#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