#1992 Johnny Thunders - So Alone

Ex-New York Doll twists pop rock of the 50's and 60's; twists but never breaks, just sneers and tortures the sound, keeping the hookiness alive. I wish it'd had gone further, shown a little less respect, been more willing to rip shit apart - the giant list of guest stars might have given it a bit of the ol' superband jitters - but it's still a scuzzy, fun little footnote 3/5

#1991 Greensky Bluegrass - If Sorrows Swim

Mumford and their calculated emotion-baiting ruined this sound. I can't hear a single layered exaltation over banjos, a single skyward build to something bigger over upright bass, a single chord-change//break into "oooaaaaaaawwwwooooooaaaaah!", without thinking of those smug fucks and their army of doe-eyed dipshits.

What if Mumford never existed? Better! What if, by whatever mechanism, I wasn't such a jaded, smug fuck of my own pernicious breed?

What if those genuinely good turns of phrase reminded me of Dan Mangan and Josh Ritter? What if that light streaking up between the planks caught some stray grass from the rock of my heart? Because dammit, the chops seem real. The sentiment seems real. And damn, that dusty production does feel like the horse led the cart. And when I listen to this I hear musicians and music and damn if that's not hard to find these days. And surely one bad apple can't ruin an entire style for an entire generation.

And then I think about putting this on and someone going, "is this Mumford and Sons?" and I want to punch a child. What an unholy asshole I am. Power through it, Baker 3.5/5

#1990 James Chance and The Contortions - Buy

The blueprint for cool music for cool people: wailing saxes, wailing men, funk guitars, a general atonal punk / no wave disregard for musicality. Dance music for the post-everything crowd.

It's lazy, arch, ugly, insincere nonsense - everything it does Minutemen did better (or decided not to) 2.5/5

#1989 Blitzen Trapper - All Across this Land

Blitzen Trapper always sounds the same // never sounds the same, orbiting that same country-flecked sun at every distance in every dimension. This time out the they've gone full wide-eyed on America, riding that long lonely road with Bob Seger, John Cougar and The Boss.

It's full and rich and feels right. All Across this Land might have seen like a tacky pop move from another band, but it's just another memorable stop on the map for these wanderers 4/5

#1988 Motorhead - Overkill

Trying to respect Lemmy here, whose stuff I overlooked till he died, who bristled when Motorhead got called "metal", but man Motorhead sounds a lot like metal, like the metal that came before and the metal that came after, from Sabbath to Metallica to the whole New British Wave. Those're some solid riffs.

Themewise and scenewise though, you see his point - there's no scifi, no horror, no hair, no pretension, all dirt and grit and punkrock dontgiveafuck. Most metal guys are secretly pussycats.

These guys don't seem like secret pussycats.

No theater here, its dead direct like good old Rock and Roll, doing its own thing and fun as hell to listen to by accident, just by bein fuckin cool 4/5

#1987 Elbow - The Take Off and Landing of Everything

Peaceful post-rock that seeks to soothe, that tries to deliver us, the world-weary and the death-obsessed, to something beyond. Admirable goal.

It works in places, those hypnotic churns, that rounded sound. But I couldn't quite get with it, held back by the similarity to late-era Peter Gabriel, in terms of Garvey's voice and the way its themes run watery by the end. To return to, maybe, when I'm less jaded 3/5

#1986 The Beatles - Yellow Submarine

Is it possible? This blind spot?

I'm a big fan of the big late 5, of the Early Stuff, but the weird 2nd tier falls through, and the shock of that 2nd side of instrumentals, the shock of Only A Northern Song, that now knocks me over backwards on the (re?)listen, I think I might have never heard this before that day on the late 28th, 2015. How strange. I suspect this is the last Beatles album I ever get to hear for the first time.

I'm not trying to be contrary but:

Yellow Submarine // All You Need is Love, whatever.

And the second side instrumentals, eh, meh for double.

But fuckina. Those remaining 4, Only a Northern Song, All Together Now, Hey Bulldog, It's All Too Much [edit: ok, ok drunky - All Together Now is nothing special], god they knock it out. They find that sweet spot where the lads were a little selfaware about their spot, where a fist of truth punches right the fuck through in all these ways. They are, arguably, a few of my favorite Beatles songs, this brilliance that shines through The Beatles, more clearly than anything this side of Sgt Peppers' title tracks. They know, and in that knowing the transcend the transcenders.

Pretentious twatling aside, lukewarm instrumentals aside, there are at very least four incredible tracks here, and even a couple more if you unclench your heart. Maybe its that fuckedup Zooropa spirit in me, but I love, love, love those 4 lost 2nd tier tracks. Did from the first listen, more so in this review-time relisten.

Something shines through here, when a band has the freedom to do themselves as hard as they want, aware but unfettered by their own patterns, that rebellion against expected levels out to just dead even and something real comes through.

Shine on you crazy fuckin diamonds - and we're out, first and only Beatles album to find its way onto this blog ever you four souls. Fuckit. Even All You Need Is Love is pretty great, as it cracks me on the home stretch. Shine the fuck on 4.5/5 [edit: fully half the album is basically completely forgettable. I'm a mess.]

#1985 Arca - Mutant

If you need the newnewnewnew and want to hear sound fucked to pieces in whole different ways, this guy's got Oval/Matmos/Aphex-level game. Rips, expands, shatters, melts - physical excess. As experimental/noise goes it's listenable, hints of a human edge; Cronenberged beats and some actual notes lounge on islands in static seas.

Hell to listen to though 2.5/5

#1984 DJ Koze - DJ Kicks

Koze's Kicks turn is introspective, mellow, a series of hypnotic, soft-hooked landscapes sewn together by uncanny vocalizations. Yoni Wolf's yowl, Shatner's muttering, The 2 Bears // Marker Starlings' Albarnian croons, cast among conversations between mechanical voices and chopped samples - it's a backbone of the familiar and the strange that distracts you from the subtle scene changes.

It's a little boring by the end, lacking peak Koze's heady swoons, but you'll come away with memories of a journey to a place where they speak the language, but with different dialects, with customs that inspire you to forget 3.5/5

#1983 Deerhunter - Fading Frontier

Outside of a couple of brilliant songs on Microcastle (7 years ago!) I cannot figure out what the scene has ever seen in Deerhunter. Pretty, sure, but Fading Frontier's sleepy songs are completely forgettable, swift-fading dreams at best. And even the upbeat moments sound like Smashing Pumpkins' late-era gutless pop stabs.

I've listened to this damn thing 3 times now and still can't call up a note of it. Maybe that's the appeal, a soporific for the terminally bored 2.5/5

#1982 Viet Cong - Viet Cong

Surely two full-on waves of post-punk is enough? But Viet Cong's debut LP is packed with new collisions, a kaliedescope of [New Order/Pixies/Gang of Four//BOC] at their artiest, with shards of that PtBS buzzsaw sear, churning with seductive menace. Harmonic, hypnotic, insistent, shimmering, blackened, sexy - a maze of fuzzy walls at uncanny angles, breaking open into pits and parlours, inviting, dangerous, electric 4.5/5

#1981 Downtown Boys - Full Communism

Those giant saxes make a wave, pushing every song forward, surging unstoppable.

The thrashing, the wailing, the thundering guitar chug - all vital, exciting. Ruiz's righteous rants hit the heart of the matter with blunt and barb. But it's that sax wave that give it power, Springsteen gone double psycho rockabilly what knocks you down and drags you away. Essential 4.5/5

#1980 Archy Marshall - A New Place 2 Drown

I listened to this while I wrangled computers and came off underwhelmed.

Now I sit watching the ocean blazing silver-white with reflected hazed sunlight, plants swaying in front erratic breeze, and I bob my head and feel kinda high and I go, ok, ok. Deep in blankets, behind walls of haze, moving in slow motion, beats burble and click, words drip like clocks, hip hop for the very gone 3.5/5

#1979 Count Five - Psychotic Reaction

Sounds of early second-wave American garage - these guys were copying (and covering) The Who before it was cool. End up sounding more like The Small Faces. Could do worse.

There's invention and energy here, but it's not on fire - the boys can't quite just let it fly. They want to sound *good*, or at least like their British heroes, worshiping American rock the long way around. There's ambition in the crannies where there should be --fuckit--[* **] - - * , and it steals some of that garagey energy, till it sounds also-ran in retrospect 3/5

#1978 The Flaming Lips - Hear it Is

Straight on from the debut: it's those same aluminum buzzsaw guitars shaped into actual songs. That post-punk churn churns on, newly spiked with anthems, builds, swerves - actual excitement! It gets  samey by the end (Man From Pakistan is a Frankenstein of just-heard tricks) but there's bristling tension, prickling uncanniness, and just enough puckish fun 3.5/5

#1977 The Flaming Lips - The Flaming Lips

Scenesters' chronic overrating of The Soft Bulletin stunted my interest in the Flaming Lips for decades - its whiny half-underground sound was a warning sign on the band's entire early era.

Incorrectly! Their menacing, sheetmetal post-punk debut is fascinating, serving up its own simmering weirdness, plus a glimpse at seeds before rotten fruit. It's not *great*, stirring the same pots for too long, but it'll give you a jagged little dose of hypnosis. Essential for anyone remotely interested in the Lips' 30 year (!) career 3/5

#1976 The Marshall Tucker Band - The Marshall Tucker Band

I really should hate this, but something about this album's just so damn agreeable: its supersoft, too-perfect mix of country, honkytonk, Americana softrock and jammy meanderin just makes me smile. It's overpolished, overpretty, undergritty, but dammit it pulls it off. It's unpretentious without being showy about how unpretentious it is (I'm looking at you, Lynerd fucking Skynerd), just shuffling along and inviting you for the ride 4/5

#1975 The Barrel Fires - The Barrel Fires

Listen / buy here!

I dig the imperfection. It's a charming little EP, sounding like the boys were all about finding the spirit of the moment, unwilling to grind it out. And it's pretty: full of dulcet guitars, vocals and vocals with just that pillowey touch of reverb.

Too pretty for my taste though. It's good! These guys totally did what they set out to do. It's pretty music from some nice-sounding lads, but I like a lot more whiskey in my tea 3/5

#1974 Jeremih - Late Nights: The Album

Auto-tuned, synth-n-glitch-drenched R&B's taken over a lot of hip hop's territory, conquering most of the neutral zone, crushing the airwaves.

"Maybe that's not such a bad thing!" I thought a couple times here, I gotta admit.

At its best The Album's awesome - it's icy, weird, cool, nicking experimental indie-electronic angles to bring heart and vulnerability and drugaddled laserblur to your 2am. Planez is creepy, alien, slitheringly charming. Pass Dat's strangely beautiful, some collision of Jamie XX and Grimes. And Giv No Fuks gets by on core premise.

But there's so much filler here, so much dopey club-ready generica, so much meandering and wandering that fails to keep your attention.  I don't know what the hell Don't Tell Em did to earn a hundred and twenty three million Spotify listens - that song's boring as shit.

It's a fine line between being cool and lilting over, straight falling asleep in your private booth. Dude has got an eye for a hook, but he's not ready to go album-length, and a bunch of weakass guest appearances can't cover it up 3/5

#1973 Diggs Duke - Civil Circus

For decades, jazz + anything = watery twaddle. But lately we're getting somewhere: the brainfeeder crew brewing up winedark jazz / hip hop soup, Donnie Trumpet spiking sunny asides into Chance's raps, Kneebody and Daedelus disappearing into eachother...

Add Diggs to the list of dudes making it work - horns and floaty organs work their way through spoken word, R&B, and electronic-etc to make something uncanny, funky, and cool - like the cover art's cubism. You're never really sure where its headed while it slips out from under you, glitches, layered ooos, beerlight sax wanderers, spinning something hypnotically wooly and downright pleasant, flashes of day in night 4/5

#1972 The Funkees - Dancing Time, the Best of Eastern Nigeria's Afro Rock Exponents 1973-77

Funk and psychedelic rock rolled out real strange and slow - those 60's organs and wickawack guitars crying out over horns, chants, and oblong beats. It's vibrant, exciting, hypnotic. It's hard not to make the comparison to Tropicalia, especially with that blownout garagey production, even if vibe's real different

The pacing runs a little overlong - eventually it all starts to sound a bit the same - but this's essential for anyone interested in rock outside the Western world 4/5

#1971 The Flaming Lips - Transmissions from the Satellite Heart

Wayne Coyne's voice, that sub-Martschian winge, it really is unpleasant.

Say "Eddie Vedder" out loud. Those thudding Es and Ds and dead-end R: it sounds like his voice, his deep, steady groan.

Say "Wayne Coyne" out loud. That about sums it up.

I wanted to love this, its strange production choices, its lurching prog-ish hitches, its slashes of uncanniness. And I got tempted to love it again and again - I damn do dig that swirling, brilliant build on Moth in the Incubator! The bonkers backing makes up for the vocals most of the time. It's an idea-packed record that you'll admire and occasionally enjoy, but might not love as much as you want to, those shamelessly bleats crashing the bedroom again and again 3.5/5

#1969 Flesh Panthers - Ngc 2632

Relentless, clattering garage rock, packed with scuzz and seared guitars and blownout shouting, band falling down the stairs forever. Glammy swagger and sha-la-la's give the briefest breaks from your inevitable moshing/dancing/thrashing.

Good fun, in other words, but probably more fun live - you can almost hear the club's soundsystem straining, those tinfoil guitars played harder and harder till they slice the little arms to ribbons 4/5

#1968 Kneebody and Daedelus - Kneedelus

I was in a high school jazz band with Kneebody drummer Nate Wood. Lil' trivia for ya.

Kneebody's a knotty little jazz/rock/[?] outfit with some real clean little hitches in their sound. They played mindblowing backup to Busdriver back in 2000something, and now here they are with The Weather collaborator Daedelus -- full circle.

The combination's an incredibly fluid, winding sound: gentle slashes of horns, rocksolid skitter from Wood, with subtle touches from Daedelus. It's jazz rendered otherworldly by unclear means - beautiful, trippy, hooky, as close to early Sigur Ros as that cover alien might suggest, albeit from other angles entirely. And then again and again that jazz spills over genre levees into ambient territory that's more Daedelus's purview, into some unholy rockist hybrid, until the whole plain floods.

I'm a big fan of anything that defies categorization, that thwarts reverse engineering - this fits the bill nicely. Fans of pretty, adventurous stuff will have a good time failing to tease this apart 4/5

#1967 Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - Euclid

A nice counterpoint to those deadboring loopers I've been bashing: this has a real twiggy, organic quality for something so purely electronic. The analog machines are let to breathe, evoking night and space, and the Labyrinth suite lives up to its name, conjuring twisty spaces to fall backwards into. Mysterious, quietly magical stuff 4/5

#1966 Andrew Hung - Rave Cave Level 1

An EP of 3 pointless little bleepbloop loopers from one of Fuck Buttons' button-fuckers. Lo-bit chirps with some higher-fi simmers, bringing no particular getupandmove energy, no particular hypnotic cloaking, no indication that these took more than 20 minutes to slap together.

Small context bonus for ably soundtracking reading about Trump's terrifying war on decency 2.5/5

#1965 Oneohtrix Point Never - The Fall into Time

Six deeply, mechanically minimal tracks, shifting only barely as they loop in place. It makes a certain sense: Oneohtrix always played with time, now instead of dragging individual samples incrementally into detunery, it's the whole song stretched back into a different kind of tunefulness.

The patience, the slow-shift bleeding out from under you, is the album's small thrill. But it ends up feeling like a conceptual wank and won't compete with any of the greats for pure ambient ambiance 3/5

#1964 Ty Dolla Sign - Free TC

Nobody raps anymore. The hip hop station in town's all auto-tuned crooning, all club-ready nonsense. Free TC has just about everybody as a guest, but even the guest rappers barely rap.

There's hope up front, a laidback west coast groove rolling out over the first few tracks. There's even some rapping! But then it just gets waterier and waterier and waterier, a puddle of auto-tune fuckery over forgettable bleep bloops for an hour twelve 2.5/5

#1963 VA - [Cease and Desist] DIY (Cult Classics from the Post-Punk Era 1978-82)

13 icy, repetitive, taut, simmering little rants - totally minimal, mostly hookless, but strangely engaging. This's an expertly-curated collection, laying out a sense of scene and delivering a surprisingly fun, personality-drenched 44-minute tour 4/5

#1962 Grimes - Art Angels

Wildly, overtly, aggressively pop, more so than you thought Grimes could go.

Don't let the panting, Die Antwoord-worthy meltdown of SCREAM fool you - heck even Kill V Maim's squirrely blowouts are red herrings - this is an album packed with sunny melodies, big easy beats, and high-polish production.

As pop? It's better than most. We'd be lucky to have the youth of America hooked on this. Its still weird, still packed with little flourished, pulling pop in the right direction. But don't come in expecting too much - it's cloying more often than it's daring, less Bjork than Beautiful Garbage, and ends up sounding less than totally sincere 3/5

#1961 Ben Lee - Grandpaw Would

It's a catchy little singer-songwriter album, full of clear feelings and pretty touches. But boy is it twee, especially once you know that Lee was 17 at the time. Feel like I should be able to get past that. Can't.

There are some nice little narrative threads: the callbacks to The Pixies, to Lee's songwriting struggles, to "the girl". It's cute. But if you're going full singer-songwriter, I've got to feel like you're telling me your real story - or at least let me suspend disbelief. This put a skeptical look on my face by track 3, made me say "oh cmon" by track 12, and by the time I got to track 18 (eighteen!) I was just sticking around out of completionism 2.5/5

#1960 Life Without Buildings - Any Other City

Sue Tompkins is a mess, yelping and wringing and flinging herself about // Sue Tompkins is in control, repeating lines again and again until she gets them right and drills them in. No punkass song's gonna tell her when she's done.

The band keeps time with clockwork efficiency, a pulse for Tompkins' to scrawl over, vulnerable and menacing and unstoppable, the most interesting girl you ever dated, too much for you to handle 3.5/5

#1959 Born Ruffians - Ruff

This is a nice bounceback after the too-pop Birthmarks, bringing back some of that indie wonder and angst and hope - a little grit to offset the leftover sheen. It's hooky, pretty, and very very indie rock, adventurous, if only incrementally 3.5/5

#1958 Billy Bragg and Wilco - Mermaid Avenue

Billy and Wilco make songs out of unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics.

And that's the story of what you're going to get: some folksy sentiments, some Wilco indie-country-indie, and a lot of general mismatch and hodgepodgery. Wilco sounds shackled to the format, the lyrics' personal impact is undercut by the guest-writer/performer format, and the whole thing feels awkwardly reanimated. I've never found collaborations between greats to work, from the Travelling Wilburys to the New Basement Tapes - tight-knit vision makes for the best rock.

Exceptions for lyrics that are so damn good they just carry the project. Walt Whitman's Neice is endlessly, wryly witty, and Unwelcome Guest is quietly devastating. And well, Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key's just plain pretty as hell. But in between there's a whole lot that just feels unnecessary 3/5

#1957 Blitzen Trapper - VII

There were hints of this sound in Black River Killer, and now its everywhere, licks of soul, funk, and big boombaps alongside wobbling trumpets, slide guitars, and wailing harmonicas. There's no avoiding comparisons to Odelay, what with those hiphop beats, country flourishes, psychedelic imagery and crackling experimentalism. In fact, these guys have a lot in common with Beck: those swings between downhome simplicity and bigcity shitstorms.

But what made Odelay so great was the way it kept you guessing, right to the end. VII just happens to run out of steam right at track 7, settling down to a lazy simmer over those last 5 tracks. I like where the band's pointed, and the first half throws some sparks, but this feels like an understuffed course correction after American Goldwing's too-simple sound 3.5/5

#1956 The Ozark Mountain Daredevils - It'll Shine When it Shines

I do love it when I can feel an album's creation shining through - Ty-loose or Kid-A-tight, I just wanna feel it. There's an effortless energy to these guys that I dig. It's country shuffle and stomp, with a rock and roll backbeat backbone - all pretty, driving forward at a pace that's --just-- fast enough to put the wind in your hair, but not fast enough to muss it up. This is some ur-Blitzen-Trapper bullshit.

Every song sounds easy to make, easy to listen to, but it's never cloying, never boring, never full of itself, it just flows out like a river. I could listen to this all day, on porches, with cards skipping on felt, with a whiskey and a couch and a night gone by 4.5/5

#1955 Born Ruffians - Birthmarks

This is polished as hell, especially given how ramshackle they used to be.

Maybe it's the agreeable fake-rough vocals and approachable melodies, but there's something in this that smells designed for girls, in a tacky, capitalistic kind of way. Nicking little bits from Phoenix, Mumford, Hot Hot Heat, and a thousand other indie touchstones reinforces that overslick impression.

Which makes Rage Flows frustrating as hell: it's a /killer/ track, setting up expectations and knocking them apart again and again, ratcheting up tension perfectly across verses until the blasted, clipped production is tuned right over the top into a terrifying, thrilling speakershredding climax. I want to hear the album that *that* band made 3/5

#1954 Harmonia - Musik von Harmonia

Meandering and droning and formless, even for Krautrock, this pulses and flows, with spatters of guitar and wobbles of electronics in no hurry to get anywhere, sounding improvised. There's a purity to that - this is better than average hypnosis grist, with little "how'd they make that noise" puzzles waiting in the wings 3.5/5

#1953 Oneohtrix Point Never - Garden of Delete

I've claimed it before, but this time I mean it: this is the payoff for all those years of annoying, slurred, detuned electronic fuckery that we suffered through in the early 2010's. It was Oneohtrix's own Replica that really jumpstarted the movement, so it's fitting that he's here to show us the way out.

There's still samples slurred to oblivion, but they're alongside a hundred other tricks and constructed into actual songs, into actual arcs of experience, into something you might want to actually listen to. It's one of the most impressive combinations of wild experimentalism and actual listenability I've heard in ages - there's enough melody and flow and beauty here to work its way into your head, seducing you into its strangeness, changing the room around you underneath your awareness.

Skitters, drones, buzzes, warps, woofs, chops, pulses, stutters, and it's all got that magical sense of being untouched by man - an album launched into space, corrupted on a trip past a distant sun, reconstructed by alien robots with poor motor control.

Special award for having the perfect album title and cover.

Put it on when you've got something creative to do, something that can stand up to a little disintegration 4.5/5

#1952 Blitzen Trapper - American Goldwing

Perfectly pleasant as country rock goes; Trapper can still nail that backbeat backbone, with those vocal hooks and the solo at justherightspot. It's so conservative though - I accept we're never going to get anything as gloriously batshit as Wild Mountain Nation again, but there's nothing here that even matches Furr's slightly-adventurous highlights.

Heck, there's not a single moment on here that betrays its 70's disguise: this could sidle right up alongside Skynryd or CSNY and fit right in. If you're down with that, this'll soothe you good, but fans of the band's previous work might be left underwhelmed 3.5/5

#1951 Goat (Sweden) - World Music

Guitars, drones, chants, polyrhythms, there's nothing to moor to as everything swirls psychedelic, there's no repeated riffs, just waves of noise that rise up underneath and islands of beauty and relief. It's the best and worst thing about the album, that wailing indistinctness - it's a full on hardline 60's trip if you're willing to commit to it, packed with monument and detail 4/5

#1950 Goat (Australia (Metal)) - Sign of the Dead

Add it to the list of essays I'll never quite write: accidental musical discovery in the internet age.

Latest example: I'm listening to an album by Australian band Goat, and it rolls past its Spotify endpoint into their next album, a doomy metal album by a completely different (also Australian!) band called Goat*.

Weirdly, I almost thought this was the same guys from a different era. It's got other-Goat's disarming earnestness, underproduction, and stripped-down underpromising//overdelivering charm - even if the sunny acoustic's been replaced by nailbombed guitar/bass. These're clearly dudes who love music, who really want to make music, and said fuckit and set up a tascam and banged out some clumsy, thin-mixed doom that I totally enjoyed listening to 3.5/5

*and neither of these bands are the Swedish experimental Goat the Cleveland pop Goat the Seattle jazz Goat the Spanish dance Goat and boy is Spotify confused

#1949 Goat (Australia) - Circles

It's a small record, probably made by buds in a garage // living room // barn, chugging along earnestly, a little hookless, a little boring -- but strangely charming. The relentless acoustic clatter, the sunny little chord changes, the Wolf Parade-lite howling vocal inflections, they won me over.

It sounds unforced and sincere, downright effortless. Enough for me 3.5/5

#1948 Styx - The Grand Illusion

Second-tier 70's week continues!

See, I'm learning about myself here: I'll take goofy indulgence over plodding devotion to the blues and the road and being a simple kind of man anyday.

I'm totally falling for the lame overproduction, the proggy flourishes, celebrity's-an-illusion fairy tale. This lands somewhere between Journey, ELO, and Rush on the hokey art-rock band map - it's not as catchy//sincere//virtuoso as the rest, but dammit, I had a good time coming along for the romp 3.5/5

#1947 Foghat - Fool for the City

Maybe it's all the deadboring stuff I've been listening to, but I actually kinda like Foghat's goofy, half-baked experimental//pop indulgences right about now. The harmonies are goofy, the proto-hair-metal shrieks are goofy. Mark it: album cover, album name, band name - all goofy. It's overproduced and sloppy, like drunk Steely Dan, but dammit it kinda won me over. Plus, Slow Ride's an all time jam 3.5/5

#1946 Bachman Turner Overdrive - Bachman Turner Overdrive

The core sound's good enough: those forward-leaning drums, that Canadian-Skynyrd guitarwork. But man, for a band all about roads and gears and trucking this band is in no damn rush to get anywhere - every song goes on way longer than it should. I must have muttered "is this song still going?" 3 different times. Which is weird, because they're only 4-5 minutes long, but that feels long when the pace is so slow and there's only a GBV song's worth of ideas powering the whole thing. Plus, god! There's never any climax or anything - the song just churns and churns and stops.

Maybe it's all about that endless road hypnosis 2.5/5

#1945 Ride - Going Blank Again (Extended)

I usually go for the original releases, but I accidentally listened to the rerelease with 4 extra tracks, and I have to admit it made the difference. Some people were disappointed that this made some pop concessions compared to Nowhere, but I feel like those extra 4 tracks, especially the 11 minute closer, bring this back to epic scale. It's packed with shoegaze layers, sanded into aerodynamism but still jumbo-jet, still intimidating.

I'm still not a super big shoegaze guy, but this's more fun than most 3.5/5

#1944 Fuzz - II

The riffs are huge, and they rule. It's heavy and nasty: the fuzzed out bass juggernaut, the screaming guitar solos, the neckbreak dives into overpowering guitar noise maelstroms. But I feel like I don't like it as much as I should, somehow. Have we finally reached saturation on the Ty Segall sound?

There's something overstuffed and plodding about this, even as it's great, even as it's hooky, it's just so much, so loud, for 67 minutes - it's numbing. It makes me appreciate the great Ty Segal albums, which managed to give you room to breathe, in the mix and in the sequencing.

Possibly the perfect Segallsphere album to go to if you want pure dedication to riffage, but not my first choice overall 4/5

#1943 Free - Tons of Sobs

Heavy British blues revival rock, sticking pretty close to the master form, tearing off into something new here and there only occasionally. There's some ripping guitars, and inb4 Zepp, Sabbath, etc. if you're into history. But if we're talking about the actual listening - too much blues-debt for my taste 3/5

#1942 Bad Company - Bad Company

I don't know how these guys got off the ground. Their later stuff is a little better, but man, their first album is some real generic brand, cut-rate 70's rock and roll. Slow paced, unmoving, unimaginitive, unexciting. It's fine, but aggressively unspectacular - the kind of stuff I'd expect to hear some dads making on a Tuesday night at the eighth-best bar in town 2.5/5

#1941 Herzog - Cartoon Violence

God I love these guys - Weezery power-pop crunch + slide-laser guitar + too-old weariness + unexpected structural swerves. It checks [so] [many] [boxes] [for] [me]

Unexpected, lively, tuneful, hooky and fun, all railing against the pre-middle-age limpdickery I'm kicking my way through right about now. Young people music for old people that somehow makes you feel like you're not fooling yourself 4.5/5

#1940 Latin Playboys - Latin Playboys

Man I love an album that won't sit still, that's got its throughline and theme but that just takes you on all these little sideroads through the countryside.

Latin Playboys' self-titled debut has a stagger'long, bluesy backbone, not too far from the band's Los Lobos roots, but then it's off into swampwater drones, ragged horns, fuzzed out textures, a roadtrip through strange lands with details in every detour. It's rich, real, strange, Beta Band songs piped from an ancient dimension though a dusty backyard radio, hunter's moon rising 4.5/5

#1939 Eluvium - Nightmare Ending

Ambient pushes of strings and sound and churning pianos, deeply patient, deeply repetitive, a slow-motion duel between Sigur Ros and The Disintegration Tapes refereed by Explosions in the Sky on ketamine.

It lands in a strange ambient valley though. It's not as pure enough to become object-in-rotation ambient; you can't you unpack its layers as meditation when too-noticable shifts let parts bob in and out of frame. And it's not narrative ambient - the shifts are too slow, too detached from emotional arcs.

In the valley is landscape ambient, where you progress overimpassive terrain slowly, watching rivers connect, hills ebb into one another, contour lines flowing slowly. The landscape though, it's boring. The sound's not especially well designed, not especially well paced, as if created automatically, without any particular nod towards listener experience, just here. Like a landscape somewhere far away.

There's an artistic purity to that. But ambient music doesn't have to be this boring: it can use all that space and time to stimulate intellectually, to dredge emotionally, to construct, to speak. Nightmare Ending too often just feels like gain knobs, turned slowly, hoping to stumble into your affections 2.5/5

#1938 Jon Hopkins - Late Night Tales

This is the first volume of Late Night Tales I've come across, but this is Jon Hopkins all right, all small, patient beauty, all float and space, all hypnosis, all forgetting of sound, as drones pulse and arpeggios meander and ghostly voices sweep through. It fits the name, if nothing else - this is music for long nights alone by rainy windows, for underlit living rooms, for feeling small and content and scared, auroras by the bedside 4/5

#1937 Wire - 154

Wire's really underappreciated: their first 3 albums cast a line through taut punk-adjacent noise and on through catchy prescient 80's/90's-underground post-punk sounds, all by 1979.

Tortured, angular, industrial, noisy, joyfully romping, glistening with synthesizers and smiling menace, packed with contradictions. They're right there with Talking Heads as straddlers of art and hooks. It's not quite as fun, nor as interesting, as the Heads' best stuff, but there's something less arch, something more natural about this album that I like - a weird knot of sound pouring out inevitably 4/5

#1936 The Televibes - High or Die

Listen / buy here!

Between these guys and Creaturos, I've got hope that there's a real garage rock revival scene coming to Boston. These guys are more OhSees/Gizzard than Ty/OBNIII - psychadelic and spacy, with riffs to spare, layers and layers and layer, a galaxy-class spanakopita coming to crush your mind fuzz 4/5

#1935 Creaturos - Popsicle

Listen / by here!

Nasty, overblown rockandrolls that gets your shit moving, Boston's own little chip off the Ty/OhSees/SF garage rock scene. Ripping, noisy, hectic good fun, packed with little flourishes and blunt-force fuckoff power 4/5

#1934 Long Beard - Sleepwalker

This album puts all its chips on the vocals. With shoegaze-lite guitars this unspectacular, with a near-complete lack of drums or drive, the frontman/woman's alone in the spotlight. But Leslie Bear's singing just isn't especially powerful or personal or nuanced, making for a quietly unspecial after-hours indie-rock serenade 2.5/5

#1933 M83 - M83

This preceded DCRSLG's gigantic soundscapes, and [every M83 album thereafter]'s turn towards 80's-adjacent pop, and it shows. It's not that epic, not all that catchy, but the same screaming synths / guitars are here, the same smashings of noise and beauty. It's like that scene where the sniper opens his briefcase and snap-snap-click-twist-breathe-aim - we're introduced to the tools that will buzz into our hearts all century.

What Gonzalez and Fromageau don't have figured out on their debut is pacing and structure. It's an often-boring listen, without much actual appeal in the waves of buzz and shriek, but it's a fun piece of history for the semi-casual M83-appreciator 3/5

#1932 Built to Spill - Untethered Moon

Too few albums take advantage of that first-track opportunity to greet the listener, to settle into a place in the band's canon, to position itself in the musicfan life experience. Whether it's Separation Sunday's declaration to pick up where Almost Killed Me left off, Kid A's commitment to an anti-rock swerve, or Is This It's concession to unmeetable expectations - it's always a little thrill to be addressed so openly.

On the ripping first track All Our Songs, Doug Martsch muses along with us about the long trip Built to Spill's been on over the decades, about how strange it is to be anything at all, flanked by a who's who of guitar effects, one after another, a 21 gun salute to band not yet dead. It's sentimental and thrilling and personal, and from there on out I'm hooked to the rocket, ready for whatever I hear next.

That's the highest high on the record, but everything else lives up to the legacy, full of grand guitars, intimate asides, and structural swings that make their own clockwork sense. This is a veteran, assured band, drawing you into the fold, inviting you to jam on rock and roll over some beers, a warm, intricate record that I think will probably grow closer over time Who'd have thought? I'd given up on these guys, but dammit if Doug didn't set me straight 4/5

#1931 Airship - Algebra EP

Big joyuous shoutalong indie rock in the spirit of Danananakroyd and Los Campesinos. Prettier than most; I'm a sucker for the title track's giant synth hook that cuts through the mix and into your heart. The rest of the songs don't quite live up, but its a feisty, fun little romp 3/5

#1930 Alice Coltrane - Journey in Satchidananda

Deeply psychedelic, even as astral free jazz goes. Pulses, surges, squalls, squeals, blown out production, drones, strings, horns, horns, percussion of all varieties - too busy too be calming, too cluttered to quite be /interesting/, but in soft focus it's a true timemelter, a real trip 3.5/5

#1929 The Nails - Mood Swing

The 88 Lines About 44 Women band, but they're about half as new wave and a third as pop as you'd expect.

With Marc Campbell's whooping baritone, a pounding, dry drum sound and a ripping, raging horn section, these guys are more menacing than joyous - sounding like a band called "The Nails". It's skeezy rockabilly, a step away from the Cramps. There's a goofiness that keeps this from greatness though, like they can't quite commit to the shtick, but it's still an inventive, style-straddling piece of almost-pop 3/5

#1928 !!! - As If

Given that dancepunk was dead just about the day it dropped, how are these guys still going?

How does this shit still sound so fresh?

The lyrics are hitchy and hooky and flecked with politik, the structures are full of little surprises - you're always on your toes, this funky alien thing writhing around you and around you and in its own way its a damn fine dancer.

Also, I don't call out individual tracks very often, but goddamn Freedom '15's one of the banginest things I've heard in ages - the huge bass, the slinky verses, that euphoric chorus calling upon the best of Stax fuck-you songs, and then the cracking second half that snaps the whole thing 90 degrees, degree by degree till you're in a whole 'nother headspace. That bass.

This makes me want to be in an actual dancing club. I never go to dancing clubs. Cool rave song.

4.5/5

#1927 Dan Friel - Life

Somewhere between the silver sheen of Ratatat and the rusted shrapnel of late-era Oval lies Dan Friel, where gutcutting shards have been scrap-recycled into rough-hewn hardlines and swooping curves.

Everything clatters, everything bristles, everything screams, but the construction's rigorous and perfect and gesturing at something simple and human. It's a beautiful sweep of noise that's only a little bit painful to listen to 3.5/5

#1926 Ninjaman - Bounty Hunter

Essay for another day: "underground" in the streaming world.


There's something about the cheap rat-tat-tat drum machine beats, the wildly uneven volume, the clumsily executed experimentalism, the lilting, staggering flow that makes this sound straight out of musty basements, pumped from pirate radio broadcasts via crappy car speakers.

I knock Reggae for sounding samey, for getting locked blues-tight into a particular rhythm and feel, but this is wonky, swingy, janky, curious, adventurous - that crackle of something unfound 3.5/5

#1925 Billy Bragg - Life's a Riot With Spy vs. Spy

I've got no patience for dude'n'guitar tales of this'n'that, but for Billy I'll make an exception. That rich voice, that bristling electric, that shock of crisp cavern reverb - apocalypse songs of better days, belted from the dried-up sewer shelter.

So biting, so stripped down and unpresumptuous that it wins me over 4/5

#1924 Siriusmo - Pearls & Embarrassments: 2000-2010 (Vol. 01)

Another marathon Siriusmo LP, again cobbled together from his stuff I've been listening to. This is pretty good, but a little less diverse, a little more plodding. Worse, he pulls a lot from Allthegirls and The Uninvited Guest, which (besides holding his weaker stuff) got a little bit of mileage out of their loose thematic ties, which are untethered here.

It's fine, but the first time I found myself getting bored with this dude - run couldn't last forever 3.5/5

#1923 Siriusmo - Mosaik

Siriusmo's first LP is composed mostly of tracks off the EP's and singles I've been listening to.

Those're good. This is good.

His tricks are less durable when you're hitting the hour mark with them, and sometimes the pacing lags. But the core songs are still so damn solid, and there's just enough dips into hyperaggressive and pretty and playful that its a great listen 4/5

#1922 Chill Rob G - Ride the Rhythm

Real old school, a bit of Slick Rick narrative, but mostly a loose freestyle, every way you can mean it. Production's slick, classic. A real smooth back to basics groove 3/5

#1921 Oval - Ovalprocess

94 Diskont was pure. with no hand of man.

here the bzzrrrrrrrrzzzzzz and sktttkssttktkktsksssss and ...k........kkk....k...k............k, feel more constructed, composed. Stttil alien, stiltll mostly unplest, interesting the sloser youlist tructed, composed. the natural endpoint maybe of thiss king of discfucked noisutctctcted, composed 3/5

#1920 Miike Snow - Happy to You

There's a machine is in charge, making the big swoops and leaving the band to put a song over top. I feel like this machine knows Menomena's.

This machine's the star, and at its best it seems to understand humans, using its amalgamation of buzzes, pulses, horn drones, and piano twinkles to strike an emotional chord.

But all the machine's production's left hanging and disconnected from the songwriting; choruses pile on and songs get dragged into ill-paced, overlong shapes, slathered in boring falsetto and slavish devotion.

I'd like this better if the band wasn't here at all 3/5

#1919 Alice Cooper - Killer

Alice keeps you guessing, scuzzy and glammy and simple and complex. There's a fearlessness that makes this exciting: going for Stooges grit and proggy excess* back to back to back, bouncing off of every awesome style going in 1971, breaking off pieces and smashing em up.

Cooper's strained, thin voice is the weak link, and the papery mix undercuts the power, but the songwriting and swagger are strong enough to make this a minor classic 4/5

* anyone else notice the last-act hook of Halo of Flies is basically Genesis's The Knife?

#1918 Sponge - Wax Ecstatic

It's the 90's alright. Crunchy guitars, Albini-lite drums, and droning deadpans.

It's got more power than most, piled high with power chords and reverb. And most songs work in some kind of surprise, some structural swerve, some pretty moment.

But I can't say I remembered a single note of it when it was done 3/5

#1917 Toadies - Heretic

I was pretty into Rubberneck in high school, but absent knowing Sabbath, or the Pixies, or fucking, anything, I was a child walking into the middle of the movie.

Also totally lost on me: the hellfire religiousity at its heart, that rage and terror at the threat of damnation.

This is more than an album of acoustic versions of old songs, it's a series of reimaginings, an extraction of dusty skeleton ancestors, and the folk / revival / roots strands calling up the ghosts of that old time relijun. It mostly works - dude can still sing pretty good - but it's undercut by a too-perfect production approach that sands the rough edges off. Those edges are what make this whole sound work you holy fools! Still, a fun listen and a good excuse to revisit a band that's still around against all odds and expectations 3/5

#1916 2Pac - Me Against the World

2Pac gets shot and comes out a changed man, death and dread covers everything, his hands flying forward in fists and skyward in claws, words hard-edges and gnarled. It pops in small doses, and the production's slinky // sharp, but it gets exhausting - this gangta stuff's not my scene 3/5

#1915 Jobriath - Creatures of the Street

What a gorgeous, sweeping mess he is, staggering and knocking into barstools with a flourish, curtains shower down and the theater erupts in sparks and flashes. It's the Stones in Exile, its the Kinks lost in America, it's Ziggy as the world comes crashing down, the members of the chorus erupting in flames as a backdrop falls, a doorframe lands just a step from perfect, the star's arm knocked clean off, sequins splattering. Cans fall and explode, and streetlights shine in through the scaffolding and rooftile hangers on. The star dies, the ghost closes the show to no one 4/5

#1914 Siriusmo - Allthegirls

Overtly muscular, shamelessly rockist, aggresively going right for the big motherfucker Justice sound. The buzzes are catching, the grooves heavy - it's a solid stomper. But the pacing's off, and it lacks that atmosphere, that elliptical perfection, that understated grace of Siriusmo's best stuff 3.5/5

#1913 Siriusmo - Sirimande / Feed My Meatmachine

I just got Resogun, a sidescrolling spaceship shooter in the Defender / Stargate vein, with a Robotron approach to shitshitshit run'n'gun. An explosion of highly-polished laserlight, with action that draws you into loops and whorls around a cylindrical stage, elegant and overwhelming, with an old soul behind the eyes.

When it came time to review this album, that game got fired right up - more so than your average electronic album, it's a perfect fit. Those graceful buzzes, that retro update debt to Kraftwerk's icy futureshock robotic perfection, that elliptical interlock, that electric sheen, those burbles of busyness.

This dude's early stuff is just brilliant, packed with laseraxe swagger 4.5/5

#1912 Ozzy Osborne - Blizzard of Ozz

Brilliant shit. There's nothing here that competes with the best Sabbath as far as gigantic riffage, but this is a perfect storm of heavy and fun, nasty and gorgeous. Classical guitar flourishes abound, and Goodbye to Romance is one of the prettiest rock ballads around, but full on thrash is never more than a track or two away. Those big basslines too. Add in songwise swerves and rock solid album flow and you've got a keeper 4.5/5

#1911 Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine

I've been an on-again off-again fan of NiN, especially the Atticus Ross-era stuff. So much texture.

So I grudgingly admire the production: it was pretty visionary to be this glitched out and metal and dancy in 1989. There's some good, nasty noise in the crannies, some real squonky hooks.

But good god these lyrics! Some real middle school book margin shit, so relentlessly miserable, from "grey would be the color // if I had a heart" to "now I'm slipping on the tears you made me cry" and on and on and on for 48 minutes. It's like being trapped by some sad sack at a party, feeling your sympathy and patience drain as the same grievances get aired again and again 3/5

#1910 The Cars - Heartbeat City

I'm a big fan of the Cars' debut and so far this dip into their later stuff is a disappointment. The effortless fun and hookiness are gone, replaced with forced quirk and a strangely pop//hard rock streak. This is barely new wave by now, sounding like a Foreigner record half the time. Not cool.

Drive's a classic though 3/5

#1909 Holly and the Italians - The Right to Be Italian

Bleary, sunny New Wave-lite, chugging along on superficial cool - cool like a band from LA hanging its hat on euroism. It goes by agreeably without surprises, summer into winter in Southern California, somewhere between Blondie and Fleetwood Mac, everything's so fine and fine and fine. Sometime you even buy into the cool and smile despite yourself 3/5

#1908 Lynyrd Skynyrd - Second Helping

Skynyrd practiced their solos, wanted em the same every time. I never could get past that.

It's a solid collection songs, filled with tasty guitar lines, honkytonk shuffle, and a generous helping of unexpected turns. But without grit, without real looseness, what good is this kinda rock? Too polished, too calculated to excite. Also, fuck Sweet Home Alabama 3/5

#1907 Ray Wylie Hubbard - Snake Farm

Straightforward, slightly overpolished blues. Gritty-lite themes deadpanned out one after the other, marking time till the solo arrives. Solos are slow and sweet, with plenty of nuance. A perfectly passable backporch slowburner 3/5

#1906 The Chills - Kaleidoscope World

Kaleidoscope's about right the right word for it: effortless flickers of scathing punk, chiming guitars, shimmering jangle - right at the forefront of the underground sound. Every song's its own invention, especially impressive circa 1986.

It's a bit slow, a bit sleepy, but impressive, with that unnamable New Zealand [something] that I've always rather liked (did they have different recording equipment down that way or something? the mystery of that subtle New Zealand patina haunts me) 3.5/5

#1905 Hood Internet - II

It's telling that Donnie Trumpet and Chance show up on the first two tracks on this album: there's a kind of sunny positivity throughout that reminds me of their recent, excellent Surf collab.

II's breezy, adding pop hooks to brighten up hip hop - Girl Talk's funtimes sharing basically none of his actual techniques.

It's almost too easy - almost disposable - but that's the summer for ya - so good it's gone 4/5

#1904 Country Teasers - The Pastoral, Not Rustic: World of Their Greatest Hits

Loose, noisy, pisstaking county-adjacent scuzz rock. Too low-stakes to get excited about, but it'll draw a wry smile 3/5

#1903 Don Cherry - Brown Rice

Timemelting jazz that's all texture, all feel, all tone, with frenetic squiggles of trumpet that disappear into soft focus. Trippy, patient, alien//organic, surprisingly listenable, strangely peaceful 3.5/5

#1902 Fanfare Ciocarlia - Iag Bari

Rolling horns, flickering horns, horns blowing like swirls of wind, voices rolled around, interlocking, loping, slow-motion swooping, endless inevitable, bumping, hopping, skittering over top, a whole earth ecosystem of low horns, high horns, interlocking and endless, peaceful and exciting and night and day in stop motion relentless and endless 3.5/5

#1901 Tiga - Ciao!

Does this ever want to be DFA/LCD (James Murphy shows up to help!), packed with disco bass, fizzy synth progressions, moaning boys, and cooing girls. Plus plenty of artificial sweetener cool, with lots of sexy/stylish/quirky/cool mantras. Air quotes.

There's some hot synth buzz, especially the blown-out What You Need, but this's a good reminder of how fragile cool is, and how important it was to the best DFA bands' success: Tiga got the synths but can't pull off the sound, got the outfit but can't pull off the look 3/5

#1900 The Flaming Lips - Clouds Taste Metallic

Trippy, fuzzy, hooky, knotty - for those who know the Lips from [that Vaseline song] -> [Yoshimi] -> [Yaaaaawn] this'll come as a pleasant surprise. 90'sunderground at its most whorling and rollicking, wheeling Builttospillian with a blownout art-fucked twist. Wayne's voice is pretty brutal (and more than a little Martschian, actually), but this's a great bit of weirdo fun 4/5

#1899 Mount Eerie - Sauna

After the visceral minimalist//maximalism of Clear Moon and Ocean's Roar this feels like a return to form, to bare expression, to balance in the drone and the lack. Elvrum stares death bare in the face, warmth bringing life, cold bringing awareness of life, Sauna feeling waves from the last fire album, The Glow Pt. 2. It's daunting, harrowing as ever, a deep-dive into a place beyond music like only Elvrum can bring. Go in prepared and empty and patient and come out exhausted and changed 4/5

#1898 Múm - Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy

Yesterday was Dramatic had a magic to it, dropped from the sky. This still has samples, tones, glitches, but it loses that magic, sounding arch, its little details forced. Maybe its the acoustic instrumentation, maybe its the singsongy singing, but twee cleverness and overcomposition poke out at all angles 2.5/5

#1897 Siriusmo - Sirius EP

Dancy, poppy, buzzy fun - way ahead of the curve in 2003 with its space disco groovin. Weird synths jitterin, lady croonin, beats skitterin over funk guitars, a joyous 4-pack of dance/rock/electronic reconfigurations 4/5

#1896 Siriusmo - The Uninvited Guest

Mad little dittysuite with some real structure. That repetition, that return to the twistedround 3 Pigs plotline, that warbling pacing, that bending of synths and guitars into pure pulse//groove//buzz, it's brilliant. It's a //thing//, this pile of loops and texture and dubbsteppy braying and buildingblock majesty. Fans of Justice // Vitalic with a taste for the weird, definitely check this out 4/5

#1895 Megapuss - Surfing

Here's some weirdos taking a page from the Zappa playbook, filtered through pure Ween wierdoism. These dudes, weird dudes, they lay out that cover, that tricky angling. It's right agreeable on the surface, all bubblegum and yacht rock and neo-soul and 70's California pop-rock - - - but that bandname, that naked knifefight cover artwork . . . a seed of doubt.

And the falsettos wobble funhouse, and a man man barks duck man manifestos, and hitchy startstops and breakdowns and shrieks and everyone meows and everything just gets kinda addled. It reads a little goofy, a little forced in places, but it's damned hooksome and curious enough often enough that it's well worth your trouble if you're into this kind of thing 3.5/5

#1894 Sister Rosetta Tharpe - Gospel Train

Ma'am you can sing, for sure. All that power, that foot-down beltingout, that yowling mouthy massaging of the crucial syllable, shifting gear from throttle to fishtail with swooping grace, a ragged, worldworn Super Sprint into the heart of the matter. It feels more like performance, less like deep-true souldumping than the highest greats, but that's a high holy bar. It's good stuff. If you decide to really tuck in, really let it take you, this'll get you home before you know it 3.5/5

#1893 Wavves - V

FIDLAR showed us how to grow up and out of scuzzpunk slackerdom. And how.

Wavves, despite all odds, despite initial flameouts, is still a band, and Nathan Williams is coming up on 30, struggling to find new ways to not give a shit, struggling to find a way to give a shit, settling into a rut. Put this on shuffle with the last couple and tell me the difference.

It's fine. But FIDLAR spoiled me. I want more 3/5

#1892 Larry Gus - I Need New Eyes

How did this get made? Seems beyond creation, fallen out of a portal. Even the nonsense title, the wobwobwob cover art say it. Bedroom pop with an interdimensional closet attached.

Falsettos skim and steer, the bass pops, it's all Hot Chip, all so 201x. But the backbone is atumble, polyrhythms, start-stops, a shimmering, sheer texture in between, glitch in the corners, Moby |> gone right. It's bewildering little listen that doesn't pigeonhole easily. Points for that, as we approach album two fucking thousand on this project 4/5

#1891 Joe Tex - Happy Soul

Joe's got personality, jawing and yowling and chatting and scatting over some pretty popping soul/funk/rock. But every song hinges on its one little joke//message and its pretty flat once you get past it - can't imagine this's something I'd come back to again and again 3/5

#1890 Keith Cross & Peter Ross - Bored Civillians

As you quit seeking excitement, as you just seek reprieve from seeking excitement, this is the salve you need to sleep for another thousand days. This soothing ether, a wash of all of the 70's in all of its harmonies, all of its twinkling guitars, all of its post-60's weariness 4/5

#1889 Sanford Clark - They Call Me Country

Drawling rockabilly packed with witty turns, gritty tales, and curiously adventurous production decisions. Clark's velvet baritone is in no rush, rolling out deadpan tales of lovelost woe, sounding like a ghostly ancestor to the likes of Lou Reed and Stephin Merritt. A gorgeous, clever, soulful gem - guaranteed to raise a weary smile 4/5

#1888 Akufen - My Way

Seldom has so little been done with so much. One big concept and a couple thousand parts (microsamples recorded off the radio) and all you get is an hour of icy, unevocative microhouse, every track overstaying its welcome, the same vocal samples coming back and back and back and back and back and back and back and back and back and back and back and back and back 2/5

#1887 Joe Bataan - Riot

Something hot in the air, equatorial heat, the heat of an overstuffed city in summertime. Rhythms shuffle along, this is dead pure, damn near simple, busting over it's levels. Insistent, but stuffy, stifled, a muggy pulse of transplanted simmering heat 3/5

#1886 Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport

I'd just listened to Street Horrrsing, and it holds up. This is a pale imitation. Gigantic walls of bleeps and beats and noise noise, sure, but amounting to nothing. Without the shrieking vocals, without the majestic eye towards the epic, this doesn't raise neckhair the way Horrrsing did. It's just there. Like a wall. Lacking motion and lacking magic 2.5/5

#1885 McLusky - Mcluskyism

couldn'tgiveashit as ever, mclusky shriek and swagger and sneer, backed by a wall of thundering bass and broadsword guitar slashes, never stop startstopping, every pause a debt that's paid next measure. blistering, noisy, jeering nihilism packed with blistering riffs and blistering wit 3.5/5

#1884 Krazy Baldhead - The B Suite

A Big Adventure:
  dubstep-adjacent buzz/wobble
    glitch bridges and breakdowns
      beats get broken
        mcs ride in in force, full on hip hop breaks out
          bleepbloop spacehighway
            buzzsaw burndowns
              sample shards in the wasteland
The first album from the worst-named act in electronica is as proggy as the great sophomore Noise in the Sky, but nastier, tighter, more exciting. Rockist bleepmaking that wants to see what's out there 4.5/5

#1883 Wand - Golem

The perfect psychedelic album. Gigantic riffs in step with meditative wanderings, stone hammer bludgeoning streaked with quicksilver strangitudes, terrible and mysterious, the ghost of Ty Segall. Full and soft, an embrace disguised as a punch in the face, flinch yourself to sleep, capped perfectly by The Drift, wake up wondering what happened 4.5/5

#1882 Astral Travelling - Lonnie Liston Smith and the Cosmic Echoes

Been a long couple of weeks. Woke up early, decided to sleep till after traffic. Couldn't. Scrambled out before. Out the window it's trees and blankets of fog. Little oils in my breakfast bar find their way into my coffee and coil black black black. Organs push, drums turn, wobble, wander, a saxophone 4/5

#1881 King Sunny Ade - Juju Music

Rhythm section locks into some place beyond and matches many paces, never lets go, setting up waves on waves. Vocals on vocals, etherial un-guitar, zaps from beyond, time melts. Good, good, bye bye time 3.5/5

#1880 Cymande - Cymande

Dark water, smoldering ash, bass leads, slowing smoke or rolling spark. Bass is in the lead. Horns a throne around king bass. Everyone swaps for king bass. Fall asleep dreaming of slow motion dancing 3.5/5

#1879 Benji Hughes - A Love Extreme

Each song's dead simple. A lump of guitars and flourishes about some angle on love, Hughes' deep dark voice poured thick on top. Muggy little sundae. Of Montreal without the structural adventurousness, a pop fiddler somewhere between Self and Eels.

Once you hear the theme, you've got the basic trajectory. But together those 25 pile up into something strange and small and soothing, a meditation that beats 69 Love Songs for wistful wisdom and glimmer of personality forged by sheer endless persistence 3.5/5

#1878 Jobriath - Jobriath

Pure glam Bowie prototype, bold as Queen, full as ELO, packed to busting, overflowing with operatic fury and grace and desperation.

Less of the artful rock and roll mastery than Hunky // Ziggy, fewer remarkable landmarks, lost in a wash of watercolor pinks and purples by the end, but it sweeps me right up 4.5/5

#1877 Port O'Brien - All We Could Do Was Sing

I'm working on a theory of eras of rock music as stages of grief when it comes to your own death, with the late 90's -- 00's as the stage when we started to really look the truth in the face.

This album's not about death exactly, but it has that big shoutalong community thing going, that big railing against the world, that lone man falling over backwards into questions and disintegration, that smallness, that helplessness-together. All Modest Mouse croaking, all Microphones wonder, that Arcade Fire+Wilco+Mumford busy-ness, all prickling and twinkling and cold.

It sounds like something I'd like, but it doesn't quite click for me, my skin too thick, heart too jaded, ears that heard it all before. That I'd found this in 2008 it might have been a different story 3/5

#1876 Broken Social Scene - Bee Hives

B-sides collection from the You Forgot it in People days - it's got all the quiet//busy jammy atmosphere of the band in that era, but there's too little of that human touch, that insinuated, sensual intimacy that I've come to expect. YFiiP is a masterpiece that required some patience - the castoffs require more still. For the hardcore fan only, a drifting, ethereal curiosity 3/5

#1875 At the Drive-In - In/Casino/Out

Writing, knotty, start-stop angular art-punk - patterns intersect at oblique angles, with just enough sense for you to fall over sideways into and slide between. The shouting dripped over top is pretty heinous, swinging between emo-adjacent-half-rap and sub-hardcore shouting, but when it all blurs into soft focus and slithers in through the back door you come out the other side exhausted and cathartic 3.5/5

#1874 Hole - Celebrity Skin

If you're a fan of Billy Corgan's guitar production (I am!) and not so much Hole's code self-loathing (I'm not!) this'll win you over, at least for a handful of songs. Those riffs, those melodies, those downright pretty moments sure are polished up good. Damn tasty, those guitars. Hit So Hard // Malibu are downright convertible-ready.

But it's a badly frontloaded album, and there's nothing remotely memorable on the back half, leaving the whole thing understuffed and underexciting 3/5

#1873 Fishbone - Truth and Soul

Fishbone's a damn tight band, banging out whatever they please, whatever gets that toe tappin', whatever gets their Message across: funk, punk, ska, pop-metal, et cetera. We got these horns, we got these guitars, this guy can play some keys, these guys can sing - porque no los dos? It's a little too polished, a little too 80's to be cool, but you'll smile in spite of yourself once you get past it 3.5/5

#1872 The Velvet Illusions - Acid Head

Midtempo psychedelic // garage rock that falls all over itself: scuzzy, sloppy, overlayered, lurching along on broken legs until it gathers the lift to fly crashland fly again. Saxes, guitars, organs, the whole menagerie, all over that same deliberate beat and bass bop. Not all that hooky, not all that memorable, but with ramshackle energy that'll keep the rocklover grinnin' 3.5/5

#1871 You Am I - Hourly Daily

Perfectly fine, jangly alternative-lite pop-rock, packed with little touches: throbbing strings, popping horn moments, heartfelt updates of Beatles harmonies, and general washes of prettiness. This was a bit ahead of the curve in 1997, but after wave after wave of similar indie rock nothing stands out in 2015 3/5

#1870 Flo Rida - Only One Flo (Part 1)

Smashing together Girl Talk-ready party hip hop and big dumb EDM-lite house, here's the bottled sound of clubs-like-on-TV: top-tier douches and douchebaguettes go to get shitfaced and grind on eachother. It's that classic something-for-everyone fantasy: all the girls are the kind of girl that boys like. I LOVE THIS SONG! WHAT?! I LOVE THIS SONG! I DON'T THINK SO MAYBE LATER!! WHAT?! Main purpose: making your shitty apartment party feel like one of those clubs 2.5/5

#1869 Kurt Vile - B'lieve I'm Goin' Down

Sounds like any other recent Kurt Vile album, but missing some particular magic.

Vile's more personal than before, his lyrics more poetic and overtly strange. And there's little gestures of novelty; a piano here, a banjo there. Rumbling organ. But there's nothing strikingly new, it's an incremental refinement that actually feels like a step backwards: I miss the clouds, that atmosphere, that wonder, borne of some passing naivette and gritty necessity long gone 3/5

#1868 Judas Priest - Hell Bent for Leather

I like guitars, and the interplay's occaisionally pretty sweet. And this was ahead of its time, sure: this is the blueprint for hundreds of metal albums to come. But man its boring, always a step too slow, polished to a shine, with song after song that lays out its theme and rides it and rides it. An album lacking a single surprising moment in 2015 2.5/5

#1867 Spectral Bat - 16 Song Ep

Listen / buy here!

Disclosure: Vish's a friend and a good dude. And the gooddudism shows here: drum machine beats, plainstated psychedelic sentiments, crunchy punk chord start-stops, all filtered through bedroom-ready self-production - it's intimate, inviting, endearing

Crucial is that Guided by Voices MO: songs whip in, do their thing for one minute, and then disappear, keeping attention taut. All hooks, no filler, not a refrain that overstays. It's small, simple, but occasionally brilliant - if someone mentioned some underground cult classic and put an old record and this sound came out of the speakers, I wouldn't tell them to shut the fuck up 3.5/5

#1866 Standby - The New Space EP

Listen / buy here!

Intricate, mathy, proggy rock-lite made by sharp dudes with good chops.

I bet when they play live they are very focused on hitting their notes.

It's pretty, but its all so very clockwork - I kept wanting a greasefire to break out in the depths of the machine, but no greasefire ever came. I wish these oversweet, overachieving kids the best 3/5

#1865 Magic Dirt - Friends in Danger

Australian contemporaries who toured with the likes of Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr - they fit right into that sound. But for my money this's a much better listen. The songwriting rollercoasters all about: dirges, hardcore, hooky underground screeds, and tons of metal muscle. Not as wildly experimental as the heavy hitters from the scene, but a ton of fun. Plus, that roaring, loping distorted bass fucking kiiiiiiills, bringing so much visceral power to every track. Other than the overlong Bodysnatcher the pacing's mysterious and intricate and a blast to weather, slotting in right alongside the best Sabbath 4/5

#1864 Kylie Minogue - Impossible Princess

A perfectly fine pop album, the kind of thing Madonna might've made if she'd gotten out of her own damn way. It's mostly fluff but there's some dips into full-on electronica, trip-hop, etc; little flashes of a quirky Bjork-lite mini-masterpiece that didn't quite bake all the way through 3/5

#1863 Afghan Whigs - Gentlemen

I know these guys are from Ohio, but they've got a uniquely British kind of wailing, spare self-importance. Like the wildly-overrated Pulp, and to a lesser degree the less-overrated Smiths, they have a frontman in Greg Dulli who wheels and wrings operatic about his own weakness, wallowing in darktones that I guess I'm supposed to relate to

The noisy, start-stop backing's alright, some spawn of Built to Spill and The Dismemberment Plan, but it's also a bit much. There's not nearly enough payoff for all this self-importance - I am not won over 2.5/5

#1862 The Soft Boys - Underwater Moonlight

If The Beatles'd been around in 1980 they'd have made this album. In this world, some say that it's just a throwback to the Rubber Soul days. Some say it's just a swing at catching up to post-punkers like Gang of Four and The Jam, that new mod vanguard. And the rightminded love it in spite of // on account of all that, hearing a fearless, strange update of a golden age.

Back in this reality: some weirdos made this fearless, strange update of a golden age: lovesongs offset by Cronenbergian details (Kingdom of Love), glistening harmonies offset by sheetmetal jangle (I Got the Hots), everything wheeling off to some lookingglass wonderworld, familiar and bracing and slithering with menace 4/5

#1861 Dan Romer - Digging for Fire Soundtrack

A touching little minimalist meditation - the same themes coming up again and again, those rising flutes and falling synths. You could bluff and call this a 27 minute Brian Eno piece and not get called a liar. It works, in its small way, lifting just enough in its final refrains to cast itself as a cloud and out to sea as a memory 3.5/5

#1860 Malcolm McLaren - Duck Rock

A spiraling mix of South American and African styles, injected with hiphop, insistent loping bass, dancable post-disco, infectious chants, and more than one squaredance hoedown breakdown (!) all wrapped up in an underground radio package, complete with banter and callers. This must have been goddamn mindmelting in nineteen eighty fucking two.

The rhythms, the approaches, the irresistible groove, the vibe totally foreign to the West but so humanly relatable, its disorienting - calling it A Trip is about the only way I can do it justice. You might feel like you took a lil bit too much though - by the end I kind of want to get off and get my head straight, but I'll be back when the world gets boring again 3.5/5

#1859 Thin Lizzy - Fighting

Thin Lizzy, pre-Jailbreak: more desperate, more defiant, a bit most closely metal-adjacent. Fighting lacks the everyman charm I associate with their breakout, and some of the slower songs kill the momentum, but those twin guitars, goddammit do they sing, everworth the wait, pure quicksilver helix heaven every damn time 3.5/5

#1858 White Reaper - White Reaper Does it Again

Desperate, shouting garage rock that builds a launchpad of pure rumbling muscle and fires streaking guitar solos and signature hard-edged synth lines. Part Exploding Heart's pure energy, part Surfer Blood agreeable chug, part early Thermals all-in blitz - this caps it all with some special something, some uncanny blast of youthful fuckyes, spirals of light and dark until dawn. Gorgeous, awful stuff that builds all kinds of new ideas on their debut's shitkicking powertrip 4.5/5

#1857 Air Waves - Dungeon Dots

So much rumble this feels more like revival than rock: no real hooks to speak of, no real maneuvers, just a churning of chiming guitar wash, waves of understated cymbals, and everrolling bass, with Nicole Schneit's voice swooping over top, humble biplane over rolling seas. It works, mostly because that jumblejangle is so well crafted, partially because those vocals are pleasant and unassuming and flying you off to distant clouds 3.5/5

#1856 Breeders - Title TK

While I'm on the subject, I'll take the Breeders over Sleater Kinney anyday. There's no unspoken yelps or unfound non-chords, but the sound's so full and satisfying and *good* top to bottom.

And no, there's also nothing as catchy as career highlights Cannonball or Divine Hammer either, but Title TK sure hits a sweetspot between pop and noise: the slinking rumble of Sinister Foxx, the frail, overblown lo-fi of Off You, The She's laser-saw organ buzz. Inventive, tasty stuff 4/5

#1855 Sleater Kinney - Dig Me Out

An undeniably good rock record that overflows with clever noise, breakneck swerves, and a hitchy, hooky little sneer of attitude.

But I can't get past Carrie Brownstein's voice. She puts on a masterclass in voice as instrument, wringing yelps and emotion and razor edge out of every syllable, and on paper it's fucking brilliant, but it's just searingly miserable in the actual listening. It causes me pain, in the ears. If you can get past it, enjoy this album extra for me, because everything else on it is pretty goddamn kickin 3/5

#1854 Le Savvy Fav - Cat and the Cobra

Spastic, hectic art-punk with walls of noise, garotte-wire guitar chimes, shredded-throat barking, minimalist breakdowns, and swerves into outright prettiness. It's a blistering, splintering, exhausting ride, packed with ideas so densely you can barely pluck them at they streak by 4/5

#1853 Prefuse 73 - Every Color of Darkness

I stopped hoping for anything anywhere near the legendary One Word Extinguisher out of Prefuse a long time ago. Shit's been weak as hell since then.

But this has got a flash of that old magic: grooves pulse with power, frail details flicker in the maelstrom, a shotgun barrel of mirrored puzzle pieces that you interpret mid-flight. It's still a bit muddy, lacking that signature flow on the track and album scale, but it's an incremental nudge on his signature style that brings a glimmer of the new, while being solid to listen to. More than we could've hoped for at this point 3.5/5

#1852 Vladimir 518 - Idiot

Giant synth-backed Czech hip hop with swagger and muscle and thrilling little twists, a bewildering blitz through neon cyberpunk future-Europe dystopia. The words are lost on me, and the star is that insistent lasersword production, but the vocals work as abstract percussion counterpoint. Good shit for programming binges and night drives into the heart of the megadrome 4/5

#1851 Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats - Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats

Country, soul, gospel and blue-adjacent rock, never quite pigeonholing itself, never falling into a rut. It rarely ignites, just smolders on agreeably, a tenacious campfire on a brisk fall night 3.5/5

#1850 FIDLAR - Too

Shitkicking couldntgiveafuck wastrel stoner punks FIDLAR follow their couldntgiveashit debut (sample track title: Wake, Bake, Skate) with a concept album. A concept album! About Sobriety: Challenges Of!

You lose some of the frantic fun, sure, but its no American Idiot, more Separation Sunday, a surprisingly thoughtful whallop of manic romp, freakout rage, and pissy indignation, half Never Gonna Grow Up, half It Sucks to Grow Up. Sample line: I figured as i got older / life just sucks when you get sober // I figured out when I got sober / life just sucks when you get older. Occasionally profound, always one trip away from heavy - the exact moment at the party where you forget tomorrow for good.

It's exciting. The hooks are sharp, the energy electric: you never know what's next, but all those surprises hang together as an album, and afterwards you feel exhausted and sparked and ready to live life and ready to listen again 4/5

#1849 Todd Terje - It's Remix Time Time

Terje's album was built on atmosphere, on strutting energy, on grooves, on cool. That's all stripped away here, everything left soulless, the original's hooks skinned and dangled in place. Just as well that this is a slight little set of 4 tracks: the whole project was a bad idea in the first place 2/5

#1848 Regurgitator - Tu-Plang

I'd heard Art was this big later departure for Regurgitator, but they were doing the same basic stunt right away on their debut LP: jumping genres, fucking around with rap, funk, punk, and electronics, being mildly offensive, fairly hooky, and generally strange.

But where Art felt *new* this is pastiche, Limp Bizkit-worthy terrible takes on rap and proto-nu-metal noise. Also, these dudes just sound dumb as hell most of the time: spitting middle-school takes on misogyny, selling out, racism, and generally being super radical and punk rock and offensive. They're a concept band at heart, with shades of Ween, Beefheart, Frogs, but at this point in their career they didn't have the awareness, didn't have the will to twist hard enough to snap 2.5/5

#1847 Billy Corgan - The Future Embrace

The Pumpkins were my JAM in high school, but by the time this came out in the post-Adore, post-Zwan hangover, I was completely done with Billy Corgan's shit. So here I come back around, old as shit, ready to give a fair shake.

Everything you read says this was about doing what the Pumpkins wouldn't. The dead-simple drum machine beats are the opposite of Chamberlain's jazzy skitters, the single-take guitars are the opposite of the meticulously crafted walls of noise, and the strange fractured take on track composition, well that's just in defiance of how you're supposed to make music.

You can feel Corgan flailing: the guitar rock well's run dry, the patience for his shit is run out, so he's constructed a Rube Goldberg machine for making records hoping the radical process will make a radical record.

The process worked exactly twice, making two very good songs, and Mina Loy and Camera Eye are put right up front to give you false hope: twisty bass, floating vocals, and gorgeously textured guitars make for some really exciting shit. Those guitars, especially, are a highlight, buzzing with Trent Reznot // Atticus Ross intrigue and thrill. And even at the end a couple of frail tracks remind you of Adore's finest moments of vulnerability.

But in between, it's a mess. There's no heart, no soul, no hooks, no momentum: it sounds, sure enough, made by a Rube Goldberg machine: these tracks are those times a day when the stopped clock wasn't right. I found myself saying "is this song still going?" again and again, as I heard the same limp chorus limp by for the 8th or 9th time while endless tinny snares clicked by.

It's frustrating to see an artist once so prolific reduced to this - I'm reminded of Bowie, as we dare to hope again and again for a flash of that old magic, hear singers wondering Has the world changed or have I changed? 3/5

#1846 You Am I - Hi Fi Way

Acclaimed Australian 90's alt-rock that never really made a splash over here.

And sure, it's reasonably solid as 90's alt-rock goes: hooksome, scrappy, dotted with little inspirations (dat mellotron), but, eh. Lyrics are generic, chords standard, sounding only a little better than your average Pablo Honey track, poppy Nirvana b-side, local band's 3rd best track. Nothing that I'll remember tomorrow 2.5/5

#1845 Anthony Naples - Body Pil

Earthy, basic, analog house-adjacent atmospherics.

Beyond electronic-analog, beyond basic sines and squares and envelopes - Body Pil is electronic music as if churned off an early industrial assembly line. There's that alien quality of floating untouched by human hands, beats sound manufactured by iron pistons, synths scuffed on their way off of wooden rollers, as if carved expertly by unknown people with primitive tools, microscuffs and imperfections.

Warm, reflective, if modest, a well-crafted decoration with subtle character 3.5/5

#1844 Lost Animal - Ex Tropical

Slinky, soulful, strange - Ex Tropical bristles with island-adjacent rhythms, delivered via vintage keyboards, analog synths, Sonic Youth guitar squalls, dodgy chords, and other left-of-center tones, gloomy Grandaddy in too-bright paradise.

Much too bright.

It's all a bit off: a bit nervous, an alien recreation, vacation remembered long after // felt through a psychedelic haze. It's the sounds, and its the human crash: there's neo-soul seduction, mixed with indie vulnerability, mixed with a Dylanesque flatness. All that splitting and crossing keeps you on your toes, but keeps this from settling into any particular role or purpose or mood.

Maybe that's part of the idea: like a good hard trip, you're fascinated, but never quite comfortable, watching everything just shiiiiiiiiiift onby 3.5/5

#1843 Oasis - Dig Out Your Soul

Four phases of listening to this album:

1) Well, I do hate Oasis, but this isn't too bad. They're going for it a little. Can't quite get past that Oasisness though (this last about 2 tracks)

2) Alright, alright, whoever these mystery British dudes are, they kinda rock. Propulsive and heavy. They kinds sound like Oasis, but like, good (this lasts about 2 more tracks)

3) This sounds kinda like the Beatles with the saturation turned down. Wait a minute... fuck! This *is* Oasis (you guys even copied being really into India from the Beatles, huh?) (4 tracks)

4) I'm bored.

I really tried to keep an open mind about this. And there are places where you forget that you're listening to Oasis, where you can hear the actual rock and roll chops through the dickish veneer. But they just can't keep it up. It gets sloggy and boring and pedestrian and phoned in and so very Oasis by the end. Still points for being better than expected on that first half there 3/5

#1842 CeeLo Green - CeeLo Green is the Soul Machine

"CeeLo's such a weirdo" I think to myself. Again and again, it comes to mind, with a reluctant smile. He wallows in it, calls out his own penchant for singing // rapping // sing-rapping, sultry and jokey and murder-rapping back to back.

"CeeLo's been given the power, to take you where you wanna go" the chorus of ladies declares. "He can do anything!" they follow.

He sure has, and he sure can. The Soul Machine is totally unbridled, an 18 track braindump meticulously constructed and left unedited outside hands. And CeeLo's such a weirdo. Shades of Andre 3000 is an understatement.

It's an hour long, but it feels longer. Luckily almost everything's catchy: bustling and bursting, and even as it slogs its charming and tuneful, overflowing with tripled up vocals, horn hits, soul guitars, synth buzzes, start-stops, and go go go's, all to make you smile despite yourself 3.5/5

#1841 The Auteurs - After Murder Park

Swooping and seasick - 90's British cheekiness offset by that Albini production, keeping the guitars sharpened, the drums loaded. Like an Arcade Fire ancestor, there's melodrama and ennui to spare, casting out with a swoon and a shout and a wallow and a woop.

The edge falls off too many songs, but when they go for it, like on the start-stop stabbing Land Lovers, there's thrilling stakes to explore 3.5/5

#1840 Nada Surf - Let Go

It's all there on the opening Blizzard of '77: obvious chords, acoustic strum, pretty vocals swinging through microballad detail-hopping...but with this little tinge of something special again and again: some small little turn of phrase, an off-center rhyme, an out-of-place tone, a hitch in the structure.

And so it goes: the 90's pop-rock shtick skeleton, dressed up with a dapper air that makes you want to buy it a drink.

It tips into pure saccharine at times (Inside of Love), and rides most of its choruses way too hard, but there's a little bit of magic, a little bit of These Guys Got It that makes Let Go well worth your listen 3.5/5

#1839 Rowland S. Howard - Teenage Snuff Film

Made #1 on that list I've been looking at - seems like that's a gotta checkit out.

Night dark, shapes moving, Howard sulking and slipping and strutting and slinking though every neon puddle and beerlight backalley, droning and muttering and melting down.

Thrilling bass keeps the knives out, a backdrop of mourning strings and guitar screech keeps the heat on, endless Joy Division throb meets Gang of Four bristle. We tingle with the spark and prick in the air, like something's about to happen. Or maybe it already happened - we and forgot it and live in shadow aftermath.

Words pour out oily and black, menacing in the specifics and their insinuations alike.

Brilliant and impossible, will probably yield endless details if you can make it through the listens, grim and harrowing and haunting and discouraging of any visitor to return 4/5

Month in Review: August '15

Mostly just keeping up with a trickle of new stuff, listening to new record by old favorites like an old person.

Album of the Month
 
The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms - a bristling, thrilling post-punk album bursting with nervous energy

Also Recommended!

Vundabar - Gawk - grownin'-up second record from my favorite local band, it's a propulsive, surf-flecked gem

Regurgitator - Art - Australian rock band makes their what-next 3rd album, watches dozens of ideas breaking off and burn up on re-entry

Royal Headache - High - Australia again! Less visceral energy than their trilling debut, but with hooks and hearts to spare

#1838 Glide - Disappear Here

It's those drums that make all the difference: compare to Lime Spider's lumbering backbeat, this's got that popping little breakbeat skitter-on-the-3 that I'll always associate with Debaser and it makes the whole thing fly. Those sprightly drums get you through an album that's a bit wishywashy in the vocals, a bit flatlyteenage, and onto some highlight moments of sunshine guitars and playful basslines.

There's nothing worldchanging here, but it's an excellent specimen of 90's underground, some even-less-known Australian cousin of Swervedriver and Built to Spill, full of heart and moments of subtle strangeness 3.5/5

#1837 Regurgitator - ...Art

See, this is what I'm talking about when it comes to That Weird Album, that 3rd album thing.

Word is these guys started basic, but this's some beautiful piece of playful experimentation gone wrong. Think Guerrilla-era Super Furry Animals with a slab of American crunch via Self or The Dismemberment Plan's strangest moments, dipping all the way into full on Surrender-era house tourism.

Things start off familiar enough, some late-era underground rock with a twist of electronic thisandthat, but then everything gets poppier and less pop, wobbles, and explodes somewhere halfway through Strange Human Being, one of the best aggressive-production-as-instrument rock tracks I've heard, a crunch bunch of bounce chopped into crystal skitters and tossed into the ceiling fan, right into I Wanna Be a Nudist's IDM-stutter hardcore.

Things get all self-referential, songs called I Like Repetitive Music that goes on too long, a title track called Art, declarations and questions and exclamation points. Raveups, raps, screams, mutters, wanderoffs. It's successful about half the time, catchy at about 3 out of 4, just clumsy enough to be charming as shit, completely compelling to the end 4.5/5

#1836 Lime Spiders - Cave Comes Alive

I love that skinshedding album - the one where the band tosses off the sound that put them on the map and shows what they've really got. My absolute favorite is when a boring band morphs into something just strange enough to be interesting: Vitalogy, Zooropa, Surrender, Beautiful Garbage, etc. The fact that said album's usually super unpopular by comparison is just a hipster boner-tickling bonus.

So when I saw a lot of those on this list of underrated albums, I got excited and checked out tons of stuff off it (plus some of the early consensus bests that set up the underrating). Those reviews incoming, starting now.

---

Inauspicious start: anything good here is slapped apart on every single 2 and 4, gigantic Albini-gone-wrong snares blasting to 11 in the mix, reminding you twice a bar how dead simple this is. The choruses are blunt and drawled, the guitars are standard, and a little goodcleanfun bass isn't enough to save this bog standard barbanding 2.5/5

#1835 Fungi Girls - Some Easy Magic

I really dig these guys' sound, that surfy rumble, those girlgroup beats, I'll bet its good for twisting a toe to on a weeknight.

But I just can't get past the Local Band sound. It's a such a dickhead thing to even bother picking on, but I've heard bands like this a hundred times: the production's a little thin, the performance is a little nervous, the songwriting's all along the same basic pattern.

Just go for it kids! You've got a good starting point, just take it an run for the county line! These guys could probably be a really ripping band if they got a little tighter or a little looser // started taking this shit seriously or stopped giving a fuck so often 3/5

#1834 Cloud Nothings and Wavves - No Life For Me

Wavves and Cloud Nothings are two pretty uneven bands. Wavves is prone to go-nowhere jams, but can bang out a sunburned punk rumble with the best of them. Cloud Nothings can run slow and boring, but their fast songs sear with propulsive, searching desperation.

What you've got on No Life for Me is a strange middle ground - a collaboration that dodges both bands weaknesses but loses their best qualities along the way. It rocks front to back, chugging and churning and clicking on and on. But you've got a mismatch in tone: Wavves is stoner rock about not giving a shit, Cloud Nothings is desperate post-emo, burning with introspective fuel. Wavves puts skateboarders on the covers of their albums, Cloud Nothings puts lonely black and white skylines.

Not really fun, not really wracked with feeling, it's a peanut butter and chocolate shell with no filling. It'll tap your toe for 20 minutes, but it's not going to move you to get high or low tonight 3/5

#1833 Ratatat - Magnifique

Ratatat laid out a pretty firm trajectory with their first 4 albums, wavering from their path in only the smallest ways.

This breaks zero molds - those same clipped beats and synth//guitar//synth//guitar lines are on full display. There's few growth points: things're a little sunnier, the hooks a little hookier, but if you shuffled this in with the other 4 albums' songs none of these would pop out and bite you.

The subtle growth comes on the album level: the flow's solid, and wafts of radio flutter and vocal snips actually do a lot to build atmosphere, nudging a click towards instrumental hip hop, giving the listen a foothold into your world. I think it might be my favorite Ratatat album front to back, even if we're basically talking Golden Delicious vs McIntosh vs. Empire 4/5

#1832 The Clean - Vehicle

The Clean's a known Pavement influence, and it shows. Those dissonant, wobbling guitars, the tuneless singing, the crusty aesthetic, the utterly unrelenting beat - it's not pretty, but it all crystallizes into something brilliant when you least expect it. A minor masterpiece of underground rock 3.5/5

#1831 The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms

All tension. All too fast and taking too long to arrive. This is nervousness, this is excitement.

That motorik played by man-machine. Those chiming detuners, that bobbling bass, that stammered sentiment, a Joy Division vampire dragged into the sunlight, thrilled and bristling - with Morriseyan vulnerability and tunefulness beyond all peers.

Just feel those guitars an oohs on the back half of Original Love.

I'm reminded of the Unicorns live circa 2004, the splinter of things falling apart.

That rare union of utmost precision and inevitable self-destruction, all beauty and accident.

A touch of the terrible rock music I try to make - all tension.

Great shit 4.5/5

#1830 Prefab Sprout - Steve McQueen

Man, opening track Faron Young got me so fuckin *jazzed*, that driving cowboy twostep tripping over itself into the night, a strange, hooky little piece of post-punk that keeps zigging and zagging.

But Paddy McAloon didn't come here to rock. He's a crooner, a respectable singer songwriter, and everything slips into an 80's pop haze, some wisp of Sting or Billy Joel or Steely Dan. The synthy swipes, the little vocal ghosts, they make it prettier and more interesting than most, and the lyrics prick with everyday details, but it's not my scene 3/5

#1829 Iron Maiden - Powerslave

Iron Maiden loves them their guitars. They just ride em on and on and on into the sky, not even bothering with any particular death and destruction trappings by now, just galloping drums, soaring guitars, and layered vocals, sounding about 2 degrees from Rush, the 13 minute closer wiping out the line between metal and prog altogether. This is just showing off.

The propulsion's enough though, it's a good time just to watch the boys whip themselves into a rock-loving frenzy without giving one single shit about what the world thinks 3.5/5

#1828 AFX - Orphaned Deejay Selek 2006-2008

The Richard James barrelscraping resurgence continues!

If you've heard the basic Aphex Twin / AFX shtick there's not a lot new to find: basic beats // glitchy beats // wobbly alien-anatomy synth lines. No piano, no samples, no production tricks to speak of - it sounds basic, like it was made on basic equipment, analog shades of acid house.

It also sounds lazy: like so much of what's come before, like itself.

On the other hand, there's devils in the details: the subtle deliciousness of some of those fizzling synth hits, the slides between techno/house/IDM, the overloaded layers of track 3.

But back to that first hand: there's too little here. No real beauty, no real invention, nothing to make it worth your trouble over a hundred other songs that sound basically the same 2.5/5

#1827 Liquor Store - In the Garden

Stompy bar-band swagger taken back to its roots, the Hold Steady stripped of the storytelling, AC/DC stripped of the brattiness, BRMC stripped of its gloss, until you're left with a garagey kernel of Stones, rougher and simpler than even the Stones managed. The guitars roll, the kids shout, banging out songs called Keys to the Face, Vodka Beach and Titty was Loc'd. Titty was Loc'd! No frills, no flash, rock and rollers rockin' and rolling. Good enough 3.5/5

#1826 Black Moth Super Rainbow - Falling Through a Field

Before BMSR tasted pop they were in the bedroom, Tobacco croaking out melodic little confessions of his own frailty, so close you can feel his whisper on your microphone ear. Synths churn and buzz on little loops like snow on suburban landscapes, all temporary and beautiful and glinting with crystals, with the occasional gorgeous little line of vocorder chiming or electronic buzz flitting by like, well, a rainbow, or maybe a remarkable moth.

Good band name.

It's slow-paced and underedited, but that's part of its charm, somewhere on the continuum of Grandaddy and The Microphones, twinking and small, until you can almost see the little forgotten flyover house in winter 3.5/5

#1825 Tapes and Tapes - Outside

Loved these guys' early stuff, and like this too. It's hooky, lightly twisty indie rock that'll keep you entertained through every moment of the listen.


But goddamn if a single note of it stuck with me after 2 full playthroughs. Josh Grier's voice finds the same basic croon and locks in, the band backing gamely, but there's none of the spark of The Loon's highlights: none of The Illiad's raw postpunk startstop, Jakov's goinforit intro, or Insistor's insistent stomp, and no comparable swings for the fences to make up for it. Just a band trying to be too pretty, lacking hunger, lacking edge, unwilling to reach out and grab us 3/5

#1824 Spank Rock - The Upside

YoYoYoYoYo was so skeletal, so unapologetic; one-dimensional, but admirable in it's commitment to rawdog Baltimore noise and skeezy hiphop sleaze, a stop-motion T-800 out for pussy. The followup sanded off the edges and got listenable for a net loss, forgettable by comparision.

And here's maybe the sweetspot - still unpredictable and inventive, still weird as shit. Laser blasts bomb you, start-stop slither sweeps the leg, and Juwan drops cryptic, simmering sex, - more Prince than Peaches. That swagger comes out in the pacing too - how do you lay down 7 tracks in 24 minutes and sound like you're in no rush at all, letting bloopy loops breathe, wedging sentiments in every other cranny?

Twisty, futuristic stuff that'll sidle up into your pants before you know it 4/5

#1823 Feed Me - Feed Me's Psychadelic Journey

Never can make it through a Feed Me review without mentioning his Big Adventure, still the high-water mark of dubstep-adjacent buzzsaw house. There's a glimmer of that elusive old stuff here - Patience's got laser sword riffs to rival Justice and Without Gravity builds fuzzy rocketship power that teases and transports subtly, motion by motion by motion. Even Time for Myself squoggles and squirts, juuuust short of the border into too-happy raver nonsense.

Dude needs to cut it out with the vocals though, Alarm Clock sounds dopey as heck, trying too hard to bring emotion to the party and ends up killing the momentum. With only 22 minutes to work with, its a tough stumble to get past, but the Journey's a pretty solid little sampler and a dash of hope that dude's still got another legendary LP in him 3.5/5

#1822 Ecstatic Sunshine - Freckle Wars

Freckle War's got a dozen little propulsors, all angles and micro-start-stops, jangle jangle, arpeggio-io-o-O, rhythm overload without a single drum hit, voices galore without a touch of vocals. It's classical guitar updated for the 00's, Dananananakroyd and Fang Island stripped all the way down to the basics until it's soundtracky and propulsive, like chiming microdosed Explosions/Godspeed. Frantic and relaxing, subtly evocative fun 3.5/5

#1821 Video Hippos - Unbeast the Leash

Every note of Unbeast the Leash floats on a sea of synth tone and rumbling guitar drone and endless bass notes - there are no moments of silent, no breaks between the sounds, just that sea and the spikes and peaks of vocals and guitars that manage to crest it. It can't stop, it pushes forward always in overwhelming, bristling, start-start post-post-punk glory, Single Frame with motion blur, thrilling, exhausting, nauseating, pushing till you drown 3.5/5

#1820 Sheer Mag - II

Man, you gotta love that giant bass, that slashy guitar, that hooksome Thin Lizzy / Cheap Trick feel good strut.

But before you dive into this, you're gonna have to ask yourself if you're up for Christina Halladay's shrapnel vocals, shouted from a broken megaphone across a tincan telephone. It's one part her delivery, one part blownout production, all physically hurtful.

Fuuuck though, that songcraft behind it, and the actual energy underneath the jagged edges on the voice, I can't quite stay away, back into the nailbomb phonebooth for superman all again 3.5/5

#1819 Royal Headache - High

At first I was disappointed that this lacked the breakneck energy of the Headache's debut. But it finds its own lane - as a pre-post-punk take on The Strokes maybe, that clipalong cool, run ragged with shattered, lovelorn vocals. The poppier stuff like the title track's catchy as heck, and things kick up nicely as it all spirals to destruction before you know it.

I first heard this the morning after rewatching episode 2.3 of Rick and Morty, which I won't spoil. But for some reason the impossible tale of a bright-and-fast fling with an intergalactic hivemind seemingly fit this album's soundtracking. Something in High's hugeness, recklessness, sadness and fury strikes a chord, as it glances in humble terms off something gorgeous and impossible with an energy just beyond grasp 4/5

#1818 The Doors - Morrison Hotel

Oh Doors - they're rip-roaring when Morrison breaks on through, but too often his baritone and the backing band's bass and organ swirls make for a murky mess, a blanket of stifling humid air.

There's hookiness here, drawing on blues and general Americana to conjure dusty energy, spinning the sound out in a dozen little directions. But goddamn, Morrison's voice, swampy and winedark and all-consuming, a weight in the gut, making even the hookiest song echo from across a heroin haze, making every song a varying degree of misery 3/5