#1790 Van Dyke Parks - Song Cycle

That I could turn off my mind, let this hot mess flow all over me - someday I might come to love it.

But Jesus Joseph and Mary and all the goddamn saints, what a mess. Parks's cloying crooning manhandling syllables like a sitcom-bad kisser making his big move - too much mouth, too much motion, too much..trying. Strings, horns, incidental noise, everything else slathered over top like thick, cheap gravy, all atumble, like nobody talked to eachother beforehand and nobody who gave a shit put it all together afterward.

Was the near-complete lack of drums a stylistic choice, do you think? They probably would have helped keep some of this shit on the same beat // page.

Maybe this is all part of its charm, some prescient notion of twee. Maybe it's all artful genius, a reckless disregard for convention while paying tribute to the song styles the past! Whadda paradox! And I guess I dig it's sense of LA place when I can dig it out of the tarpits.

But mostly it just seems sloppy as shit, like lower-tier Zappa or Rundgren. It makes my face make a face, like I just watched a bad kisser making his big move 2.5/5

#1789 Young Knives - Something Awful

Pulsing, moody post-punk that screeches and broods, a Single Frame song after a bad breakup and too much to drink. The pacing's murky, the vocals meandering, the whole thing off by a few degrees, but I dig it - at least it's doing its committing to its own thing, putting some swagger in all that staggering about 3.5/5

#1788 Everything Everything - Arc

Herkyjerk rock, packed with offbeat emphasis, angular guitars, streaking falsettos - a throwback to early aughts second-wave dancepunk. At its best it's got enough surprises to sound like Menomena's best computer-augmented instrumentations*, but by the end it droops into Franz Ferdinand / Hot Hot Heat territory, sounding watered down and understuffed, leaning too hard on those keening vocals while the band keeps time. There's real potential here if they could keep their edge on 3/5

* first track here is Cough Cough ~ IATFBM's Cough Coughing: Coincidence?

#1787 The Moody Blues - In Search of the Lost Chord

The world's got it all wrong, holding up the Moodies' Days of Future Past and totally ignoring the masterpiece that followed it. Is this pretentious? Sure. But it drops almost all of the synphonic horseshit that made Days a mushy, prissy mess; a little bit of the ridiculous spoken word poetry sticks around - but not much!

In that negative space is something even more majestic and strange, an album bursting with inventive moments, trippy atmosphere, and some fucking spectacular production that pivots guitars, vocals, mellotrons into and out of the fore with abandon, socking you with vertigo. Wildly listenable and enjoyable and strange 4.5/5

#1786 Thundercat - The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam

The whole Brainnfeeder clan is into some pretty incredible stuff lately, conjuring one dark rainbow of soul and motion after another. This short EP plays more like a single 16 minute track, and it's got some of that magic, keeping you guessing while it twists and simmers and pulses, Thundercat's bonkers bass twisting everything at odd angles.

Wildly original.

The main knock are the vocals, that samey falsetto blurring the more interesting backing - just look at how engaging it is in its instrumental 3nd act. Absolutely worth hearing, but marred by putting its least interesting element front and center 3.5/5

#1785 Sam Cooke - Night Beat

Cooke's voice, it really is something, full, round, bold, expressive, even mustering a bit of grit when the song demands. It's a good fit to the loose feel of these late-night sessions, a bunch of musicians rattling through all the rock and soul they love.

Cooke's deliberateness, his insistence on making it good (god forbid) undermines some of the rock tracks - rock needs a little more fuckit. As soul its just right - deep and true and blue like a moonlit lake 3.5/5

#1784 Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch!

1964. Jazz's chords had been all mined out; modal territory was pretty well mapped, jazz shark's manifest destiny says "keep swimming" - there's still some notes never played out there!

But the diminishing returns are kicking in, like the discovery of a new atomic element that only exists if you point a bunch of magnets justso - this is lurching, atonal, erratic, hopscotching along a negative space Goofus world of a beat and scale.

I'm not that desperate yet, the good stuff still gives me enough of a thrill 2.5/5

#1783 Jan Johansson - Jazz På Svenska

Utterly spare piano and bass playing Swedish folk songs in a patience, delicate jazzy style, with all the

space

  to    breathe

     between

notes.

That minimal instrumentation lets everything drift at its own pace, the simple chemistry between Johansson and his bass player and a generous dose of human intuition keep the pace as right as it needs to be. Sleepy, subtle, pretty 3.5/5

#1782 Love - Da Capo

Early classic psychedelia.

Side 1: 6 quick, brilliant hits - ragged garage edge, flaming sax rips, garagerock shouts, the occasional pretty lilt, all flowing together perfectly.

Seven and Seven Is, especially, goddamn, white-hot.

Side 2: the 19 minute Revelation’s not bad as these jams go: aimless and ill-paced, sure, but watching the loose evolution unfold’s a good little trip to come back down on 4/5

#1781 Nico - Chelsea Girl

The best and worst and only thing about this album is Nico’s singing -- her husky, rambling, undertuned moan-singing, over backing that's simultaneously barely there and too much. All those strings and flutes (even Nico hated the flutes).

It’s disarmingly strange, occasionally beautiful despite itself, but it’s unbearable at length, especially during the interminable It Was A Pleasure Then / Chelsea Girl slog centerpiece 2/5

#1780 Sturgill Simpson - Metamodern Sounds in Country Music

Despite the spacy album cover and the “metamodern” title, this is dead-straight country music. Ok, ok, the lyrics are a little trapper, and there’s that backwards guitar at the veeery end, but don’t come in expecting anything that takes overmany chances.

Still good. Simpson’s voice is resonant and round, conjuring Jason Molina at his best, and the vibe is dustyclean swoon and stomp, prickled with subtle angles and solid guitarwork, but the marketing’s a little misleading 3.5/5

#1779 Rick James - Bustin' Out of L Seven

Maybe Come Get It! benefitted from my lack of Rick James expectations, but this doesn't quite fire me up the same way. Its extended, repetitive jams seem more directly aimed at the dancefloor, with more disco in its disco/funk/rock/soul paella. This is just kinda there...then still there, smoldering through its length, even while it pantomimes at exploding 2.5/5

#1778 Adventure Time - Dreams of Water Themes

Daedelus teams up with Frosty to make an unevenly paced, generally pretty sloppy pile of samples. Not particularly atmospheric, not particularly hooky, this never really engages. By now there're too many Daedelus albums that do the same basic stuff better for this to be worth your trouble 2/5

#1777 Arthur Russel - Calling Out of Context

This's got that offkilter edge of the outsider, all those synths and beats and string swipes coming in at oblique angles, all those fussfingered production maneuvers, while Russel deadpans tunelessly through mysterious moments. That newness works in flashes - The Platform On the Ocean is a unique piece of somethin'.

But holy shit does this wear out its welcome. The lack of craft, of pacing, of songsmanship, of tunefulness makes this an ordeal by the end of its hourlong runtime. Could have been a charming gesture as a 16 minute EP, but if you're expecting me to listen for an *hour* you need to master your craft first 2.5/5

#1776 Christopher Owens - Chrissybaby Forever

What a sneaky record.

It comes out sounding like a pretty standard singer-songerwriter post punk pop kinda thing, shades of Paul Westerberg, maybe Nick Lowe or Elvis Costello at their poppiest.

But that weird cover, that weird title, they nag at the back of your mind, and by the halfway mark this has become a curious, intimate, little thing. Someone who’s sidled up closer to you than you expected, and you’re a little uncomfortable, a little excited, unsure and staying cool but wondering what’s next. Shades of Todd Rundgren, and of something else altogether, lo-fi excursions, watercolor melody, surges of barbed vulnerability.

And then the album, the night, it all goes on a bit further, a bit longer than expected, seemingly winding to gorgeous comedown around I Love You Like I Do, and you stumble out into the light a little different 4.5/5

#1775 Charles Mingus - Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus

A greatest hits retrospective, Mingus and a new band recording some of his greats.

And it's great. Because the songs are great, because these renditions have just enough rawness, just enough edge and darkness and grit and spark.

No great Jazz, fan, I. And this is probably not as legitimate as the groundbreaking first passes. But to you and I, we presumed rock-firsters, this is about as thrilling a listen as you'll find in jazz, fucking packed with brilliant texture and tune 4.5/5

#1774 Sun Ra - Secrets of the Sun

I do not know what these guys are doing. I don't know if they do either. There's obviously /some/ structure here, the occasional actual tune (Space Aura), the actual planned jazz moment, but this is mostly total freeform freakout, chanting and spattering and skittering and shitting on all yer rules.

It's possibly brilliant, all that rulesshitting. But it also sounds lazy and scattershot, not bothering to put any kind of through-line for the listener, never conjuring any real atmosphere beyond "weird".

If that's all you want though? If you want something /weird/, something to soundtrack a good solid chinscratch, sure, you could do a lot worse 2.5/5

#1773 Oscar Peterson Trio - Night Train

Peterson's piano is *crunchy*, just full of texture and gristle and lithe movement and that muscular flex. One moment its aflutter, but then there's this meaty ribcage, this heft, that sneering punk with a butterfly knife, and a bunch of tough motherfuckers at his back. That piano don't get pushed around.

Great, hearty upright bass on this record too - grudging respect from the jazz philistine 3.5/5

#1772 Florence and the Machine - How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful

This's the hazard of letting my reviews sag a full 3 weeks behind the post data / listening date. Since I last heard this for the first time I've seen Florence et al at Bonnaroo and they FUCKING RULED. Girl is pure electricity, raging around the space, pure melodic lighting. And now dammit this album seems so alive, beyond the disk.

Review the disc. Fine fine. At their best they're dynamite: the modern Fleetwood Mac plus a spark of production thrust and operatic boldness - those first two tracks are pure female fire. I'm out of metaphors that connote the release of energy, but when they're good they're brilliant.

There's not really an album's worth of power here though, running out of steam, running together, the same basic vocal tricks wearing thin.

Shit though, that spark 3.5/5

#1771 Jamie XX - In Colour

Not to turn this into another treatise on slurry, sludgy, detuned electronica - but goddammit we've suffered through so much of it in the last couple years, we gotta point out why the occasional win's different, why it's all been worth it.

This is a win.

This works because all that fuckery's not a crutch. It works because this dude gets humans, gets emotions, gets how to open ribcages to poke at frailties.

When the beat slips off the pulley, when the notes sag like Dali clocks, that's not just because lookit-my-new-trick. It's because that's the way your chest sinks when you think of ex-lovers. Because sometimes feeling deeply puts a hitch in your heart. Because sometimes you feel so fucking vulnerable that you swallow yourself up in place.

All those tricks, all that fuckery, it's a means not and ends. It all helps this magical, crystalline, warmly humming, quietly terrifying album /work/

Suddenly you find a stranger in your intimate midst, and you let it stay, and your knees buckle and you fall into space 4.5/5

#1770 Dexter Gordon - Go

The jazz hardliners seem to be pretty into this hardline jazz album, but as a philistine and general know-nothing: it makes zero crossover concessions. There's no universal feeling, no transcendent structure or tone - just guys who are very good at playing jazz. Plenty for some 2.5/5

#1769 The Do Likes - The Do Likes

Sunny indie from my girlfriend's first crush's band. Cute.

It's got a lighthearted britpop (see Ash) vibe, all those vocals refracting, beats clip by like daylight off milemarkers. It's straightforward, the vocals altogether without edge, all sounding uninterested in rattling any conventions, but still - every song's got some flourish, some synthy wash, some dash of strings, some clever turn of phrase, some damn thing that'll make you smile 3/5

#1768 Charles Mingus - Tijuana Moods

3 shorts, 3 longs, alternating.

The shorts are more traditional jazz fare: horns doing their synchronized runs along the main theme, dipping into solo sections, then returning to the main theme (Flamingo's more of a wander).

The longs are the highlights, clocking in at 10+ minutes each, they're getting into arty territory, with wily instrumentation, narrative arks, slithery progression. A Colloquial Dream closes things out on the artiest of the arty, some drawling beat lines drawn on out as the flames die down.

And that brings us to our final highlight, which is that I dig the structure here, the rhythm of the album, as it dips from theme to improvisation and back, to longwinding masterwork and back and forth. Say:

Theme A
Solo Solo Solo
Theme A
Looooooooong strange trip
Theme B
Solo Solo Solo
Theme B
Looooooooong strange trip
Meander around a loose Theme C
Looooooooong even stranger trip

the structure unravelling slowly before your eyes. Pretty cool, man 4/5

Month in Review: May '15

Flailings from the quest for the new new new, just looking for anything, any search term or angle or recommender that will yield something worth listening to. A scattered series of finds include:

Album of the Month

Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment - Surf - wildly original and fun as heck. I don't know how an album like this even gets made.

Also Recommended!

Ray Mang - Mangled - One of the better space disco albums I've come across. Solid.

Les Baxter - Ritual of the Savage - A great find mostly because it's just something completely new: retro ripoff exploitations exploded into ironic/unironic funtimes.

Cannonball Adderly - Somethin' Else - Just damn agreeable rollalong jazz