#1518 Holy Wave - Relax

A sleepy, churning piece of modern psychadelia. At times maddeningly busy and detuned and sloppy (shades of Deerhunter and Wavves at their worst), but at others finding a beautiful clear thread, more reminiscent of Olivia Tremor Control and recent fav Kurt Vile.

I'd never call it catchy exactly, but it winds agreeable around the right kind of night 3.5/5

#1517 Al Green - Let's Stay Together

Man, I just want Al Green to have a good day. Actual song titles on this actual album:
 - Let's Stay Together
 - So You're Leaving
 - I've Never Found a Girl
 - How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
 - It Ain't No Fun to Me

He's just got that voice, made for cryin, so let's sing about pain. It's a beautiful pain, awash in horns and croons and that stairstep of guitars down on into the darkness of night. The mix is lush but thin, beautiful like a cloud over a three quarters moon.

You poor, poor, lovestruck motherfucker Al Green 3.5/5

#1516 Perfume Genius - Too Bright

An album that's deeply personal first and foremost, deeply queer only as a side effect of that intimacy and the artist's identity. It's intense, that intimacy. That feeling of a casual acquaintance oversharing, but sensing that in the sharing is a need to share that you can't duck.

And yet, the stories are told in mystery, a smoke obscuring crucial subtitles. And then these moments of breakdown where the film just burns, as Kid A / Runaway distortions obliterate the details of I'm a Mother, fray the edges of My Body, and the music speaks the volumes - there's pride here, but also frailty, even terror, all in the windblown, surging, piano/electronic/vox washes.

It seems like an album you could delve into details, reconstruct a story if not a psyche. It's a bracing worthwhile listen, but I don't know if I can take the energy, the tension, to say nothing of Mike Hadreas's essential but borderline unlistenable crying croon. Don't know if I'll find my way back, but I'm glad to have heard 3.5/5

#1515 Mobb Deep - The Infamous

Quintessential 90's East Coast rap: gritty stories, dark production, epic scope. Or, translated for the haters: toughguy bullshit, boring beats, waytoolong runtime. I fall on either side of that opinion; the rapping's a balance of intricate and straightforward, but it all gets daunting by the end, without any particular attempts at hooks or brightness to pull in the casual rapfan whiteguy 3/5

#1514 Motor City Drum Ensemble - Send a Prayer EP

Every song on this starts off like its going somewhere, and it kinda starts to, but then you get hypnotized by the slow buildup and the next thing you know you've been listening to the same basic boring ass loops for 5 minutes and you're retroactively annoyed. This doesn't do much of anything that Gassyo and that Mothership track don't do better 2/5

#1513 VA - Brontosaurus 2014 EP

Little 3 track sampler from a larger Bronosaurus VA comp?

First track shows its hand in the first minute and then never really goes anywhere remotely unexpected with it for the next 7 or so. Moves too subtle to care. Second track's got a little more swerve and swagger in it -

but it's closing track Mothership that's the draw here. A tiny, housey little thumper with this microtap beat and then this warm little organ and then this thin little guitar then this twangy little croon crawling with electronic squiggles. It's such a soft, spindly little thing, blank white and sexy and crisp, with heart. Never heard anything quite like it - that endless beat over these unassuming acoustic little bristles, great song 3.5/5

#1512 Kurt Vile - Square Shells

I'd put this right alongside It's a Big World Out there as Kurt Vile albums go: hypnotic buzzy//clean production tucked into fuzzy sheets, everything winding down into tonal cyclers and back into hushed, warm songs proper. A quiet, intimate, curious little album that will cushion you in quiet strangeness 3.5/5

#1511 Gassyoh - Jumbo EP

Serious space rock in electronic electron beam form. This is a huge record that gets bigger the closer you listen to it, packed with hypnotic stereo moves and interdimensional lane changes, Japanese chanting gets chopped into pieces and melts away to raveups, then bleeps bleed in like from other songs, never settling on a style, like a seamless mashup of songs that never existed. Seriously good headphone music, might even be an assshaker for the right kinda night 4/5

#1510 Parkgolf - Cat Walk

For every kickin synth and skitterey beat line there's three doses of overrepetition, slurring and detunerey. It's a shame, because this does drop a lot of kickin synth lines and skitterey beats. Again and again, the guys on this Maltine label are really at their best when they're doing their own thing and dodging rotted trends 2.5/5

#1509 Girl Talk and Freeway - Broken Ankles EP

Never did check out Gillis's its-about-time foray into rap production.

He's got great restraint here, lets the samples ride; production knows its role. He makes his presence known, but it's subtle, adding emotional backbone and unexpected structure to the tracks, with shades of the best tracks on Ratatat's Remixes Vol. 2. Freeway's rapping hits hard in classic bang-bang East coast style, but its that quietly snaky production that grabs and holds attention 4/5

#1508 Guchon - Megamix: The Hugest Party on the Internet

A dance record / mashup record that lands somewhere between DJ mix / Girl Talk album, a populist version of Since I Left You. You're getting dance music, not party music: there's no Weezer singalongs, no Since You've Been Gone suckerpunches. But it with 400 songs in 120 minutes, this isn't just a song-then-the-next-song flow-showoff, and it's not afraid to truck in a lot of the same "you know you love THIS riff" samples that Greg Gillis leans on.

With all that laid down it seems like I should like this, but it didn't really work for me: it all slurred together and got tiresome by the end, lacking that contrast that made the best Avalanches and Girl Talk and E60 stuff work. Might be a great soundtrack for juuuust the right kind of party 2.5/5

#1507 Iserobin - hemogTAPEtrax

I just listened to this while playing some virtual pinball. That felt about right. The start-stop energy, the drum and bass propulsion over Prefuse skitching that so big in Japan, plus little pinches of IDM glitchery. Frantic synth lines dart around like on fire, while big bad Brother wobbbbbs lay the stage - its a frantic, exciting little EP 4/5

#1506 The Smashing Pumpkins - Monuments to an Elegy

Behold! The Smashing Pumpkins commemorative coin: a flat shiny bauble you can keep in your pocket to remind you of the real thing*. It's very definitely a lesser Pumpkins album, and yet! I actually rather like it - a svelte 32 minutes that's actually pretty hook-packed. It's the first time Billy's sounded loose, like he's having any fun at all, in decades; maybe expectations are finally so low he's not overreaching.

The lyrics are embarrassingly false-innocent coming out of a 47 year old's mouth, and some of the songs have nowhere to go, but dammit if Drum and Fife isn't a hook and a half, and Tiberius and One and All are like shitty Zeitgeist songs that have been training for a half-marathon. Imagine if this had come out right after Adore - a slim little rocker instead of an endless skyward deathspiral 3.5/5

* not that you asked, but:
Gish is the indie comic book
Siamese Dream is the movie
Mellon Collie is the theme park
Adore's the arty off-broadway theater production
Machina's the cashgrab 2nd movie
Zeitgeist is the straight-to-video 3rd movie
Oceania is the straight-to-video 4th movie where they like, go to space
Maybe a coin's a step in the right direction

#1505 Glassyoh - Jazz EP

Loopin, loopin, sample loopin disco music packed with frazzled vocals, throbbing horns, and the occasional pulse-pounding synth burner. AI-NO-EKI is the standout, a full powered, strangely original smashemup that works an endless shrieking horn riff right into the grain of a Justice-ready buzzsaw chug.

Exciting shit, it even flows real good! Just wish it was an hour - how often do I actually complain that something's too short around here? 4/5

#1504 Mirrorball Inferno - Super Sale Out

These Japanese electronic dudes (or at least the ones on the Maltine kick I'm on) really do not like to settle into a particular style. What starts out hard-driving video game music goes all Orbital space-house for a while, before it gets all glitchy skippy and stumbles slowly down the rabbithole. It's damned hard to review these musical Katamari, though I think the first three tracks make for a solid enough listen to spur mild recommendation 3.5/5

#1503 Rabbitbass - Rabbitbass EP

There's so much to like here, it's a shame its ruined by leaning on some of the worst recent trends in electronic music. The triple-title-track has a freaky breakdown and some bursty synth lines, but they're stitched together with a grabbag of dubstep cliches and airhorns. AIRHORNS.

Things get delightfully choppy, downright Prefuse, but at every turn pointless wobbles and slurs shit in the salad. Closing track Relation nearly escapes intact, weaving the kind of childlike glitch-and-skip you could see a more innocent Aphex Twin ginning up, but airdropped Squarepusher squiggles wither out of place. Plenty of potential if this guy (?) ever finds his own voice 2.5/5

#1502 80Kidz - Face

Packed with fakeouts: this opens hard and then strings together 3 tracks of poppy, beatdriven, happy club music, somewhere between Cut Copy and like, I don't know, Katy Perry? Bubblegum stuck up in its loops with just a touch of 80's mystique.

And then comes that angry Justice buzzsaw on Venge // Sting and the whole thing decides it came to rock after all. Bait and switch for the kids? And then it's sentimental, kinda trip hop, kinda breaky, sleepy, bouncy - consistent within tracks but all over the place in the transitions, on and on and on. It's fascinating, if uneven, you almost never get this kind of Mellon Collie eclecticism in electronic music 3.5/5

#1501 Lullatone - While Winter Whispers EP

Well goddamn with the well named band.

Somewhere between xylophone, vibraphone, and pure sine tone is the sound underneath this lulling little lullaby, the best of Music for Airports where all the flights were to sleepytown. The warmth of those tones is what elevates this, they glow with ambiance.

This is totally niche music: peaceful, childish, utterly pure rounded notes of melody that rock cradles not boats 3.5/5

#1500 Terry Malts - Killing Time

Wonderfully shambly shaggy little punk record, with all that scratchy energy and tripoveryourself chug. The weird thing, and the reason it has that "indie" tag down there, is the singing - more Surfer Blood soaring than punk barking // shouting -- heck, Pinkerton got nastier than this ever does. It's actually pretty damn melodic, offseting all that undertuned bristle in the backdrop.

Electric, noisy buzz that goes down damned easy 3.5/5

#1499 Beyonce - Beyonce

I liked this more than I expected to: it's clearly taken a page from the Dark Twisted Fantasy playbook, wielding arty structures, electronic fuckery, and personal soulbaring to keep you off-guard. Haunted in particular is a wonderfully strange midnight wanderer that dares to jettison verses and hooks to get under your skin.

But it doesn't have enough ideas to keep it rolling: once it blows its load around track 3 you get the Blow/No Angel/Partition run that's just treads water on icy minimalism, banking on Beyonce's vocal acrobatics to prop up underfed songs. I admire the strongest moves, but the whole thing's uneven at best 3/5

#1498 Blut Aus Nord - What Once Was... Liber III, Pt. 1

I felt physically ill, soul-sucked listening to this, its invasive, subliminally wrong black metal that surges and crawls with guitars and drums and groaning voices chugging and chittering until they're a distant machine digging inexorably towards your heart. A brilliantly unpleasant oilslick, just exciting and riffy enough to keep you hooked into its atmospheric deathspiral 4/5

#1497 Five Finger Death Punch - American Capitalist

Chugging, soaring, furious metal, a sarcastic bald eagle F16 paintjob, burning through a Michael Bay backdrop of layered guitar parts, panning drum fills, and production tricks.

It's actually kinda exciting; I can get past the overproduction. But I can't get past the attitude. I just can't. It's protest-rock lite, mock-intimidating, about a third as radical! as it wants to be. Every time I dive into the overload there's a guy going "yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaah!!! this is radical!!!" 2.5/5

#1496 Yo La Tengo - Extra Painful

The original album itself: all time 5 outta 5, #13 album of the 90's.

So what about the bonus tracks that make this reissue extra?

The alternate versions bring color to an album that, let's remember already had 2 versions of Big Day Coming, coming from a band that's built on repetition and droning and allowing-to-sink-in. They add a little bit of depth to the era and no small measure of small thrills. YLT proves the song's just a starting point.

The new songs fare even better, especially the shitkicking Shaker and Smart Windows' sloppy groove - each could have brought a nice jolt to the original album's nighttame shades.

--

Oh how to rate a reissue?

Despite the good songs, I don't think the new stuff altogether works as a listen, and this is a band //all about// the big listen. Split the original's score with a generous 4 and end up around 4.5/5

#1495 Deathtrip - Deep Drone Master

Double 2nd-degree acquaintance Brad Fickeisen* called this his favorite album of the year, so let's check that.

You know what this does that all the best doom should do? It transcends human creation - it's alien and strange and wraps its tentacles. It insinuates depths, moves while seeming static; chords shift out from under, themes wind back from songs ago tapping into lost past.

The mix is strangely flat, the songs strangely inert, but within all that gravelly growling, all that shimmering dissonant guitarwork, all that muddy galloping drumwork, those moments of breath and beauty, there's a landscape that beckons with dark distance that goes on forever 4/5

* He's a friend of a friend who I've seen play a couple times (he's a killer drummer!). Also his girlfriend is the only person in Boston who can cut my hair worth a shit.

#1494 Pantera - Vulgar Display of Power

Dundadunda-dunda-dunda-dunda-dundaaaadaaadaaa!

Somewhere between Sabbath's endless drones and Slayer's serrated thrash - all energy, all power, strained, searing vocals, slugged into pure headbobbing elipticals. This shit rocks, pure and hard, with primal too-fast // too-slow it slides in through your armor 4/5

Month in Review: November '14

A life-busy, music-thin month that was mostly fueled by the discovery of the great Shake Appeal column, packed with "garage and garage adjacent" coverage.

Not a lot blew me away this month, but here's a couple of gems for ya:

Album of the Month
Lindstrom - Where You Go I Go Too - strangely emotional, quietly eternal. A space disco epic meant for straight-through listens.

Also Recommended!
OBN III's - Live in San Fransisco - Great, garagey fuckoff energy, this is what live rock and roll is meant to be.

Adhesive Wombat - Marsupial Madness - Proof 8-bit doesn't have to be a gimmick, this is muscular headbobbing, bodymoving stuff.

Hawkwind - Space Ritual - Enormously, insanely, indulgently proggy. If you're going to do space rock, do it all the way.