#992 Banana Phonetic - The Facts of Evolution

Listen / buy (pay what you want) here!

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

#991 VA - Beach Blvd. (CD Version)

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

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

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

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

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

#990 The Dead Trains - First Thing Smokin'

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

#989 Earl Sweatshirt - Doris

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

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

#988 Onaquest - Live at Slinky 14

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

#987 Japanther - Skuffed Up My Huffy

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

#986 Jay Reatard - Blood Visions

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

#985 Husker Du - Zen Arcade

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

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

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

#984 Jay Reatard - Matador Singles '08

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

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

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

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

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

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

#982 Ty Segall - Singles 07-10

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

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

#981 Freddie King - Burglar

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

#980 Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs

Yo La Tengo Report Card time!

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

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

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

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

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

3.5/5

#979 The Psyched - The Psyched

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

#978 Destruction Unit - Void

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

#977 Electric Light Orchestra - ELO II

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

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

#976 R.E.M. - Reckoning

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

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

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

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

#974 Disappears - Pre Language

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

#973 BB King - Live at the Regal Theater

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

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

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

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

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

#971 Daedelus - Righteous Fists of Harmony

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

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

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