#905 Paperhaus - Lo Hi Lo

Listen / buy here!

Perfectly pleasant 00's indie rock, with simple, chiming guitar lines that lean on their warm extended ringing to provide interest and breadth. The songs lilt along like Built to Spill at their prettiest, doing positively nothing wrong, but almost nothing that will get your attention or stick in your memory 3/5

#904 Mandrill - Mandrill

On their debut, Mandrill brewed an eclectic stew of proto-funk, blending soul, jazz and rock into a socially-conscious, diverse stew. It doesn't quite pop as much as anything Funkadelic would start doing around the same time, and flow is turgid at times, but its a heady, complex piece of psychedelic somethinerother that's worth a hit for fans of weird, groovy shit 3.5/5

#903 King Tuff - Was Dead

Jangly, bratty (post?) punk, all angles and elbows, all first-person sneering. The guitars are brisk and hooky, with an Exploding Hearts neon slash bouncing off of a quavering T. Rex soft side; if you can deal with vocals like a detuned laser in your brain, the combination's good giveafuck fun 3/5

#902 Bernard Purdie - Soul Drums

God damn. Those're some sick beats.

Purdie's a peerless drummer, deft, nuanced and funky as fuck, and this is an album that isn't shy about showcasing his talents. Horn riffs sketch out funky, jazzy lines, pianos dance to and fro, but underneath it all is some the richest, most completely irresistibly headbobbin funk drumming you're ever gonna hear. A thrilling album that rewards background soundtracking and carefully listening, both 4.5/5

#901 Howlin Wolf - Moanin in the Moonlight

A legitimate blues shouter gone electric, Chester' Burnett's voice is an imposing presence, prowling around a song like an unstoppable predator. His twangy, soulful guitar playing's inspired at times, but its that voice that will get you, cracking like thunder, cooing like wind. As an album, the songs strart to sound the same pretty fast, but you owe yourself to check the man out if you haven't

[edit 8/3/16: I knew I knew that sample from somewhere! Opening track Moanin' at Midnight's the backbone of Self's It All Comes Out in the Wash. That was driving me nuts all day.]

3.5/5

#900 Son Lux - We are Rising

Let's celebrate hitting 900 by exalting the hazards of manual numbering! This was theoretically #898 but I totally missed albums by Ornette Coleman and The Frogs and then only months later remembered that I'd heard them and inserted them back into the chronology correctly via the magic of last.fm scrobbling. So the numbers of hundreds of entries are off, and for now I'm just leaving em. But now we're back on track!

No time to celebrate though, time to get dragged down by this slurred, druggy piece of overwarped and overwobbled lap pop. Like a haphazardly remixed Hot Chip album, or two Why? songs played on top of eachother, all the little tweaks and slurs and tempo drags don't seem to serve any purpose other than to make the songs unconventional - they carry no particular emotional or headbobbable or relatable heft, a heady swoon to nowhere 2/5

#897 Streight Angular - Mikayo Single

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I was worried about these guys. After their initial slash of retro shitshow partytimes their new songs started slowing down, getting less fun without getting more interesting, and it smelled like maybe they were out of ideas. But here's a sparkling little firecracker that takes their Beatles-on-acid sound to new places.

The A-side is a sweet, simple ditty, but its acoustic version is a looser, more spontaneous little jam that's even more fun, and the highlight is clearly In the City Tonight. Its a song that somehow manages to be a Kinks-perfect guitar cruncher and a formless East-West jam, hypnotic and boisterous all at once. You're only gazing at your shoes because they're dancing. It's a sprawling, compact, fascinating little contraption.

There it is, that feeling that anything's possible! From Streight Angular, and maybe even from life 3.5/5

#896 Thee Oh Sees - The Master's Bedroom is Worth Spending a Night In

I try to keep things fairly objective round here, but according to my lastfm history I've listened to Thee Oh Sees as much as the next 3 bands on my "top listens of the last 3 months" list combined. So its possible that I was just a bit burned out on their sound by the time I got to this, their 5th or so album I've reviewed lately.

Regardless, I came away from this one feeling like its thin on ideas, thin in the mix, and stretched thin over 15 tracks compared to their usual punchy 9-or-so track assaults. A perfectly ok album on its own, but if you're doing TOC, I'd stick with Carrion Crawler / The Dream or Floating Coffin and only bother with this one for the outstanding Two Drummers Disappear 3/5

#895 Polaroids - Polaroids

Listen here!

The surfy touches are warming, and Borrowed Time's Aphex synths runs are shiverworthy, but there's just too little actual music here. The drums are so low in the mix, the New York deadpan vocals are so flaly delivered, the songs are built on the back of so many similar-sounding arpeggiated little runs, there's just nothing really happening. Polaroids' debut is a whiff of smoke, a dream on waking; maybe that's what they're going for, but I like a little more meat on my ghost 2.5/5

#894 Pill Wonder - Jungle / Surf

Someone heard some early Animal Collective and said "I can do that!" Buzzy, lazy, ultimately uninteresting, and lacking any of early Animal's Collective's redeeming exuberant charm, Jungle / Surf is salvaged from the bottom of the ratings pile only by some sunny Beach Boys guitars and glistening Manitoba beats 2/5

#893 Spooky - Gargantuan

A little too much house, a little too little progressive, a lot too full of vocal samples (though the Pixies samples are a fun touch). There's enough groove to make it more overtly dancable than your average house record, but the basslines are too often more distracting than entrancing, and there's just not enough interesting stuff actually going on to work as armchair listening 2.5/5

#892 Depeche Mode - Violator

An undeniable masterpiece that's negative fun and that I have no interest in listening to ever again. The approach to synthesizers, guitar, texture, and tone is unprecedented, with a bristling, confident swagger, building a domineering atmosphere of sultry dread, lurking like liquid smoke between every note. The singles are striking, but the rest is fillerey and listless, and the overall feeling, even at its best, is of hanging out with a really cool friend who you just wish would cheer the fuck up, who you talk about with other friends saying "I want to be a good friend, but man, he just gives nothing to the conversation, its work hanging out with that motherfucker".

Violator's that friend, and I'll hang out with it now and then out of respect and nostalgia, but I'm not going to go out of my way to make plans any time soon 3/5

#891 The Juan Maclean - The Future Will Come

Detached, repetitive, discodancy new wave, firmly in the DFA style (think The Rapture, LCD), with shades of Human League in the boy/girl handoffs.

The retro synths, moogs et al. flow insistently, dropping in and out at the only moments they could, evolving enough to keep it interesting over the course of the album, but staying consistent enough to stay locked into the detached dance party groove. While it lacks the emotional undercurrent of Maclean's DFA-mates, The Future Will Come benefits from its singular focus on the line and the beat, hammering out a uniquely icy kind of cool 3.5/5

#890 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Cosmo's Factory

If Green River was an escape from the Bayou, this is an honest to god arrival home. A nearly perfect classic rock album, full of effortless hooks and a disarming sincerity, sounding like it simply came into existence fully formed. All the parts in place, all in perfect balance, deft and unpretentious and beautiful and perfectly paced and impossibly listenable.

Creedence is one of those bands that you just know, just by virture of having been alive in the 20th century, but you don't realize how many good songs they really have, let alone how well they really coalesced into damned solid albums, until you really sit down and listen 5/5

#889 Fugazi - Repeater

Fugazi's debut's appropriately named, riding its particular start-stop, shout-shout, sheetmetal guitar sound on and on, uniformly confrontational, but more frustrated than fearsome, which makes it relatable, but wearying. The lack of compromise is bracing, but its all too one-note, lacking the tuneful inventiveness of Red Medicine and The Argument 2.5/5

#888 Carroll - Needs

Listen here!

Indie rock belligerently, aggressively against trying to engage, with a detached, nasal approach straight out of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and countless other early 00's bands. Things pick up now and again when the beats shuffle and the synths run Genesis circa Duke, but even then, every note just feels like its trying to drag itself out of bed, every beat running a half beat late, and those vocals that just cut to the bone. There are catchy moments, but I feel like I'm trying to cheer up an occaisionally-fun, usually-depressed friend, and its weirdly exhausting. It's even called "Needs" for christsake! What about my needs? 2.5/5

#887 Gabe Goodman - Midnight Sour

Listen here!

Some bizzy beats and some decent bedroom croonin' and a better couple of songs than you might expect given that description. Goodman's got a real sense of motion and some lush, soulful production chops placing emotional angles in unexpected places: Twin Shadow's the obvious point of reference.

I'd be stoked to hear these song as part of a larger, more diverse, occasionally faster album - as it stands they're a small pleasure 3.5/5

#886 Daft Punk - Random Access Memories

What's the value of a boring album?

Look, I like lots of boring music. Boring music can be hypnotic, evocative, transportative in ways wholly unreachable by music with pesky things like memorable moments, relatable sentiments or propulsive percussion. And this album has strikingly few of those. So is it any good, those handicaps notwithstanding?

Well, for one, it is pretty, even transportative at times. Heck, at times it seems brilliant, whipping styles and tones and instruments into a disco-flecked space-rock opus with echoes of French albums from Moon Safari to Hurry Up, We're Dreaming (and even Bankrupt!) hinting at themes and veering off with a mind of its own into starlit crannies. Giorgio by Moroder in particular just might be a classic, with perfectly executed vocal interludes outlining the song's two halves: an infectious synth hook played over a solid click beat complete with organ solo...into a vocal interlude... then that same synth hook roars back again, this time over a sparking live drum counterpoint, complete with hip hop scratches. It's the mission statement of the entire album: laying out the two sides of the electronic / rock coin, and casting disco as their ambassador. It's a masterpiece overflowing with ideas and hooks. But nothing else here lives up to it.

Really, only lead single Get Lucky even comes close: at least it makes you want to move, and that's surely the song you'll remember on this otherwise featureless journey. For an album packed with ideas, none of them really manage to stand out. Too often the soup of styles, the combination of all those reds and blues and greens, just turns out turgid grey, with songs dressed up with nowhere to go, like soundtrack outtakes, like Jamiroquia b-sides. It's the worst during the disastrous Beyond / Motherboard / Fragments of Time stretch, which manages to neither be interesting nor to even be inoffensive enough to fade into the background, each song laden with misguided strings or vocals.

There's something compelling about the album. Something that makes you want to listen, that compels you to try. There's clearly a voice here, little asides, little subtle gestures that draw you in, and you strain to listen, but it talks so slowly and it talks so much and it says so little that eventually you're just bored. And only occasionally in a good way 3/5

#885 Vundabar - Antics

Listen here!

I'm calling Quantum Leap on this shit. No way three dudes who look all of 17 can make music this self-assured; no way those fresh-faced kids can bang out such joyfully stomping, swooping songs so effortlessly. I'm taking bets right now, there're some grizzled pros back behind those eyes, cranking out a second childhood's-worth of shimmering neo-rockabilly, hitchy post-punk, and sprightly, angular jams.

However they pulled it off, this is a heck of a debut from one of the best live bands in town, perfectly-produced and overflowing with rollicking good fun 4/5

#884 JEFF The Brotherhood - We are the Champions

One part meathead shitkicking Black-Keys-via-Turbonegro riffhumping and one part soaring, searching Surfer-Blood-via-Weezer chugging, guitars running rampant and endless through it all. Which is to say, a damn good goddamn time if you want it. Pure 70's revival 90's revival, pumped full of smoothed-out punk-jam guitar crunch, as good for lolling your head to as pumping your fist to. Genuinely fun stuff 4/5

#883 Metallica - Kill em All

Way back in the day, before they turned into perverse corporate parodies, Metallica were just some fuckedup fuckyouup dudes. They whip up their share of nonsense demon imagery, with song titles like The Four Horsemen and Phantom Lord, but there's punk swagger here, sounding like a band down in the gutters, more likely to club you with the cover's hammer than perform eldritch banishing rituals.

The guitars're showy, and the shock-lite subject matter hasn't aged all that well, but compared to most everything of the era there's a workman's precision to these songs. This is a factory full of sawblades and blast furnaces. This is where work gets done by dudes who will kick your ass - by the standards of the era, its downright credible. Throw in some legit chops, some wickedfast strumastrumastrumastruma, and some selectively chosen proggy structure kinks, it's almost enough to make you forget S&M ever happened 3.5/5

#882 John Coltrane - Giant Steps

A fantastically dynamic jazz album, with frantic runs running electric, bounding off of this and that like a cartoon character that got into the good stuff, surging off invisible forces, surging according to unseen patterns of resistance and chance. The actual licks are fast and unpredictable, the backing relentless, and the songs full of knotty structure, running ground low, and lightning high as the time demands.

Not jazz for your cool cocktail parties, this is jazz that demands your attention, jazz that seems like it might break something if you leave it unattended 4/5

#881 Dusty Springfield - Dusty in Memphis

Serious voice on this girl, a serious performance of soul singing for the ages, full of emotion and connection and straight up pipes-havin'. The production's syrupy smooth, staying out of lady's way, just dusting her coat in flowers and gold with the softest of touches, force multipliers on the mellodrama. Smart move band, it's some big singin'.

Just wish I could give a shit about big singin'. 2/5

#880 The Traditional Fools - The Traditional Fools

Its always nice to have a five-year-old, unreleased album lying around, just in case you've only put out 4 albums in the last year-and-change and you want to make sure you keep people interested.

2008-era Ty Segall, it turns out, was already a master of crushingly huge buzzy guitars, and a surfy sentiment and a double dose of breakneck couldntgiveafuckism give this record its own scuzz-punk charm. Lo-fi, crazy-loud; ear-shatteringly good fun 4/5

#879 Death Grips - The Money Store

How nasty can you make hip hop? How filthy can you make a synth? How hard can you chop it? How deeply can you warp layers of menacing shouting? How frantic and relentless and spastic can you make a song? Death Grips are trying to find out, banging together the already bangedup likes of Spank Rock, Die Antwort and El-P and seeing what gets bloodied first.

It's an achievement in one sense: this is about as far as you can take things before it becomes honest to god noise rock: this still has its own fucked up kind of groove to it: you'll bob your head until you have a headache. The over/under on that headache's about 2.5 songs though, and this motherfucker's 13 songs long, a geek show of relentless barely-rapping-shouting, challenging you to listen as long as you can.

I listened to the whole thing. Otherwise it doesn't make the blog. But the over / under on complete listens of this I ever bother with is about 1.5 3/5

#878 Visual Transitions - Cape Cod

LocalMusicBoston disclosure: RJ Foley, the dude behind Visual Transitions, is a friend of mine and allaround good dude.

Here's an album of buzzy, nuanced progressive house with a geographical theme, sixteen songs leading you from the tip of the Cape, right around the coast, all the way on in to Buzzard's Bay. Fittingly, the music's more about head groove than hip groove, less about bodies rocking than giving you an endless Krauty pulse to drive to, coloring the floral and faunal passerbys, borderline ambient at times, The KLF's Chill Out via DFA.

The drive definitely has its particular blueprint: each song's built on the back of a shimmering loop or two, while the odd knob turn or fade-in gives the landscape subtle texture. The honest-to-god swerves are rare, but tantalizingly well-executed enough that you'll wish for more: Welfleet's breathless drop back in, Truro's breakopen moment, and Provincetown's slurred triplet stutters are standouts that set the bar mightily high for the rest of the album. While we're on the subject, Provincetown's a highlight in general, illustrating all the album's strengths, sporting a killer wobblesaw lead and ghostly emotional undertones.

The real problem is that the sound, while striking 3 or 4 tracks in, is too consistent by the end, the basic tones and tricks becoming familiar as soon as Orleans and blurring together by the time you've reached Sandwich. Sometimes the songs seem content to swirl around themselves without particularly imposing their will.

Its a fine line between riding the endless trancy path to transcendence and providing some landmarks along the way, and this felt more like a night drive than a day one by the end, headlights and reflectors whipping rhythmic and indistinguishable. That's arguably a strength, but the first half left me wanting more. Its not that the album should be shorter, but there's too little that's new on the second side. I wanted a few more glints of sun off of sea, a few more clearings popping with wildflowers.

Nonetheless - an impressive debut, with a well-defined voice and a careful ear for rhythm, tone, and flow. I'd be shocked if I didn't put this on next time I drive the cape 3.5/5

#877 Patrick Vian - Bruits te Temps Analogues

If aliens crash landed on Earth circa 1976, and their ship exploded and all of their alien technology was melted and they were space musicians and wanted to start an Earth band with Earth instruments, this is the album they would make. In this story aliens fall in love with the Moog and figure that thing the fuck out because they're really smart and they make it do all kinds of weird shit.

It's music somehow more mechanical and more alive, more futuristic and more fundamental, than post-rock, krautrock and longwinded electronica combined. Out pour jazzy beats and jazzy synths and minimalist chiming and surging electronic pulses - it's outside genre, totally strange, totally listenable, totally not-listen-to-able, occasionally demanding, and oh here comes a piano and upright bass interlude to ease us out of the laser tunnel. Yep.

More fascinating than fun.

Must-hear stuff

3.5/5

#876 Monster Rally - Coasting

I don't know if Ted Feighan started writing better songs of if he started picking better loops or if he's just gotten better at his particular brand of sample-driven jiggery-pokery, but this is a much stronger effort than his debut. The coastal vibe's allowed to shine through thanks to a much smoother album flow, and the actual beats are twice as sick, especially on the outright murder killer centerpiece track Chicks, sounding like the best song RJD2 never did.

There's still something slightly wobbly about the entire thing, but this time everything's tight enough to be a net win 3.5/5

#875 Modeselektor - Monkeytown

I love it when weirdo electronic dudes aren't afraid to get rockist, and this album is ModeSelektor's most aggressive in ages. Busdriver and Thom Yorke aren't exactly the most original guys to get to sing over your vaguely-adventurous glitchy production, but their presence helps give human presence and backbone to the skittery experimentalism. None of the album's tricks are new by now (2011), but the balance of complexity, tension, and outright banging fun's unstoppable 4/5

#874 Charles Bradley - Victim of Love

Down to the cover art, down to the subject matter, down to the backing band, Bradley wears his influences on his sleeve. On his face. On his face sleeve. Like a mask. 70's soul, soul, funk, soul soul.

Vocally, dude pulls it off. Dude can sing, with plenty of gravelly character to offset the smooth croonin'. But the band's a big muddy in the mix, and the songwriting doesn't know how to grow outside of its influences, running out of ideas and interest somewhere around Where Do We Go From Here?

The faster songs are highlights, especially the restless bass on Strictly Reserved for You and the relentless organ chug on Love Bug Blues; even the dub-dusted instrumental Dusty Blue is more fun than it ought to be. But too many of the songs sound too familiar: Confusion rips off the intro (and much of the feel) from If There's a Hell Below pretty baldly, minus the mystery and menace.

Revival is fine. Homage is fine. But Bradley needs to forge a potent vision to match his potent voice if he's going to grow out of the shadows of his forebears 3/5

#873 Feed Me - Love is All I Got

Let's get it out of the way, there's still nothing in this song nor its 4 remixes that approach Feed Me's Big Adventure highs: there's more twatty raveup positiviesm, dubsteppy drops, and general pandering than I'd really care to hear on any given night. But as droppy postivist dubstep-flavored techno goes, you could do worse: the dueling vocal hooks tag team the songs to keep them from getting too predictable, and the whole disc works surprisingly well as a 22-minute epic song if you just spin it front to back. Definitely a better single than a song 3/5

#872 Deerhunter - Monomania

Why didn't every Deerhunter album sound like this? Why did they spend so much time fucking around with dissonant, go-nowhere drone-ons when we all knew they could put out honest to god crunchy rock songs at will?

This is the first un-overrated Deerhunter album ever. Plenty of fuzzy, frustrated guitar churn, with all the signature oilslick sheen and a third of the self-indulgent bullshit. There's nothing quite as propulsive as Never Stops, nothing as gorgeous as Nothing Ever Happened, but the consistency of the self-assured, understated ruffled rock power make it a solid solid 3.5/5

#871 James Brown - Star Time

Across 71 tracks, this collection's four discs sum up four James Browns:
 - Disc one is Lightning James, where he just comes out raw and bares it for all to see, a pure force of nature. Signature track: Please Please Please
 - Disc two is Fire James, where he's got a head of steam behind him and he's seeing how far he can take it, ratcheting it up by sheer force of will. Signature track: I Feel Good
 - Disc three is Ember James, where the flames can't leap any higher, but now they smolder, as the sound stretches out and gets hot and cool, where the act and the sound have become effortless and the jams just go and go. Signature track: Talking Loud and Sayin' Nothing
 - Disc four is Stone James, where there's not much fire left, but Brown just is, just keeps rolling, a testament to his sound, even as it adds little to the legend itself. Signature track: The Payback

Would this have been better with a tighter set of 3 discs? Maybe. But, in a way, the excess, the endlessness, the relentlessness is the perfect embodiment of The Hardest Working Man in show business. If you want to hear any James Brown, this has what you need, and afterwards you'll be well-versed in the power of a man well-deserving of his many titles 4.5/5

#870 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Green River

Right insistent rock and roll, shedding some of the bayou sludge, drifting on out to the river where the water moves fast and clear and the sun beats hot and the days are numbered and long and full of longing.

Balladic, bluesey, simple, but with an aura of power and mystery and substance all at once. You sense that this is the only kind of music this band could ever make, so they made it, and it was good - classic rock doesn't come much more classic than that 4/5

#869 Prince - Sign 'O' the Times

Prince does weird and Prince does cool but he was never quite this weird AND quite this cool at the same time. Slinky, funky, proto-Debra pop soul whorls around and around until the weird gets numbing and then gets weird again. Its just Prince seducing the ladies, you, himself, then you again, and then it all goes a bit fuzzy, and all you know for sure is that something freaky just happened, and you're pretty sure you liked it 4/5