#868 Monster Rally - Coral

Someone get the word out to the bedroom musicians of the world: a loop does not make a song. In what might be mistaken as an art of artful minimalism, each track on this album starts with a loop that remains unchanged for a couple of minutes, a second part fades in, a knob gets twiddled, the original loop drops out, and then the song's over. A loop, a tweak, an outro, repeat. A loop, a tweak, an outro repeat. There's not enough here to keep your attention, and even the loops are slurred and sludgy produced, the parts bearing all the artifacts of being clumsily stretched to match one another. That the beats sway by island breezes might be pleasant enough if the laconic invocations weren't so thoroughly at odds with the album's titchy feel.


It's worth noting that Ted Feighan triggers all this by hand, eschewing automated sequencing. And maybe, live, that makes the Monster Rally show all that much more of an experience. But on the record it doesn't buy him any particular immediacy or organic charm: it just sounds sloppy, unfocused, and un-fun, a hasty slapping-to-disc by someone who's found a way to make sounds but hasn't figured out how to make an album 1.5/5

#867 Elton John - Goodby Yellow Brick Road

Elton John, normally known for his obstinate restraint, finally does something wild.

Sprawling's too small a word, this is an opening of the floodgates. When it all starts off with 30 seconds of near-silence, leading into a 6-minute instrumental intro to what turns out to be an 11-minute opening track, you'd be right to suspect that you're in for something genuinely adventurous. Unfortunately, the next 16 tracks take about as many chances, combined, as that one opening track.

When John puts his stamp on a song, it's better than it has to be, like on the Ziggy-meets-Sgt-Pepper bentback lounge classic Benny and the Jets. But too often he seems to be coasting, playing out the same basic tempos, keys, and song structures until it all blurs a bit.

Even Elton John's single LP's tended to have lagging second halves - stretching things out like this only exacerbates the problem. There's gems here, but you've got to dig a lot to get to them 3.5/5

#866 Stevie Wonder - Talking Book

Even more so than usual, Stevie Wonder brings life to the songs on Talking Book. Not as in, like, a life-affirming in message or tone, but rather he creates music that itself twists about with a life of its own, keyboard runs slithering with unpredictable swerves. The production is peerless, the songs bristling with originality, an on a per-song-level the album's an undeniable masterpiece.


Two knocks: Wonder's voice remains reedy and strained during every other phrase, a taste perhaps I still have yet to acquire. And on an album level, there's little flow or cohesiveness: this is still just a collection of (admittedly, pretty brilliant) songs that doesn't carry the kind of long-game arc I crave 4/5

#865 DJ Koze - Kosi Comes Around

This's got nothing on Koze's breaththrough Amygdala: its a straight up straight-laced house record by comparison. But outside that pink'n'purpl'd shadow, its some pretty strange stuff, bending the box's 4 corners in odd dimensions, warping when others would woof. Amygdala had you leaving your father's body; this'll just get you hypnotized and spacey and stoned and strangely attracted to John Madden. Which is still kinda fun 3.5/5

#864 Neil Young - Harvest

More folk-tinged than most Neil Young, but with enough electric crunch to keep it from getting it watery; this is a good, solid road trip album with full of dusty Americana soul.

The occasional symphonically-enhanced moments are disastrous though, severely undercutting the album's credibility and atmosphere. A Man Needs a Maid, in particular is just cringeworthy. An album like this isn't going to blow you away with its fretwork, or how hard it rocks, or its inventive album structures. This is no Everybody Knows this is Nowhere. This is the kind of downhome album that's only as good as its heart, and little moments like that belie its sincerity. Heart of Gold is a pretty darn good song though. 3.5/5

#863 Phoenix - Bankrupt!

More so than ever before, Phoenix have put out that album that is blood simple, but hiding the details of countless cells, revealing new loops and whorls and edges and substructures the closer and closer and closer you look. And yet, this is a bowl of blood, a puddle at best, without a single artful Cache slash: none of 1901's staggering start-stops, none of Liztomania's vertigous dropouts, none of Love Like a Sunset's bold minimalism. S.O.S. in Bel Air has some serious synth moves, and the title track wraps itself in compelling mysteries, but there are too many songs like Don't, which runs in place at best, its M83 drum bursts notwithstanding.

This might be an album that demands a different kind of listening, that will reveal sentimental angles worth finding underneath its overshined sheen. But so far it seems a perfect pearl, shimmering and gorgeous, but lacking in surprises and character and details to remember 3/5

#862 Paul Simon - Graceland

It's all about the beat. The backbeat that makes rock rock, the 4/4 that makes house house, the clave that makes a dozen afro-cuban styles what they are, and on and on. So the fact that this otherwise pretty straightforward Paul Simon album wields a variety of African rhythms is not actually window dressing, its actually a move that makes for a whole different style of American pop.

And what of this new style of American pop? It works. Mostly it works because it all cooperates: the offkilter lyrics are tuned to turn the ears of Western listeners, the structures churn repetition into miniature hypnotics, the instrumentation rings unplaceably uncanny, all at parallel lines to those wobblewheel rhythms.

And what of this American pop that works? Well, as admirable as it is as a venture, it's often more of a well-reasoned, well-working piece of American pop than it is something you'd actually want to listen to. Hit single You Can Call Me all is a splintering piece of pop brilliance, and The Boy in the Bubble paints in broad strokes of magical realism that will haunt your dreams, and Under African Skies' female vocals simply soar. And across the board its just some vaguely pretty, slightly unusual, downright adventurous well-working pop music that is wholly worthy of our admiration.

But can I be honest with you? I miss my goddamned backbeat 3.5/5

#861 Thee Oh Sees - Floating Coffin

A return to form! This is Thee Oh Sees at their best, full of splintering energy, huge swooping guitars, chaotic and skitterey beats. As on Carrion Crawler / The Dream, the band's secret weapon is Petey Dammit, whose rollicking basslines are a live wire whipping through the songs, jerking them in oddball directions and giving them uncanny fast-zombie energy. I Come from the Mountain, in particular, is a bracing, toofast, holyshit opener in the spirit of Debaser, Here's Your Future, and Grown Men Don't Fall in the River Just Like That.

Each song is its own beast, each sounding a bit off in a way that gets you looking closer, all so that it can jump up and get you by the throat. Even the slower tracks, like Night Crawler and Minotaur, provide more thrills than likeminded tracks from Putrifiers II.

Awfully fun for how tense it is, this is everything you want from indie rock today: adventurous and listenable, establishing a rich sonic ribcage and the slamming every surface on its way out 4.5/5

#860 Charli XCX - True Romance

How high is your threshold for bullshit? Because at the heart of this album is some borderline brilliant, nuanced, shimmering production, but its buried under shovelload after shovelload of bullshit. The real problem is Charli herself: from her name to her picture on the cover art, the album frames itself as some real retro-future, post-post-ironic tryhard bullshit, and nothing on the disc says otherwise. Charli's voice is stuck in that late-era Brittney Serious Pop Music grasping, mewling mode, and the lyrics are perfect for girls who've decided they've outgrown Miley but haven't actually matured overmuch. This is teenager music with better production.

And the production's good! Every trick in the book surges and flows. But to get to it you have to listen to some teenagers-with-feelings pop that doesn't have the self awareness to regard itself without Capital Letters. If that sounds good to you, I sincerely recommend this without malice, but don't let the accolades from the heavy hitter reviewers fool you, they're just blinded by the profound scale of the bullshit 2.5/5

#859 Thee Oh Sees - Putrifiers II Demos

Thee Oh Sees fans aren't exactly starved for new material: this is a reliable album-plus-a-year band, so releasing a demos album hardly seems necessary. The fact that these demos are generally just rougher versions of the originals doesn't help: there's little new-sounding here, just a more fragmented ramshackle take on the same basic sound. For what it's worth, this is actually a better album, with a scruffy, open-air Exile charm, stripping much of the reverb that made all those high harmony whines double-whiny. But then, this was one of the band's weakest albums to begin with, so take that praise with a grain of salt 3/5

#858 Daedelus / - LA Series 6

The split EP, challenging reviewers not to resort to the "this side...but that side..." structure since 1982.

Give or take.

Well I'm just not that good at this shit: Daedelus's six instrumental hip-hop tracks have a hazy, wobbled quality, sounding like DJ Shadow at his druggiest, mixed with so much of the lurch that was hot circa 2010. At least the underlying beats are hot, Teeb's 4 tracks lack that punch, his tracks sounding lost in themselves, with angular rhythmic stuttersteps seemingly tossed in for their own sake, hemorrhaging flow and leaking cool. Anchor Steam, his most straightforward track on the album, is certainly the strongest of the lot, prickling insistent and tense.

The short song lengths, capping out at an epic 2:30, do keep the collection right sprightly, evoking a hip-hop Guided by Voices odds-and-ends collection, and that frantic, unpredictable lo-fi spirit justifies a modest recommendation 3/5

#857 Daedelus - Rethinking the Weather

The original The Weather was a right odd offkilter skamperer of a rap album, sounding spontaneous and stoned and scattered; uneven but charming. Arguably that mostly came from the offhanded rapping, but here Daedelus, having stripped out nearly all of the vocals, has created an equally playful, unpredictable, downright fun romp of an album. Samples drop in and out and around, and liberal liberties are taken with the originals' structures, pulling off parts and putting them back at odd angles, leading to familiar abominations, a series of sonic Moduloks put together by drunken schoolkids. A blast for those familiar with the original, and probably pretty compelling for the uninitiated looking for a capricious piece of instrumental hip-hop 4/5

#856 Dan Curtin - The Silicon Dawn

There's two partners on this here dancefloor: the Curtin beat lurches in place like an intricate machine-man, encouraging guests to explore its intricacies, while a series of swooning synth swoops swirl around it on a whole different phase, like a backwards-dancing dream dwarf. The deviations from the structure are minimal: only the occaisional beat change or extra squiglerun breaking the structure only now and then. Even on the macro album-level it's strangely over-structured: a short intro, seven 6-8 minute songs, and a short outro. Done.

The result is an album that seems put together by an alien intelligence: meticulous, but not overly interesting; restless, but not altogether exciting; a curiosity without any real purpose or goal. Just kind of, there. Which is maybe an accomplishment unto itself? I'm not so sure 2.5/5

#855 The O'Jays - Back Stabbers

A Philadelphia soul album with a little bit of everything, leading off with some hard-edged Cloud Nine-era Temptations psychedelic soul, then working in some Calypso elements, Issac Hayes bombast, and syrupy balladic, with a couple of hard-hitters on the back end. 992 Arguments is a highlight, and manages to work all those themes into a single song, featuring a blistering MFSB vibe solo and generally sounding like an O'Jays song getting double-teamed by James Bond themes.

The album suffers from sounding like too many things at once: if the saccharine moments had been cut it could have been exhilarating, but as it is its a scattered, curious, still-compelling miniature masterpiece of the sounds of the time 4/5

#854 Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix Remixes

If its 2009 and you have to pick a band to do a remixes album of, Phoenix is a pretty good choice. Their balance of hooky populism and detail-oriented production buzz is right in line with laptop electronica of the time. And this collection reflects that: the populism is more populist in the form of bigger beats; the weirdness is weirder in the form of additional chops, bends, buzzes, and hyperknobtwiddles. Stretching the band in its natural directions! Ideal! The sole 1901 remix, in particular, is delightfully nasty in its clipped skwonkiness.

As a collection it could have benefited from a bit more curation though, running too long, and featuring a Fences version damn near ever third song (literally! 5 out of the 15 remixes are of Fences). Hearing that same whine, again and again and again reminds me of the Summer I worked in London, where the radio in the repro shop played Coldplay's Yellow, that high monument to relentless whinnying, every hour, on the hour, every day, all Summer. A yelping vocal line can only be allowed to slam itself against your head so many times before it, raptorlike, finds the weak spot and runs rampant on the fleshy scientists in your brain.

Still, Fence-weaknesses aside, its everything you could want from a remix album, mostly listenable as a whole, full of individual tracks that are true extensions of the originals' souls 3.5/5

#853 Ty Segall - Lemons

Ty Segall doesn't waste any goddamn time. His self-titled debut was a fairly typical Whitestripsey garagerock affair, but just a year later he put out Lemons and its clear he'd already found his stride, pounding out that thunderously huge hooky sound that would serve him well during the relentless 4-years-and-counting run he's been on. The production is wanton and irresistible, the caveman chops terrifying, and the whole thing's a hell of a lot of fun. If God had a garage band, this is what it would sound like 4.5/5

#852 Radiohead - Com Lag: 2 + 2 = 5

A messy collection of remixes, live tracks, and meandering experimental pieces, light on guitars and heavy on dissonance and distorted vocals. The songs are mostly sub-Amnesiac electronic skitterers, with a few stripped-down alone-with-Thom ballads peppered in. Only I Am a Wicked Child sounds anything like a rock and roll song, even that sounds like a song off Hail to the Thief (not a complement), its bluesy harmonic touches notwithstanding. It's all pretty bloodless, with no album-level cohesion at all - as an odds and ends collection, its no Airbag / How Am I Driving 2.5/5

#851 VA - Acid Trax Volume 1

Of the two acid house compilations I've heard lately, this is the less interesting, lacking the playfulness of volume 2 in the same series, and leaning too greatly on hard beats and vocal samples. The second half, consisting entirely of Jack Frost tracks, is better, but reminds you why there are so few LP's by acid house artists: with a style this tightly defined, you really need that DJ'd multi-artist transitioning to keep it from getting stale. It's a fine little pile of squonky 4/4s, but you can do better 3/5

#850 Joy Division - Closer

Aggressively disconnected post-punk, as Curtis mutters with secondhand menace, drum machines click on forever, and sheetmetal guitars shimmer in and out like ragged ghosts. Too often the band just seems to let the song pass through them, but when they tighten up and rachet up the tension, as on Atrocity Exhibition and Colony, the result is bracing, exciting rock and roll.

Better as art than music, it's worth hearing as a point of reference, but it's almost exactly no fun at all 3.5/5

#849 Thee Oh Sees - Putrifiers II

A kaleidoscopic array of vaguely-retro, rolling, psychedelic garagey tunes, each flocked with taut, high vocals straight out of late-era Liars. The mix is less sludgy and more confident than on Castlemania, but sadly the thunderous Stooges stomp of Carrion Crawler / The Dream proved to be a momentary detour for the band.

Thee Oh Sees are one of my favorite recent acts when they go for the throat, but they repeatedly lose focus here, especially on the droning So Nice and Cloud #1 pairing that kill the album's momentum. There's admittedly a certain hypnotic sway to this album's meanderings, but it too often strays from the band's strengths in the name of arty obscurity 3/5

#848 The Meters - Look-Ka Py Py

The Meters, like the just-reviewed Chuck Berry, stick pretty closely to a sound, but what a sound! In short, they play impossibly tight instrumental funk. The beats are icy crisp, the organ warm and soaring, the guitars funk-flash fresh, with sponteneous whoops and moans and chants and bangin bright production keeping everything live. I tend to like a little more variety in my albums, but when you sound this good doing what you do, why mess around? 4.5/5

#847 Life Coach - Alphawaves

I actually saw these guys live a bunch of times going to shows in Boston. I mean, not literally, but guys just like these - vaguely talented, mildly well-versed in blues, metal, psychedelia, the Dead, and a minimalist and/or arty genre of choice that think gives them their special sauce (this Pitchy points out its a bit Motorickey, but they're been saying that about *everything* lately). Each song is, let's say, firmly inspired by a given style, with only the barest twist. You can almost hear them hanging out in the Cambridge practice space and saying let's do like a Hawkwind song, but like even trippier. And then they play the right beat and the right modal chords and a solo and the song's done. And when they play live this everyband hopes that if they genrehop often enough they'll hit one you haven't heard of and you'll mistake it as original.

No such luck guys! I've heard everything! That's howlingly untrue. But unfortunately I have heard pretty much everything on here, and while its all reasonably well done, its territory too well-tread for this to stand out as especially noteworthy 3/5

#846 Chuck Berry - The Great 28

Chuck Berry is great, incredible. A brilliant innovator and performer with a power and style all his own. And this collection is great, but it does reveal how narrowly Berry cast his sound over the course of his first 11 years with Chess records. Is Reelin an Rockin really a different song than Too Much Monkey Business? Johnny B. Goode's signature opening riff is repeated almost exactly just two songs later on Carol, and the song has its own charms, but proceeds to be Johnny B. Goode part 2, or like, 1.5 maybe. And then again to open Sweet Little Rock and Roller, which sounds like a slower Rock and Roll Music. And so on. The songs are great, they're fun, but eventually its all basically one sound. I mean, what a sound! But it might have been better suited for a more tightly curated collection so as not to draw attention this fact is all.

The chronological arrangement of the collection helps to watch the sound evolve, and in particular draws attention to the last three songs, the only three on the collection recorded after Berry's 18 month prison stint. They don't shatter any molds (and No Particular Place to Go is even a reworking of a previous song), but they show a different energy, and an exciting swerve in the sound. Why did he never grow past this? Was it actually like Back to the Future said, where he just got his magical sound from the future past and then didn't know where to go without it? Or maybe he just didn't give a shit, as the legacy of his post-60's performing career attests.

Fact is, its an unstoppable sound. And if this was the only recording Chuck Berry ever did this would be a 10. And my scores go to 5. But as an album, I'd rather put on Chuck Berry is On Top or even After School Session, which are more varied and more tightly paced. Incredible artifact, merely great listen 4/5

#845 Bombino - Nomad

Dan Auerbach has a sound, that's for sure. I mean, its not like the Black Keys guys are super-exceptional songwriters, nor especially virtuosic players: its that sound that earned them the adoration of ad execs across the country. And by the sound of it, when Auerbach geared up to produce Taureg rocker Bombino's latest he didn't shy away from goosing the guitar tone in that general surefire Black Keys direction. It's not a bad thing; the guitars on this album turned out great, full of hearty buzz and flickering nuance.

But Bombino, the man himself, is still decidedly, emphatically the star of the show: his rhythmic, harmonic, and structural approaches are decidedly non-Western, providing a delightful combination for the vaguely adventurous rock and roll fan: this is something decidedly new, but couched in familiar trappings: expertly-played electric guitar riffage. Did I mention expertly-played? Dude is an awesome guitar player, sounding effortless and human and engaged and transcendent in turn, if not at once. The songs flow and flow, seduce and inspire unseen, bobbing heads to bob with armies of unseen hands. If you like riffs, can tolerate some non-English singing, and want to hear something really exciting, grab this one quick 4.5/5

#844 Billy Joel - The Stranger

I'm going out on a limb and a half here, cause I wasn't around in the mid-to-late 70's, but I'm gathering that there was a subversive strain of pop music that sounded like a lot of fun, and arguably soundtracked the good times, but that if you listened closely was really about the emptiness of said goodtimes*. Steely Dan undeniably falls into this category, and I think this album might too.

These are hook-filled tales of everyday life, but there's a desperation and resignation and frustration lurking just under the surface of each. And sometimes even on the surface. And sometimes even ripping through the surface and throwing a hissyfit.

On their own, each works. The pop hookiness is fairly choice; Joel is undeniably a talented songwriter, a good piano player, and a tuneful (if unadventurous) singer. And when the sentiment stays understated it can be cutting.

But the two sides run counter to each other: the disdain is too surrounded in hook-grasping to really bite, and it in turn is a drag on any pop joy you might otherwise find. The result is a strangely empty album, full of good ideas and good executions that somehow don't find eachother in any satisfying way. Maybe you had to be there 3/5

* if you think that shit's empty, wait around till the 80's when shit being not real really gets real

#843 Pretty Girls Make Graves - Elan Vital

Good Health was one of the most exciting punk albums of the 00's, full of enchantingly savage guitars and a couldn'tgiveafuck vocal shriek to match. Then the band seemed to lose its nerve, wanting to prove that it could do pretty, that the fretwork could be matched by patience and grace. Ok! Proven! Elan Vital is full of intricate textures and moves, and the subject matter is decidedly darker and more fearful and more post-Ok-Computer than anything from the band's earlier days. Good Health was all skeletons exposed to the sunshine, this is an album cloaked in night, sulking and darting in shadows, daring you to know it.

And that's the basic gambit here: the band plays hard to get and hopes that you'll come tumbling after them and into their trap. But the songs don't quite leave enough compelling candy in their wake, and the lyrics too often undermine the band's seriousness with some More Adventurous-era Rilo-Kiley hand-wringing. Worse still, Andrea Zollo's voice, perfectly suited to bratty screed-screeching and desperate longing, just isn't up to shouldering the band's Muse-y epic-sized ambitions. What's left is an impressive maze of art-rock angles, but without enough soul at the center to get you invested in winding through it 3/5

#842 Blondie - Parallel Lines

A preposterously solid album, positively shimmering with excellent songwriting, draped in swagger on swagger in the delivery. It's all the cool of new wave with half of the challenge, with songs bent into poppier, hookier forms, songs that bounce off the walls but stay in the same, starkly black-and-white-striped room. The slower, more retro-flecked songs threaten to sap the momentum, but always manage to pull out of the tailspin, making the album-length maneuver all the more impressive in retrospect. The fact that the guitar moves are inventive and deftly execute sure doesn't hurt - Hanging on the Telephone, in particular, is just an all time pop-punk masterpiece, burning off excess tempo and Pretty Girls Make Graves guitars and double backbeat debris across its entire flaming reentry 4.5/5

#841 Thee Oh Sees - Carrion Crawler / The Dream

On this album Thee Oh Sees show themselves to be far more than a 60's revival act, unleashing a full-fledged, ridiculously catchy post-punk assault. Like The Stooges, these boys are all about power, raw and otherwise, alternately hypnotizing you with endless jams and assaulting you with bursts of irresistibly riffage, exuding mastery over timing and tone.

The cover art of their various albums would lead you to believe that Thee Oh Sees are going for Crampsey shock value, but the message is far more insidious. It's the crush of an abusive partner, the rush of embezzlement, forty minutes in the grip of a band fully in control of every freakout and drone; these guys will torture you with tension and terror and leave you smiling through every second 4.5/5

#840 Thee Oh Sees - Castlemania

Have these guys discovered some kind of magic portal into the collective mind of the past? How can they so effortlessly kick out 17 albums, give or take, in 7 years?

Are all those albums as packed to the gills with such thoughtless, effortlessly tweaky, muddy hookiness as this one? Channeling Guided by Voices channeling Frank Zappa via Ween via Deerhunter, the buzzy, garagey, psychedelic guitars just roll and roll, with the occasional wisp of the past dragging attached, a proggy organ solo here, a Creation cover there. By the end, when a flute interlude straight out of Selling England by the Pound and some downright folky harmonization come along it all winds around itself into some timeslipped drainspiral, as if the lords of the 60's are collecting on their soul-debt at last. Given the infernal, twisted subject matter and sound, this kind of bargain seems downright plausible.

These guys toured for a while with the similarly prolific, likemindedly garagey, equally suspiciously talented Ty Segall. Maybe they share some profane secret? Thee Oh Sees are considerably less fun than Segall's brand of couldntgiveafuckism, but there's still something undeniably intriguing about watching a band fling this much shit around and seeing so much of it stick 3.5/5

#839 Neil Young and Crazy Horse - Rust Never Sleeps

I fucking hate Neil Young's voice. Let's get that out of the way.

It's like oatmeal. Do I like oatmeal? No!

But you give me some oatmeal covered in blueberries and honey and brown sugar and some kind of whiskey glaze maybe if that's a thing and I'll be like, man! This oatmeal's amazing!

In this metaphor, the electric guitar and the electric bass, and the actual fire and energy of Young's most electric stuff, say Everybody Knows this is Nowhere stuff, is the blueberries et al.

So when the accoustic/electric-sided Rust Never Sleeps opens with 5 or so tracks of pure hum'n'strum'n'wail from Neil, just Neil yelling about this and that, it didn't, for me, start things off on the right foot. The saving grace is that the last few tracks pour on the toppings, and the vocals do a serviceable job of floating them into your ear-mouth where you can savor those savory accoutrements.

Let's just say that those last few tracks deliver some pretty choice guitar crunch, but I'll never listen to this album again except when I start it at track 6-plus, and that seems like a bad sign 2.5/5

#838 Steve Miller Band - Fly Like an Eagle

You could be forgiven for, if briefly, being tricked into thinking this album was actually pretty cool, like in a Thin Lizzy, Steely Dan, hey did  you ever actually listen to Mott the Hoople? kind of way. The opening intro is good spacey fun, and Fly Like an Eagle is actually kind of a good song, full of inventive psychadelic flicks and flecks. But then on Wild Mountain Honey you start hearing strummed chimes, and lyrics about the moon and the sun, and then there's a song about Miller's youthful dancin' grandparents, a song about Miller's sweet ass Mercury, possibly the least convincing song about a cool car ever written. And it's about then that you realize: wow, this album is fucking lame.

Does that mean it's not any good? Yeah, it kind of does. I maintain that listening to music is a proxy for hanging out with the musicians that make it, the corollary of which is that, if the album projects a persona of the band that if you wouldn't want to be seen with, you probably won't be able to truly enjoy that album. I'd hang out with Sinatra, I'd hang out with Doom, heck, I'd even hang out with Donald Fagen. I do not want to hang out with Steve Miller, or any member of his band.

The music has its moments, its catchy, goodoleboy rock lite, with some clever guitar moments and production tricks. But then, just as you start to say you know, take the money and run is actually kind of a good song, in come some doubletime handclaps straight up like the theme song from Friends, and it just kind of breaks the spell. What is rock and roll without swagger? Without legitimacy? Whatever's left when you've stripped away the attitude and the energy, it's not enough for me 2.5/5

#837 The Horrors - The Horrors

Here's an album with a sound. There is the dissonant guitar paean, undercut by a lumbering doubletime bass, and the maniacal overblown shrieks of a demented frontman, and that's the basic blueprint for every song on this seething slab of psychobilly punkrock freakoutism.

Two good things: The Horrors find a lot of hooky, inventive ways to use that blueprint; and its a good goddamn blueprint. The sound is raw and true, exciting bordering on harrowing, The Horrors go for a shitkicking sheetmetal sound and they stick the landing again and again, stick it 11 times, stick it like a prison snitch, again and again and again and again 4/5

#836 Born Ruffians - Little Garcon+

Here's an EP-sized extra helping of Red, Yellow, and Blue-era Born Ruffians, serving to remind us of the stark difference between that album and its disappointingly limp follow-up. All three of the new originals have developing dynamics, unexpected turns, curious instrumentation and/or straight up catchy moments, which is to say: the things missing from Say It. Even the remixes do Say It one better, the Four Tet remix of I Need a Life in particular winding fragile vocal snippets and slow-burning chorus shoutalongs to cast a shadowy hangover across the original's exuberance (minus points though for a pointless, overlong outro that mars the aftertaste of the song, and the album at large though). Still! Further proof that there's a difference between being offhandedly clever and just being offhanded (the former's better) 3.5/5

#835 Born Ruffians - Say It

Part of Born Ruffians' charm is their off-the-cuff energy, their yelping, surging, helpless need to express. On Red, Yellow, and Blue, that impulsive spark was backed by some hooky, adventurous songwriting, and the combination was downright irresistible. Here, though, the charm decorates songs of too little substance, each leaning too hard on a single thin idea, each running in place without ending up anywhere particularly exciting. Sole Brother brings some cheeky levity, and At Home Now buzzes with Indian energies, but I otherwise kept wondering "is this the same song still playing?". Maybe its because the songs went on too long. Or maybe they just sounded the same. Maybe both! Yikes. 2.5/5

#834 Guided by Voices - King Shit and the Golden Boys

The endlessly, effortlessly prolific Robert Pollard apparently had a whole slew of outtakes during the early days. Shocker. And here some are, piles and piles of lo-fi, distant, curiously effecting ditties, each with their own charming moment or two, each with at least some small innovation or turn that justifies their shortish existence.

The listening experience is far more smoothed out than Alien Lanes or Bee Thousand: this collection lacks the sharp transitions, the truly strange turns, the simply brilliant bursts of melody that made those albums so disjointed and exciting. These aren't the worst songs from the sessions, just not the most interesting. These are the teeming masses of Pollardia, and might constitute a cult masterpiece in their own right if they didn't come from such a storied pedigree 3.5/5

#833 VA - Acid Trax Volume 2

In a world where the subdistinctions between all these electronic subgenres can seem razorthin, if not arbitrary, it's nice to stumble into something with a clear voice: acid house = 4/4's + squiggles, usually from a TB-303.

Within that tiny blueprint, within the most basic track on-offing, within a smallish subregion of knob-twiddling methodology, there would seem to be a pretty limited set of sounds you could hear. And to be fair, this is all pretty samey, the stuff on this record. But there's something...cool about it. It's no wonder it caught fire. The combination just has an elemental quality driving it, and on this particular collection the transitions are well-managed, the tones well-designed, and the vocal snippets consistent in their brash nastiness.

It's a solid, cohesive collection of super-listenable, hard-edged electronica, with just enough squonky retro flair to give off a dirty darkside you can't help but be drawn to 4/5

#832 Nick Warren - GU30: Paris

What's the difference between trance and progressive house again? I can't keep this shit straight. All I know is, this melts time, and manages to not be altogether ambient, nor overpacked with cloying siren vocals. I mean, it will melt time right away, it just surges in ways that catch your attention and then - what year is it? That ain't nothing. This might be super incredible, but at the moment I feel a little roofied by it, so I'm going with a hedgy 3.5/5

#831 Fantastic Liars - Fantastic Liars

Here!

I'm sometimes tempted to pull my punches when it comes to this local stuff, but there's no escaping it: this is some really boring goddamn music. Maybe that's what its going for, emulating waterey prom-rock of oh so so long ago, (ironically? reverently??) but neither gratuitous sax nor shoutalong urgency rescues this thin-sounding, dozen-bpm-too-slow wisp of a mini-album 2/5

#830 Ty Segall - Ty Segall

Love this dude, heading back to his early stuff.

The raw garage energy is already place, and this is much more raw, much more simple than his later stuff; the White Stripes comparisons all the more unavoidable. Segall's production tricks and pedal mastery have grown tremendously in the 4 years and seemingly dozens of albums since this came out, so there's little of the hugeness, but its still bracing and exciting rock and motherfuckin roll 4/5

#829 Grateful Dead - Workingman's Dead

Even more so than usual, this album exhibits the contradiction of Grateful Dead: dudes from Northern California make dusty, country-fried Americana, sounding straight out of the heartland, dead simple and pure.

There's a rustic, swooning charm to the album's harmonies and easygoing soloing, and its the kind of thing that likely breeds appreciation with familiarity. Again, again, the harmonies are sweet; when each voice is kept in balance its downright gorgeous, but then, again and again, up rises Garcia's reedy whine, straining to the top, leaving a path of destruction in its wake. This is a problem I have with a lot of this 70's stuff, maybe my ears are broke, but that kind of nasal sting right kills my buzz 3/5

#828 Daft Punk - Human After All

Everything they say about this album is true: it's over-repetitive, over-minimal, and it sounds like what it is: hastily assembled. But there's a genius to it: why can't electronic music be rough and produced in a ramshackle, punk rock spirit? Even if the result sounds nothing like punk itself, isn't there something to be said about the idea that spontaneity, that over under-over-preciousness, still has a place in a world where the actual sound is produced with comparatively minimal actual human muscle?

Maybe I'm just too tickled by all of these douchey conceptual questions, or maybe I just have the benefit of hindsight with respect to an album that was eventually revealed, via killer live versions, to be secretly packed with bangers, or maybe I've been too recently weaned on even-more-minimal electro, or maybe I just generally have a high threshold for bands stripping themselves bare on an album*, but I kind of liked it 4/5

* examples that come to mind are Adore**, They Were Wrong so We Drowned, and The King of Limbs.

** even though I still kind of hate Adore.

#827 Professor Longhair - New Orleans Piano

Do understand that this was recorded between '49 and '53, so the bouncy, ragged, hitched, nasty R&B that it resembles, the Ray Charles stomp it evokes, the rock and roll swagger it exudes; it predates it all. This is all the flagging fury of the blues shouter against the hoppinest takes on jazz around, plus something all its own straight out of New Orleans.

All that is why it should be admired, but Longhair's admirable croak is downright abrasive, and the music slogs as often as it pops, leaving it short of enjoyable plenty of the time. The listening experience is further compounding by the tracklist: this is a compilation with several repeating alternate versions, sometimes placed back to back, breaking up any sense of flow and any illusion of performance.

The result is altogether a fascinating artifact, a great record of the time, but not a great album of songs 3/5

#826 James Brown - In the Jungle Groove

This is James Brown at his jammiest. Just one track after another, each packed with tight, hypnotic production stretching six minutes+, every beat irresistible, every bassline restless, balancing Brown's insistent, endless exaltations with pure funk soul power. This is definitely the numberonegoto for James Brown party music: the repetition gears it as background, rushing rushing to nowhere at all, but punchy enough to spike new energy every time around the beat. Impossibly understated for being so overstated, the listening's insidiously exciting 4/5