#928 Don't Talk to the Cops - Regular Show

Further irreverent techno/electro/hip hop genre-bounding bounce from these inspired Seattle folks; like a rap mixtape made dancable, Regular Show is spontaneous, lively and fun. A nasty The Go Team, a day-glo Death Grips, Don't Talk to the Cops turn styles inside out and parties with their most precious bones 4/5

#927 Daedelus - Live at Low End Theory

Here Daedelus showing off his full range of monome wizardry: loops get stacked on loops, and while the pacing drags at times, occasional brilliant moments shine through and add up to a satisfying whole.

There's nothing here to rival the just-reviewed Bespoke LP that came later, and its questionable just how spontaneous the performance really is underneath all the fun gear, but the approach is so unique, and the result so catchy, that its worth a listen 3.5/5

#926 Daedelus - Bespoke

Daedelus has always been a different breed of hip hop loopsmith, using samples to make music that doesn't sound retro and doesn't sound futuristic; music stands outside of spacetime in its own quiet way.

This is the man on top of his game, making an album that resonates with emotion that you can't place, sounding as silky, alluring, mysterious and understated as the bespoke clothing the titles evoke. Sometimes skitterey (French Cuffs), occasionally Twin Peaks ethereal (In Tatters), always off doing its own thing, its a cohesive, compelling album that walks off on sidelong paths, within earshot of convention, but just 4/5

#925 The Meters - Rejuvenation

Seemingly having taken super-tight instrumental funk as far as it would go, The Meters put out a comparatively conventional funk album. Rejuvination takes the basic Sly Stone blueprint and runs with it, filling out The Meters' sound with wah'd guitars, punchy bass, jangly piano, and all manner of vocal exaltation.

Its a deeply funky, thoroughly enjoyable listen, showing the world that the Meters never found a kind of cool they couldn't rock 4/5

#924 Pixeltan - Yamerarena-I

Nothing here that exactly shatters the DFA mold: disco-tinged rock beats clip-clop along over roaming bass and vintage synths. There's some fun squonks on No More Delay, and I Told You So gets funky on the breakdown, but the band's clearly put all their eggs in Mika Yoneta's basket, putting her front and center with a spotlight on. She puts up a fight, heaving disinterest like some desperate offspring of a stoned Karen O and Satomi Matsuzaki on heroin. But she doesn't pull off that most difficult of rock moves, the passionate dispassion: she goes for fire and ice and ends up with lukewarm bathwater, splashing unconvincingly over underinspired backing to underwhelming effect 2.5/5

#923 The Kinks - The Kink Kronikles

I'm not a big fan of compilations: why watch a compilation random scenes from a director's movies instead of, you know, one of the actual movies? Same basic principle anyway.

But this collection's an exception, partially because it draws from a legitimate, well-defined era of the band, where there was a particular theme being approached from a variety of angles (broadly, defiance of modernity), and it just so happened to be an era PACKED with great music. Further, while all the era's albums were solid (Village Green and Arthur in particular) none of them had a really unassailable overall flow, and none of them were wall-to-wall with great songs. So cherry-picking doesn't necessarily put you behind. The fact that there's an unusually excellent selection of non-album tracks filling in the gaps seals the deal.

I'd still stick with the original albums in most cases, cause I'm a weirdo purist like that, but this is an undeniably rock solid collection of songs with an arc as good as any of its sources'. You could do a lot worse than this as a Kinks starting point, and shit, if you're exempt from my particular hangups, its a pretty good ending point, too 4.5/5

#922 Kool AD - 51

Like Heems' recent tape, this's less focused and less exciting than the full Das Racist, but its still an admirable sprawler, engagingly effortless and passionate about the art. The production's ungarnished one-loop mixtape stuff, with just the odd throwaway instrumental providing a landmark, so it all just puffs to a haze. That lack of structure prevents this from being anything especially striking or cohesive, but as stoned-friend-rapping-out-of-his-mind simulations go, this is about as good as they come 3.5/5

#921a The Rolling Stones - Between the Buttons (US)

Dropping much of the swagger and menace of Aftermath, Jagger's back to being powerless and frustrated on the Stones' second album of original songs. Musically, too, there's less punch, with harmonies, harmonicas, and overall jangle finding their way into the mix. The result is tuneful, but unfocused, even outright sloppy in places, and not necessarily in a charming way. You can't argue with the stompy Let's Spend the Night Together, but the reedy, dissonant, overrated Ruby Tuesday mucks the early momentum pretty early on.

This album is the sound of the Stones trying to branch out, leaping without knowing where they're landing. It's an awkward phase, one with its moments, but without the effortless swagger of the early run, nor the silver age ('68-'73) that would come after 3/5

#921 Wampire - Curiosity

Here it is, the natural conclusion of the decade's revivalism: an album that deals in swirling psychedelia revivalism (see Tame Impala, Alt-J, et al), AND wistful 80's synthpop revivalism (see Twin Shadow, Cut Copy, et al et cetera.).

The album goes down smooth, smearing reverbey washes over reverbey solos over reverbey beats, letting the whole thing bleed as watercolor nebular as its cover art. It's noisier and more adventurous than most of those namedrop victims, but nothing really sticks, leaving listeners with nostalgic daydream memories and a faint wellness that fades on waking 3/5

#920 Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest

Welp. Its a Boards of Canada album, bringing together ambient and glitch sensibilities with a basic backbones of beats. The usual. Does Tomorrow's Harvest sound feel less adventurous because it's more familiar than it was 15 years ago? Sure. It's also tighter: it's tempered, annealed, generally more aurally pliable and readily agreeable than their previous efforts. There are strange voices and burbles and hisses and hums, but they simmer under the surface as texture instead of landscape.

Paradoxically though, the more consistent sound that makes it sound less alien also makes it sound more alien; there's less of a sense of studio exploration and more of a sense of a fully found alien artifact. The mythology rings less true, which makes it ring more true.

Let me explain it this way: Geogaddi, for example, sounded like two guys making music that sounded like it was from another dimension. Tomorrow's Harvest sounds like two guys found an actual recording of music from another dimension and put some beats underneath it to make it understandable to human ears. This is a less adventurous album, but its otherworldly consistency makes it compelling in its own timeless way that may yet stand the test 4/5

#919 Don't Talk to the Cops - Champions of Breakfast

This Seattle group's latest is a strange brew of instrumental hip hop, regular hip hop, and art-rock pastiche. Clearly unburdened by any particular constraints, genre-oriented or otherwise, the emphasis is on effortless, angular fun, like a less-political The Coup. Champions of Breakfast is a strange soundtrack to a strange party, one where your guests assume you've put on an eclectic, slightly inappropriate playlist, but don't say anything because they've got to admit it kinda works and nobody wants to chance breaking the spell 4/5

#918 Kanye West - Yeezus

Gotta give credit to innovation. Say whatever you what about Kanye, dude does not stand still, taking chance after chance after chance. Once again, he's created a sprawling mess of an album that cannot be ignored, full of impossible swerves and strokes.

The first 5 tracks auger an absolute classic, each taking modern electronic stylings, smashing them, dancing on the pieces till neon blood splatters. On Sight and Black Skinhead are whipcrack sharp, and just when you settle in for an assault I am a God throws you a curve, counterpointing doubledown grandstanding with shrieks of existential terror, West's greatest Strong-Weak changup ever. And then New Slaves features one of the prettiest outro sections I've heard, well ever, in hip hop or otherwise.

The problem is in that second half, where West seems to have either run out of ideas, or just gotten bored. The pacing drags, the delivery lies flat, and the samples get overused, or just get used badly: Blood on the Leaves's Fly Like an Eagle sample is a distraction, and Bound 2's Brenda Lee ("uh huh honey") sample is just wildly out of place in a song that's already leaden with front-and-center samples. The whole song is so poorly, jerkily composed its almost brilliant. Almost.

Even the album's "bad" half is still weirdly intriguing in its fearless embrace of going its own way, but that's the difference between a classic and a noteworthy curiosity: can it finish? Does it have a whole album's worth of ideas? My Beautiful Dark Twisted fantasy did, but Yeezus doesn't quite get there, limping across the finish line.

As noteworthy curiosities go, this is more noteworthy than most: there's a generous serving of chancetaking here that can't be missed 4/5

#917 Squarepusher - Shobaleader One: d'Demonstrator

Are you sure this isn't the new Daft Punk album? Maybe its all the busted synths, poppy structures, and distorted vocals that's my best guess. There's no way it was RAM, so I'm gonna keep looking. Or maybe this is a Trent Reznor side pop project gone crazy (see that last track). Just saying, if you thought Solo Electric Bass still sounded too much like a typical Squarepusher album, this might be your answer.

Whoever made em, the songs are overrepetitive, churning in place on the same basic groove, but the tones shine with enough crystalline glinting that they can be a shinny distraction to work to. Nothing to write home about though, and hopefully not a direction Jenkinson intends on going any further with: it feels like he's already out of interesting places to take this particular idea 3/5

#916 Squarepusher - Solo Electric Bass 1

Does what it says on the tin! In the earliest days of squarepusher we got flashes of the fact that hey this guy can really play the bass, but the actual use of an actual instrument got pushed deeper and deeper into the background as the great IDM one-upsmanship of the late 90's forced the shedding of anything traditional if you wanted to stay in front of the wave of Innovation.

A decade or so later, full reset: just the bass.

It's probably the best just a guy on the bass album you'll ever here, full of interesting pacing, subtle warm tones, and some faceripping runs. Half the fun is picking apart how the hell one man with two hands makes all that sound, think Brian Gibson, and the other half is just letting a long harmonic come to rest on your backbone, as things get fast and slow, respectively (and sometimes both).

Still imma file this under novelty. Cool to hear once, but at the end of the day its just a guy on the bass showing off how well he can play the bass. There's little in terms of emotional resonance, no movement or narrative, not real useful as a listen other than to piece together the enigma that is Tom Jenkinson 3/5

#915 Roxy Music - Stranded

Could never get into Roxy Music. Ferry's voice, and the sound at large, is so willfully disonnant and difficult it felt like work to listen to, and there was never anything quite interesting enought going on underneath to justify it. In this post-Eno era at least there aren't experimental squiggles joining the alienation effort, and the song structures are still unpredictable and still operate at inventive angles, and there's a wavering, funhousemirror self-doubt that's relatable and engaging we uncertain souls, and and and and and

And yet, the actual songs are just too overt in their moves, too fussy with gestures, too full of "ands"; they distract from themselves again and again until you're not really sure what you're listening to, nor why you should care 2.5/5

#914 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Willy and the Poor Boys

Is it possible that one of the best-regarded bands of all time is underrated? Everyone likes Creedence, but how many people would put them in their top 10 classic rock bands? Its so easy to overlook them in the name of other Bigger bands like The Who and Led Zeppelin, but no one this side of the Beatles hooked a tune quite like John Fogerty and the boys.

This's possibly their most fun album: tellingly it includes Down on the Corner and Fortunate Son, two of their loosest, jangliest hits. Also tellingly, it perfectly fits the trajectory out of the muck of Bayou Country and dustiness of Green River on out into the sun proper, but hasn't quite hardened into the perfectly honed punch of Cosmo's Factory. Still wild-eyed, still effortlessly catchy, another in a long line of (maybe) underappreciated albums 4.5/5

#913 Booker T. & the MGs - Melting Pot

Deeply, wildly funky; a twisty, rollicking album that never skips out of the groove. The first side is straight-up Meters/Sly funk, lead by the title track that mixes fun and full italics cool about as well as anything ever. Classic. That the band had just finished a switchedabout full-album cover of Abbey Road should come as no surprise - that kind of tunefulness is fully present on the second side, which also features a smattering of trippy lady-vocals and an outright Here Comes the Sun quote.

Together its the culmination of one of the finest backing bands around, a testament to their mighty musical breadth and depth 4.5/5

#912 Al Green - Call Me

Al Green's breathy, rangey warble is on full display here, the rhythm/horns/strings weaving only the softest pulse for the man to emote over. Green sounds wounded, lost, and near-hopeless all the way along and the result is damn near ambient in places, hypnotic in its understated consistency, just Al passing the night away, waiting for time to come and heal those wounds of his 3/5

#911 The Rolling Stones - Their Satanic Majesties Request

A strange, wild album that would be hailed as a lost masterpiece of 60's psychadelia if it hadn't had the misfortune of being created by a little band called The Rolling Stones.

Thoroughly out of step of the Stones' no-frills, muscular rock and roll, this album chants, wobbles, meanders, loses itself in itself, finds you at the bottom, loses you along the way, and generally takes more chances than anything else the band ever did, before or since. It's messy, enchanting, slippery, lurching in tempo and tone, strangely seamless for all the swerves it takes. It sounds less written than found, and I'm more intrigued by it than any of the (arguably much better) Stones albums I've been listening to lately 4/5

#910 Travelling Wilburys - Travelling Wilburys Vol. 1

I won't bother listing the preposterous star power behind this most super of supergroups, but it sounds like what it is: some guys who can play and (kinda) sing, banging out some jams for kicks.

I don't have a whole lot of use for the actual songs, which take only the barest of chances and sound mostly like Tom Petty b-sides, but the spirit carries the day. These guys have nothing to prove, and it shows, and that kind of bare lack of ambition stays out of the way of the fullest-ever realization of my "is this a band I'd want to be in?" test. Good God.

That subconscious little fantasy alone, not just of playing with these guys, but of playing with these guys in this kind of breezy, sunny, dusty atmosphere, is heady shit 3.5/5

#909 Surfer Blood - Pythons

If Astral Coast (my favorite album of 2011!) was a rogue wave, Pythons is a surfboard, sporting  a tighter, sleeker sound: the beats clip with NYC metronomy, the song structures are more snuggly ratcheted into place, and everything rings like it was designed by the hand of man. The scruffy charm is gone, the boys have jobs now, and that job is to rock. And sound more like (good) Weezer than ever.

At least the carefully designed sound is well-designed, with guitar slashes and distorted shrieks piping in to provide rhythmic punch at the climax of the choruses and bridges. Some of the tracks (I Was Wrong) spin in place without catching onto anything, but for the most part its actually a pretty crafty little album, taking a careful few chances, sticking all its landings, proving hookier and hookier with every listen 3.5/5

#908 Peter Jefferies - The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World

A good companion piece to Like Clockwork, similarly drenched in dread, each song churning in place like wasted days. The variety of textures is bracing, guitar squalls and bass drones and tape wobbles wander out of the rain, but at the heart of each is Jefferies, unpacking regret poems in his hitched baritone, again and again, with no ray of sun, having a resignation contest with Bonnie Prince Billy and winning.

The space is squirming and alive, but it's a closed system, there's no attempt to escape, no attempt to rage, just mysterious shapes bouncing off one another in the dark before settling into rest 3.5/5

#907 Queens of the Stone Age - ...Like Clockwork

Another perfectly named album, evoking the album's relentless, inexorable chugging and the relentless, inexorable fear of the inevitable that drips from its every bone. Muscular and hard-edged, but with enough nuance and touch to keep it alive, ...Like Clockwork has all the stark lines and subtle details of its cover's skeletal seducer. Nothing on here will surprise you deeply, but its metallic sheen is agreeable enough as it hums along like, you know 3.5/5

#906 Jon Hopkins - Immunity

Hopkins' latest is a bristling, textured trip, filling housey frames to bursting with drones and glitchy twists. Every moment has momentum to the next, but the actual progress is glacial and subtle and at odd angles to the world, your clockwork horse losing ground on a treadmill.

Then the bottom drops out. The second half sheds nearly all of the tension and twitch: Abandon Window wafts in mist-thin ambiance, and the piano-and-moan of Immunity sounds right off of Hopkins' King Creosote collab. Even Form By Firelight's hard beats are undermined by tinkling pianos, overtaken by uncertain tones, and finally smothered into a closing thirty seconds of silence.

And somehow the two sides cohere, tones of longing and frustration and resignation and acceptance battling to a stalemate that vibrates in place, a complex self twisting in time. A possible masterpiece that I respected more than I enjoyed 3.5/5