#1113 Sweet Valley - Eternal Champ

Intricate, hooky sample-driven music that spans styles and means of appealing. Instrumental hip hop is the backbone, but the result is unusually active, melodic, and exciting; Eternal Champ is unafraid to whip out of a groove just to keep you on your toes, drawing on electronics, soul, hip hop, movies, video games and more. The only downside is the so-2012 wobbles and slurs, detuning notes in ways that annoy as often as they intrigue. But maybe that's just a necessary evil for making music this listenable so strange. Good stuff for weirdening up a long night or a long drive, you'll never be quite complacent listening to this, for better or worse 3.5/5

#1112 Brian Eno - Ambient 2 / The Plateaux of Mirror

More barely-there music from Eno, evoking mood with sounds that barely register as notes, so much do they ring and blend and bleed. A piano plink goes on forever, followed by a couple more, swimming in the sea of their ancestors' reverberations, sounding completely peaceful, still waters with thin fishes to follow if your mind wanders. There's nothing here as good as the first track on Ambient 1 / Music for Airports, but I always found all the vocals and strings on that album a bit much, a bit-unambient. This succeeds more fully in staying completely out of the way, nary a hard mark on a subtly textured watercolor wash. Beautiful, sparse stuff 4/5

#1111a Blue Oyster Cult - Secret Treaties

Here's where BOC sleekened up, everything getting leather-tight and swaggery, with hard-rock chops and switchblade glint, with a hint of glitter, with flashes of what 70's metal would become: songs about evil, dominance, submission, and harvesters of eyes, over guitars that can slink and slash with equal skill. It's a wooly, unpredictable, exciting little album that works its way out from under you again and again, clearly onto something, but cagey about letting you know just what 4/5

#1111 VA - Killed By Deathrock Vol. 1

What's uncanny is the way that this collection of 11 songs by 11 bands sound like the work of one, despite the fact they came from all around the world in the pre-internet 80's. The sound is post-punk with a tinny, cavernous atmosphere, encompassing desperate, shouty vocals, big bouncy bass, and clipped little beats, all clopping around a little overfast, a little overthin, all a little bent and twisted by time, an ex-addict's skeleton still reaching.

Today it doesn't really come across as all that scary or all that groundbreaking or all that interesting, but there's a thrill of history here. To make something this noisy, this industrial, this seething and slinking and seductive was a bold stroke, and it's worth a listen if you want a primer on music that surely influenced much of the gothy rock that came after 3/5

#1110 Rex The Dog - The Rex The Dog Show

A big beat electronic album of pop-length songs, focused more on well-crafted tones than on artsy tricks or lifechanging drops. Just good, clean synth loops packed into agreeable patterns over 4/4 thumps, completely enjoyable without making itself overmuch noticed, as simple and fun as the titular cartoon dog 3.5/5

#1109 MSTRKRFT - The Looks

Hard-disco electronica that's not afraid to indulge in some rockism, standing alongside the likes of Justice and Vitalic on the buzzy riffage podium. This will get your head bobbing, and even make it think about banging, which isn't too surprising given half of the duo's Death From Above credentials. Fun, noisy shit, just how I like it 4/5

#1108 Guerilla Toss - Gay Disco

A lazy album that likes the idea of noisy, spastic rock and roll without really bothering to figure out what makes it worth making. The squelch of Enon worked because it evoked the future. Satomi Matsuzaki gets away with her tuneless yelp because it reinforced the thrilling chaos of her backing band.  Ponytail can flip out like that because they make it fun.

Here it's just an analog squiggle, a pounded guitar chord, endless clipped-out shrieking, and about 3 changes per song. It hurts your ears, and it's not in service of anything else in particular. There's no message, no mastery, no fun. You can't just make your instruments make any noise you want, scream about "mary mary, quite contrary / why do you have to be so scary" and expect to earn any particular interest from this listener.

I'll tell you what, I accidentally started the Trumpeter Landfrey sample at the beggining of Balaklava in another player while I was relistening to this album, and it was a huge improvement. Finally something to focus on, something on top of this bed of aimless noise. Seems like kind of a bad sign 2/5

#1107 Pearls Before Swine - Balaklava

Another severely psychadelic album, most noteworthy because it has no drums at all, just voices and guitars and piano and horns and field recordings of veterans and birds and a damned bit of everything. But no drums.

There's plenty of folk out there that forgoes drums, but here we have all the ambition and scope of a full experimental psychedelic rock album, the kind of stuff that The Beatles and the just-reviewed The United States of America were doing. Not only that, there's not even a consistent rhythm guitar presence, allowing a democratic approach to timekeeping that undermines your ability to track tempo and the passage of seconds and minutes. Psychadelic folk, formless as it can be, still can usually be counted on for a tiptap on a bongo or something to track by. Even Tom Rapp's lispy delivery helps keep your grip on the moment slippery, climaxing in the harrowing tape experiment that rewinds the entire album back to start in a squall of squeals and screeches.

A little too strange, a little too unpleasant for its own good, but too fascinating not to recommend 3.5/5

#1106 Richard Youngs - Sapphie

The idea sounds so appealing: man goes to remote location with his guitar, records long (9, 9, 18 minutes. respectively) songs in a single-take and releases them without additional production. Pure music, man. The problem is each song is basically one guitar move, progressing through a couple of chords and circling back around, for its entire (long) length, with Youngs moaning over top. There's no particular progression, no moments that stand out, no moves or swerves at all, just pure, glacial minimalism. Which still might be appealing if not for 2 problems:

First, the guitar half of the songs is some pretty unexciting slow classical fingerpicking. It can be fun to tease apart how Youngs gets two independent-seeming lines to come out of one guitar, but again, its a trick per song, 3 for the whole album, and they're really all kind of variations on the same basic trick.

Secondly, and most damningly, this puts a lot of weight on the actual singing, and Youngs's yelp is charmingly untrained at best and a bleating paean to tunelessness at worst. The actual words are almost unintelligible, so you're left with this vague, unpleasant noise that is the only thing really going on on these songs. Heck, its so unpleasant it even wipes out the goodwill earned via the guitar's very occasional gestures towards evolution.

I admire its pure minimalism in the abstract, the bleak landscape it evokes, and I maybe even admire Youngs himself for making it, but this is music that should not be listened to by anyone with interest in enjoying themselves for the duration 2/5

#1105 U.N.P.O.C - Fifth Column

Ridiculously catchy indie rock, with the effortless tunefulness of The Magnetic Fields, the hyperlayered harmonies of The Beach Boys, and the low-key inventiveness of Josh Ritter and early Shins. Every song leads with a spot-on melodic backbone, and each has at least one twist, some swerve, some bridge, some shift that will excite and surprise.

Take closing track Nicaragua, which starts with a flinty, lilting vocal delivery over a spare, jangling guitar, slowly joined by romping bass, brushy drums, backing la-la's, leading into a double-strength second verse, and just when you think the whole thing's peaked, the bottom falls out. The guitar solo wheels in, then the bottom really drops out and you're floating on a single guitar line and the cavernous, terrifying bass drum kicks in, and the ending hypnotic drone-on comes and goes and shifts and sinks and by the end you've lost time, feeling like you've been through a 9-minute masterpiece but it all happened in half that, and with none of the effort that kind of time infers. It's been a joy, a pure pop experience, somehow spiked with legendary-length proggy potency.

A wildly inventive album for how small it is, some strange piece of camera trickery that will thrill fans of early aughts indie 4.5/5

#1104 The Postman Syndrome - Terraforming

I don't rightly know who this album is for. Angsty music school kids? Where else do you find overlap on the Venn diagram of people who A) want puzzlebox song structures and time signature fuckery and B) have extremely high tolerance for deeply embarrassing, sub-Linkin Park metal screaming?

Every time you try to find something to appreciate, here comes that screaming. You listen to "The Hedgehog's Dilema: Chapter 2", and the song tips you off that something might be amiss, but you say hey, ok, this is kind of pretty, got kind of a Dismemberment Plan via Tool intro thing -

rrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

It's possible that you'll physically cringe. On the other side of the coin; how many people who want to listen to this kind of really impotent, wildly unsuccessful singing are interested in complex music. Maybe there's some overlap with fans of Coheed and Cambria, another band whose earthly existence I cannot fathom how to explain.

It happens again and again. It's the fly in your ointment, that singing. It's The Fly in your ointment. And it's the singing, and its also it's what the singining represents: a band that thinks it's way cooler than it is, this is total twonce rock. The Postman Syndrome is a perfectly passable, over-egged, emotional indie prog band, not the second coming of Slayer. If the guys understood that they could probably make a better album that this 2/5

#1103 The Gun Club - Fire of Love

Thrilling proto-psychobilly, ripping through roots, blues, and R&B-inspired songs with pure punk fury, painting manic, intricate portraits with hard-plucked bass, offkilter lyrics, and sliding, skittering guitars. And somehow, through all that reverence for tradition and rollicking energy, there's still room for an art-rock streak, groaning with post-Velvets tension and drone. Wildly original for the time, it's also a hell of a lot of fun now, good for long nights alone, long nights of poker, or long nights getting fucked up 4/5

#1102 The United States of America - The United States of America

A wildly psychadelic album, swirling through traditional pop, dixieland romp, hard 60's rock, and monastic harmonies. That diversity is disorienting enough, but it's all whipped around with extensive tape manipulation and post-production: every song has countless parts, entering, exiting, swirling all over one another, adhering to no obvious song-structure, sounding in retrospect like an obvious inspiration point for Olivia Tremor Control / Circulatory System, and then the entire thing folds back on itself during the final track mashup of everything that came before. Overbusy and bewilderingly unfocused, it's hard to say what's even happened when the album's over, but it was a trip 3.5/5

#1101 Sockeye - Retards Hiss Past My Window

Just check out those song titles and you'll know whether this is for you. Each of those 27 tracks pretty much does what it says on the tin.

And despite songs declaring that you should Buttfuque Your Own Face, or telling detailed tales of a Boy With Breast Implants, its not clear that this is an album that set out to shock. If you're shocked that's a side effect. Instead you get the impression of pure expression, created by some kids with very strange thoughts in their heads and zero fear about expressing them. Equally fearless is the songwriting, which recklessly blasts through spare ballads, experimental freakouts, and smashmouth punk rock with equal enthusiasm. These guys just do not give a fuck, think Ween or The Frogs if they were deeply twisted up inside and had even fewer filters.

Which puts this roughly in the same box as the profoundly unpleasant Shaggs album: you admire that someone made this, in theory, conceptually, but goddamn if you'll really feel the need to listen to it other than to know about it. The subject matter, the brattiness, the whiplash pacing, the general sloppiness: it's incredible that anyone could make this, but there's probably good reasons nobody else did 2.5/5

#1100 Vitalic - Flashmob

A banger of an electronic album, full of nasty, textured synths marshalled into hooky formations, driven by rock-solid beatmaking and structures that swerve without breaking the trancy flow. Dancable without being simplistic, noisy without being unlistenable, packed with exciting moments without being dropy or otherwise awful: basically this is everything experimental you liked off of Ok Cowboy made super fucking fun, skipping along at a sprightly clip. In other words, really goddamn good 4.5/5

#1099 Daedelus - Drown Out

The album art is telling, with its little man sinking to a drowned world, exploring or returning home or dying or...

Earlier Daedelus albums were steeped in history, in dusty details, in the analog crackle of the past, samples tripping past as memory. But on Drown Out, you enter a fluid and alien world, with beats that get lost in the larger rhythms, with notes that bleeed and blend. Sampling and looping are still part of the program, but where vintage records once formed the backbone, there's now a much greater reliance on buzzy tones, sequenced arpeggios, analog/additive/subtractive synths. Little stands out, there are few big moments, few strong melodies, just swoops and whorls that swoon and intersect, and in the end it doesn't quite work. It's not as hypnotic as more traditional ambient music, not as danceable as more traditional electronic music, and lacks the heart of more traditional instrumental hip hop. You can't help but admire the guy for trying to keep moving, but here he's lost the thread of what makes his great stuff great 3/5

#1098 Buena Vista Social Club - Buena Vista Social Club

Recorded in the 90's by musicians associated with the titular Social Club, this is a grand tour of music hot in Cuba in the 40's and 50's, when the club was in full swing.

The songs span a variety of tempos and styles, but the overall feel is one of bristling, hitched, clip-clopped Latin rhythms, sparkling with horns, rippling with acoustic guitars, and drenched in throaty, powerful vocals. It is a transportation to any number of times and places; it could be a night coruscating with city lights or a breezy day of splintering sun, but the music is fraught with place, relaxing and exciting and inviting and strange 4/5

#1097 Heart - Little Queen

Heart's second album is harder to love than it should have been. There's a problem of expectation here: their debut was a thriller, and leading off with the propulsive Barracuda cements the idea that you're in for a rip-roaring rock and roll ride. But this is actually a record of pretty, mildly experimental songs, from the analog throb of Sylvan Song to the start-stop rhythms of Say Hello. Kick it Out and Little Queen are the only two other uptempo songs, and they're nothing special, underpaced and undercommitted, distractions from the fact that this is an album with far more in common with Tusk than Houses of the Holy.

Taken on those terms, its an enjoyable, adventurous listen with a bit of an identity crisis 3.5/5

#1096 Bruce Springsteen - Darkness on the Edge of Town

Sweeping and majestic, Springsteen's fourth album was his first to fully descend into hopelessness. Compare the blank look on the cover Darkness on the Edge of Town to the giddy tension on Born to Run (and compare those titles, besides). Springsteen's albums had always been about escape, about ecstatic figures on a desolate ground. Those moments where the sun cracks the clouds are still around, but these are songs about the storm, about the darkness, not the town.

The album embraces it, with workmanlike post-mad dog drums dragging us onward to something worse, extolling the beauty of a fire that will consume the world. And along the way Bruce's voice soars, the music swelling huge, building a monument to a world too great and endless to notice us at all 4/5

#1095 Janis Joplin - Pearl

A staggering, rollicking, full-throated album, with Joplin's fixed-gear, full-speed voice rampaging front and center.  This is a towering funeral pyre to the 60's, recorded just months after the decade ended, and just months before Joplin herself died of a heroin overdose, drenched in organs, fat riffs, and oozing psychadelia.

The best and worst thing about this album is Joplin's voice itself. It's ferocious and peerless, and always on, always tearing itself apart at the seams, the life of the party that won't quit rocking till the sun's burning high, a force of nature that will exhilarate and exhaust you 4/5

#1094 Elvis Costello - My Aim is True

For most of his career after this debut, Costello kept a wry distance, sounding arch and self-aware, making music about the kind of music he was making. But here he's just making music! There's legitimate bile and frustration set to bouncy pub rock, an angry young man in the tradition of Nick Lowe and Graham Parker.

Don't be fooled - early on, Elvis C. the man was arguably a punk rocker, but there's only the barest whiff of punk on the album. Instead, this is tuneful, minimally threatening, mildly abrasive rock and roll played by a tight, rough little band, occasionally boring (Blame it on Cain), occasionally thrilling (Mystery Dance), and mostly somewhere in between 3.5/5

#1093 Prince - Dirty Mind

An album of razor-edge funk and electro R&B, full of clipped beats, synth stabs, and popping bass, Dirty Mind is a glistening machine built for sex. The sex is vocal of course, as Prince smashes into every taboo touchstone in sight. You get the distinct impression that Prince just does not give a fuck and that he also gives a fuck very, very much; a slinky hedonist with an insatiable desire and a fragile heart. The sex is in the music too though. It bounces with offset carnality, fleshy taffy pullers set to song.

It's all actually a lot of fun, most of the raunch reading camp by 2014, but with teeth that catch, like when Prince complains that his cheating lover "didn't have the decency to change the sheets". It'd be a good soundtrack for the right kind of party.

The fly in the ointment is Prince's reedy, taut falsetto, which buzzes and cracks unabated for the full half hour. If that's the kind of thing that gives you a headache, this might be a non-starter. But maybe you're into it. Or maybe you're not, but you're into flies in ointments. Whatever you're into, you know that Prince is into it too; maybe that's what makes this album such a fun date 4/5

#1092 Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral

I'd always found things to like in Reznor's texture experiments but didn't realize that he'd been this inventive this early. This is a surprisingly complex, detail-packed album, every song full of twitches  that defy earthly explanation, coalescing into notes that, against all odds, flow into honest to god songs. From static, guitars, synths, echoes, glitches, foley errors, misplaced bits, filters and the occasional bare moment of melody comes something bracing and beautiful.

The whole thing isn't nearly as terrifying as it wants to be, the years have taken its teeth. But it's still an intricate artifact to watch spin, never more so on the inexplicable, brilliant Closer. That song's still a minimalist-maximalist art-pop masterpiece.

It's not an approach that can sustain an album though. Outside of Closer, the instrumental A Warm Place, and the closer Hurt, the album's relentlessly overbusy, and by the halfway point the hyperdense pinpricks are numbing. What was an intricate puzzle to unwind on track 2 is has become exhausting and countlessly titchy by track 13. Restraint was never Reznor's strong suit, and his career ever after would retrace these steps, blowing past the perfectly-curated album into an unlistenable failed masterwork 3.5/5

#1091 The Rolling Stones - Tattoo You

A small pleasure of a Stones album, an unassuming little set of rockers, without much snigger or sneer or swagger once Start Me up is out of the way. Here's a band that doesn't seem all that desperate to prove anything, inspired-by but not overly shackled-to its R&B revival roots, just a band making some tunes, from the thrillingly skitterey doo-wop of Hang Fire to the proto-Radiohead shimmer of Heaven. Even Little T&A sounds ahead of its time, like an aughts band reviving a Stonesy stomp with a shiny modern click.

Separate this album from the band The Rolling Stones and what you've got is a perfectly good, light, fun little romp of rough-polished melody and tone 4/5

#1090 Blue Oyster Cult - Blue Oyster Cult

BOC's first album is about as straightforward as hard rock gets: throw down that riff, that big backbeat, that groaning moaning vocal line, verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-chorus-maybesecondsolo, repeat 10 times, boom, done. Nothing surprising here, few real swerves, no real insights, 3-4 minutes at a time and done. The beats get skitterey, the guitars amble with occasional angles, but it's mostly meat and potatoes rock, Led Zeppelin without the pretention, Deep Purple without the power, just some dudes who made a band doing what dudes in a band do and doing it reasonably well 3/5

#1089 Marillion - Misplaced Childhood

Landing somewhere between Rush and Journey on the artrock-poprock scale, this has all the trappings of prog (long songs, a smattering of strange time signatures, preposterous imagery, general indulgence) without really committing to them, instead padding them in shinny production, accessible themes, and pretty, major-chord guitarwork. It sounds dropped from an alternate universe where Peter Gabriel left Genesis and went big-guitar pop instead of little-synth icy.

And while you might be a little embarrassed to be heard listening to it, not least because of Fish's sub-Gabriel British emoting, if you're honest, its kind of... good. Pretty in places, inventive in others, all fairly safe, but never quite boring.

The fact that it's all so proto-emo, somehow less cool than deeply uncool prog itself, is offputting to say the least. But the underlying music is so shifty, shimmerey, and downright melodic its impossible to disregard altogether 3.5/5

#1088 Quicksilver Messenger Service - Happy Trails

So John Cipollina wanted to do some guitar solos, so they they laid down some Bo Diddley-inspired backing and off he went. And sometimes it blow up (midway through When Do You Love), and sometimes it smolders effectively (the first minute or two of Where Do You Love), and sometimes it just plain rocks (the big bass on Which Do You Love), but mostly it's meandering noodling and obnoxious stereo moves, the kind of thing people picture when they think of Grateful Dead, acid rock folded in on itself and right on down the navel. Probably a solid soundtrack for tripping your balls off, but there's not enough structure to make this a satisfying journey the rest of the time 3/5

#1087 Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - Going to a Go-Go

Sweet little R&B songs of love and fun, sung with androgynous splendor by Smokey himself, the miracles drenching every note in counterpoint. It's swinging, snappable stuff, low on surprises, high on big rich production, as Motown as Motown comes 3.5/5

#1086 Willie Nelson - Stardust

Nelson croons and croaks out the kinda-classics, bringing country twang and modest improvement to his covers of a dozen songs. The breadth of songs and underlying authors prevents the albumlong listen from settling into any kind of realfolks dusty groove, this's a series of performances, the Nelson show. If you're into him, the man the myth, this is a treat. If not, its a cute novelty that won't do much to excite or inspire 2.5/5

#1085 Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City

It's tough to talk about this album without mentioning Pitchfork's nail-in-the-coffin, grotesque overrating on its top albums list. Lindsay Zoladz tries to claim that the narrative of Vampire Weekend as pretentious twats is over, but I hear no evidence.

Let's concede, this is the band's catchiest record yet, packed with far more interesting ideas than their output thus far combined, with some really nice little production tricks peppered throughout. But it's still twiggy, reedy, effete, watery indie at heart, still readymade for target commercials and tearful Zooey montages. It's still by rich kids, for wannabe rich kids, even sounding like it was wildly expensive to make. That New York looms, a city in the clouds, on the album cover seems like a severe non-coincidence.

This still sounds like a rich kid's hobby put to tape, and no matter how many hooks and tricks and swerves you pack in, the album's still anathema to rock and roll, making it a cute trick at best, an intricate scale model of real music 3/5

#1084 The Fuzz - The Fuzz

Not to be confused with the girl group from DC, nor either of the two bands named Fuzz I reviewed last year, nor any of the other 8 bands you get when you google "the fuzz band". It's this album?

Whoever made this, they like the Stones via Supergrass, plenty of buzzy and (yes) fuzzy guitars, crunching along with impassioned calls from the frontman, with just a kick of propulsive, stompy adrenaline. Solid, sneering rock and roll without much left to say after the first 20 minutes or so, but agreeable enough that you'll let it thrash around your living room till it tires itself out anyway 3.5/5