#1041 The Godz - Godz 2

Roughly the same rambling, single-chord, defiantly single-minded proto-drone-chant Velvetism that the Godz put out the first time around, this time without that rush of the new, without that same spirit. This one smacks of effort, which is a death blow when your whole draw is art brut outsider braindumperey. There's still a strange brilliance to the primitive stomp, but the fun is gone 2.5/5

#1040 Basic Channel - BCD

Minimalist electronica with shades of ambient house, built on crystal loops that change glacially. The best bits are the details, the little analog crinkles and crackles that get pulled into the repeat cycle and become instruments unto themselves, camouflaging the entrance of new sounds: The Disintegration Loops in reverse, nothing arriving consciously before it's approached subconsciously. Conceptually, there's a satisfying balance between accident and perfectionism, but in the experiencing its a frustrating close listen and a passable piece of background music at best 3/5

#1039 David Axelrod - Song of Innocence

Take everything big about epic length jazz suites and soundtracky modern classical, jam it into a rough rock format without shedding any instrumentation nor adding any vocals and end up with something that manages to not quite be prog. Its an advanced platypus rock maneuver.

Most of the time its a bit by the numbers: horns and strings play classical washes, bass and drums play jazz, guitars play some rock solos or funk jiggerjacks over top, see what falls out. Sometimes its beautiful, and the individual tones and moods are inspired, and that drum and bass is just sick, but too often those big classical surges drown out the details, and create a pall of sameness over the album's run. I admire the ambition more than the execution; a little less beak and this thing could have soared 3.5/5

#1038 Soft Cell - Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret

Tainted Love tells you more or less everything you need to know about this album: like most of their ilk from the 80's, Soft Cell found their synth sound, found their basic attitude, and stuck to it out of a supreme confidence, consistency, or a lack of imagination.

Soft Cell justify that consistency better than most though: the album's all needing wanting more, grasping for that greater thrill, chasing that next high, a treadmill in molasses at a million miles an hour. The songs loop with sparking heels and neon buzz, words drip from mouths with pre-Blur disdain, we wander through identical clubs, down identical streets, through a night that never ends, through nights that never end, highs and lows blur together. Over the top, saxes scream, girls chant, and voices whisper "sexxx dwaarff" in dimly lit underground Love Shack raveup comedown. It's cool, it's weird, it's exciting, it's boring, it's endless and over too soon. It completely cancels itself out and does it so well that it comes out ahead 4/5

#1037 The Fabulous Wailers - The Fabulous Wailers

This right here's the sweet spot. Everything you love about garage rock revival of R&B raucousness (starting with say, The Sonics) and everything you love about the actual rip-roaring R&B of the 50's (Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Gene Vincent) collided in some kinda space-time cusp in Seattle 1959. The Wailers' debut is as genuine and raging as the originals, with that do-it-harder-do-it-faster-fuckit-if-we're-doing-it-right aplomb and full-throated Link Wray rumble that you can only get by trucking it a couple years and half a country away.

You get the idea that these kids just really fucking love rock and roll, and they love it every way there is to love it, from the galloping instrumental opener, to the impossibly cool, jazzy 2nd track, to sax and piano Little Richard rollick of Dirty Robber, where vocals kick in for the first time and they're ragged and raw and you mentally drop back to the first couple of tracks and try to piece together what trajectory this thing's on.

It's a two part-greatness here. The actual songs, while sounding a bit samey by the end, are kicking, rocking, enthusiastic and terrific fun. But its the album that seals it. I'm reminded of Mellon Collie and Kid A: albums that start with a weird opener, double-down on that weirdness in the second track, and then get down to business on the 3rd. There's disorientation creating tension, and then a spot of relief, and then off you veer again and you don't know where these fools are taking you but you trust that it's gonna be interesting. That confidence and wildness is on display here, and remember that being unpredictable isn't something that any of the R&B gods, nor their revivalists, were especially strong at once you got past their opening salvo. But this keeps you guessing, just look at the slinky atmosphere of High Wall into the shitkicking handclap thrill of Wailin'. To take one of the greatest eras of rock and roll, pump it up, and twist it into a shape that touches on jazz, pre-surf, and punk-before-punk, and heave it into the world like a firebomb, it's a hell of a thing, and a fitting capstone tribute to the 50's 5/5

#1036 The Godz - Contact High with The Godz

By now we're pretty used to punk and lo fi and indie pop and whatever the fuck The Shaggs was. But in 1966, the idea that you would make music without really being particularly good at playing your instruments or having decent recording equipment or having any verifiable talent to speak of was a bit more adventurous. The Godz make minimalist one-chord songs that lurch in place, made mostly of acoustic texture and meandering notes and tape artifacts, building pillowey crunch for the vocals to soar over clumsily.

The band swings from Ween to Guided by Voices*, sometimes leaning on weirdness to make up for their deficiencies, sometimes just baring earnestness. It's the latter that wins out, and the album just...pulls it off. It takes up a warm place in your heart. It has little to offer, few pretentions; it's only modestly interesting while you're listening to it; but afterwards it'll have nuzzled out a space that you won't begrudge 3.5/5

* Bob Pollard mentions them as an influence, and the vocals sound a bit like his to boot

#1035 VA - Creative Outlaws: U.S. Underground 1962-1970

If you'd never heard any rough-edged music from the 60's, if you only knew The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, this'd be a perfectly good way to get a taste. If you've never heard any Captain Beefheart or MC5 or Blue Cheer, artists that can only generously be called obscure, you'll find a lot to blow you mind here. I can't promise you'll have a real good trip, but you'll have an experience.

There's still some gems for the more jaded listener: Moondog and The Godz have the album's strongest moment, a one-two punch of trippy, formless rock. But the collection's terribly uneven, with the barest tonal cohesion and jerky track-to-track flow. It sounds like a mixtape hastily composed in 1970 (supposing that was a thing in 1970); a stoned grocery bagger of 28 putting his favorite tracks together for his younger brother. If you might be that younger brother, you just might cherish this. If you're more like the older brother, you're likely to feel like you could've done better 3/5

#1034 Dibiase and P.U.D.G.E. - L.A. Series #1

Dibiase's production on Flashbang Grenada's album was inspired, but  his songs on this split EP are just lazily warped and looped samples / chiptune leftovers. Aimless and unlistenable, this has half the freshness of Up the Joystick, and that was a pretty gimmicky album to start with.

If Dibiase's songs are underdone, P.U.D.G.E.'s songs are overdone, like he took decent instrumental hip hop songs and bent them all out of shape to gain art-house IDM appeal. Both end up in roughly the same place regardless: worble and borble with only a passing regard for whether anyone would want to listen to music this haphazardly disjointed 2/5

#1033 Rufus Thomas - Walking the Dog

Dance-oriented 60's soul made for an everyday good time: the title track's throaty, emphatic delivery of nursery rhyme lines pretty much says it all. A popping backing from the Stax house band keeps beat behind Thomas's powerhouse voice: half Bo Diddley's yooooowl, half James Brown's heeay! It might seem like frivilous stuff, but dude's all in. It's a fun tromp, even if it sounds a bit samey by the end 3.5/5

#1032 DJ Rashad - Double Cup

I'm told this is a footwork album, surely the most fucked-up music ever made to dance to. I'm old as fuck.

Backstory aside, this album's pure skitterey minimalism, each song working with different mincings of the same sort vocal sample, chopping the same beat at as many angles as possible, all riding on the same album-wide 4-chord progression that reappears again and again, slowed down, sped up, skittering, extruded, diluted, melted and bent. There's prefuse crinkleup around every corner, jacked into seemingly arbitrary origami roadmaps, but underneath it's a stone soup of samples and acid house squiggles, seemingly no more than a dozen or two, just sent again and again through the wringer. That re-re-re-construction makes for a difficult listen, but that 4-chord backbone elevates it - each track's a kaleidoscope section of the same post-apocalyptic landscape 3.5/5

#1031 The Sonics - Boom

More choice R&B revival proto-garage rock from the Sonics. This is rougher, tougher, more frantic than Here Are the Sonics, but it lacks that honed edge and punchy delivery - nothing here cuts quite as hard as Strychnine or Psycho. This is the cooler, more diverse, but ultimately less exciting of the two Sonics LPs 3.5/5

#1030 Tom Waits - Mule Variations

Here, even more so than usual, Waits get by on details - on atmosphere, on personality, on the creaks and groans and sub-note croaks that pepper his songs. The highlights are the stompers, the drunken staggerers, the songs that play up Waits' demented, chaotic side, while the ballads are weathered and soulful but not altogether inspiring. Between them its a lurching skeleton, heavy with years, prickling with secrets, full of crypic lines and broken melodies, inspiring curiosity and sadness and release 4/5

#1029 Shark? - True Waste

Shark? update the Strokes / Interpol new-york-post-punk sound with a transcoastal trip through summerey cool, finding the middle ground between detached leather jacket cache and stoned boardshorts blase. The thrum thrum thrum thrum chug chug chug chug moan moan moan moan formula's down to a T, but crossed by handclaps, surflines, and Surfer Blood burstopen choruses - all beach-ready enough to find its way onto GTA V's socal stoner rock radio station. It's a disorientingly winning combination, letting just enough sunlight into the club to keep things bright, staggering with just enough swagger to keep you guessing 4/5

#1028 The Future of the Left - How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident

Cynical, sneering, self-referential, generally unpleasant, truly an album for our time! The riffs are heavy, the lyrics incisive from time to time, the songs even hooky, but it's no fun at all, too busy tearing down to build much of anything 2.5/5

#1027 The Men - Immaculada

This is where The Men laid the blueprint for Open Your Heart, one of the best albums of 2012. All the parts are here, the noisy meandering, the atmospheric drones, the hardcore screamfits, the brief glimpses of honest to god rock and roll. The parts are structured all backwards though, leading with the artiest gestures and then settling into some comparatively traditional 90's underground-flecked rock, an inversion of the usual pop record structure that you can't help but respect, before closing with a breakneck title track climax in a style all their own.

The album's every kind of nascent, lacking any cohesive plan, but that gives it all that ramshackle punk edge. It's thrilling to hear a band respectful of rock but unwed to any particular notion of how to use it, thrashing with abandon against Can via Sonic Youth, evoking inconsistent legends like Wild Mountain Nation and African Majik, forging its own little slice of skittery strange 4/5

#1026 The Men - Campfire Songs

If you release an album of songs recorded live around the campfire, you're going to have to get by on atmosphere and feel. For the most part, this one does.

Five repetitive, textured songs churn and flicker and outline the night. Nothing much happens, a cloud of acoustic guitars merges and evolves in increments, but it strangely works as an extension of The Men's atmospheric, repetitive post-punk side, as acoustic versions of songs you might find on the second side of one of their recent albums. The final track in particular captures a certain eternal, grasping hoping spirit.

If you want rock and roll, look to another of their albums. If you want nostalgia for a moonlit night you never lived, this is better than most 3.5/5

#1025 RJD2 - More Is Than Isn't

Doesn't much feel like there's anywhere left to go in instrumental hip hop. RJD2 tries to keep his sound sounding fresh by spreading its wings genre-wise: check the See You Leave -> Descended from Myth 4-track stretch that spans deep soul, jazz, hard-edged funk, Outkast-via-Basement-Jaxx R&B, and Jason Forrest maximalist mashism. It's a fun, eclectic, energetic mix that works more in mixtape moments than as an album whole - there's none of that sense of exploring an emotional or musical landscape that the best instrumental albums bring. Some highlight tracks, and a showcase that RJD2's still got some tricks, but the fact he showed them all off makes for a whiplash listen 3/5

#1024 Darkside - Psychic

Finally! Maybe this is the payoff for all the horseshit aimless experimentalism we've been suffering though for the last couple of years: Darkside has weaponized it and made something magical, nicking snatches of The Field's overminimalism, Oneohtrix's detuned wobblefuckery, Radiohead's most far-fetched deconstructions, Daft Punk at their most icy, bouncing off of half a dozen other points of reference and arriving at an evocative, inviting, haunting masterpiece.

This plays by scant few established rules, but it's decidedly listenable, using distant samples, searing vocal twists, warm Rhodes, and that unstoppable analog bass, especially that bass, to stunning effect, again and again and again. You'll find yourself falling in love with it even as you struggle to understand why. The music straddles the line between post-rock and experimental electronica but rises without any of the heavy lifting those scenes tend to demand, coming on like a mysterious stranger sweeping away your inhibitions.

There're guitars, but they don't exactly play riffs. There're drums, but the don't exactly play beats. There're vocals, but they're barely singing. And yet it gets in you like rock, landing somewhere between Dark Side of the Moon and Endtroducing. It's like academic software engineering out there: everybody's inventing new languages, Darkside's one of the few that's saying something 4.5/5

#1023 Forest Fire - Screens

A massive improvement over their underwhelming previous album; maybe this is what Forest Fire was going for. This time out, the tuneful buzzes extend tendrils past the first track and find fertile grounds, providing intriguing textural twists. This time out, the slithery pacing works, building intimacy and atmosphere, all on the backbone of those unstoppable, serpentine basslines. The epic-length Annie, in particular weaves a hynotic, krauty web out of endless bass, crisscrossing synths, and Yo La Tengo drone solos. A compelling, moonlit little gem of an indie rock record 4/5

#1022 Forest Fire - Staring at the X

Forest Fire's second album starts off promisingly, with all those synths and zooropa echo guitars on the killer opening track, but then it just settles into a kind of listless simmer. Maybe the band's trying to exude cool, or evoke detachment, but it only inspires boredom, everything too slow and too sparse to maintain interest 2.5/5

#1021 Marty Marquis - Switched On Goodbye Bread

Listen here!

Cute trick. Marquis accurately and playfully recreates one of Ty Segall's (lesser) albums with naught but old synths. The tones are warm and the rhythms nuanced, but this captures little of the album's resigned fury and provides little interest as a standalone piece 2/5

#1020 The Field - Yesterday and Today

The Field lives up to its name: as uniform and understatedly beautiful as a grassy one, as uncaring and unknowable as a magnetic one. This is loop-based electronica wholly of itself, an artifact with only a passing interest in being listened to. Consider Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime, a song that builds and drops and builds and drops, suggesting a larger-scale arc, but defying the expectation, all one step forward one step back, ending up where it started and mocking your anticipation otherwise. Leave You pulses in place for a few minutes before enticing with a roving bassline, but even that is used to betray anticipation of outcomes never to arrive.

A curiosity, to be sure, even intriguing in its way, but unwelcoming to the point of rudeness, an elegance-draped vampire that won't deign to seduce you, lurking slender and distant for hours and hours and hours before disappearing in a wink 3/5