#1562 Self - Super Fake Nice

Huh! I was hard into this guy / these guys in college, jamming to Half Baked Serenade and Gizmodgery, following the label-quashed Ornament and Crime debacle with much chagrin. But this was just about the last band I expected to make a comeback around now. I guess if NMH and MBV can do it anyone can.

Opening track Runaway's apparently even got almost half a million plays on Spotify (??), and deservedly, its a fun little swinger, build on a huge synth bass surge and a typical hooky Self chorus. The rest is enjoyable, if a bit quietly so: there's hints of Gizmodgery's tinniness, some offkilter breaks and bridges, a good dose of ELO's dense // quirky soaring, plenty of those dips into Princy soul.

This is basically the same soul-funk-pop that Self put out 15 (!) years ago on Selfafornia - still fun, though I still feel like there's another gear, 20+ years on, that this band's yet to find. Call me an optimist 3.5/5

#1561 The Presidents of the United States of America - Kudos to You!

The Presidents are still who they are, making bouncy, offkilter portraits of quirky animals and intimate objects, as if to prove that they can make a song about anything, snapping rock off from "importance" right at the stem. Let's just jam out the ditties, kiddies!

As anyone who's played Lump in Rock Band knows, their songs are deceptively intricate: full of funky little details in the rhythms and tones - you get the sense these guys are really good musicians who just hold all rock and roll bullshit at arms length and hope you'll hop on board. The willful irreverence seems itself a little put on to me by now, and I do like a little more heft in my listen, but I don't know, fuckit, sure, I'll ride 3.5/5

#1560 Yuck - Glow and Behold

All the cooing sweetness of indie pop backed by the lush guitar washes of pure shoegaze, making for a pretty, shimmerey, thing that kind of soars and cuddles up close and flits away and you're barely sure it was there. Only Middle Sea ever really rocks, the rest is sunlight on lake ripples 3/5

#1559 The Strange Boys - Be Brave

There's a wild streak of imagination and ragged couldntgiveafuck here, but it's impossible to get past those awful, nasal vocals, an emo//dylan yowl that rakes at your soul. The dusty Ween//Frogs weirdness is almost charming, the guitar sweeps are occasionally soaring - but that voice is ungetpastable 2.5/5

#1558 Phosphorescent - Here's to Taking it Easy

Soul weary, a smile of dusty resignation. The finer Songs: Ohia's a good touchstone for the country-flecked rock that blooms like sunset through a great old oak. The highlight's that moon-dark closer though, full of hope and wondering and resignation. Gorgeous 4/5

#1557 Kishi Bashi - Lighght

A quirky little piece of pop revival, sidling in right alongside the likes of the Shins and sometimes collaborators Of Montreal. Pretty, with electronic and symphonic flourishes, it'll make an agreeable little glint in a hazy day or hazy night 3.5/5

#1556 Deadmau5 - Random Album Title

Now that I've heard two of his albums: ok I had the wrong impression of Deadmau5. I'd lumped him in with big-riffers and dubsteppers, but his stuff is actually pretty restrained, hypnotic, housey, in no particular rush. Not nearly as bro-y as I'd thought.

Still a little boring, a little uninventive, a little restrained. Solid, listenable, not altogether thrilling 3/5

#1555 Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels

How would I rate this if I hadn't heard RtJ2 already? Hard to say, but this doesn't hold a candle. Rapping's knotty and hard-hitting, the production rough-edged and fizzy, but nothing here has that fire, that full-on spark, that heartracing hurtle towards a brick wall that made its follow-up worth hearing. This is inert by comparison, a maze of rhymes without much prize at the middle 3/5

#1554 Catfish and the Bottlemen - The Balcony

These guys are catchy in a kind of obvious pop kind of way. There's hooks here. I could totally forgive it's well-designed appeal and give over to it if not for the lyrics.

The lyrics! When's the last time those even got mentioned round these parts?

I think it's a testament to just how bluntly this is an album made of nothing but choruses featuring faux-dangerous anthems for teenage girls. Remember Louis XIV and Morningwood? Of course you don't.

These faux-dangerous just-for-you anthems (something that glances off sex and / or alcohol, addressed from the first person to the second) are repeated again and again and the rest of the song is just wasting time to get to them again and again and again. 4 different songs built on:

• I remember when we swapped names / I thought maybe you'd stay and try and outdrink me
• Whoever you're mixing your drinks with / is dying to go to town on you 
• I'm not the kind to call you up drunk / but I've got some lies to tell
• She's got to wait until she gets you on your own / so she can make you make mistakes / and you can offer to take her home

Did I mention you're in a sexually dysfunctional relationship in this fantasy? 2 more songs built on repeating:

• I gotta give it to you / you give me problems / when you're not in the mood
• But we just always seem to just fall out / when I'm most in need of it

Girls and young-at-heart ladies. Please do not fall in love with this man. He's romanticizing a relationship where one or both of you always has an alcohol problem and / or is sexually frustrated. This is just real life. It's not fun. Just, I don't know, fall in love with boy bands or something, Jesus. Every person in the world is either too young or too old for this shit 2/5

#1553 Hurray for the Riff Raff - Small Town Heroes

Well darn if this album doesn't wear it's heart on its sleeve. Just read that post title will ya?

The band's identity's a little more complicated than that, but it doesn't show through in the music unless you look real, real close. By all accounts this is right pretty country / folk, lead by Alynda Segarra's quietly // powerfully beautiful voice and the swinging bluegrass / honkytonk flouishes, unassuming and welcoming. This said by someone who's not usually into this kind of thing 3.5/5

#1552 Aphex Twin - Computer Controlled Accoustic Instruments pt2 EP

Does what it says on the tin!

I've always rather liked Aphex Twin's accoustic side, mostly flashed in the crannies of Drukqs. This is warm, rich, inventive stuff, packed with analog detail splattered out in alien patterns (tracks 1 and 4 are highlights in completely different ways). All a bit small, all a curiosity, a knicknack, a clever device that whirs by unseen strings, uncanny clattering and scrabbling that draws you in with hazy trepidation.

Not altogether listenable as actual music under any real circumstances, but completely worth hearing once if you have any interest in experimental music of any kind 3.5/5

#1551 Tycho - Dive

This is the sound of Tycho laying the blueprint, doing the work that would pay off a few years later on Awake. The basics are here, the layers, the washes, that surge of sound. But it's all really sequenced, all overtight, slurred and blurred in the wrong places, mostly just forgettable. Just not there yet, lacking Awake's confident, hearty liveband motorik that just strides in the door and hefts you by the heart.

Go check out Awake, then listen to this just to see how they got there 3/5

#1550 Rumspringa - Sway

This starts off really promising, that Jack White shred and yowl, those strange burbling angles on those first couple of songs. Salt of the earth grit mixed with inventiveness and ideas, love it.

But both upsides run out after a few songs, Triptych meanders on and on, Personal Effects sounds like reheated Hang Me Up to Dry, and it gets even less inspiring from there. The seeds are planted though, look out for these guys' next one 3/5

#1549 My Morning Jacket - Evil Urges

Following the trajectory from Z, these guys go full weird about now, the resemblance to the Flaming Lips only growing, the whole thing going down a weird prog-Prince hole where songs simmer on to nowhere. At least its different.

For about 3 songs.

Then, maybe having made their point about how weird they can be, MMJ just plods through a set of their most boring, meandering songs yet. It's a good thing I didn't hear this one first or I might not have bothered with anything else 2.5/5

#1548 The Districts - The BBC Sessions

The biggest knock I can make on a live album / performance is that it sounds like it does in the studio. What's the point? Grab the moment and shake it!

This does that. But only because The Districts' debut EP was already to ragged and rambling and live. It's got a little more spark, but nothing to really recommend it strongly beyond the brilliant originals. Still looking forward to seeing these guys in town in a couple weeks and in TN in a few months though! 3.5/5

#1547 Benjamin Booker - Benjamin Booker

An exciting, chugging, soaring, soulful rock record, built on rock-solid elliptical drumming, searing guitars, and Booker's singular gravelly howl. When the tempo's up it's a ton of fun. The slow sections spike hurt and fear. And the transitions between are perfectly timed, the whole thing perfectly paced and full of great moments.

Overproduced // pop? Maybe a little, still one of the great front-to-back listens of the year. 4.5/5

#1546 The Beginning of the End - Funky Nassau

Shuffly, stummy funk that just rolls on and on along, firing horn flair afterburners and ragged shouts of islands aflame, all in a wafting psychedelic haze. Good shit 4/5

#1545 Rudimental - Home

Occasionally-euphoric, full-throated party ballads and bangers - there's breakbeats and dubsteppy pulses, but this is wall to wall guest vocals pop onslaught, well-suited to their full-band-and-more festival shows. It's perfectly solid feelgood stuff, with hooks to spare (Feel the Love!) if a little anonymous by the end 3.5/5

#1544 My Morning Jacket - Z

Still don't get the full-on MMJ thing exactly, but this is more interesting than It Still Moves: a sky-sized sound, reaching for the world with guitars and soaring singing and every droning, twinking, searing thing within reach, all while still sounding strangely grounded, still kinda classic rock.

Bonus: the structures are so strange, the overall pacing a little offkilter, that the album experience blurs together agreeably and you've spaced away the 47 minutes before you know it 4/5

#1543 D'Angelo - Black Messiah

Not what I was expecting!

Some of the deepest, darkest funk you'll ever hear, bass so thick, sound so dense, layersss of vocals, surging, sulking chords and keys. Oppressive hot night air that you bob through, with frustration and anger and psychic pain scratching out of sight. Powerful, original, striking stuff 4/5

#1542 King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard - Float Along-Fill Your Lungs

The exact bridge you'd expect between the garagey 12 Bar Bruise (still a great title!) and the tripped out wobble and slur of Oddments. 15-minute opening opus Head On / Pill is the rabbit hole, everything that comes after's weirder than ever before. There's still rock here, still the slash of late-Segall guitar, but this is some wildly inventive, wondefully disorienting modern psychedelia, Olivia Tremor Control minus the control 4/5

#1541 Jungle - Jungle

A micro-disco/funk record with atmosphere to spare: a nightclub drenched in a murky darkness that the flashes of laser lights off of glasses can barely penetrate. It's got grooves, but it sure does just lock into place on them, and those TV on the Radio falsettos get really tiring track after track after track 3/5

#1540 Sleater-Kinney - No Cities to Love

Don't get they hype on this one.

Corin's vocals sound thinner and tinnier than ever, and there's guitar squalls and noisy flourishes but they feel overproduced and measured, carefully-applied scruffs on new jeans' knees. Add some political lyrics and you've checked all your boxes for a good album in 2015 but there's no sense of an actual band putting in actual work and no damn pleasure in the listening 2.5/5

#1539 The Star Club - Darega Sekaiwo Korosunoka

Riffy punk rock that's too in love with good guitar sounds, tight-start stops, and funloving shoutalong choruses to be really nasty. Definitely fun, packed with little tricks and angles and toe-tapping tempos. The oi's and rolling bass moves and crackopen solos feel a little overcribbed, but it's never without it's own touch, and it nothing else, hey it's in Japanese! That might help make it fresh for you too 3.5/5

#1538 Dawes - Stories Don't End

Too-slow go-nowhere songs that creep along dumping Ben Folds-lite balladry and repeating overbroad "That's how *I* feel!" sentiments. Prop it up with all the cheapest Mumford and Sons // MMJ tricks you can find and you get half-baked, by the numbers pop in indie folk clothing 1.5/5

#1537 The Districts - The Districts

Quietly raucous, swaying garagey Americana, packed with quiet-loud, start-stop crashing guitars, driven by Rob Grote's full-throated shout and moan and howl. Those vocals are the best I've heard in a long time, dude has just the right amount of crunch, just the right lack of abandon. This is stuff that will sweep you right on up, made by a band who sounds like they mean it 4.5/5

#1536 My Morning Jacket - Okonokos

Still working to get on board the MMJ train in preparation for a much-hyped set at roo this year - word is that this is one of their better live albums.

There's moments of romp and plenty of atmosphere on this slow-growing, slow-burner that I could see being transportative live, maybe? But honestly I don't hear any *magic* that levitates this beyond the decent-to-good It Still Moves. The band's tight, the structure wooly and labyrinthine with silver to follow and yet...maybe you had to be there 3.5/5

#1535 King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard - Twelve Bar Bruise

See this is how you do garage rock revival right: with heart and balls and blood and sweat, this is like the best of Thee Oh Sees without the muddy psychadelia. This is a shrieking jam befitting a shitkicking shit-giving rock and roll monster, no fat on it, a wiry boney stooge of a skeleton having a blast on its last legs 4.5/5

#1534 Royal Blood - Royal Blood

Riffy hard rock in the spirit of Queens of the Stone age and mid-era White Stripes. It does rock hard! And the production's got edge. But it's all too simple, too monochrome: same basic guitar sound, same basic tempo, same basic vocal delivery, the same chorus-with-a-harder-version-of-the-verse-riff every time and by the time it's over you won't remember a note 2.5/5

#1533 Fuzz - Live in San Francisco

The super heavy, super buzzy guitar crunch you'd expect from this Segallsphere side project. Unlike the OBN III's entry in the Live in SF series though, there's no real banter, no real live feel, just BZZZZZHHHH FFFZZZZZHHHHH BZZHH BZZHHH!

Production's hot, shit is super super fuzzy. Band earns that name. This shit just sounds loud as hell. Nothing here that will knock you out of your seat, but it might make you sink about 300 feet down into it for 20 minutes or so 3.5/5

#1532 My Morning Jacket - It Still Moves

Never got into these guys, finding them wildly overrated. But if you can step outside the hype there's a rich, casual classic-rock ride here, and one that's more Neil Young than Grateful Dead. Few of the melodies will grab your ear on first listen, but it's all awfully damned agreeable, and has a way of wearing paths down your back.

One complaint though: did Jim James swallow a tiny computer? Cause that reverb is non-fucking-stop, he's like a one-man band. The whole thing is generally awfully smothered in blankets, but it's just heavy enough, just hooky enough to stab its way on through 4/5

#1531 Twenty One Pilots - Vessel

I really want to like this: it's hooky, playful, sprightly, inventive...but
* emo whining
* very-white rapping
* middle-school margin confessionals

That's three damn strikes, leading to as many cringes as grins, and I'm not even dinging them for the cloying, thinly-veiled Christian angles. But as a combo-capper, the rapping is criminally amateur, falling into that more-rhymes is better nonsense like "And the window sill looks really nice, right? You think twice about your life, it probably happens at night" Huh? 2.5/5

#1530 SBTRKT - Wonder Where We Land

A mysterious deep-nighttime production, sparse little beats and loops that hypnotize while a parade of guest stars croon over top. The vocals are all a little overproduced though - the instrumentals actually work better, where things swing more to DJ Shadow and Radiohead at their most magical, where atmosphere creeps in completely.

There's slurry modern bullshit, sure, but it's never unlistenable; this could be a fine record for just the right kind of darkened evening drive 3/5

#1529 Tycho - Awake

A really pretty, rich ambient, instrumental electronic/rock album in the spirit of Ratatat, Broken Social Scene, and Starfucker. A crisp, textured rhythm section lays down the loops while guitar lines and toothsome synths work their way through waves of washes. Beautiful, headbobbing stuff, my kinda jam 4.5/5

#1528 Deadmau5 - While (1 < 2)

Not what I was expecting from a guy with a rep for co-founding the House of Bro-Rave Bangers: a slow, often-ambient album that sounds more like Trent Reznor (who remixes and is remixed here), trading mostly on texture and hypnosis, building-up more than it delivers-on. Frankly, it's rarely dancable, and almost never sounds anything like dubstep.

So at least it's not obnoxious. Pleasant surprise!

Problem is, clocking in at 2 hours and lacking Reznor's touch at Reznor-ing, its actually mostly really *boring*.

Just can't win 2.5/5

#1527 Lower Dens - Twin-Hand Movement

A wistful little album of micro-motoriks, all churning along over agreeable drum loops and loping basslines. There's nothing that approaches career-high-water-mark Brains on here, but it's an atmospheric little jam, a kubrickian space trip that's more chilling-in-white-minimalist-lounges than colorslash-climax-mindfuck. Instrumentals in particular are choice 3.5/5

#1526 Panda Bear - Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper

Mr. Bear's voice is still a little too moaning and reverb-soaked, and the album's a little bit hookless, but there's so much intricacy and invention in the crannies. This passable as a soft-listen and rewarding to the detail-seeker - I reckon it'll reward repeated listens 3.5/5

#1525 Mac Demarco - Salad Days

Sleepy psychadalia, glam at its most laconic, a tinny clang of guitars against a disinterested Albarnesque mutter. It's almost great - shame about those detuned, tapemelted guitar sounds that grit your teeth right out of reverie again and again and again.

That opening to Chamber of Reeflection is everything wrong with music. Just a pile of slurred, dissonant drones that feel like having a stroke. Is this for getting stoned to? An attempt to give a thin song idea artsy cred?

Everyone, stop it. Just stop.

Just make good songs instead 2.5/5

#1524 Future Islands - In Evening Air

More of that vaguely dancable, euphoric, angles-and-elbows electo//pop confessions. Samuel Herring's hoarse, moaning, whining, grunting vocal meltdowns are still make-or-break: if you don't get on board with it you're not going to be able to appreciate any of the album's bounty of pretty moments.

I like this better than Singles - that album's poppier sound was more at odds with Herring's emoting. This is comparatively warm, inimate, weird, capable of nestling up closer to the vocals, making then just almost, *almost* work 3/5

#1523 Songs: Ohia - Didn't it Rain

Sounds like Magnolia Electric Co. (album) if you stripped out all the big guitars, swooping strings, country crackle, beauty and hope. Neil Young at his darkest, Bonnie Prince Billy dark, going on seemingly forever, like a night piled deeper and deeper in unrepentant existential dread. The words hit hard here and there, but I need a little more sugar to make medicine this bitter go down 2/5

#1522 Strand of Oaks - HEAL

OK OK ALBUM TITLES WITH THE ALL CAPS.

A gorgeous album with guitar grit, electronic buzz and unpredictable, epic song structures. JM's a tribute to Jason Molina and that about fits: the gut-punch moments, the twig-twisted texture. About double the guitars though: those big crushing droppins are killer.

Gonna rule at Bonnaroo.

4.5/5

#1521 RL Grime - VOID

More demo reel than listen proper, RL Grime lays out the ambient builders, the climactic bangers, the latenight jams but never assembles them into a show-shaped arc. It's like the scene where the sniper's laid out all his parts on a big sheet on the clock tower without the actual snap snap bang bang.

There's plenty of big fat synths, trappy beats, and of course everything's a little slurred cause that's how 2014 rolls - nothing that overmuch moves me, especially when there's so little attention paid to making an album of it 2.5/5

#1520 I LOVE MAKONNEN - I LOVE MAKONNEN

Proof, finally once and for all, that all you have to do to get hipsters on your jock these days is slow everything down until it sounds detuned and shitty. Hack-ass tastemakers *still* think that's innovation in 2014. Makonnen's gift seems to be that his weird voice - autotuned or otherwise - slots right into the latest flagging electronica cliche.

Played out production tricks and a bunch of mealymouthed autotooning about getting drunk and selling drugs completely drown out even the occasional bright spots 2/5

#1519 The Orwells - Disgraceland

Hooky garage rock revival revival (think Vines, not Animals) that draws from a dozen can't-miss formulas (Pixies' soaring guitars + general west coast crunch) to make something that I gotta admit, does not miss.  Always agreeable, striking clean lines, Mario Cuomo's voice finding grit and grace all over the place, this is perfectly good fist-pumping indie hard rock lite.

Don't come expecting any feats of derring do though: every 3 minute song still sounds stretched thin; there's no big moves, no innovations, nothing anything that will stick once the listen's over (beyond that admittedly catchy song from the Apple ad) 3/5

Month in Review: December '14

Main theme was finding Japanese electronic label Maltine's site, where they have dozens and dozens of albums as free downloads. Some fun stuff! A couple of surprisingly good releases from some old favorites in there too.

Album of the Month
Glassyo - Jazz EP - A strange, funky little record that I just like more the more I hear it. Check out his Jumbo EP too.

Also Recommended!
Girl Talk and Freeway - Broken Ankles EP - Girl Talk goes for it full production style! The transition's surprisingly smooth so far; he's got a future in this shit if he sticks with it.

Pantera - A Vulgar Display of Power - Never quite sure which of the metal classics that I'm working my way through are gonna move me. Lives up to it's title, surprisingly fun.

The Smashing Pumpkins - Monument to an Elegy - Surprisingly good record from a band I'd long since quit on. Maybe they stopped trying too hard. Or maybe my standards are just that low.