same rambling, single-chord, defiantly single-minded proto-drone-chant Velvetism that the Godz put out the first time around, this time without that rush of the new, without that same spirit. This one smacks of effort, which is a death blow when your whole draw is art brut outsider braindumperey. There's still a strange brilliance to the primitive stomp, but the fun is gone 2.5/5

#1040 Basic Channel - BCD

Minimalist electronica with shades of ambient house, built on crystal loops that change glacially. The best bits are the details, the little analog crinkles and crackles that get pulled into the repeat cycle and become instruments unto themselves, camouflaging the entrance of new sounds: The Disintegration Loops in reverse, nothing arriving consciously before it's approached subconsciously. Conceptually, there's a satisfying balance between accident and perfectionism, but in the experiencing its a frustrating close listen and a passable piece of background music at best 3/5

#1039 David Axelrod - Song of Innocence

Take everything big about epic length jazz suites and soundtracky modern classical, jam it into a rough rock format without shedding any instrumentation nor adding any vocals and end up with something that manages to not quite be prog. Its an advanced platypus rock maneuver.

Most of the time its a bit by the numbers: horns and strings play classical washes, bass and drums play jazz, guitars play some rock solos or funk jiggerjacks over top, see what falls out. Sometimes its beautiful, and the individual tones and moods are inspired, and that drum and bass is just sick, but too often those big classical surges drown out the details, and create a pall of sameness over the album's run. I admire the ambition more than the execution; a little less beak and this thing could have soared 3.5/5

#1038 Soft Cell - Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret

Tainted Love tells you more or less everything you need to know about this album: like most of their ilk from the 80's, Soft Cell found their synth sound, found their basic attitude, and stuck to it out of a supreme confidence, consistency, or a lack of imagination.

Soft Cell justify that consistency better than most though: the album's all needing wanting more, grasping for that greater thrill, chasing that next high, a treadmill in molasses at a million miles an hour. The songs loop with sparking heels and neon buzz, words drip from mouths with pre-Blur disdain, we wander through identical clubs, down identical streets, through a night that never ends, through nights that never end, highs and lows blur together. Over the top, saxes scream, girls chant, and voices whisper "sexxx dwaarff" in dimly lit underground Love Shack raveup comedown. It's cool, it's weird, it's exciting, it's boring, it's endless and over too soon. It completely cancels itself out and does it so well that it comes out ahead 4/5

#1037 The Fabulous Wailers - The Fabulous Wailers

This right here's the sweet spot. Everything you love about garage rock revival of R&B raucousness (starting with say, The Sonics) and everything you love about the actual rip-roaring R&B of the 50's (Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Gene Vincent) collided in some kinda space-time cusp in Seattle 1959. The Wailers' debut is as genuine and raging as the originals, with that do-it-harder-do-it-faster-fuckit-if-we're-doing-it-right aplomb and full-throated Link Wray rumble that you can only get by trucking it a couple years and half a country away.

You get the idea that these kids just really fucking love rock and roll, and they love it every way there is to love it, from the galloping instrumental opener, to the impossibly cool, jazzy 2nd track, to sax and piano Little Richard rollick of Dirty Robber, where vocals kick in for the first time and they're ragged and raw and you mentally drop back to the first couple of tracks and try to piece together what trajectory this thing's on.

It's a two part-greatness here. The actual songs, while sounding a bit samey by the end, are kicking, rocking, enthusiastic and terrific fun. But its the album that seals it. I'm reminded of Mellon Collie and Kid A: albums that start with a weird opener, double-down on that weirdness in the second track, and then get down to business on the 3rd. There's disorientation creating tension, and then a spot of relief, and then off you veer again and you don't know where these fools are taking you but you trust that it's gonna be interesting. That confidence and wildness is on display here, and remember that being unpredictable isn't something that any of the R&B gods, nor their revivalists, were especially strong at once you got past their opening salvo. But this keeps you guessing, just look at the slinky atmosphere of High Wall into the shitkicking handclap thrill of Wailin'. To take one of the greatest eras of rock and roll, pump it up, and twist it into a shape that touches on jazz, pre-surf, and punk-before-punk, and heave it into the world like a firebomb, it's a hell of a thing, and a fitting capstone tribute to the 50's 5/5

#1036 The Godz - Contact High with The Godz

By now we're pretty used to punk and lo fi and indie pop and whatever the fuck The Shaggs was. But in 1966, the idea that you would make music without really being particularly good at playing your instruments or having decent recording equipment or having any verifiable talent to speak of was a bit more adventurous. The Godz make minimalist one-chord songs that lurch in place, made mostly of acoustic texture and meandering notes and tape artifacts, building pillowey crunch for the vocals to soar over clumsily.

The band swings from Ween to Guided by Voices*, sometimes leaning on weirdness to make up for their deficiencies, sometimes just baring earnestness. It's the latter that wins out, and the album just...pulls it off. It takes up a warm place in your heart. It has little to offer, few pretentions; it's only modestly interesting while you're listening to it; but afterwards it'll have nuzzled out a space that you won't begrudge 3.5/5

* Bob Pollard mentions them as an influence, and the vocals sound a bit like his to boot

#1035 VA - Creative Outlaws: U.S. Underground 1962-1970

If you'd never heard any rough-edged music from the 60's, if you only knew The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, this'd be a perfectly good way to get a taste. If you've never heard any Captain Beefheart or MC5 or Blue Cheer, artists that can only generously be called obscure, you'll find a lot to blow you mind here. I can't promise you'll have a real good trip, but you'll have an experience.

There's still some gems for the more jaded listener: Moondog and The Godz have the album's strongest moment, a one-two punch of trippy, formless rock. But the collection's terribly uneven, with the barest tonal cohesion and jerky track-to-track flow. It sounds like a mixtape hastily composed in 1970 (supposing that was a thing in 1970); a stoned grocery bagger of 28 putting his favorite tracks together for his younger brother. If you might be that younger brother, you just might cherish this. If you're more like the older brother, you're likely to feel like you could've done better 3/5

#1034 Dibiase and P.U.D.G.E. - L.A. Series #1

Dibiase's production on Flashbang Grenada's album was inspired, but  his songs on this split EP are just lazily warped and looped samples / chiptune leftovers. Aimless and unlistenable, this has half the freshness of Up the Joystick, and that was a pretty gimmicky album to start with.

If Dibiase's songs are underdone, P.U.D.G.E.'s songs are overdone, like he took decent instrumental hip hop songs and bent them all out of shape to gain art-house IDM appeal. Both end up in roughly the same place regardless: worble and borble with only a passing regard for whether anyone would want to listen to music this haphazardly disjointed 2/5

#1033 Rufus Thomas - Walking the Dog

Dance-oriented 60's soul made for an everyday good time: the title track's throaty, emphatic delivery of nursery rhyme lines pretty much says it all. A popping backing from the Stax house band keeps beat behind Thomas's powerhouse voice: half Bo Diddley's yooooowl, half James Brown's heeay! It might seem like frivilous stuff, but dude's all in. It's a fun tromp, even if it sounds a bit samey by the end 3.5/5

#1032 DJ Rashad - Double Cup

I'm told this is a footwork album, surely the most fucked-up music ever made to dance to. I'm old as fuck.

Backstory aside, this album's pure skitterey minimalism, each song working with different mincings of the same sort vocal sample, chopping the same beat at as many angles as possible, all riding on the same album-wide 4-chord progression that reappears again and again, slowed down, sped up, skittering, extruded, diluted, melted and bent. There's prefuse crinkleup around every corner, jacked into seemingly arbitrary origami roadmaps, but underneath it's a stone soup of samples and acid house squiggles, seemingly no more than a dozen or two, just sent again and again through the wringer. That re-re-re-construction makes for a difficult listen, but that 4-chord backbone elevates it - each track's a kaleidoscope section of the same post-apocalyptic landscape 3.5/5

#1031 The Sonics - Boom

More choice R&B revival proto-garage rock from the Sonics. This is rougher, tougher, more frantic than Here Are the Sonics, but it lacks that honed edge and punchy delivery - nothing here cuts quite as hard as Strychnine or Psycho. This is the cooler, more diverse, but ultimately less exciting of the two Sonics LPs 3.5/5

#1030 Tom Waits - Mule Variations

Here, even more so than usual, Waits get by on details - on atmosphere, on personality, on the creaks and groans and sub-note croaks that pepper his songs. The highlights are the stompers, the drunken staggerers, the songs that play up Waits' demented, chaotic side, while the ballads are weathered and soulful but not altogether inspiring. Between them its a lurching skeleton, heavy with years, prickling with secrets, full of crypic lines and broken melodies, inspiring curiosity and sadness and release 4/5

#1029 Shark? - True Waste

Shark? update the Strokes / Interpol new-york-post-punk sound with a transcoastal trip through summerey cool, finding the middle ground between detached leather jacket cache and stoned boardshorts blase. The thrum thrum thrum thrum chug chug chug chug moan moan moan moan formula's down to a T, but crossed by handclaps, surflines, and Surfer Blood burstopen choruses - all beach-ready enough to find its way onto GTA V's socal stoner rock radio station. It's a disorientingly winning combination, letting just enough sunlight into the club to keep things bright, staggering with just enough swagger to keep you guessing 4/5

#1028 The Future of the Left - How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident

Cynical, sneering, self-referential, generally unpleasant, truly an album for our time! The riffs are heavy, the lyrics incisive from time to time, the songs even hooky, but it's no fun at all, too busy tearing down to build much of anything 2.5/5

#1027 The Men - Immaculada

This is where The Men laid the blueprint for Open Your Heart, one of the best albums of 2012. All the parts are here, the noisy meandering, the atmospheric drones, the hardcore screamfits, the brief glimpses of honest to god rock and roll. The parts are structured all backwards though, leading with the artiest gestures and then settling into some comparatively traditional 90's underground-flecked rock, an inversion of the usual pop record structure that you can't help but respect, before closing with a breakneck title track climax in a style all their own.

The album's every kind of nascent, lacking any cohesive plan, but that gives it all that ramshackle punk edge. It's thrilling to hear a band respectful of rock but unwed to any particular notion of how to use it, thrashing with abandon against Can via Sonic Youth, evoking inconsistent legends like Wild Mountain Nation and African Majik, forging its own little slice of skittery strange 4/5

#1026 The Men - Campfire Songs

If you release an album of songs recorded live around the campfire, you're going to have to get by on atmosphere and feel. For the most part, this one does.

Five repetitive, textured songs churn and flicker and outline the night. Nothing much happens, a cloud of acoustic guitars merges and evolves in increments, but it strangely works as an extension of The Men's atmospheric, repetitive post-punk side, as acoustic versions of songs you might find on the second side of one of their recent albums. The final track in particular captures a certain eternal, grasping hoping spirit.

If you want rock and roll, look to another of their albums. If you want nostalgia for a moonlit night you never lived, this is better than most 3.5/5

#1025 RJD2 - More Is Than Isn't

Doesn't much feel like there's anywhere left to go in instrumental hip hop. RJD2 tries to keep his sound sounding fresh by spreading its wings genre-wise: check the See You Leave -> Descended from Myth 4-track stretch that spans deep soul, jazz, hard-edged funk, Outkast-via-Basement-Jaxx R&B, and Jason Forrest maximalist mashism. It's a fun, eclectic, energetic mix that works more in mixtape moments than as an album whole - there's none of that sense of exploring an emotional or musical landscape that the best instrumental albums bring. Some highlight tracks, and a showcase that RJD2's still got some tricks, but the fact he showed them all off makes for a whiplash listen 3/5

#1024 Darkside - Psychic

Finally! Maybe this is the payoff for all the horseshit aimless experimentalism we've been suffering though for the last couple of years: Darkside has weaponized it and made something magical, nicking snatches of The Field's overminimalism, Oneohtrix's detuned wobblefuckery, Radiohead's most far-fetched deconstructions, Daft Punk at their most icy, bouncing off of half a dozen other points of reference and arriving at an evocative, inviting, haunting masterpiece.

This plays by scant few established rules, but it's decidedly listenable, using distant samples, searing vocal twists, warm Rhodes, and that unstoppable analog bass, especially that bass, to stunning effect, again and again and again. You'll find yourself falling in love with it even as you struggle to understand why. The music straddles the line between post-rock and experimental electronica but rises without any of the heavy lifting those scenes tend to demand, coming on like a mysterious stranger sweeping away your inhibitions.

There're guitars, but they don't exactly play riffs. There're drums, but the don't exactly play beats. There're vocals, but they're barely singing. And yet it gets in you like rock, landing somewhere between Dark Side of the Moon and Endtroducing. It's like academic software engineering out there: everybody's inventing new languages, Darkside's one of the few that's saying something 4.5/5

#1023 Forest Fire - Screens

A massive improvement over their underwhelming previous album; maybe this is what Forest Fire was going for. This time out, the tuneful buzzes extend tendrils past the first track and find fertile grounds, providing intriguing textural twists. This time out, the slithery pacing works, building intimacy and atmosphere, all on the backbone of those unstoppable, serpentine basslines. The epic-length Annie, in particular weaves a hynotic, krauty web out of endless bass, crisscrossing synths, and Yo La Tengo drone solos. A compelling, moonlit little gem of an indie rock record 4/5

#1022 Forest Fire - Staring at the X

Forest Fire's second album starts off promisingly, with all those synths and zooropa echo guitars on the killer opening track, but then it just settles into a kind of listless simmer. Maybe the band's trying to exude cool, or evoke detachment, but it only inspires boredom, everything too slow and too sparse to maintain interest 2.5/5

#1021 Marty Marquis - Switched On Goodbye Bread

Listen here!

Cute trick. Marquis accurately and playfully recreates one of Ty Segall's (lesser) albums with naught but old synths. The tones are warm and the rhythms nuanced, but this captures little of the album's resigned fury and provides little interest as a standalone piece 2/5

#1020 The Field - Yesterday and Today

The Field lives up to its name: as uniform and understatedly beautiful as a grassy one, as uncaring and unknowable as a magnetic one. This is loop-based electronica wholly of itself, an artifact with only a passing interest in being listened to. Consider Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime, a song that builds and drops and builds and drops, suggesting a larger-scale arc, but defying the expectation, all one step forward one step back, ending up where it started and mocking your anticipation otherwise. Leave You pulses in place for a few minutes before enticing with a roving bassline, but even that is used to betray anticipation of outcomes never to arrive.

A curiosity, to be sure, even intriguing in its way, but unwelcoming to the point of rudeness, an elegance-draped vampire that won't deign to seduce you, lurking slender and distant for hours and hours and hours before disappearing in a wink 3/5

#1019 Prins Thomas - Prins Thomas 2

Prins's brand of endless electronica is back, but it's shed that krauty churn that once made it so exciting. Housey 4's have overtaken the motorik 3's, and the propulsive bass has been replaced by a more static, synthy imposter. This is slow-shifting, icy, trancy stuff, better for sitting and bobbing than tilting through the night, lacking much of the offkilter heartbeat that made Thomas's debut so special 3/5

#1018 Meat Puppets - Meat Puppets II

Nirvana's unplugged nods notwithstanding, these guys are grossly underappreciated as influences on grunge and early indie: that raw guitar, that ragged vocal, those batshit lyrical turns, those stylistic dabblings, that general sense of strain; you can hear the spine laid bone by bone, from Pavement to Nirvana and right on through to The Men. And it's not just guitar crunch, it's little country touches and pretty instrumental interludes and adventurous detours that keep the listening experience exciting and unpredictable, recasting the excesses of hardcore punk and Sonic Youth experimentalism downright listenable. A thoroughly enjoyable, borderline brilliant album that was startlingly ahead of its time 4.5/5

#1017 Arthur Alexander - You Better Move On

On this album of lovelorn, country-flecked soulful pop, Alexander croons over longing and loss and a touch of what's in between. His voice is round and silky and bowling ball bold, and while the production and songwriting blend in with the Spectorism of the time, his long list of coverers and alleged admirers lends credence to his talents. He's been cited as a secret influence on the likes of The Beatles and The Stones, and yet its all pretty waterey to the modern ear, lacking any particular poetry or punch 3/5

#1016 Ulcerate - Vermis

A crashing clatter of guitars and drums and roaring that arches and crashes like waves, all a singular force, details whipping like whitecaps subservient to the ship-crushing surge of the song's overarching lurch. Taking it in at a soft-focus listen is an experience, as you're pushed and pulled, notes themselves impacting subconsciously.

As batshit, doomy, post-thrash goes, its more exciting than most, but it's decidedly not my scene 3/5

#1015 Potty Mouth - Hell Bent

Blunt instrument indie pop-punk, all garagey chug and nasal vocals sneering across heartfelt frustration. Start-stops and bass drops provide low-level swerves, but it's an album so simple and unassuming, so compressed in the mix, that it doesn't make much of an impression, a quiet weird kid in the back of the class 3/5

#1014 CVRCHES - The Bones of What You Believe

It's obvious why these folks are the new hotness: start with daydream-ready, mewling cute-girl vocals straight out of pop proper; add every trick M83 ever used to circumvent reason and trigger pining for a collectively-invented romantic 80's innocence. Indie kids get momentary escape from their vacantly effortless lives. Profit.

It almost works, but it doesn't even make any effort to hide the strings. It's all baldly manipulative, so brazenly pushing the right buttons: cue doubledup synth loop, trigger synth tom breakdown, insert guitar solo, overlay male vocal counterpoint copied straight out of Cut Copy. It's a seven layer dip of 80's re-re-revival horseshit. These are old tricks in 2013, every last one of them, and doing them with a girl singing doesn't pass for innovation and doesn't keep it from sounding stale 2.5/5

#1013 Coachwhips - Peanut Butter and Jelly

Thoroughly relentless and dissonant, banging along at relentless speed, integrating more clash and clatter and noise and less distinct punishing guitar lines than their earlier stuff; this is, yes, a Coachwhips album. This is the sound being taken as far as it can go and still make songs, the kind of creative thrashing needed to stay vital and evolve into something as vital as Thee Oh Sees years later - kick punch flail - out in 20 minutes - peace 3.5/5

#1012 MGMT - MGMT

I was among the few who appreciated Congratulations, finding it more interesting as a whole than the non-single filler that clogged MGMT's debut. But here the boys have gone a step too far, gone pure sheer sheets of color, flickering in the wind, pretty and formless.

There are no songs here. Voices quaver out from pillow forts, drums beat over blanket mounds, and languid puffs of pure production waft in the air without forming into anything with any point, purpose, or direction 2.5/5

#1011 Islands - A Sleep And A Forgetting

At least Islands had the decency to let us down easy. From Return to the Sea's inevitably-disappointing-but-surprisingly-solid post-Unicorns effort, to Arm's Way's great-first-five / awful-last-seven hyper-frontloaded comedown, to Vapours' crap-but-for-the-title track barely-thereism, to here.

We knew this was coming.

At last we've arrived at the inevitable endpoint of our trajectory: from a half-album, to a quarter album, to a twelth album, to a non-album: a waterey lump of crooners without a single memorable moment.

It's over and I felt nothing at all. At least it didn't hurt. 2/5

#1010 Peter Frampton - Frampton Comes Alive!

You almost had me, Frampton. You almost convinced me that this was a modest gem unfairly dismissed by the rock smugagencia, some second cousin of Countdown to Ecstasy, some estranged nephew of Fragile, with enough "hey, that actually kind of rocks" moments to crack my assumptions. But then you sucked. And then you sucked again. From Winds of Change to Baby to I Love Your Way, and most of what comes between, this is a mopey, reedy, waterey slurry of songs 2.5/5

#1009 Jacuzzi Boys - Jacuzzi Boys

Breathy, reverbey, distant cool: at its best Jacuzzi Boys' latest is chugchug rock and roll dotted with streaks and flourishes, all slow-motion spin-art. When they slow down (the damp late-Shinsing of Dust) or try to find a 3rd gear (the blandly noisy Rubble, crippled by an unconvincing chorus), it doesn't suit them. If you're going to keep us at arms length, lounging behind all the echo and smoke, you're not going to get the benefit of the doubt. You're going to have to be perfect. You're going to have to be very, very cool. Sometimes the Boys pull it off, but not often enough to recommend this album with any vigor 3/5

#1008 Factory Floor - Factory Floor

You can hear those DFA post-dancepunk clipclop beats a mile away. Here they are, back again, the vocals a bit more twisted, the song lengths a bit more varied, but the basic blueprint wholly intact: the knobtwiddle synth loops, the casiotone drum samples, the elliptical headphase. It's perfectly listenable, a modest tweak of a well-worn sound, a honing of the feel that inspires bristles on occasion (dig those bare, brazen synths on Fall Back, the hissy clips on How You Say), but surely DFA's got the guts to cast its line a bit farther afield than this in two thousand and thirteen? 3.5/5

#1007 The So So Glos - Blowout

Blowout spends about 30 seconds worshiping the 90's before it shatters into the 00's, exploding kaleidoscopic and crashing through a hall of mirrors of bratty poppunk, Japandroids soaring, hothotheat post-ska, Devo-via-Polysics spazism, Futureheads-via-Dananananakroyd shitkicking couldntgiveafuck, with a blownout snare kick popping the whole thing off careening, and closing Lost Weekend, bookending those tracks as a killer four-part opening epic disguised as 4 songs, before the title track's blunt instrument raveup shatters any shell of pretension. On and on it goes, gone before it's here, pure reflection building memories out of memories, grasping for the now and the now and the now 4/5

#1006 Guided by Voices - The Bears for Lunch

Guided by Voices, all cleaned up: studio-quality sound and normal song lengths abound. There's still some hooky moments here, but for every She Lives in an Airport, there's two Hangover Childs, just churning in place with nowhere to go, hanging out for a couple minutes past their welcome and then ending with a whimper. The production makes for some interesting textures, and most of the songs are built on buzz like tiny Lo La Tengos, but there's little excitement in the moment and little that you'll remember once its over 2.5/5

#1005 Electric Light Orchestra - The Electric Light Orchestra

ELO's first album's overtly symphonic, brimming, positively slathered, in strings and horns, sometimes consisting of nothing but for minutes at a time. Along the way are lyrics that are appropriately grand in scale, with deliveries to match. The sound is alien and eternal, the chords not quite familiar, the pacing not quite sensical, everything a bit uncanny and grand in a way that beckons onward without quite ever letting you get comfortable, will o the wisps over hills. A strange, mad first effort from a band that's hard to ever get your head around 3.5/5

#1004 The Last Hard Men - The Last Hard Men (2001 version)

A collaboration between the Pumpkins' drummer, Skid Row's singer, The Breeders' guitar player (Kelley, not Kim), and The Frogs' guitar player (Jimmy, not Dennis). Which is a supergroup in the sense that Robin, Kato, Bat-Mite and Captain Marvel would be a super-squad, featuring the most famous member of B-list bands and the second-most famous member of some A-list bands. The result is more or less exactly what you'd expect: disjointed, uninspired, and bloated.

Songs alternate from disappointing Flemion-penned wisps of 90's alt rock to not-unexpectedly mediocre Breeders outtakes, with some kinda fun, weird covers that don't do enough justify the album's existence. The "interview" sections string a fun, spooky thread through the album, but in the long term its likely just 5 extra taps of the skip button.

The main appeal is how disarmingly sloppy it all is, sounding like the folks just showed up in the studio for a few days and halfheartedly banged out some songs, cause, why not? I might even recommend hearing it once? But its a middling recommendation at best 2.5/5

#1003 Coachwhips - Bangers vs. Fuckers

Don't be fooled by the title: this isn't an album where some songs are Bangers and some are Fuckers: every song's a Banger and a Fucker, and each one's fighting itself. If Get Yer Body Next Ta Mine was John Dwyer's pre-Thee-Oh-Sees sound as a raw iron ingot, this is that ingot tempered into a crude blade and jammed earward again and again, the sound honed into pure garagey aggression with little art or remorse. It's relentless, exciting, exhausting, and at least a little admirable for its pure focus on the task at hand 4/5

#1002 Lemuria - The Distance Is So Big

A pretty, hooky boy-girl indie rock band. Heard of those? This's prettier and hookier than most though, with brisk pacing, some gorgeous harmonies, and a meatier guitar tone than usual, elevating this past Matt and Kim territory and on up to a less-self-important version of early New Pornographers. Every time you try to dismiss it, it justifies itself, with some clever turn or hook, keeping em coming until you have to admit they do what they do good 4/5

#1001 Kandodo - k2o

Utterly spare, atmospheric post-rock that drones onward like comatose Explosions in the Sky, like sedated Godspeed, like the opening moments of any operatic 20-minute guitar instrumental stretched outward themselves for 20 minutes, building towards no climax nor any expectation of one. Guitar paeans melt as they form, and then loop and overlay, backed by only the most basic beats, creating senses of texture and time more akin to Brian Eno or Pop than rock.

As music of this kind goes, it's good if unexceptional. The closing Swim Into the Sun, in particular, is effective at creating a headspace and then letting it fall away, leaving nothing. Music for long journeys, in cars or otherwise 3.5/5

#1000 Coachwhips - Get Yer Body Next Ta Mine

Surprise 1000! Over the last couple months I found 5 (five!) albums* that I'd heard and forgotten to list and only recovered and reviewed retroactively via the magic of my last.fm scrobbling. Numbers be all fucked - some day I might try to write a script to fix em.

So. Coachwhips.

My obsession with Thee Oh Sees has been pretty well documented on this blog, so what to do having finally caught up with their torrent of output? Get cracking on John Dwyer's earlier bands!

The same basic Oh Sees parts are in place: organ drones, garagey thrash, staccato bullhorn screeds, and general start-stop guitar madness. These are parts stripped from the Chevy though: there's no dissonant vocals, no K-records tininess, no extended jams, just unadorned 2-minute garage-punk glory. This is a nascent, thrashing version of the beast that would devour worlds, just pure revival of the 60's finest moments, and its a thrilling, exhausting listen 4/5

* Specifically:
525a The Frogs - It's Only Right and Natural
526a Frank Ocean - Channel Orange
526b The Frogs - Bananimals (sorry Frogs!)
618a Feed Me - Feed Me's Escape from Electric Mountain
921a The Rolling Stones - Between the Buttons

#994 Pink Frost - Sundowning

Heavy late 90's guitars! Not dead! Piled one on another on another, lined up end to end to forge an endless riff backbone that the occasional breakdown or doubledown can branch from.

I've read comparisons to early Smashing Pumpkins, but I'd take this one more step down the chain and go with the Pumpkins-aping Silversun Pickups*: there's a singlemindedness to the guitars and the writhing sentiment: Pink Frost found a sound they like and apply it with furious diligence, but haven't really probed its boundaries with any particular eagerness. Find a riff! Repeat! Repeat! Take a break from it! Bring it back! Bury some vocals under there saying nothing in particular and hope that riff's enough!

I like overlayered guitars; I even like these particular riffs; but its not enough to particularly keep my interest. We'll see what their next one brings: can they find kaleidoscopic new places to go with their guitar talents? Are they the Silversun Pickups or The Smashing Pumkins? 3/5

* or even Oceania-era Smashing Pumkins, when they'd kind of given up on doing anything especially interesting

#993 Electric Light Orchestra - The Night the Light Went on in Long Beach

Reverence for the past is part and parcel of prog, but normally it's all the way to the way back: some grasp at classical music's unassailable legitimacy. This live album's got reverence, but first and foremost for rock's origins, complete with a Jerry Lee Lewis cover, a Beatles cover, and a Chuck Berry cover (the nose-thumbing Roll Over Beethoven). But then, also In the Hall of the Mountain King, Orange Blossom Special, and a full on violin solo. All told, only about half of the album's songs are originals, making for a kaliedescopic musical experience, all expertly performed, all strangely brewed, all in defiance that genre matters all that much, positing that rock raucousness and classical intricacy can stand on equal footing.

The resulting actual listen, mission statement aside, is uneven, disjointed, and reasonably exciting despite it, with the proggy originals providing a squirrelly backbone. You're not sure ELO even really knew what they were doing, but the flailing's a heck of a thing to hear 3.5/5

#992 Banana Phonetic - The Facts of Evolution

Listen / buy (pay what you want) here!

Some tuneful singing, washes of ebow, showers of chiming arpegios, and a wash of everyday cleverness makes for an agreeable, unassuming little EP. Evoking early Built to Spill and Dr. Dog, there's nothing groundbreaking here, but it'll keep you on your tapping toes 3.5/5

#991 VA - Beach Blvd. (CD Version)

A compilation of pure dontgiveafuck punk straight out of late-70's Orange County, featuring:

 - The Simpletones, putting a sarcastic edge on 60's teen pop, making the simplest possible shouty, bratty punk

 - Negative Trend / Rik L Rik's, repetitive Dead Kennedys sneer and chug

 - The Crowd's propulsive, hooky Ramonesisms, by far the most melodic and exciting of the lot

The scene sounds disgusted and defiant of the area's Hollywood / Disneyland banality, while not really sounding that angry. How furious can you be when the sun always shines and there's no urban blight to be found, just a wallpaper of burgeoning suburban enclaves? Bored and lashing out against nothing is still a timeless message, tunelessly delivered, made admirable, if mostly uninteresting, by its inability to compromise 3/5

#990 The Dead Trains - First Thing Smokin'

Usual LocalMusicBoston Disclosure: Trains frontman Matt Axten's a friend, but his band's put together a nice mini album (listen / buy here!), showing off their signature slide-guitar driven, garagey blues-(post?)-punk sound. Beats chug, riffs whip elliptical, and the verses surge through the turns with filthy grace, jumping the tracks and landing with sparks. Exciting stuff, looking forward to a proper debut 3.5/5

#989 Earl Sweatshirt - Doris

Laid-back-complex rap in the Das Racist spirit, with eclectic production that goes from Dilla nostalgia to rockism circa The Coup. Sweatshirt's rhyming is disarmingly imprecise, with personality and voice showing through while he stumbles backwards into rhymes of bracing intricacy.

The second half is the problem, making even the modest 45 minutes sound understuffed, the album-curtain dropping to reveal a mixtape. Guild is completely incomprehensible, underproduced into unintelligibility, and the production gets hazier and lazier from there, driving home the idea that Sweatshirt had about half an album's worth of decent songs and then dumped on some filler. That's par for the hip hop course, but I'm spoiled by records that keep my interest all the way through 3.5/5

#988 Onaquest - Live at Slinky 14

A friend of a friend did this, listen here (actual play link is way at the bottom)! A perfectly agreeable house set, with smooth transitions, no poor choices, no terrible samples, but without any particularly epic emotional arc, instead choosing clockless casino tranceism. Good for chilling out or working to, as my signature electronica half-dismissal goes 3/5

#987 Japanther - Skuffed Up My Huffy

Japanther's best known for their live art-rock antics, but there's little of that on display here: this is pure sugarrush fun, with tidy 2-minute runtimes designed to please. Pop-punk with an emphasis on pop, each song is full of breakneck fun and buzzy guitars, nostalgic and performed in a nostaligic, like the world's catchiest middle school garage band 4/5

#986 Jay Reatard - Blood Visions

Shoutier, angrier, and more straight up punk than his singles collections, Blood Visions is nonetheless a hell of a lot of fun. Pure couldntgiveafuck energy pours out of every sheetmetal riff, shouty kickin, and screaming solo, all built on batshit tempos and chuggy acoustic backdrops. Songs blitz you, the hooks get in and its on to the next one, which promises to be completely different and perfectly right. Exciting in the details, perfectly paced, it doesn't get a lot better than this 4.5/5

#985 Husker Du - Zen Arcade

Would you believe this came out in the same month (July '84), on the same label (SST) as Double Nickels on the Dime? That's 4 discs worth of punk rock epics in the span of 30 days!

This is similar in ways: a sprawling, punishing exploration of the deeper crannies of what punk can be, lashing out in every direction at once. But while Double Nickel's exploration was an econo cartography of song structure within a particular drums-guitar-bass landscape, Zen Arcade thrashes harder, tentacles reaching further, droping in ambient buzz, pianos, and pretty vocal harmonies, ending up further out in the reaches on pretty much every dimension, with moments that are noisier, as well some that are prettier, than anything Minutemen did.

Lovers of Fucked Up's heady collision of pretty and abrasive will find a lot to love here: its a demanding, exhausting album that plows over itself so thoroughly that few tracks stand out, it's just a single monolithic wall of (post?) punk energy, inspiring awe without being particularly inviting. An achievement. A tough listen. 3.5/5

#984 Jay Reatard - Matador Singles '08

Reatard was one of the most truly brilliant songwriters of the 00s, spitting out impossibly fun, noisy garage-pop punk rock songs by the dozens. 17 songs from the 06-07 collection are joined by these 13 to bring the 3-year total to 30, with a couple albums along the way. Dude was prolific. And the quality rate is just impossible. Alongside Ty Segall and John Dwyer, Reatard is on the Mount Rushmore of garage rock revival perfection.

This collection isn't quite as exhilarating front-to-back as 06-07, dragged down by his cover of Fluorescent Grey, the longest, slowest song on the album, thunked down square in the middle. But what an opening. See Saw and Screaming Hand are two of the best pop punk songs of the decade, full stop, delightfully bratty and brash, jammed with hooks and ramshackle charm, each frosted by third-verse touches that drive endless one-more-play cycles. The synth boops on Screaming Hand. Holy fucking shit.

Those peaks are never reached again, and that frontload, again, busts up the album experience. But its still an endlessly listenable collection, crammed with more ideas and details than bands' entire careers 4.5/5

#983 VA - Mutazione: Italian Electronic and New Wave Underground 1980 to 1988

An awesome exploration of some legitimately tense, occasionally thrilling, truly experimental music from the 80's. Seething rage and defiance underpin the clipped electronics, the futurist fury streamtraining past the present nonsense into a future that will kill fascists.

Occasionally dancable, mostly terrifying, this evokes Big Black, The Fall, This Heat and anyone else who can't be bothered to sing a message they can barely bear to speak, with music undermining your will to tune it out. Not good work music, possibly not good music, but strangely exciting anyway 4/5

#982 Ty Segall - Singles 07-10

Segall's unstoppable. A sprawling garagey 25 song rampage, spewing formless rage and energy, slashing raw power in every conceivable direction. This is dude at his best, blasting outward with abandon, with none of the sludginess that muddled Melted and Goodbye Bread, just pure buzzsaw killstreak guitars and overblown vocal eruptions.

There's a band back there somewhere, but Segall's smash and grab vision is so singular that it seems transfigured spontaneously by his formidable will 4.5/5

#981 Freddie King - Burglar

Well-polished blues from a man that's half the shouter of BB, but a doubly flashy guitar player. This is frenetic, feelgood blues, full of fretboard fireworks and showmanship, with little of that crooning, mournful pathos you might come in expecting. More Clapton than Johnson, this goes down about as easy as blues can do, more likely to make you notice the world than make you try to understand it 3.5/5

#980 Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs

Yo La Tengo Report Card time!

Whispy twee B&S BS: C+
Avalon and I'm on My Way sound like parodies, the male vocals on these albums just haven't aged well, and the music wanders and wanders.

Fast, chuggy pop: B+
Nothing to Hide is a delight! The strings undermine elsewhere.

Loopy, dubby lopers that defy downpinning: B-
Had to add this to the card sometime around The Room Got Heavy: again, Here To Fall's strings are no match for its predecesor's organs, and Periodically Double or Triple's circus-time breakdown seems to overtly added to rescue an overly Spoony runinplace.

Endless explorations of the endless nighttime of the soul: A-
The closing 3-track, 35-minute stretch is the real draw of this album, and putting these tracks together really lets you sink into a post-rock drone-trance. It's at odds with the rest of the album though: how much overlap is there between the times you want to listen to 9 muso pop songs and the times you want to zone out to halfhour droning?

Heart: C
This has been a rough category ever since we could hear it beating as one. The bar was high, but don't come here looking for something that will change your soul more than your mind.

3.5/5

#979 The Psyched - The Psyched

A brash, thrashy smash of trebly yelling, crashing cymbals, and pealing guitars. Everything clatters and stomps, there's no guitar solos, there's no hooks to speak of, scant little tact, but catchiness barges in regardless: this is undiluted tuneless shoutalong punk rock fun 4/5

#978 Destruction Unit - Void

A set of 6 oil-black, oil-thick post-punk churners, ragers, and droners: groaning vocals over crackling guitar breakdowns and crushing, overblown bass. An inexorable, sludgy streamtrain, throwing improbable sparks, this would be exciting if it could break free from itself, but it sinks again and again into its own muck. The tension of the struggle will have to do 3/5

#977 Electric Light Orchestra - ELO II

A bizarre album that slips out from under you again and again, indulging directly in classical and rock influences without quite stirring them into prog proper, leaving parts hanging in suspension. Bombastic strings here, audacious guitar solos there, all summed up pretty well by the 7 minute version of Roll Over Beethoven, complete with actual fifth symphony opening. You don't even have to hear it: just that concept tells you everything you need to know about this record.

It's clear that Jeff Lynne is a music genius of some stripe, but this is a strange straddling, flirting with pop without making a proper woman of it, indulging in various influences without fully assimilating them. The result is a lumpy, mysterious object, songs lurching to and fro without any obvious underlying method, while suggesting a non-obvious underlying method; never making themselves clear nor staking a claim to intending to be difficult. This is a perfect embodiment of why ELO is a band I persistently respect more than I enjoy 3.5/5

#976 R.E.M. - Reckoning

Relentlessly jangly, occaisionally bouncy, pure proto-indie, sharing plenty with the chugging tunefulness of mid-80's contemporaries The Smiths.

REM was clearly a talented band, but they've never moved me. The songs crack open and pour out like yolk instead of light, strangely inert for their skyward aspirations. Stipe's reedy murmur doesn't help, penning the sound in a cramped little range. I reckon if you were there this was a revelation, but in two thousand and thirteen we've all seen the remake and can't shake the precedent 2/5

#975 Thee Oh Sees - The Cool Death of Island Raiders

Desperately lo-fi, full of Animal Collective drone and wander and coo, all through a Microphones-tiny film of lost days, with no sign of the jamtastic fury that would mark their later (much better) stuff. The atmosphere builds by the end, but song by song its fairly unlistenable, not doing enough to really catch your attention, at times overtly repelling it with that witchy, creaky singing that sticks like knives 2/5

#974 Disappears - Pre Language

Disappears continue to fail to follow up convincingly on their crackling debut, sinking here deeper into post-punk churn, building rounded angular soundscapes with oblong parts, but composing them into beasts that rumble along the ground instead of soaring. Lyrically, the death obsession persists, but here is reads as resignation, a grim counterpoint to Lux's railing against the night. I guess you can only do that for so long before you quit, here's hoping these guys get up the nerve to fire another salvo 3/5

#973 BB King - Live at the Regal Theater

Did you know that BB King used to make the ladies shriek and lose their everloving minds? Strange thing to happen to a man born old. But shriek they do on this recording, flickering and sparking alongside King's shouting and howling, and the excitement is infectious, elevating the most buttondown cutloose music to something James Brown euphoric. In fact, while King is undeniably a sharp guitar player, the emphasis is really more on his voice and presence. The fact that he has one of the most ferocious live voices around, and then has a killer solo or three as a backup plan, is a one two punch and a half.

A surprisingly lively live album, and likely not what you're expecting if you were born in the last few decades 4/5

#972 DJ Koze - Reincarnations The Remix Chapter 2001-2009

Koze's woozy, psychedelic styling shines through each of these songs, a welcome change from the scattershot shitshow that so many remix collections stage. This is a producer who knows what he wants to do, and does it assertively: this could almost pass as a DJ Koze album.

Almost! Sadly, absent the album-level consistency and flow that marked Amygdala, the deep-theta slipperiness can't really settle in, and you hover on the edge of consciousness, tossing and turning when you'd rather be dancing or tripping lightwave subconscious. Probably the best remix album possible from this guy, but his isn't a voice suited to the format 3/5

#971 Daedelus - Righteous Fists of Harmony

A heavy-hearted opus of sample-and-synth driven electronica, full of pathos befitting its theme. Purely useful as chin-scratchery armchair descontruction, this lacks the propulsive fuck-yes of Daedelus's best stuff, but it's inventive, daring experimental stuff.

Did I mention the theme? Look, I resist most of my Pitchfork-shaming impulses, but shame on you Larry Fitzmaurice for failing to do the most basic research for your review and completely missing the album's unifying tone of loss, not to mention its really, really obvious conceptual tie to the Boxer Rebellion. The name, the album art, the song titles, the fact that the lyrics specifically mention the Boxer Rebellion, not to mention the closing track's title, Fin De Si'Cle, punny French for "End of the Century", which whisps a bittersweet dovetail into the Boxers' Millenarianistic worldview. Maybe Larry is Pitchfork's electonica guy, because he apparently wouldn't know a concept album if it punched him in the face.

Which is all to say: exploring a deeply felt, deeply mournful (and very obvious) enactment of history via instrumental hip hop is the reason to listen. Its a bold experiment that executes its mission exceptionally well, even if (I'll agree with Larry here) it doesn't quite pop musically 3/5

#970 Tobacco - Maniac Meat

Is it too late to have Tobacco produce the next Beck record? Beck's two guest tracks on this album are certainly more exciting than anything he's put out on his own lately. It'd be a good fit: as on his albums with Black Moth Superrainbow, Tobacco uses warped, fractured electronic means to achieve perfectly catchy pop ends. At its best, it can be thrillingly toe-tapping and strange.

There're pacing issues that keep it from being great though: some of the songs run about 10 bpm too slow and about a minute too long, overextending their reach. Frankly, the album as a whole could cut at least a few songs and be better for it. But before it goes all Fruit Stripe on you, its a pretty tart little package 3.5/5

#969 J Dilla - The Shining Instrumental

Dilla's signature atmospherics and inventiveness are on display, but none of this quite pops on its own, coming across as waverey and indisctinct, more like the hangover than the high. The problem is that, while the man's beats are legendary, previous releases looped them just enough times to give you a taste, to let the groove sink in, and then moved on. Here they're stretched to full-track length, and without the verses that stretched them they hang baggy and uninspiring 2.5/5

#968 Blu and Exile - Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them

Thoughtful, effortlessly complex rhymes with heart to spare, spun over pretty pretty production. You get a sense of a mournful Blu, aware of death and resigned, pouring his heart out, looking for meaning in the words, finding it, and needing more and more. A hip hop In the Wee Small Hours, this works for dark night atmospherics and close listening alike 4/5

#967 The Rolling Stones - Some Girls

The context of this album is key. The Stones had been on a downslide since the Exile days and the styles of the time were overtaking their basic hard-rock approach. Here they're thrashing against the world, lashing out at oddball angles, clattering and jangling like they hadn't since, well, the Exile days. From the disco bump of Miss You to the refracted New Wavism of Shattered, they less try to approximate the fashions of the time than set them up in a room, get drunk, and put the resulting staggering and smashing on tape. The slower songs (Far Away Eyes, Some Girls) fail to spark, but the rest is as exciting as the band had been in years. Decidedly worth hearing, in all of its defiant pop-art ramshackle glory 4/5

6/25/14: god, this really is one of their best, it's a mess, it's a blast

#966 Tom Waits - The Heart of Saturday Night

Tom Waits in his early days, not yet a growling beast, but a tuneful, mournful bard of the empty hours of the night. His beat moments cool as they come, full of Beck/Dylan phantasmagorica: dude knows his way around a turn of phrase. But at times he sounds just this side of Billy Joel, longing loungily without much edge to speak of. It's a mixed bag musically, but worth a visit for the vivid portrait it paints 3.5/5

#965 Disappears - Guider

Guider is a compressed version of the band's debut, walking a straight road of tempered tempo, dynamics and tone, lacking Lux's stabby spirit, coming across as strangely limp. The only place that works in its favor is on the epic-length, Krauty closer, Revisiting. That track's a minor masterpiece, the rest is filler 2.5/5

#964 Black Dice - Mr. Impossible

A funky piece of fucked up noise-pop-rock, full of samples and squiggles and squonks, devoid of traditional song structures, nor any trace of traditional songwriting. It can sound like gibberish, but underneath there're alien semantics, and careful listening can inspire you to plumb the depths for threads to build anticipations from, so that  you might experience the joy of having those expectations betrayed.

It's a lot of work that may or may not be worth it, depending on how aggressively bored you are with the mainstream alternatives.  Brunswick Sludge is a standout, the pendulum of panning, wobbling vocals offsetting sliding sines, creating a sickly psychadelic headspace. But generally it sounds lazy. Black Dice do scant little to meet you halfway, dumping out a pile of sonic non-sequiturs like half the pieces from a dozen puzzles, with no greater solution and no particular motivation to figure out how they relate.

Why should you put in the work if the band won't? 2.5/5

#963 Disappears - Lux

Decidedly of the Thee Oh Sees vein, this is an emerging post-aughts sound that I can get behind: a relentless rhythm pulse built on restless, elliptical basslines, with the guitars and vocals punching outward, blades slashing gaps in burlap sacks, everything seething and boiling, with dark, rolling details pulling the groove subconscious. Things dip a bit too Jesus and Mary Chain on the second side and the energy wanes, but when the power is on and the wires are live, this is potently listenable, exciting shit 4.5/5

#962 Daedelus - Love To Make Music To

Here, more so than usual, Daedelus bridges the gaps between instrumental hip hop and loop-driven electronica. The common factor is the loops' status as weary old souls, whether they earned their scars from years in record bins, or their eternal existence as mathematically perfect, buzzy tones; the then and now weave together to make something graceful and unexpected. The elegant sense of pacing and flow that underpins it all helps too: Daedelus has an effortless sense of what's come and what should happen next 4/5

#961 µ-Ziq - Chewed Corners

Loopy electronica that inspires one to say little more about it. Not especially evocative of feeling or place, not especially innovative in technique (at least not to my philistine ears), not able to chill me out nor pump me up. A perfectly inoffensive piece of music that I can't find much motivation to listen to 2.5/5

#960 Metallica - Master of Puppets

More carefully constructed and less thrilling than Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets is still a rock goddamn solid piece of rock, everything in its right place, every part loud and fast, except for those parts that are slow and quiet so that the can better set up later hard and fast parts. No dead weight, no wind drag. Sometimes its a little too perfect, humming in place like an ersatz perpetual motion machine sluffing energy. But when it pops, it pops with precision, as on the title track's hammerbacks, Damage, Inc's thunderous closing, and Orion's shimmering, gorgeous progism.

It also represents an important move in Metallica's approach to its subject matter. My main beef with Ride the Lightning is its unimaginative leaning on death as a theme, and as Steve Huey aptly observes, Master of Puppets isn't about power so much as it's about powerlessness. On Lightning Hetfield threatened from above, promising destruction. Here he is merely the harbinger of a greater destruction than himself, telling of doom coming for us all, facing it with defiance and despair, alongside us and as helpless as anyone, making the message at once all the more relatable and all the more terrifying. I can't overstate how much this shift changes the entire feel of the album: it's a move that allows the band to escape its own ridiculousness and become a portent of something larger, achieving greatness via abjection of the throne. This everyman toughguy/vulnerability angle was crucial to their breakthrough appeal on the Black Album, and beats grunge to the punch by about half a decade. Its enough to make you wonder if these guys don't have friends in low places. Real low. Like, in hell 4/5

#959 Todd Rundgren - Something / Anything

Hot on the heels of my longwinded Mellon Collie resequencing deconstruction, here's another album meant to be taken as a series of semi-discrete sides.

As with Corgan's, Rundgren's opus features a whipcrack series of tone changes and sonic swerves, going from soppy ELO pop to delierious Zappa 4th-wall-knocking to Bowie circa black country rock. I can't imagine what the hell people did with it in the 70's, when people settled in for some yacht rock and got pitched overboard into strange tides indeed. It's enough to make you rethink some of these art/rock/pop divides, so talented is Rundgren at the high / low of it all.

Frankly though, at times it just feels like he's showing off, and as a result there's not much soul to it all. The batshit interludes aside, everything feels very carefully planned and overly polished, but its a catchy, complicated, bewildering array of 25 songs that you'll enjoy spending a few listens digesting 4/5

#958 The Intelligence - Everybody's Got it Easy But Me

Offkilter indie new wave on the order of recent faves Thee Oh Sees, full of bold, simple beats and minimalist jangle. When it works, when the band finds its defiant, senseless stride, it's exhilarating, especially on the brilliantly expectation-defying (and perfectly-named) opener I Like LA.

On the most of the songs though, absent an interesting art-rock angle, the band doesn't do enough fill in the space left by all the anti-pop not-doing. Take I'm Closed or The Entertainer, songs that simmer for a few minutes without arriving anywhere, nor being all that compelling in the not-arriving. Enjoyable as hooky post-punk, but frustrating in its inability to live up to its own high-water marks 3/5

#957 Ray Charles - Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music

Released near the end of Ray Charles' late-50's-early-60's golden age, this set of longing ballads stretches deep into the wee hours of the night like a Sinatra album, each song bathed in a signature combination of sweet strings and swooning, high-harmony backing vocals. There's the occasional stomper, but mostly everything's slow and low, about love, loss, or both, with little of what you might recognize as country or western music by any modern standard: less jangle and strum, more cowboy calling into the deep starlight that no earthly souls can hear 3/5

#956 Minutemen - The Punch Line

The first thing you need to know about this album is that it's 18 songs long, and only 3 of those are longer than a minute, including Tension, logging in at an epic 1:20 (and no, according to the band this isn't where they got their name). Each song is a whip crack of breakneck bass, stutterstop drums and stabby post-punk guitars played double-fast. And then gone. It's thrilling, gutwrenchingly tense, and then over, leaving you wanting more,a distilled, knife-edge version of the sprawling albums that were to follow, utterly fearless in its approach to sputtering songs rushing at you like fists 4/5

#955 Joni Mitchell - Court and Spark

I'm really averse to the whole singer-songwriter thing, anything that seems like it might be about personal problems made meekly universal, anything that might by performed in a coffee shop. Also, keening female singing. And there's strong shades of all that here, but it's better observed than usual, full of nuance and ambiguity. Sure, occasionally a song leads to a brokedown rhymeless listing of sentiments, but far more often there's a salvo of knotty notions that surge past half-understood.

Most importantly, the backing is great, skyrocketing past the usual Joe Hum'n'Strum fare: here is a full band that surges and lurches, full of free-roaming bass and swerving pacing dancing against Mitchell's restless lilting. The feeling is the feeling of feelings, improbably overcoming the crusty crust on my crusty heart 3.5/5

#954 Lee Morgan - Search for the New Land

Arty, angular hard bop, full of twisty structures and hooky hooks. It's nowhere near as listenable and exciting as The Sidewinder, and the doubled runs still sap spontaneity, but the songs are bright and bold and evocative of mood and place, especially the slinky Morgan the Pirate 3.5/5

#953 VA - Philadelphia International Records 12-Inch Singles

Disco! If you're my age, the last word you heard on disco was "sucks", the rallying cry of the rebellion against its full-fledged takeover of America. But before the takeover, before the backlash, disco was some inventive, weird, underground shit.

This collection's pretty daunting, two discs, an endless array of endless songs, outlining one scene's path through the first wave of popular dance music meant for darkened nightclubs. It's no wonder the inspiration's burbled back up from DFA to Daft Punk, an influence felt most keenly on the Edwin Birdsong tracks that rock it like it's two thousand and three.

The biggest surprise you're liable to have is how long and anti-pop these song are, and pretty darn good besides. It's really only a smallish leap from funky R&B to Philly disco, and if you like one you're likely to like the other 3.5/5

#952 The Smashing Pumpkins - Vinyl Tracklist: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

I'm very tempted to use this as an excuse to visit one of the (probably the) formative album of my teenage year, or to go on and on about the ways that formatting and physical packaging affect listening, or otherwise to make the entire article as longwinded and unreadable as this opening sentence. But! Let me just briefly go over what this packaging's effect has, splitting as it does the album into 6 sides, 5 songs each (the original 28 plus two bonus tracks), across 3 discs.

First of all, this is in no way a triple album. Each of the 3 discs would read as a desperately offkilter combination of sides with no reason or flow. Rather, perhaps inspired by the Mellon Collie era's The Aeroplane Flies High boxed set, which packaged 5 singles onto their own thematic EP-length discs, this plays as 6 individual EPs. This is a fun way to break up a sprawling double album that was necessarily jarringly sequenced by the expansive range of its contents.

Another reason to take this as 6 separate offerings? The first and last are clearly the worst of the lot, making for a drearily halfhearted opening and a whimpering end. Considering the former. So, sure, the Mellon Collie / Tonight Tonight opener was a strikingly bold move on the original disk, completely baffling the expectations of anyone coming at this fresh from Siamese Dream. But then it kicked directly into the payoff of Jellybelly. Here, we follow with a swap into disc 2's anti-two-punch 3-4 combo of Thirty Three and In the Arms of Sleep, into the whimpy wafering of Take Me Down, which is all to say, 5 of the album's whimpiest, whiniest songs all back to back with no payoff: it doesn't work on its own, and it doesn't work as a first half or third or sixth of anything that comes after. The last side similarly just packs too many of the weak-spirited songs that were vulnerable and refreshing on the original but that just puddle together here. Infinite Sadness is a welcome new track, but it follows Farewell and Goodnight, adding up to too many goodbyes.

Rounding out the "low" sides, the clear winner is the 1979/Beautiful/Cupid/By Starlight/We Only Come Out at Night side that builds a wonderfully misfit crew of sensitive weirdos into something far more touching than the sum of their parts.

The hard ones though? This is where you get your money's worth. I don't want a return to Siamese Dream's (to say nothing of Zeitgeist's) comparative homogeneity, but its thrilling to hear the rougher, tougher, noisier crush of the album's heavy element clench up into little 5-track fists. The Jellybelly / Bodies rush is bracing, if sunk by To Forgive, and thereafter sinks into some of the middle-ground songs that I guess had to go somewhere.

But hearing Fuck You into Love into XYU is a rush, topped only by the reason for this whole thing to exist:

1. Bullet with Butterfly Wings
2. Thru the Eyes of Ruby
3. Muzzle
4. Galapagos
5. Tales of a Scorched Earth

All I can say is that I'm glad that never existed as an EP when I was 15, because it would have blown my goddamned mind. That's about as fine a slice of this era of the Pumpkins as you could hope for, sandwiching some of Corgan's most underrated, soaring anthems between two of his most searing screeds. The frustration of Bullet bleeds into Ruby, the wondering and the "the night has come" bleeds into Muzzle's "the silence of the worlds" and on into Galapagos's desperate search for feeling, into a blistering comebacker of a climax that begs to loop right back into another go at Bullet, that the ebb and flow of stress and beauty never find its rest. Its moments like this that excite me about this artifact.

Is that all ridiculous? Probably, but in the highly unlikely event that anyone ever reads this far down this mess I can safely guess that you are (were) reasonably fanatical about this band and this album, and the mere idea of considering how it might be differently composed is itself might be cause for interest for you, damn near however it was actually done. This was an album for those who wanted to feel music deeply at just the moment they were just finding the need to feel deeply, and to listen to this album in a new way is a route to revisit and rethink those fecund, halcyon days.

Corgan confides freely that he wrote this album specifically to be for and about that longing segment of youth, and it was the perfect artifact for your moment when the world opens too big and we need to find ways to frame it into songs and albums and scenes and stories and stages to keep from being overcome. Hearing these songs again, maybe I just couldn't resist the pull of doing it all again.

This does nothing to replace the original: if you're not already ardently familiar with it, start there. But if your worldview was ever framed by this album, the opportunity to see it from another angle is recommended with a whole heart 4/5