#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

#951 Megadeth - Peace Sells...But Who's Buying?

Propulsive, galloping thrash with a shift from mother Metallica's deadly seriousness to arena-ready fist-pumping shoutalonging. Where early Metallica wallowed in evil, Megadeth revels, realizing that hey, we've got all these goddamn guitars, why not have some fun with em? It manages to stay just this side of silly, even if it never quite ascends to Serious, and the fiery fretwork's a bonus 3.5/5

#950 Speedy Ortiz - Major Arcana

This might be my first LocalMusicBoston and Pitchfork BNM. Good job MA!

Sadie Dupuis has earned her instant reputation as a whip-smart, fishhooked vocalist, and her barbs are driven with piledriver force by the dead-simple crush of her backing band. The songs all lurch in a single direction, growing in momentum inevitably, building to a Built to Spill monolith and then puffing out like the best of the 90's, but what the songs lack structural in guile they make up in brutal efficiency. On the small scale, every guitar tone is better than it has to be; on the song scale, ever payoff justifies its buildup; even the album arc is far better sequenced than your average 90's rocker, with plenty of follow-up punches on the back half (Plough!) and even an epic closing bustup.

If you're going to make this album, a Liz Phair / Nirvana / Breeders kinda stompy shouter of yore, and you're going to stick to your guns about keeping the riffs fist-simple, this is how you do it, with a stiff wrist and silk fingers bristling with prickers 4/5

#949 Gus Gus - Polydistortion

Overblown bass, beats, disinterested croons and a touch of IDM (EDM, kids) fuckery make for a heady, druggy, dubby experience straight out of the lookit-what-we found 90's pop/indie/electronic overground. Arguably better than contemporaries like Sneaker Pimps or the (overrated (sorry)) Portishead, but it leans far too hard on repetition and inaction to puff up some pretty thin ideas 2.5/5

#948 Action Bronson and Party Supplies - Blue Chips

Free here!

Nasal, rapid-fire, tightly-packed raps with plenty of mixtape looseness and a rockist infusion of excitement. Two of the album's own nods do my work for me: when Bronson complains about being compared to Ghost (he sounds a whole lot like him) and when Kool A.D. drops in and fits right in and it reminds you of how naturally this would work as a companion piece to 51 and Nehru Jackets.

Like any good mixtape, there's enough flubs and half-hits to make the whole thing feel live and promote the illusion of spontaneity. And like most mixtapes, endless flow respect given, you could have done more with less. But mission accomplished, point made: Bronson's got the tightest Albanian flow I know 3.5/5

#947 Metallica - Ride the Lightning

Finding a balance between the crude crush of their debut and their later excesses, Ride the Lightning is actually pretty darn good. Heavy and fast, melodic and listenable, the songs are full of little experiments that work. Neither watered down nor oppressive, this is the sound of Metallica on a roll, victorious, but still hungry.

The only place it loses points is in the subject matter. I know this is metal and all, but does every song have to be about death? Or rather, nuclear holocaust, the electric chair, death, suicide, being "trapped under ice", and "creeping death" (Call of Ktulu and Escape are pretty thin soup as exceptions go), respectively? By the end it just sounds lazy, and undercuts the music's comparatively exciting crackle 4/5

#946 The Byrds - Younger than Yesterday

They're not just those Turn Turn Turn guys, not just the curious country crossovers on Sweetheart of the Rodeo: listen to this and hear the Byrds revealed as kaliedescopic, psychadelic trans-pop superstars with flashes of Kinks/Small Faces/Zombies/Beatles/The Who brilliance in turn, spiked with some truly original moves all their own.

Just consider the first 3 tracks: the proto-Cake trumpeting on the opener, the crackling solo notes, (some of the finest of the decade) on Have You Seen Her Face, the batshit backwards aliens closing CTA-102! Each shows the influence of contemporary fashions, but each also seems ahead of its time and abreast the era's boundaries and just so slightly outside reality. It's occasionally sloppy (Mind Gardens is a thorough miss, Everybody's Been Burned goes nowhere and sounds like a Zombies B-Side at best) but the whole thing is so bursting with ideas and irresistible bounce and just the right number of B's per M that you can't help but love it. An underappreciated masterpiece 4.5/5

#945 Buddy Holly - 20 Golden Greats

A flawlessly executed collection of sweet, bouncy, pre-rock pop, rendered strangely modern in its 20-songs, 2-minutes-each pacing, like something Guided by Voices or The Minutemen would put out. I admire a song that knows how much it has to work with and doesn't stretch it, and this collection packs them into a crushingly listenable package, full of harmonies, hooks, swoops and swoons.

Lots of folks know Holly's name (at very least via Weezer) but I suspect fewer could name any of his songs with any real confidence. If that's you, check this out: its a treat 4/5

#944 Muddy Waters - The Anthology (1947-1972)

If you want a jam that runs on like the night, this is the spot. If you really want to hear the span of Waters' run, this mostly-chronological collection of 50 tracks will give you a good lesson. But if you're looking for an album to listen to (and god knows I always am)?

Here's a question for you: are you shorter on money or time?

If you're shorter on money, this will give you a mighty amount of soul power, a serious run of guitar, a peerless degree of uncut blues flex and strain and pulse for your buck. You're probably the type that needs this kinds music anyway, down on your luck maybe, watching the world drift by.

If you're shorter on time, you might be in too much of a rush for these records' timeless, endless moaning croak, running by the dozens. You might not be the kind of man who's looking first and foremost for the blues just now. You're probably off chasing the next shiny sound glinting in the green green grass.

I think there's honor in the former, and I admit with small shame that I'm mostly the latter these days. I'm short on money, but boy am I ever short on time 3/5

#943 Aretha Franklin - Lady Soul

Lady can sing. An album of mostly covers (not so uncommon at the time) of songs by Brown, Mayfield, King and other heavy hitters of the time, the focus is on the Southern sound and that omnipotent voice. Funky and heartfelt, this is a tight little performance recommended for anyone with the least interest in hearing some serious soul beltitoutism 4/5

#942 Justin Timberlake - The 20/20 Experience

You gotta admire the nerve, putting at an album of almost exclusively 7+ minute pop (?) tracks. Not burying one or two in the 9-slot, just making that the backbone baseline song length, letting that kind of expansiveness dictate the basic pacing, dilating the timescale of the album-listening experience. Timberlake uses all that space to on a combination of hynotic, slowjam repetition and cheeky diversions, buildups, breakdowns, and outright leftfield asides. If Timberlake wanted to be Michael on his last album, here he wants to be Stevie circa Songs in the Key of Life: fearless and heedless.

Two problems: 1) too many of these songs feel like more traditional songs stretched, plumped, puffed, baggy around a thin idea or two. 2) those (thin) ideas are build on some pretty tired, halfhearted lovesick entendre-and-a-halfs. Here's a game I invented: I give you the concept for a song and you tell me if its by Justin Timberlake, Flight of the Conchords, Party Posse, or Boys 4 Now.

Here's a hint, the 20/20 experience is mostly songs about how love is like being addicted to a drug, how love is like candy, or how Justin wants to take you for a ride in his car, which is also a spaceship. Maybe the album's trying to elevate the low, but if that's the plan its not pulling it off: this just comes across as lazy songwriting, and it clashes against the bald ambition of the song structures. You can't pull off "cool" when you're pitching 5th grade woo over top of your beats, no matter how post- you're trying to be. I'll take half of a bold gesture over something truly gutless any day, but if you're going to go in swinging, don't pull your punches for christsake 3/5

#941 The B-52's - The B-52's

If you only know the B52's from Love Shack, you've probably got the wrong idea. Heck, Rock Lobster's right on this album and it still might give you the wrong idea: the extra two minutes on the album version somehow make it an order of magnitude crazier than the single / video versions, from the extended jam to the menagerie sampler platter to the pickup buzz solo. It's a masterpiece.

The B52's are way more punk and way more brilliant than you're likely to give them credit for. They're campy, that lowest form of style outside bare irony, but the aesthetic runs deeper than that, aggressively rejecting the now in a glorious smashup of new wave deadpan and psychobilly rollick. Retro organs spike post-punk guitar stabs, near-nonsense is keened and shouted in one of the great vocal performances of the age, direct and absurd and tinged with madness and prickling menace.

And they're fun! Not Love Shack fun. Fun like thrilling, fun like one of the girls might whip a knife out of her bouffant and stab a guy in Tarantino technicolor and in retrospect you'd feel like you should have seen it coming. Inventive, taught, exciting stuff, far better than you might be expecting 4.5/5

#940 Hammer No More The Fingers - Pink Worm

HNMTF chug out bouncy angularism, all laquered with prettiness and accessibility, never quite settling down, but never quite catching fire, Dr. Dog and Giddy Motors starting a side project and compromising on something circa Built to Spill.

In the end, they don't sound quite like any band you've ever heard. The downside is they sound like a band trying not to sound like any other band you've ever heard, without quite ever finding a voice of their own that really sticks with you. With a syntha burst here, a start-stoppa there, a swerva upineverywhere, Pink Worm seems to substitute not doing what others do for doing anything with much authority. Hammer No More The Fingers seems like a band with enough talent to develop a cohesive vision someday, but none emerges here 2.5/5

#939 Team Spirit - Team Spirit EP

This is the kind of stuff that gets you excited about music again.

Team Spirit make irresistible, thrilling indie rock at its absolute best, blasting you with cannonfulls of handclaps, shoutalongs, and hooky hook hooks, all at terrifying speed, chests flapping against dodgy seatbelts. These guys know their rock, learning from everyone from girl groups and Chuck Berry, all the way through Nirvana and The Thermals, and right on up to Dananananackroyd and Wolf Parade. I made it through half a track before I hit songkick (they were here last month, fuck! Come back, play with Streight Angular, we'll have the Boston dance party of a lifetime).

This is the most excited I've been about a band's debut EP since Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Sticking Fingers into Sockets (ps, please don't become super fucking boring like those bands) 5/5

update: listen to 4 of the 5 tracks here!

#938 Ted Leo and The Pharmacists - Hearts of Oak

The heart of this album is Leo's reedy keening, careening like a bottle rocket on a string, straining skyward and shooting sideward unpredictably, lending tension and erratic energy to crampy indie rock ditties. The result is a manic twist on The Dismemberment Plan, Hot Hot Heat, and the whole early-00's angular scene, and the 13 songs sound like more, if only because each shoots off in its own direction, leaving trails of new wave, dancepunk, and pop bent origamical.

The album's far from cohesive, and not altogether enjoyable, but there's thrills in electric splintering and sputtering this relentlessly fearless 3.5/5

#937 Harold Budd and Brian Eno - The Pearl

Truly ungraspable ambient. Piano notes form the backbone, but the body is echoes skinned in unknowable drones. While the likes of Gas's Pop use repetition to create an object, and the likes of Music for Airports use rests to create time, this manages to be even more otherworldly, never quite coalescing into familiar patterns, never quite allowing reality to impose form, a sunfish made of smoke, evoking unnerving moods obliquely.

Those who prefer something more accessible (but still listen to ambient, a small population) will probably wish that this was a bit more interested in making their acquaintance, and its not exactly relaxing enough to welcome into your subconscious on any everyday basis, but you have to admire its rogue dedication to its own nature 3.5/5

#936 AC/DC - Back in Black

I hate AC/DC. I hate their sniveling attitude and I hate their music.

Mostly. I'm battling some cognative dissonance here, but I gotta admit I kinda liked this album. I stand by hating Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, but where that album was childish and inane, Back in Black has actually grown a pair, getting over whatever petulant insecurities its ancestor carried and coming out with some actual swagger. For the first time, I get the appeal of this band. The riffs are generally excellent, the solos occasionally incendiary, and the overall package and pacing are just downright solid. That was all true before, but the singing and sentiment and overall image was just too pissy to get past.

Don't get me wrong, Brian Johnson's voice is still just as fucking terrible as Bon Scott's, and you've still got high poetry like Given the Dog a Bone and Let Me Put My Love Into You, but for once the band's attitude wasn't so overpoweringly awful that I couldn't appreciate its musical charms. Very faint praise indeed, but given how much I loathed this band a year ago, call it progress 3/5

#935 Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

Can I make a confession? I've never really been into Tom Waits, and this album is a microcosm for why.

The instrumentation is inventive, the lyrics are stunning in their evocativeness, Waits's voice is peerless in its character, the songs are generally wildly original, but they're not good listening. They're not for background music, they're not for dancing, they're not for parties, they're not for driving, they're not for careful listening and cranny-diving. They're songs realized brilliantly and admired rightfully and nearly useless to me 3/5

#934 Zapp - Zapp

Zapp's 1980 debut is a tight little record, full of dancable, post-disco funk. There's faint whiffs of oncoming 80's stink: everything's a bit overproduced, there's vocorders here, there's some overclean guitar/soprano solos there, but somehow it all sounds futuristic instead of dated, channeling electro and Daft Punk and Beck circa Midnight Vultures. This takes the basic Parliament blueprint, tears it into 6 big pieces, and folds them into a surprisingly exciting record 4/5

#933 David Lynch - The Big Dream

Lynch called this a blues album at heart, and despite the beats and effects and Badalamenti-ready atmospherics, I'm inclined to admit that he's got a point. You can feel the blues here: its weariness, its simplicity in form and message, its texture. This is less like the Zooropa-ism of Crazy Clown Time and more like the bizarro twin of Cash's American songs series. Where Cash dragged modern tales into a timeless space, Lynch drags timeless songs into a moment, possibly one still in the future, where they are rendered awobble and strange. Unsurprisingly, the feel evokes Lynch's films: much like Lost Highway's born-again mechanic, the pulse of the uncanny undercuts everyday gestures. The music's menace evokes the seething madness that swirls around Inland Empire's imperiled heroine. The industrial hum and crackle is the sound of Henry Spencer's brain at its most idle moments.

But if you take away all the projection and metaphor and listen to the actual songs, you're left with some impressive slabs of unsettling atmosphere that are nearly impossible to listen to. The dissonance is relentless, headlined by Lynch's impossibly nasal twang. On Crazy Clown Time it was molded into a menagerie of goblins, but here it is just laid out, blues-raw, and it cuts through every song like piano wire. You'd be half tempted to liken this album to something Tom Waits would put out if the vocals at their center were not so fundamentally opposed. Where Waits growls and imposes, Lynch snivels and squirms.

David Lynch's never been one for accessibility, and I admire and enjoy that about his films. But when it comes to his music, there's just not enough vision to justify the indulgence 2.5/5

#932 Muse - Absolution

This feels cut from the same cloth as the just-reviewed Coldplay album: early aughts albums that use carefully-produced, slightly overlong songs to evoke big feelings, all through a sound that reminds you more than a little of Radiohead.

But where Coldplay reaches for the ether, Muse goes for the truncheon, sapping you into submission by a thousand hammering blows, relentlessly pummeling you with texture, riff, climax and howl. The result is the same, your ultimate submission to the greatness of the band, but Muse makes it a lot more fun along the way, sending your careening down endless alleys of swerves, buzzes shreiks and guitarist aungularism. The maximalism is exhausting, and this album would have been far better at 10 songs instead of 14, but you've got to admire the little moves along the way, the savage buzz of Time is Running Out, the frantic gallop of Hysteria, the metal lurches of The Small Print.

If I've gotta be dragged down, I'd rather go down fighting for my life 3.5/5

#931 Pink Floyd - Animals

Preceded and followed by a pair of all-time album-scale sprawls, Animals is comparatively compact, swinging in with an intro, 3 long songs, and an outro.

It's Floyd at its most traditionally proggy: the songs are twistily structured, dense with atmosphere, and thick with slabs of riffage. It's not super accessible, but it's not all that difficult either: every song creates its space and drifts along at the right pace, providing enough twists to keep things interesting, but stopping short of Yes/Crimson territory, never indulging in any really jarring swerves in timekeeping or tone. Compelling, if powerfully joyless, this is music for wallowing deeply, for wandering indistinctly 3.5/5

#930 Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head

Coldplay's best-regarded album really pulls out all the stops to make you fall for it. Like a suave pickup artist, it strikes the right tones and employs endless repetition to hypnotize and break down defenses. You don't even know it's happening, and then you're both back at your place.

Hypnosis is the key. Seven of the eleven songs are in the 5-6 minute mark and you barely notice because there are no big changes, no signposts, just the laneline click of an open road, just the whirring of slots in a clockless casino. I'm reminded of Michael Campbell's description of U2 and Bruce Springsteen's grasps at significant music: when a song varies only slightly over time it can be simple and serious. This music is too big, too meaningful to deign to be interesting. This message is so important that it deserves 5 and a half minutes of the same backing tracks.

But in the listening, it's all a bit telegraphed. Each song opens with a beat and a chiming melody follows, then a keening vocal line, and by then backbone is laid, and a fairly standard verse-chorus-verse song falls out, severely gilded with effects and just-the-right-chord chords. Moby circa Play would be proud. And in fact, this is more of an electronica album than a rock album: it's all about feeling and rhythm and pulse and losing yourself in the moment. There's no real sincerity there though, it all feels like an exercise, a cagey hooker who make you think she really cares. It has its moments, but its ultimately unsatisfying, and it never feels much like the real thing 2.5/5

#929 The Who - Live at Leeds (1970 version)

The original version's 6 tracks are a knotted fist of rock with a pipe in the middle. There's none of the fey opratics of Quadraphenia or Tommy here, this is just the world's greatest garage band ripping through four blistering short ones and a pair of sprawling, erratic rockers, teetering on the edge of destruction and coming back black and singed. Proto-punk in its directness and fury, this is bracing, inspiring stuff 4.5/5