#1270 Junior Senior - Hey Hey My My Yo Yo

More or less more of the same from this manic dance-party-pop duo: impossibly cheery hooks, dayglo synths, and big beats to which to move them feet. Delightful stuff, if a bit one note and wearying by the end. Pure caffeinated fun 3.5/5

#1269 Bryan Scary - Daffy's Elixer

A sprawling, bewildering collection of twisty prog-pop songs. This lacks the immediacy and cohesiveness of Flight of the Knife, but there's countless crannies to get lost in, with hooks down secret passages you overlooked on last listen. Fans of Fiery Furnaces and other knotted, catchy rock will find a lot to like 3.5/5

#1268 War - All Day Music

Accurate title!

This is a smooth, searching collection that skips between styles with grace, some P-Funk slow jams, some soaring soul, some Santana skitch-skitch, some gospel-into-reggae floatons, only really lighting up on the lively last track. Cool music for a hot day 4/5

#1267 Double Dagger - Double Dagger

Start-stop rhythms, angular basslines and deadpan shouting and all the usual markers of harder-edged postpunk are here, but it's not any fun to listen to and its arch, gimmicky "graphic design rock" angle taunts, song title after song title, that these are smug art kids making a racket. Even the guitarless lineup reads like a gimmick - they're no Lightning Bolt. Heck, they're not even Giddy Motors. If you're cooler than everything and post-post-jaded maybe this'll be your new favorite band, but I like my art-punk a little less on the nose 2.5/5

#1266 Herzog - Boys

First things first: this album's got hands down the best three-song opening salvo I've heard in //years//, one of the best ever, beating out holy-shit-this-album initial suckerpunches like They Threw Us All in a Trench and Put a Monument on Top and Sticking Fingers into Sockets. It's an absolutely joyous, instantly-memorable, irresistibly infectiously foottapping headbobbing holyfucking experience that anyone who likes rock and roll needs to go get a hit of rightnow. The drums burst to life, the guitars scream with electricity, it's canned joy, Thin Lizzy and Mott the Hoople in blinding starburst style.

After that it becomes just-great, from the Dananananakroyd shoutalong of Bicycle Girl, to the coasting glitter of It's Hard Getting Old, to the bare Boys Part 2 - it's insightful, gritty, shimmering, alive, a graceful comedown from that initial rush, a full life through nostalgic sheen, watching your best days drift away with fondness and acceptance of the present. Fans of Weezer, Surfer Blood and Lizzy and Mott alike will find tons to like here, this is simply great, fun rock and easily my favorite album of the year so far 5/5

#1265 Danny Brown - Old

One of the least fun rap albums I've ever heard, just dripping in darkness while Brown's nasal, jawstretching yowl bounces off the walls joylessly. Verbally it's remarkably deft stuff, but the atmosphere is oppressive, slurred and sludgy and stoned and miserable 2/5

#1264 Jeff the Brotherhood - Hypnotic Nights

Super-straightforward, masterfully crafted, big crunchy midtempo riffage, distilled Weezer with bigger bass punch, more Pumpkins sheen. Perfectly enjoyable, mostly unsurprising stuff that will do you just fine for a feelgood drive or smoke or sitaround 3.5/5

#1264a Eddy Current Suppression Ring - Eddy Current Suppression Ring

Pure garage scuzz, sneering delivery of platitudes of banality elevated to art.

Baaaaaaasss-snare, baaaaaaaaasss-snare, every rhythm section lurch all bending of a moist plank and releasing with a *thack*, little little cycles of stored energy released again and again, pure orgasm addict, pure buzzcocks.

These guys are just fucking around, and that makes it damned exciting, full of wherethefuck surges and deadpan boredom both 3.5/5

#1263 Swans - To Be Kind

These guys are getting a lot of Hall of Fame (figuratively) talk lately, critics heaping praise on this album as some weird, indirect lifetime achievement award.

Some of the good word is deserved - this takes post-rock to the next level, huge like Explosions and Godspeed, but eschewing narrative buildups in favor of exhaustive minimalist exploration. The interest doesn't come from smearing rock to the horizons, it comes stretching a small piece of rock to fraying, watching the tendons pop, glistening the darkness. Nothing climaxes, everything breathes and rolls over like a bloody moon and breathes and breathes and breathes and then stops. This is beyond time and place, rooms erected inside of ideas, abstract figures on a ground of terrifying unknown, lorded over by a frontman sounding alternately creepy like Tom Waits and creepy like Liars' Angus Andrew.  It might be one of the most deeply, fundamentally Lovecraftian album ever made. If David Lynch ever wants to come back and come back dark, he knows who to call for the soundtrack. It's dark and strange, is the theme here.

Most of my praise is conceptual though, the actual listen can be tedious, and sometimes the curtain of the eternal falls and all the repetitions feel like good old fashioned rock indulgence - by the halfway mark of the meandering Kirsten Supine you start getting that old "this could have been a single disc" feeling. What's that Michael? You will/will/can't/can't/will/will/can't/can't/won't/won't/will/will/can't/won't/will/can't/will/won't/will/can't* let it go? Tell me more.

I'll say this, the vaguely adventurous rock fan should definitely listen to it once, all the way through, and expect to say "wow. well, now I've heard that" and never put it on again 3.5/5

* this is not me being a dick. this is the literal list of updates we get on where dude stands vis a vis letting it go

#1262 VA - Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack

Maybe its all the Daft Punk via Dancepunk revivalism, but this holds up reasonably well as throbbing, hypnotic dance music. The Bee Gees' falsettos are a bit much to take in such large doses, but the rest of the album, a meandering club mix of beats and bass and strings, still actually kind of works as a night-drenched backdrop to a Nik Cohn yarn that never was 3.5/5

#1261 Grateful Dead - Anthem of the Sun

Aha! When I first listened to Grateful Dead I was confused. Lead to believe them meandering noodlers, I was surprised to find that s/t, Workingman's Dead, and American Beauty are actually pretty cohesive, downright structured. But here's where that Dead was hiding, an album full of 8 minute jams that I can't remember a single word or note of. Good to just like, have on, a rather pleasant backdrop, a tie-dye wall hanging, but nothing that's going to change my world 3/5

#1260 La Sera - Hour of the Dawn

Galloping indie rock with a right tuneful lady and some killer guitars at the helm, bringing more thrilling, frantic Good Health angles than you might expect given Katy Goodman's comparatively stompy Vivian Girl backstory. It doesn't have all that many /memorable/ moments, but it's a fun, well-produced, occasionally gorgeous album bristling with Summer driving energy, especially on euphoric highlight Kiss this Town Away 3.5/5

#1259 Squeeze - Cool for Cats

Damned cool British New Wave, with storytelling full of understated strangeness and wit, more The Jam than Elvis Costello (that's good). Where other bands of the era were overtly quirky, leaning hard on nonsense and synthesizers to make a splash, Squeeze made the combination seem natural, knocking out an honest to god heartacher with Up the Junction, right alongside hitchy masterpieces like the title track. Squeeze just do their thing, swaggering with pub rock legitimacy, telling stories with truth over confident, throbbing, sawtooth pop. Funky, enjoyable, stuff 4/5

#1258 Childish Gambino - Because the Internet

Donald Glover very nearly couldn't possibly win. His only chance was to not give a fuck and lay it all out there. But instead he put out an album that very much gives a fuck, that wants very much to be liked, that puts his voice dead front and center, that makes countless arty gestures, that out-Kanye's Kanye in every way possible, for better, for worse, for a net loss. It's like dude wrote a list of every possible way people could diss his album and designed an album to thwart each angle of attack, one by one, swerving arty here, directly rapping vs. accusations of fakeness there. Heck, he even tried looking bored on the album cover to show how much he doesn't give a fuck, gave the album a dismissive title like he doesn't give a fuck. But tunes don't lie.

Production's intricate. Rapping's wicked clever. Very very clever, totally well done, intricate as hell. The whole thing has all the right parts, but a monstrosity's been built out of them, a rap album with no particular actual voice, with no realness at all, sounding like a talented rapper with no real hunger, with infinite resources at his disposal making the best album he can. Which is great. But it's ELO rap. I like ELO. But that don't work that well for us in hip hop. At least Kanye went King Crimson.

Glover shoulda gone Das Racist, gone bare bones, gone couldn't give a fuck, gone "I don't even need rap - rap needs me", but instead we got long instrumental interludes, got bombast and ballast, got a gorgeous empty shell that's great to look at and shitty to live in, swooping scaffolding showing through, geometric chairs that suck to sit in, an album that I enjoy immensely in places but feel hollow listening to 2.5/5

#1257 Gruff Ryhs - Hotel Shampoo

A nearly completely forgettable album, loungey and repetitive and small, with none of the boldness of Gruff's Super Furry Animals days. Consider tracks 6 and 7, Conservation Conversation and Sophie Softly, neither of which gets beyond noting that their title words kinda sound kinda neat together. Maybe it's all a conceptual play about everyday banality? Regardless, other than maybe the horn bursts on Christopher Columbus the whole thing is just barely there, an underwhelming disappointment 2/5

#1256 White Denim - D

God, White Denim are one of the best bands going right now and I am right stoked as fuck to see them at Bonnaroo.

This is their best album, less spastic than Fits, less smoothed out and Black Keyseyan than Cosicana Lemonade, finding a hooky, impossibly enjoyable middle ground that bursts with ideas and melodies and inventive timbre and deft lines.

At the Farm sums it up pretty damn well, an instrumental interlude that builds in pixel-perfect Pixar timelapse, every note delightfully unexpected and exactly the one that should be there, everything moving at a pace seemingly directed by the listener's will via latent metaphysical talent, those skittering drums, those impossibly perfect guitar lines.

This is art rock done right, incredibly listenable, dauntingly explorable, every expected-a-zig-zag becoming right in the moment it happens 5/5

#1255 Paul Simon - There Goes Rhymin' Simon

Maybe I'm mellowing in my age, bacause this is so pretty. So pleasant and melodic and lilting and I don't think its very boring at all. Rarely exciting, but never boring, and overtly soothing from time to time to time. Reminds me a bit of Harrison's All Things Must Pass. There's countless little melodic moments here, expanded outside of the Garfunkel days' barebones instrumentation for flavor, given texture and color to spare 4/5

#1254 Chad VanGaalen - Shrink Dust

Trippy wobbly stuff, strums echoing off to nowhere, waves of reverb on the shore, plenty of little electro-analog details wiggling out of the woodwooork - better than the average such stuff I shit on around here. The problem's VanGaalen's warble, imposing itself on the atmosphere, reminding us this is his trip we're on, when songs this nuanced would be better off with a much softer touch 3/5

#1253 The Lemonheads - It's a Shame About Ray

Big-accoustic 3-chord 90's pop-rock that kicked off the cliche, making Elvis Costello lite on the way to inspiring countless Lemonheads-lite songs. It's all a little crunchy, all a little clever, all a little pretty, not a lot of anything, just stretching a thin idea, propped up with a token hitch to 3-minute length (though Rudderless's little climax is a great pop trick).

It's fine. It's the kind of thing you could rightfully be real nostalgic about when you're 30 if you hear it when you're 20, so go for it if you've still got time! 3/5

#1252 Cage the Elephant - Melophobia

CtE's early stuff was uneven at best - they lashed out in every direction, occasionally rocking your face off, occasionally coming across as embarrassing and ridiculous. They've smoothed the edges off by now, making something perfectly agreeable and comparatively girl-ready. It's a little angular, but sort of in a early-00's Hot Hot Heat / Franz Ferdinand kind of way, which is to say there's not a lot of gamble in it. There's some unexpected moments, but while there's nothing as awkward as, say, Indy Kidz on here, there's also nothing as exciting. Melophobia's their best album yet, but not the one I'll reach for next time I want to hear 'em 3/5

#1251 The Clash - Combat Rock

I'm not saying I liked this better than London Calling, but its closer than it's supposed to be.

Despite having their two biggest mainstream hits, this's one of the stranger Clash albums, full of atmospherics (Straight to Hell, Sean Flynn, Death is a Star), evoking Blur's self-titled, one of my all time underdog favorite albums. It's also possibly their scariest record, reaching out to larger themes of oppression and desperation than their severely British opus. I always like the sound of a band thrashing against the outside of what it's capable of, and this succeeds far more than it fails if you're willing to look beyond what a Clash album's supposed to sound like 4/5