#1427 The Octopus Project - Identification Parade

Here on Identification Parade you can see skeleton, the barest blueprint of the band that would make Fever Forms some 10 years later. But where that album is hyperbusy and exuberant, this is spare, generous with silences and tones, loping in slitherey stop motion, organ drones and theremin wobbles and experimental buds gestating patiently.

Slightly clumsy quietly intriguing stuff 3.5/5

#1426 Javelin - Canyon Candy

A far, lonesome cry from the pop eccentricities of Hi Beams - here's a dusty, atmospheric DJ record, with shades of The KLF's Chill Out; Endtroducing from beyond the sunset. The flow's brilliant, the tone deep as night.

The only shame is that Javelin doesn't have the chops to really let this thing ride. The approach they've laid out doesn't sound like it'd stretch beyond these little 2-minute loopers without getting boring, and an album like this begs to go on for about triple its 24 minute runtime - it's a sound you want to get lost in, but you wake up just as things are getting gone 3.5/5

#1425 Javelin - Hi Beams

This kind of synthy, autotuned, micro-anthemic, semi-dancable indie was the kind of thing I burned out on circa 2012, but maybe it's just been long enough for this to catch my attention. Maybe there's just enough variety here, just enough interesting tones and angles, just the right balance of Max Tundra heartstring nudges and Mint Chicks mindfucks to keep me hooked into what's next.

Quietly intriguing, slippery, understated electronic pop that's certainly worth hearing 3.5/5

#1424 The Octopus Project - Fever Forms

This had me from those first overblown synth notes - that place where the texture becomes wooly and gets a life of its own, this album strutting like a malignant cyborg, all giant tone, all instrumental hookiness, escaping that feeling of instrumental jazzy-esque muso knobbery by just being so buzzy and feral and perfectly designed, robot cheetah on a stack overflow. This is future-terror Fang Island, digitized Danananakroyd, Dan Deacon in a silver suit, the Go Team's bizarro future-fucked funbuddies, Menomena rendered human and ready to party.

It loses some momentum after the climax of mmkit, but this is just busy enough, just frilled and flared enough with fun angles to have totally won me over 4.5/5

#1423 Os Haxixins - Os Haxixins

I've been slamming a lot of bands lately for slapdash 60's revivalism, but these guys get the right idea - there's that actual flaming desperation here, those surly organs, a smoldering version of Os Mutantes' og Brazilian take on hard psychadelia. Here there's danger, here there's stakes. Just wish the songs, blissfully short though they may be, didn't all run together as they do 3/5

#1422 Mujeres - Soft Gems

A little bit of everything 60's from these Spanish rockers: lazy surf roll, velvets dissonance, general swirling walls of guitar noise. Zero memorable moments though, lost in its own reverb-drenched navel 2.5/5

#1421 Daikaiju - Daikaiju

Alabama dudes take on Japanese personas and create kickass, rollicking surf rock - good times result. With plenty of Link Wray rumble, rockabilly rollalong, and punk rock rollick this has dauntless energy. It's a small box they've painted themselves into, and it gets a little exhausting and samey by the end, but these guy are doing up the classic sound with more muscle and motion than most 3.5/5

#1420 Molice - Resonance Love

Super solid, hooky, downright dancable indie rock that just happens to be mostly in Japanese.  I'd probably dismiss this as derivative if it was in English, but dammit if it's not catchy, those unintelligible little coos and croons from the ladysingers drawing focus to the pure perfect energy of the underlying pop-flecked rock and roll. Nothing altogether groundbreaking here but goddamn if it doesn't tap into some perfect aughts-rock vein and send your body moving 4/5

#1419 Goat - Commune

The most middling of the 60's masquerading as artful, this is aimless, swirly, squaky psychedelia, wavering and shimmering without going anywhere, excusing itself with mythology, largely ruined by the shrill female vocals that crack any atmosphere with a poor stab at primal cred. The same galloping drums, the same rolling basslines, the same guitar washes, the same go-nowhere solos, it's a worse than a bad trip, its a boring one 2/5

#1418 Boom Bip - Sacchrilege

None of the atmospherics and subtly I associate with Boom Bip - this is pure propulsive, maximalist techno, throbbing with post-80's pulse, musclebound synth lines, and motion to spare. Great background music for a drive, fight, or other intense experience - even the tidy 5-song structure keeps this EP from wearing out its welcome 3.5/5

#1417 Streight Angular - After and Before

Listen / buy here!

While I still long for a Streight Angular record that captures their early, shitkicking live shows, After and Before is a ton of fun: brilliantly sunny, packed with pure pop touchstones, girl group taptaps, call-and-response-ready chantalongs, and 90's-swirled on-and-on-and-on raveups via REM via Swervedriver. It feels like a band overflowing GBV-style with ideas, letting them pour out on tap, with a looseness that suggests they've got plenty more to draw on. Even the angsty sneering rings conspiratorial, a love letter to people in their 30's in the 2010's, looking for that feeling, swinging for it again and again and again 3.5/5

#1416 Gramatik - Beatz & Pieces, Vol. 1

The beats are hot, the samples hot, the combinations solid, but Gramatic doesn't seem to have any notion of how to turn a loop into a song, let alone songs into an album. Everything on here goes on longer than it justifies, there's no motion, no flow, no way to come out of this without being bored somewhere pretty far from the end. Put some rappers over this and maybe you got something, but as it lays 2.5/5

#1415 Aphex Twin - Syro

10-something years on, when the man, the myth rises from his slumber, he's not reinvented himself, though he's not quite the same either. He's a man returned from war, honey left out to crystalize, a beach at uncharacteristic tide. Gone are the days of reckless reinvention, even the modified piano excursion of drukqs are gone (closing track aside), this is Aphex Twin in stride, master of his craft, making a plainold new Aphex Twin record, packed with disconnected stutters, ambient washes, bleaaaping skitters - the same tricks from new angles, in new combinations, with a couple new edges. There's something sad about that.

It almost distracts from the fact that from a pure listenability standpoint, from a pure consistency and craft standpoint, this is his best album ever. There's a contagious atmosphere that nothing of his ever had; this is by far the most cohesive album he's ever created.

And he does branch out - borrowing influence on beats, mixing new approaches with precocious abandon. But this is Richard James all grown up, out of his long teen age.

So it's pretty fucking great. And if you like his stuff you'll like this. But in deference to the core of this blog, fuck, I am too old or too stressed or too lame for this shit anymore. Even though I think its fairly brilliant I can't listen to it, and I can't reasonably go much higher than 3.5/5

#1414 Purling Hiss - Lounge Lizards

Somewhere in that shoegaze buzz, that jagged dissonance, that Jagger swagger, there's a heart that does not give a fuck. There's a heart that beats with confidence as it casually observes the garbage all around, and that steady beat's enough to make you feel safe in the wasteland, to make it a trip with a glint of fun through a hail of noise 4/5

#1413 La Terre Tremble !!! - Salvage Blues

Y'all know I like noise and all, but it should either be banged into hooks, or make some artistic slash, or be some pure expression of feeling and energy. This is carefully crafted to be detuned and herkyjerky for its own sake, grating and dissonant and unpleasant without giving you any real compelling reason to stick around.

Every once in a while it gels into some riff, some resolution, some moment of production, but mostly its an awful lot of work to get nowhere 2.5/5

#1412 Driver Drive Faster - Open House

This 2011 album feels exactly like the last gasp of a long 00's - it's full of all the touchstones of slightly arty, slightly slipperey, slightly angular, clever, lush, climaxing indie rock. It's meant to sweep you up, but it goes in the back door, sounding icy and detached before a simmer of power sneaks in. There's not a real sense of a band, just an emergent, subtly dense sound with just enough hooks to actually make it really appealing. Could grow on me if I find enough time for an album like this in my life 3.5/5

#1411 Daphni - Jiaolong

I read some review that, curtly, said the first three tracks on this album were good, but then it lost its way. I concede it was not wrong.

The key is that those first three tracks weave in a vocal sample.

That backbone, plus some excellent other-wise mixing tricks, on this uncharacteristic-from-ex-Caribou-nee-Manitoba solo album, makes for the real highlights. It gives those loops some body, something to groove to. Without that backbone the remaining tracks (with a remaining grace concession to the 4th track) just don't have enough substance.

Dude's got talent. This is his first-ish go in this direction. Seeds of promise here, but a meager early harvest yield

3/5

#1410 Jack of Heart - Only Seven Inches for Your Girlfriend?

That title's a tipoff - this is nasty all right, but without any particular muscle, just out of a brash, battered disdain. All the sneer feels applied by brushstroke, the mix blasted out seemingly on purpose. A fake bloodstain drying in on summer sidewalk. I just don't buy it. When your clattering, gasping climax pulls a fancy pan maneuver how do you maintain best-we-can credibility?

In this vein of rock and roll credibility of purpose, of striving, of desperation, it's the only currency that matters and this doesn't bend to the bite 2.5/5

#1409 Electric Discharge Machine - Electric Discharge Machine

A quick little EP from another of these noisy French fuckers.

You know what I like about this? I've heard it three or four times now and I still can't pin it down. It's of a sound, but its a hall of mirrors, glinting hard glam, surf rock, rockabilly slop, and pulsing shoegaze - it's unpigeonholable, despite being clearly made of pigeons.

I like the way it slips through my fingers. I'm intrigued. I hope in vain that these guys put out something else I can get ahold of 3.5/5

#1408 Harlem - Hippies

Insanely loose, jangly punk rock, you get that great joyous sense of dudes making noise and loving it, spraying off whatever feeling finds them with maximum speed. You'd think it was all improvised if not for the insidiously sharp start-stops, the sneaky clever little vocal hooks. Sloppy, unfocused, overlong, underedited, good with the bad - the spirit of The Frogs, The Exploding Hearts, and a touch of the sainted Jay Reatard ghosts through every trebly note. Fun shit 4/5

#1407 Death from Above 1979 - The Physical World

A smoothed-out version of that drum-and-scorching-bass, muscular sound we first (and last!) heard on album 10 years ago. What this looses in visceral, creepy aggression it gains in pure hookiness - this is undeniably a more listenable, wall to wall with headbobbing, undeniable lines, reading much more as roughed-up dancepunk than catchy noise rock. Pure riffage, punchy, if ephemeral 3.5/5

#1406 Yellabird - Mountainosaurus

Listen/buy here!

My biziepartner recommended these guys and the first thing I blurted out was "these guys sound like what I wanted the Black Keys to sound like".

I stand by that - circa Thickfreakness, this's got that filthy, heavy energy, blues gone bad, blues gone to heaven, walking to Satan's rhythms now, with that stomp that pounds your head to the ground. They set them up and they knock them down, there's a real sense of visceral songwriting here, of knocking you off your expectations with maximum downward force. Shit if Dixie ain't a shitkicker -- I gotta punch a motherfucker just to slough off that overloadedddddddfffffffffuckingenergy.

Rock and fuckin' roll.

A crushing, brilliant opening EP, making a wondrous spectacle out of small parts, shattered and thrown faceward 4/5

#1405 The Dying Falls - Pheromones

Listen/buy here!

Double disclosure, I've probably seen these guys live a dozen times and hung out with them a handful.

Acquaintances.

Look, what this album hinges on is: can you deal with the fact that these guys sound wicked like the Strokes? If not, you're gonna prob have a probem.

But. But! If you can get pastit, this is a seriously fucking hooky piece of post-punk. If I can double down on the Strokes comparison, if this ended up being the Strokes second album instead of Room on Fire, I think that band woulda been better off.

No small praise.

Alls I'm saying is, if you're gonna sound like a band, at least outdo them. Or at least outdo their 2nd best album.

This is insanely hooky shit, full of places where the song breaks open - opened Finger Paint alone has two altogether different moment where new layers bloom and explode. Frontman Matt's little coughs, huh-s, asides -- all give it a loose Stonesian edge. good way.

And! Unlike 90% of Boston bands I see first live, this does a damned fine job of capturing what makes their hitchy, hooky show so damned worth seeing. Looseness abounds, and goddamn if that aint at the bloody beating heart of rock and roll.

Those opening little buzzes and oaahahoos of Distress, that opening rush of Sunday Night, and then, god, that synth kickin. One of the finest pop moments of the year. To say nothing of that sly Smiths nod. Goddamn. Killer track.

They're a terribly fun band if you let them be. Please do 4/5

#1404 Clara Clara - Comfortable Problems

Listen / buy here!

I got a soft spot for guitarless bands, and Clara Clara's endless clatter of drums / rumble of angular bass / pulse of synthy organs makes for a writhing mess of a background, banged into angular angles, pounced on by shouty vocals. Angry, busy, fun, stressy, its a slash of noise that never quite falls into a workable shape, but it's fun to watch it thrash against your grip 3.5/5

#1403 Rustie - Green Language

Some era-spanning shit if you'll pardon the namedrops forthcoming --- there's that recordgroove soul of 90's DJ Shadow, that 00's Avalanches danceparty deconstruction, that 10's stoned slurcore haze. Rustie blurs the lines but he knows which borders to park on and what angle to smudge them at.

Never quite fun but thrumming with blanketsmothered cool, this is a sample-laden, fingerprint-drenched piece of hypermodern electronica, wobbling to the waves of instrumental hip hop's past. Recommended for long night drives, long nights high, and any other time dark and borderless 3.5/5

#1402 Yeti Lane - The Echo Show

A break from the usual hammering noise rock on this modern France kick, Yeti Lane carve off slabs of big lush synths, pile them on slices of guitar, sprinkle it all with electronic baubling, and layer on strained, whimpy vocals, making a big Grandaddy/early-M83/mid-Flaming Lips/Grasscut style sandwich of meandering, buzzing, atmospheric electo-emo-indie rock.

It mostly just pulses as washed out backdrop. Every now and again it hits a really tight little melody (Warning Senations is a highlight), but mostly it all hovers about in a fuzzy swarm, daring you to remember it as it washes your setting in gossamer 3/5

#1401 Pneu - Highway to Health

Keeping this France thing right on a'rollin!

As hyperpropulsive bass-heavy instrumental swerve-hook-hook-swerve cockkickers these guys land about halfway between the dayglo fun of Fang Island and the furious immolation of Lightning Bolt. Fans of the latter are probably more likely fans - this is nasty, stressy, stuff that will keep you on your toes and tip you over tapping 'em at all arthritic angles, packed to the gills with starts, stops, and virtuoso bursts of nitro speed, putting a smile on your face before melting the entire motherfucker right off 3/5

#1400 VA - Noise in France

In my quest to find the next hotbed of good scuzzy rock I found a cache in France of all places. It makes a strange kind of sense: if I was stuck in France I'd want to make riotous racket against banality too.

This - this is a spectacular compilation, 24 bands, plenty of guitars, a spattering of damaged synths, it's regularly nasty, occasionally pretty, relentlessly inventive. No one sound emerges exactly, just a bursting sense of newness, a pipebomb of arty angles that put fun and fuckingshitup ahead of pretension - Dananananaykroyd came to mind more than once.

Very highly recommended to noisy rock fans interested in something new 4.5/5

#1399 Catholic Spray - Amazon Hunt

Mega-scuzzy garage rock out of France, sounding a fair bit like Ty Segall, so you know I'm down.

This lacks the best stuff's directness though, buried in overblown bass and tinny guitar distortion, sounding badly mixed and played from down a tunnel. Which is thrilling in its own small way, but eventually it sound more like affect than workin-with-what-we-got scrappiness.

Still, do love me a good racket and these guys have some legitimate shitkicking energy, wafting up haunted from those Parisian sewers 3.5/5

#1398 Lorde - Pure Heroine

If Rock's dead and there's no way left to shock the heart, to mark the moment, at least there's still the faint flicker of Pop out there to soothe our thoughts away, to stroke our hair when we collapse in resignation.

Shameful anti-Pitchfork post-snobbery kept me away from this one until now. In fact, it took the happy coincidence of New Zealand week and a Metro article mentioning Lorde's likewise origins to nudge me to give this a grudging chance.

There is a tinge of the twangy, mouthy, inflected ladyvocal that I'm so tired of here, and plenty of electronic flourishes, but this has less to do with Dirty Projectors and Grimes than you might think. Instead, Pure Heroine beats with the heart of the likes of mid-00's superstars Why?, The Unicorns, and Broken Social Scene*, that fine tradition of those who fiddled specks of beauty in the small while the big disappoint yawned apart, that fine tradition of young mortals leaning moments against eachother, bulwarking against the never.

Every song has its perfectly observed little line, its filigree production hearttapper. Lorde pulls off the who-needs-the-stars, you-and-me-and-we-against the-world schtick that she debuted on Royals 9 times out of 10 (Team's a bit on the nose), and the effect is a guide into darkness, a skin-prickling electricity of flickering hope.

If rock had to die, at least we shiver to its ghosts 4.5/5

* Ribs' sly nod to BBS meltdown Lover's Spit is about as perfect a meta-pop moment as I've ever heard, nestled into a tune that evokes both that song and sister song Anthems for a 17 Year Old Girl until you hear every great moment of You Forgot it in People as a secret, subconscious backing track. Incredible.

#1397 Night Beats - Sonic Bloom

Can't win around here. Garage rock revival's the only thing left of rock these days, but that's not a recipe, no guarantee. These guys have the simple structures, the big fuzzy riffs, the swirling psyche, but there's no rock and roll here.

I'm gonna name this blog the search for rock and roll one of these days.

This has none of current omega-rocker Ty Segall's urgency, just retreads of the Creation and the Faces at their meatiest, an album packed with Black Keys and Raconteurs B-sides, songs without enough hookiness to bother putting on the album. Disappointingly uninspiring 2.5/5

#1396 Cymbals Eat Guitars - Lose

Is rock dead? I said it was out loud this weekend at the Jamaica Plain music festival where perfectly competent bands played perfectly competent rock music that simply didn't rock. Around that time, paragon of relevance Gene Simmons apparently was saying the same thing. Must be true. More on that shithead and what he's right and wrong about in possible upcoming post.

Spoiler alert, rock is in a coma, the per-decade beeps of garage rock revivals are its pulse.

This comes up because hearing this album is what got that notion pecking at its shell. This is perfectly good indie rock, perfectly enjoyable to listen to, inventive in its small ways, completely beyond reproach and completely unexciting. With no hint of danger, no real sense of newness, no spark that will defibrillate a heart. Hooks spin elliptical, reedy vocals soar, guitars chime, sands through the hourglass. The solos occasionally shred, the climaxes are climaxey - if this was 1999 this would rule, but why can't it make me feel alive in 2014?

Is this all that's left? Sitting by a bedside? 3/5

#1395 In Flagranti - Worse For Wear

Good album title! This sounds like its slowly wearing itself out, spinning in place at best - and its certainly worse for it.

Worse for Wear is post-disco in the DFA vein but there's no motion here at all, no energy, just like a DJ trying to Mrs. Doubtfire two simultaneous sets, leaving a loop rolling for 6 minutes and hoping no one'll notice. The fact that the actual loops are thin and uninspiring doesn't help. Stillborn stuff 2/5

#1394 Half Japanese - Half Gentlemen / Not Beasts

The two things you need to know about this album:
 - guitar player Jad Fair does not know how to play the guitar ("the only chord I know is the one that connects the guitar to the amp". good line.)
 - the album is 3 discs, 38 songs, and nearly 2 hours long

That's probably enough to send the most of you whipping the scroll wheel.

It is as bad as it sounds: it is a marathon of unpleasant sounds, of ragged noise, of go-nowhere meandering, of utter lack of self-editing. But you do have to admire the raw omega-punk energy of it.

I've heard this compared to the Shaggs but that's horseshit. They didn't want to be there. They were, at absolute best, art _about_ rock and roll. At absolute best. If you're generous.

Half Japanese couldn't want this more, couldn't *be* more rock and roll, nails scratching // at // the // coffin // walls. You have to admire that animal energy, even if listening to this feels like being in the coffin with them 2.5/5

Month in Review: August '14

This was the month I finally lost patience with trawling the classic rock best-of lists, weary of the diminishing returns on listening to the 18th best album of 1972, the 3rd best Grateful Dead album.

So now what? Desperation leads to following Spotify accidents, like looking up an old DOOM album and finding a similarly-titled track by some kickass Sweedish hip hop dudes, which got me thinking international, which lead to New Zealand week, capping with a happy also-named-The-Gordons bluegrass accident. The future is now motherfuckers.

Album of the Month
Ty Segall - Manipulator - Still love this dude. Kicks his shitkicking garage rock mastery to the curb, brews up a sprawling, hypnotic glam-rock masterpiece instead. Still rules.

Also Recommended!
Lonnie Mack - The Wham of that Memphis Man! - Can't get enough rollicking rockabilly, this was a great surprise find.

Sjukstugan - Rap pa Svenska - Who knew? Them Swedes can sure bang a bangin consonant-heavy syllable together.

The Gordons - The Gordons - Major highlight of New Zealand week, these guys make rock and roll with that kind of couldntgiveafuck energy I love.

Wire - Chairs Missing - Still some value in the old lists! Thrilling, knotty, hitchy postpunk.