#1250 War - War

War was finding itself about now, drawing on a lot of the styles circa 1971: some Funkadelic funk, some Mayfield soul, some early Sly positivity, plus some uniquely striking moments (that horn scream on War Drums!). The resulting brew's snakily unpredictable, curiously compelling, listenable, lulling and finding backdoors into the half-listener's subconscious. Evidence: I'm giving this a good rating and I'm not altogether sure why - it's got its hooks in and I like it 4/5

#1249 Prins Thomas - Prins Thomas III

I got into Prins because of his propulsive, Krauty, rockist debut, but he hasn't quite found that groove again. This is near-ambient at times, the beats're static, the basslines scarce. It's playful, agreeable as background music, but lacks that muscle, that can't-stop-walking-ever-ever energy that I came on board for 3/5

#1248 Elton John - Madman Across the Water

This is the first Taupin-era Elton John album I've found that sounds like you might expect: like one man wrote the lyrics and another put them to song. Worse, it feels like afterwards a committee of dozens carelessly dolloped strings over top. After the excellent two opening tracks the whole thing settles into hookless, forgettable muck - not one of his strongest efforts 2/5

#1247 The Knack - Get the Knack

This can't quite decide what it wants to be: broadly agreeable in a Thin Lizzy / Paul McCartney kind of way, or arch and new wave in an Elvis Costello kind of way. The result is a tease: rarely fun, rarely cool, riding the same basic chorus-hook too hard, with few surprises along the way. Except My Sharona, which is fun, cool, surprising, deservedly a hit, absolutely an outlier on this otherwise forgettable album 2.5/5

#1246 Elton John - Honky Chateau

This is funkier than you're probably expecting, with scant little emphasis on romantics, taking Tumbleweed Junction's brushy Americana to ragged, hard-hitched heights. Rocket Man's still a classic, but a red herring - this is a strangely small album, more man in a band rockin' at a piano than that song's operatics would suggest. Impetuous, charming stuff 3.5/5

#1245 Young Marble Giants - Colossal Youth

Super-spare post-punk indie-pop. Get yer hypens!

Stripped to the bone, this fits the mold of those "tiny bands Kurt Cobain loved" like the Raincoats, the Frogs and (shudder) the Shaggs - super personal, a little uncanny, not altogether musical. Drum machine taps it out, Alison Statton coos, that rad, weird, hard-plucked bass bangs out the angles, organs tap and drone. It sounds like a lot here, but it adds up to so little sound on the record. It's occasionally pretty (Wurlitzer Jukebox), occasionally funky (title track, Wurlitzer Jukebox again) a fascinating little artifact, not altogether enjoyable, but inspiring in its purity, that "anyone can make songs" indiepop thing on full display 3/5

#1244 Mudhoney - My Brother the Cow

Garagey, grungy rock with a painted-on sneer, halfway between Fuck You and Whatever. The basics hew obvious: slumpy tempos, crunchy guitar, nasal shouting; though somebody at least had the decency to ball this up and put some creases and kinks in to keep it a *little* unpredictable. Into Yer Shtik's the highlight and best example: a little startstop here, a little slide guitar there, a bottomdrop, doubletime bridge to cap it.

But even at its best, the album's stuck trying to drag its calves out of its own mudhole, too consistent and persistent in its sludgy chords and vague, punk-lite disapproval and checkdout disinterest to really spark your attention 2.5/5

#1243 The Breeders - Pod

When Kim Deal split off from The Pixies and joined The Breeders there was a reality fracture: in one timeline The Breeders took the Pixies' poppier, hookier trajectory to its logical conclusion and made the immediate, gratifying The Last Splash. In the other timeline, they made an album that rejected the Pixies' melody and rage and stretched the arty tension to just-near-breaking, trucking in tension and eternally unresolved anticipation. Somehow we're living in some gagglefuck timeline where both happened.

Pod's most natural point of comparison is Sonic Youth: these songs simmer and twitch near-imperceptably. And while they don't commit SY-hard to static structures, the climaxes that they foreshadow come in halfpowered, upside down, or not at all, everything stewing and smoldering. It's a fascinating as an artifact, but it's damned unpleasant to listen to, an exercise in denial. I'd rather just get the payoff 2.5/5

#1242 Talk Talk - Spirit of Eden

There was no linear progression for Talk Talk, it was just an acceleration right off a cliff: after the hints of experimental expansiveness on Colour of Spring, this next album jumped right into wholehearted meandering minimalism. It's ambient, atmospheric, tense, barely there, that distant muted trumpet a recurring theme, with only the occasional burst of pent-up energy. Far more here to admire than to enjoy, it takes some nerve to make an album this sparse out of nowhere, and a little bit to listen to it too 3/5

#1241 Beastie Boys - To the 5 Boroughs

I recently called Hello Nasty an instrumental hip hop album that happened to have rapping on it and I meant it as a compliment: the dense, twisty, funky instrumentation was its brilliant center.

This a complete retreat, a straight-up hiphop album, like the Boys were concerned that they weren't being taken seriously as actual rappers. The production's old-school, dead simple, one beat with some drops, one or two core loops looping onandon and rap rap rapping. Even the subject matter's a call back to hiphop proper, about where you're from, how you're a good rapper, how the 2nd person sucks at rapping, about politics and important stuff, shout out to your deli and your inspirations. And zero songs about robots.

It's fine: loose, playful, occasionally charmingly clumsy, occasionally distractingly clumsy, a perfectly enjoyable listen, but it's no match for the wild invention of its predecessor. It was the Beasties' wild genre-smashing and rampant hookiness that won me over, take that away and you've got 3 pretty good MC's and one pretty good DJ and 3/5

#1240 Larry Heard - Alien

Super-minimal electronic blipping and sustaining that sure is patient, just spooling up a loop and letting this and that wander in and out of its own accord, maybe trying to build atmosphere, but mostly wringing out a vacuum.

I don't know what the hell you do with this, its barely there, nothing to grasp when you listen close, providing nothing when floating around as passive noise, not even working as ambient. Its a pet cloud that just sits in the corner of the ceiling, looking mildly hungry, providing no hint as to what it eats, subtly cluttering up the place 1.5/5

#1239 Talk Talk - The Colour of Spring

This is mostly interesting as backstory: there's hints here of what Talk Talk would do on Laughing Stock, their impossibly patient, otherworldly masterpiece.

It's not all that weird just yet: most of these songs have proper beats, reasonably normal instrumentation, and might just sound like regular old soft rock if not for...something? I assume it's the improvisational recording approach that accounts for the pacing, the molasses structures, the time-melting feel that puts the album on the fringe of the pop/rock sphere.

Interesting doesn't equal good though, "historically interesting" even less so. This doesn't work: it's not quite art, not really listenable, the strangeness all a little affected, and (most damningly) Mark Hollis's voice is still overinflected to hell and back, but if you're into later Talk Talk it's an interesting little crumb on the trail 2.5/5

#1238 David Bowie - Earthling

Somebody should have told Bowie you can't sing over breakbeats. The generally-accepted knock on this album is that it sounds like Bowie's singing over a completely unrelated track, and its true.  You're not going to be able to keep up unless you're shouting / rapping / generally matching the hard edges (see Chemical Brothers, Prodigy) or keeping it sample-short clipped (take California). If you're showing up with a laconic croon as slow as Bowie's and slap it over galloping boombiddybaps its going to sound like you have no idea what you're doing.

The songs that work, and there's only a few, skip the whole jungle angle. Looking for Satelites rides a triphop groove that actually kind of works, and album highlight Seven Years in Tibet surges in dissonant tensions and bursts in pre-TV on the Radio glory, full of pulsing horns and crashing guitar grind climaxes. The album closes with I'm Afraid of Americans and Earthlings on Fire which belie the incompetence of what came before: they're not great, but at least they seem to have some basic understanding of how to make a song that sounds like a song.

You can't show up and mutter over breakbeats and call it an album. You just can't. Or if you do, you're going to get accused of lazily jumping on the latest sound without innovating on it, let alone getting what it's about, which is pretty much what happened, and rightly so 2.5/5

#1237 Anoraak - Chronotropic

80's synths, disco influences, funk guitars, rolling basslines and live-ish drums, on and on and on-ing, this sounds like limp leftover Kavinsky plus leftover dancepunk plus leftover RAM-era Daft Punk. There's no soul here, droning about sunglasses, summer, islands in the sun, while sounding like their opposite. Except maybe sunglasses, this is indoor nighttime sunglasses music, maybe good for a night drive if you're bored with everything similar that came out in the last couple years 2/5

#1236 Roxy Music - Avalon

Well, this is the trajectory these guys were pointed on. I thought their early Eno-era stuff (don't tell Roxy Music fans) was actually a little too odd and angular to enjoy, then they hit their stride melodically circa Country life, and then they got old and kinda pretty and barely there and just /fine/ on this, their last album. This is perfectly listenable, gliding along on synth cloudbeds, clicking along under Ferry croonin', pretty, very pretty, useful as background music to low-key life moments, but nearly completely forgettable 2.5/5

#1235 Final Conflict - Ashes to Ashes

Hardcore punk with a lot of the fast bass runs and slashy guitars you might associate with thrash, this is nonstop, blistering, brutal stuff. Cross listenable Bad Brains with listenable Slayer and you're most of the way there - though I use listenable pretty goddamn loosely, this is relentlessly harrowing shit 3.5/5

#1234 Thee Oh Sees - Drop

It's an Oh Sees album alright - that endless chug, the looping, loping bass, those squalls of guitar noise, those cooing falsettos, now with more little touches of organ and horn, now with less of the meandering nothing experiments. This is distilled Thee Oh Sees, getting that muscular Krautey, Velvetey-via-Liarsey sweet rotting flesh noisome stomp good and toned for Summer, its their most consistent album yet: their first that's completely listenable front to back, with nothing as thrilling as The Dream or I Come From the Mountain (though Penetrating Eye's growing on me). That consistency will probably get this more plays on my player than many of their better albums, but I still find myself wishing there was a little more excitement to be found 3.5/5

#1233 Electric Light Orchestra - Time

Even ELO must have felt out of ideas circa Discovery (see previous review), because on their next one they went for it and made something thrilling and beautiful and strange. This is ELO with a harder electronic tack, a more overtly futuristic set of themes, a real sense of unease from a century away, an actual spark through the backbone.

Grandaddy cites this as a reference for The Sophtware Slump and that shows all right - if you inspired an album about the terrifying present via a 20-years-previous album about the terrifying future, you're doing something right. Shades of Flight of the Knife here too, while we're on the subject. Yours Truly, 2095, in particular, is a revelation - that swooping structure, that blippity backline, those off-center verses, that chillingly welcoming/alienating storyline.

Unfortunately, the album's also ferociously front-loaded, with the backside dropping much of what made those first four or so tracks so exciting, but it still all works, because those songs are so good, because they set the stage to give every more-standard ELO song that follows an uncanny tilt, a slowly lilting rocket to nowhere 4/5

#1232 Electric Light Orchestra - Discovery

Around now it sounds like ELO is out of tricks, everything getting a little mushy and overdone, with too much disco, too much easy McCartney melodicism, too little ambition and scope. Horace Wimp has some striking drop-hit-swoop-swoon dynamics and structures, but being buried on the graves of Mr. Blue Sky and A Day in the Life makes it hard to rock along unhaunted. Nothing else here really distinguishes itself, not even lesser single Don't Bring Me Down - if there'd never been an ELO album before this'd be decent (but still derivative). As it is, there's too little new to bother with 2.5/5

#1231 David Bowie - Pin Ups

Come at this as a Bowie album and you're likely to be a little disoriented, if not disappointed - this is all mid-60's Brittish rock, itself a lot of 50's R&B revival, which is to say, the opposite of Bowie's usual future-defining lean.

If you're a hard fan of that block of 60's rock, you might call this an abomination: there's little of the grit and punch of the era left, with that slinky, sleazy smooth sheen, all crooning and backing vocals and glammy surface smothering it.

If you're a fan Bowie AND of that block of 60's rock, this is a curious delight, a bizarro peek at the era that might have been, a fun series of covers by a talented musician, a middleground hybrid that doesn't quite accomplish anything, that never really comes into its own, but fills in the gaps in the map of what rock is capable of 3.5/5

#1230 David Bowie - Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

I felt bad I hadn't heard this one either, but it's Bowie's /fourteenth/ studio album. Lotta ground to cover.

This's a swing back towards soul-flecked pop after the Berlin trilogy, with some of that same Eno-y crunch (though Eno wasn't actually involved) and that same (actual) Robert Fripp guitarwork, and I say pop only out of contrast because there's more melodicism and backbeats and all: this is still weird, full of future terror and gritty resentment and glitchy texture. There's actually a tremendous amount to like in the details, even if the memorable moments (title track, Ashes to Ashes) are scarce. Understated, solid, solidly second-tier Bowie 3.5/5

#1229 Prince - Purple Rain

Hahahah. Wow, I thought I was done with the era of "how have I not heard this before" embarrassment, like I'd heard all the biggies by now. But watching a (FUCKING INCREDIBLE) video* of Prince first performing the title track in a weird live-to-canonical-album-version move made me go "have I really not heard this shit??"

Wow.

Amazing.

Title track is beyond words.

Everything else is also killer, impossibly well put together. Sexy, vulnerable, angular, brilliant, everything I liked about My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, say, but better. The electronics, the guitar solos, the singing, the pacing, the sexiness, the vulnerability, so much of them both I mention them twice, it's sweeping and bracing and stunning. One of the best albums I've heard in ages, I can't believe it took me this long to come across it. It's a crime. If you're future-complicit in the same via not having heard this, plea up, get out, listen now, repent, weep, repent, and love. Great, legendary, peerless shit. Great great great 5/5

* here for now, though they're pretty aggressive about taking this down these days

#1228 White Denim - Corsicana Lemonade

Splitting the difference between Fits' angular spasism and Last Day of Summer's breezy laconics, this is hitched, breezy, hooky rock, herking in a straight line to the closest point of contact via unpredictable paths, slow-motion sonic lightning. There's a Steely Dan / Thin Lizzy melodicism, a Black Keys crunch, and all manner of jazzy flourishes, soulful dips, and left turns that read as the the only way to get where you end up, bopping and grinnin, relaxed and tense and not knowin why 4/5

#1227 Bass Drum of Death - Bass Drum of Death

Big garagey crunch and godfist riffs from the school of Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees, with a hooky, surfey touch that keeps the head bobbing and the toe tapping. Less adventurous, more consistent than the others on the scene, this is still pretty must-listen shit if you like rock and roll. This is what's happening right now, a dead-necessary counterpoint to all that watery electronic 00's indie doubledowning goin around 4/5

#1226 Ash - 1977

Classic britpop: young, fun, pop-punk 3-chord bounce with the occasional swooping crooner, the occasional metal grinder. The themes are light grasping the heavy, the guitars are full of crunch, the vocal hooks are hooky as heck. I'm too old for this to be anything more than good headbobbing, daytripping music, but if this'd caught me Mellon Collie-style and planted some teenage season seeds? This might well be one of my favorite albums and I'd be swaying hopeless to Oh Yeah solos by now 3.5/5

#1225 Amos Lee - Mountains of Sorrow, Rivers of Song

Vocals-focused big soulful country-tinged folk with lots of melodic sway and sweet harmonies, deep ethereal stuff that reminds me of Songs Ohia. Some of it's a little tacky, a little 6th Avenue Heartache, but most of it actually rings true, cracking my country-hardened heart here and there 3/5

#1224 Little Dragon - Ritual Union

God I feel like I'm saying this once a week these days: more of the usual synths + ladies thing. This at least has those minimalist, retro synths and spacious rhythmic pacing, giving it a weird tense kinda cool, as the beats clip basic, the drones drone with patience, everyone shy in the mix. Still not my thing, but at least it's doing its own thing 3/5

#1223 Seasick Steve - Hubcap Music

First of all, ever since Double Nickels I'm a sucker for a car-starting intro. After that things get bluesey and simple, with some of that Black Keys / newer-Jack White distortion and attack, a little rockist edge, a little bit of stuff shifting out of pattern to keep you on your toes. On one hand, there's nothing altogether new here. On the other hand, this guy's 70-something, and dammit that matters. Knowing that when you listen to this gives it echoes and legitimacy that you just can't buy. Shouldn't matter. Does. 3.5/5

#1222 Cloud Nothings - Attack on Memory

There's some of what I loved about their newer one on this, its predecessor: those motorik drums, those chuggy // stabbyfunk guitar, that railing against the everyday. But here it's much more emo, more exhausted and exhausting, still pulling a leg or two from the much before the soaring to come. Separation's a blast, and Wasted Days is kind of brilliant, weaving 9-minute tension around minimalist emo "I thought I would be more than this" x 100 --- but mostly this is for sinking rather than rising, a stepping stone of state on the way to some real good motion 3/5

#1221 Grouplove - Spreading Rumours

Grabs from everywhere it can to make maximalist pop, full of shoutalong anthems, angular guitars, and electronic flourishes - it's Matt and Kim gone big. There's something a bit obvious about some of the moves, like they're following the map of the human jump-jump response, with some of that Polyphonic victory-through-numbers strategizing, but I'm not a jaded old shell just yet: I like it, it's got some of that giveafuck Dananananakroyd energy. By the end it's dragging, you can only fire afterburners for so long before it just feels like a commute, but that acceleration's a thrill, full of blastoffs and two-wheeled turns 4/5

#1220 Washed Out - Paracosm

Impossibly laid back, this is spacier, less anthemic than their last one, and better for it, riding a Hawaiian bounce into endless sunsets. This is more firmly what it is, embracing sub-song wash and roll, instead of trying to be indie-rock too. Assured.

Still. There's not a lot here, everynote wishy washerey in place of melodies, a gossamer haze that passes through you in waves and waves and gone. It reminds me of hearing MGMT in San Francisco years ago and weeping for the state of music taken over by non-music - it's pretty, but it's all surface, nothing that you can carry with you out of the dream 3/5

#1219 60 Ft. Dolls - The Big 3

God, there's this weightlessness to those riffs, to those vocals, everything just whips like well-designed paper planes to the heart of the matter. The bones of Gang of Four and the Clash are on display here, that punk/post-punk angular, athletic shouting against the crushing quo of the banal. The drums are thin and low, the bass low and low, but those guitar lines weave around it all, propulsive and pointed. It's a lot of fun, simple like the best of punk but as melodic as after-punk, angry, but finding the fun in the anger, full of head-bobbing, fist-pumping moments 4/5

#1218 Rufus Zuphall - Phallobst

Straightforward Krautrock that's more Jethro Tull than Can, and not just because it's got flutes a-flyin': this is full of killer riffs, straightforward vocals, and hard edges, deigning to outright rock with the fury that'll spur purists to sniff in indignation. There's little minimalism or hard experimentalism, just those garagey piledrivers driven with ballerina grace, the jazziness coming in the way that those riffs simmer and explode with Beat energy. It can be a little formless and hard to follow, but when it coalesces it capitalizes on all that contrast and the hits come extra hard. Exciting, inventive, jammy stuff 4/5

#1217 Todd Terje - It's Album Time

Love this, one of my favorite electronic albums I've heard in a long while. Wildly playful, with sparking island cool, pinpricks of energy in a thousand forks and glasses and sequins one moment, and then shooting off into the night through neon highlights. And then its back bossa nova, and you dance in sunlight off seaside and then its twinkling on and on again through windshields. Spinning in place, then wheeling off to somewhere, then frollicking and rolling and back and forth Ladyhawkian before the dance and the night collide in the final track. It's perfectly paced, spanning hours and hours in the tidy memory of minutes spent living moment to moment 4.5/5

#1216 Sepeltura - Schizophrenia

Yesss, this is what I want from thrash. Wall to wall sound, blistering guitars, splintering-eternal drums, vocals that wring a writhing backbone without embarrassing themselves. Relentless, surprising in the odd moment, mostly shifting//tectonicunderneathyou, the better to open chasms to eternity. Slot this right alongside Reign in Blood as go-to Fuck This music 4/5

#1215 Jackson and His Computer Band - Glow

Wildly varied electronic music that isn't exactly dancable, not quite IDM, not exactly for armchairs, sounding only sporadically like the rock music like you might expect from the nominal "band". It's more like a soundtrack to an alternate reality cool 80's, like an electronic concept album that's willing to knock off genre-imposed beat and instrumentation expectations, more Bryan Scary and Grasscut than Daft Punk. The lack of cohesiveness keeps this from really transcending, but it's never boring: the beats are willing to blister, the synths willing to get legitimately nasty, the whole approach bending to unseen will 3.5/5

#1214 Disclosure - Settle

Big hard beats with soul underneath and among very-looped vocals, everything minimal, tuned towards songness, like Fatboy Slim regressed back into calcified legitimacy. There's a bodyrockerey here, and some expressive, effortless synthwork, but there's also something tuneless lurking in all the crannies, something detuned, something offkilter and uncannily deformed that puts my teeth on edge, that makes me tense without catharsis, a vibrating bus seat for 400 miles. Want to like it, can't 2/5

#1213 Warpaint - Warpaint

When you see overlaid images of ladies on an album cover you know what you're in for in 2014: ladies singing over ethereal instrumentation. This at least takes it a step farther: even the singing is rendered ethereal, voices coming and going at wildly different volumes and spatial velocities, so that it's often not so much a duet or harmony or chorus, but a series of ghostly presences wheeling about eachother.

And it kind of works. And at least someone's trying to nudge this staid genre a notch. It wears out its welcome and disappears into itself by the end, but at least you've got atmosphere, rolling bass, and some glimmer of innovation to warm yourself by while you slip away 3/5

#1212 The Wood Brothers - The Muse

There's a dead simplicity to these country-folk-flavored songs - fundamental structures that do nothing but make simple, bluesey rotations on fundamental sentiments (I got drunk, if you're sad sing about it) with almost no embellishment lyrically or otherwise. But there's none of that fire and actual feeling I associate with the blues, its all a bit casual and overtwangy. This is "things're ok" blues, and I sure can't find the point.

The production is almost too perfect, with every little nuanced captured, but the songs are so so simple that it's just dead boring on a per-song and album-long level both 2/5

#1211 J Roddy Walston and The Business - J Roddy Walston and The Business

Full-throated shoutin' rock and roll with a boogie bounce, sounding not unlike the Stones at their most upbeat with a shreddy, arena-ready guitar streak over top. Great fun for a while, but the oversimple, shouty thing gets exhausting long before the album's over 3/5

#1210 Cloud Nothings - Here and Nowhere Else

With all the shitty, waterey, no-note electronic indie out there you come to expect a certain sound from a band called "Cloud Nothings". But do allow yourself to be surprised! I'm using the word "propulsive" a lot, but this shit will fill your robot heart with rocket fuel, just perfectly designed to wind you up and flip you skyward with a hup! and fill your sails with wind and land you on an aircraft carrier speeding towards the stars. This shit moves; it's thrilling, full of insanely busy drums motoring a flailing storm of guitars chords, all the curves handled with graceful sparks on the guardrails. Highly recommended to fans of fast-paced, highly-textured rock 4.5/5

#1209 McChurch Soundroom - Delusion

Big, heavy, downtuned jams, loping along, sounding a beat too slow, coming in from out of a haze with an affected slink. This is serious stoner rock, heavy metal influences rendered jazzy and melodic, with rolluping bass and skitterey drums and pulsing organs as scenery, shrill, sprightly, breathy flute runs as the protagonist. If you're looking to space the fuck out, this'll do yah, but on most days I like my arty rock a little more lively 3/5

#1208 Typhoon - White Lighter

I was pretty underwhelmed by their first album, but these guys found another gear here, getting into late Modest Mouse / Wolf Parade / Polyphonic Spree kind of huge fist-pumping / fingers grasping at the heavens kind of stuff with some big moments for getting your heart all sweptupinta.

Wolf Parade in particular comes to mind - I love me some Apologies to the Queen Mary, and this has some of that raw-nerve electricity. With more horns. It demands a little more time to worm around in my veins, but in the meantime I have to admit these emo motherfuckers have my attention 3.5/5

#1207 Break Science - Seven Bridges

Maximalist riff-driven electronica over breakbeats and breaky programming with hints of hip hop, there's good texture, and some genuine excitement here, but its all puffed to 11, to the point of ridiculousness. If you can deal with your beats and bass and vocals and borderline-dubsteppy drops and swerves pushed into technicolor excess, you'll find a lot to love here 3/5

#1206 Jon Batiste and Stay Human

As I said when taking notes for my upcoming Bonnaroo jaunt:

Jazz, but all over the place, with some ragged bop and new orleans swing, a little poppy and douchey, but they feel like a band that knows how to put on a good live show.

I think that about sums it up. You sense that Batiste's a legitimate musician making populist overtures, and the result is a strange brew that's enjoyable and interesting, but not as much of either as it would be it had committed to one or the other. Still, I recommend it mildly, if nothing else because it keeps things unpredictable as it wheels so readily between sparse solo showcases, lightly experimental explorations, and knotty little jamups 3.5/5

#1205 La Santa Ceclilia - Someday New

Vocal-driven latin rock with a bit of bounce and a bit of sway, croonin along real pleasant-like. Marisol's voice is nice enough, she's got pipes and nuance both, and tracks like Ven A Mis Brazos have a wiry energy, while Someday, Someday New gets mileage out of big nasty New Orleans horn rips and poofy organs pulses. A small, energetic, poppy little pleasure with just enough psychedelic edge to keep it interesting 3.5/5

#1204 Classixx - Hanging Gardens

Things start off so promising on that opening title track, that ultimate of stage-setting archetypes, defying expectations of dance music. The beat doesn't even start to flirt with creeping in until 2:00, sticking out a tentative handclap or two, before finally settling into a slowmo swaying unts...clap...unts...clap, while synths swirl full portamento over peppermint skies.

But afterwards things settle into pretty straightforward beats with pretty uninspiring synth wiggles over top, sounding like the same old M83-toos and backseat Drive soundtrackers and Daft Punk re-ripoffers, bottoming out in that miserable little pitchshifter A Fax From the Beach. It's fine, its just all a bit thrice-baked by now 2.5/5

#1203 Cass McCombs - Big Wheel and Others

A sprawling 22-songer, all over the map, as long as that map is loosely of a region of country-flecked, pop-tinted, singer-songwriter indie rock. But given that map of that particular region? Alloverit, like Stephin Merritt or UNPOC or Beck straddling his most adventurous acoustic and most pedestrian electric sides. It's a little overpretty, a little overclever, a little underclever, but an enjoyable trip for working, driving, or doing anything that can distract you from the little something or another it's lacking 3.5/5

#1202 Haerts - Hemiplegia

Everybody wants to be M83 in the long 2013, and ladies singing in particular are hot hot hot, so here you go, straight from the church of Chvrches, big 80's beats and spooky crooning building to climaxes. Also, jesus, kids with these twee-ass bandname spellings, what are we, on the internet in 1997? Amiright? And that's an ill omen for how old this listen's gonna make you feel unless you just started listening to music, like, yesterday: there's not that much sincerity here, almost nothing new, and even the climaxes are the kind that make you tired of all this sleeping around 2.5/5

#1201 St. Paul and the Broken Bones - Half the City

A legit soul shouter, with croonin' chops to boot, this dude's got a killer voice and wailing energy, channeling everyone from James to Curtis to Al. There's blues pain here and sincere catharsis and joy to follow, with pretty kickin horn and rhythm sections to boot - what more could you ask for? 4/5

#1200 Blank Range - Phase II EP

Low key, dragging bluesey drag with a pseudo-Dylan drawl, full of riffs and moves that rev up but never really get off the ground, counting on goodwill to make you bob along, Band of Horses gone small, Dr. Dog gone early Dr. Dog.

I'll bet your buds think you rule. If I was your bud, I'd probably think you rule. But I don't know you guys, you need to do a little more to win me over. I'm past post-caring 2.5/5

#1199 Embryo - Rocksession

Instrumental, jazz-flavored psyche jams - can you tell I've been on a bit of a Krautrock kick lately?

This is full of full-figured organs and lithe bass, all spatial and physical and winding. It's severely spacy, mostly aimless, but the sound is so full and busy and musical that it's never boring. The mix is perfect, every instrument in its own space, nobody stepping on eachother's toes, just clockwork interlocking by pure chance with remarkable consistency 4/5