#2366 Jeff Rosenstock - We Cool?

Rosenstock's latest is my favorite album of 2016, so let's tip back.


We Cool?'s not as overwhelmingly hooky or overpoweringly sincere as Worry, lacking that strangely satisfying glimpse of the crumbling New York scene - but the core magic's totally in place, roaring with love, exhaustion, determination, grappling with death, grasping at joy and clinging for dear life, all set to endless storming Weezer guitars, spiked with the Pixies, Thin Lizzy, and everything soaring.

There's truly personal moments, real rock and roll let-ya-ins, a bipolar rocket that can't stop moving or it'll start thinking, so the guitars just keep coming - an effortless piece of almost-pop-punk panacea for the desperately crowded and hopelessly alone 4.5/5

#2365 Yesterday's New Quintet - Angles without Edges

Madlib's first YNQ album's halfway between instrumental hip hop and sullen, bubbling jazz. Five fictional members give Jackson room to lay down murky, hitched, off-center grooves. It's hornless, leaning on synth, bass and vibraphone ringing, never straying overly far from its central tones, never giving you any real hooks or choruses or signposts, the music never changing, but the listen becoming claustrophobic and labyrinthine, running through the Goblet of Fire maze aimlessly in superslow motion.

Interesting, but never altogether pleasant, and remarkably difficult to actually listen to all the way through 2.5/5

#2364 Anderson .Paak - Malibu

After multiple breathless recommendations, I found my first listen to this one so _underwhelming_

And I get it a bit better now - it's got a smoothness, a lazy bit of bounce, with just the tinniest spike of that dark-jazz vibe that's been bubbling up the last couple years.

But, nah.

The production's too produced, too smooth, somewhere between JT and Jamiroquai. And all the sounds repeat and repeat, little custom studio-polished session-musician loops, with none of the grit and history of a proper sample, none of the spark or sizzle of a proper live backing. And every song just blends together, same basic feel, same basic tempo, wildly overstuffed at 16 tracks.

And Paak himself doesn't save it - he's chained to his voice's raspy spine, with desperately little emotional or musical range, always sounding the same kind of ever-so-slightly pained.

There's no stakes, no commitment, just a easy groove to cruise to nowhere in.

We're ready for a funk revivial, but we can do better than this 3/5

#2363 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Skeleton Tree

Never been a big Nick Cave guy, but this feels like the time.

The electronic skitchering fits the moment, as everything falls apart in increments.

The moaning abstraction, it slots alongside Coen, Bowie, loss.

Now more than ever, maybe, we need the sound of crumbling, splitting, loss of hope, glimpse of hope. This is that. Repetition, desperation lost, quit, sounds like ghosts with grudges, taking one last, long, slow swing at vengeance 3.5/5

#2362 Swet Shop Boys - Cashmere

With Heems on board there's a touch of that old Das Racist vibe: blunt instrument beats, loose and loping rhymes, infinite irreverence. But this is post-fucking around, those political undercurrents running rampant right over the top: American racism and distrust, defiance and flashes of fear, fearless flashes of culture and sound from across the Indian subcontinent -- with a borderline concept-album obsession with Airport security in particular.  And isn't that where it all comes to a head? Where you're trying to be a citizen of the world, and American authority has near-complete power.

Cashmere's never predictable: every line's packed with swerves, packed into twisty structures, in an album that can't sit still - it's wooly, daring, tense and __every once in a while__, a bit of goofy fun (Tiger Hologram!). All we can hope for right about now 4/5

#2361 FM-84 - Atlas

There's a big 80's electonic revival that's been going for a few years now -- it went pop a few years ago circa M83 and Cut Copy, but an underground pulse keeps the dream alive.

At its best, this is the best of that.

Wistfulness, escape, possibility. Those chord tuned into your soul, those arpeggios outlining its outlines. The instrumental tracks are better than most.

The problem's the vocal tracks. That's where FM-84 go from conjuring the spirit of the 80's to reanimating its soulless corpse, pet cemetary style. Those songs are just too Top Gun soundtrack, and kill the flow. But in between, again, better than most, take me away 3.5/5

#2360 Frank Ocean - Blonde

Welcome back, team! It's mid-Jan, bouncing back from vacation, getting caught back up, back in the swing of things.

--
 
I got a whoooole theory about how rock (the movement, not the musicalogical sound) is having its baton picked up by hip hop, and he's an album that blurs it all into nothing.

One foothold -- rock (loosely) used to be where we found those albums quite-unlike, those frame-knockers, those eye wideners. But here's the latest offering that hits it, and it's... soul? dashes of hip hop? But with more in common with Bon Iver's deconstructions, Radiohead's post-band production gestations, the Microphones' expulsions. If Frank Ocean was white, we'd have no problem calling this abstract rock, Spiderland, Laughing Stock, a warming piece of post-rock, but given his background/backstory/musical path to now, we're all wind-twisting tittering twits.

The spirit of rock is to find something sincere, something sincerely delivered, realness. To escape populism, popular grasping, and this is that - it has that audacity, that fuckitism.

--

Beat's the classic identifier of popular style. Hip hop beat. Rock beat on the 2 / 4. Four to the floor. Unts unts // boots and pants. Here's this liquid sound with more guitars than beats, with more unidentifiable sounds than guitars, more mysterious glimpses and glances and goundings than sounds, even.

Which is all to say, this is fucking exciting. Thrilling, unknowable, personal, electric, and totally fucking unchained from any kind of sound, meandering under its own blasted volition, inspiring us to stumble around in the darkness.

It is adventurous. Thank god. There's still room for adventurous. Still room for being surprised. As Ocean murmurs and clips and moans and swoons his way through a labyrinth of emotions, senses, thoughts, as humble and important and complex and elemental as the thoughts racing through your mind every day -- it's the spattering synapse of being a confused person hurtling through life, cast as light on the ceiling 4.5/5

#2359 Solange - A Seat at the Table

An album so minimal, so distant, it's barely there.

The production's prodding and icy, mistaking unpredictable blurts of sound for jazziness, the way a bad horror movie mistakes jump scares for scariness.

Lyrically it's all or nothing, deadpan bluntness or vague mad-libsian wisdom-by-association, with ten times as many limp rhymes as actual insights.

And even when Solange has a personal message or meaning, it's delivered with all the theater of a commencement address, never deigning to welcome or impress or entertain. The guest spoken word segments are the most-moving parts, but they don't make a moving, personal, or affecting album, absent any actual musicmaking. Look at Common, Chance, Kanye, Frank, Heems, or hell, Beyonce, for how this can be done better.

Three of the song titles start with "don't", a crucial section talks about how this isn't for me, and the overall tone is of pushing at arms-length-plus. I believe Solange. Good for her for having the courage to make this seemingly very sincere, personal record. Sincerely. But as music or entertainment or art, we can agree to agree, it is squarely not for me 2/5

#2358 Kevin Morby - Singing Saw

Kevin Morby knows music. You can feel the confidence in the way he moves through chords and tones and moods. He sways and swerves with like man who knows every mogul, rock, tree, every breeze and twittering feather on a mountain as he cuts his lines with geometric precision.

And from the confidence comes the power to flourish and embellish effortlessly, to pack every rich tone with strings and horns and bass, and yes, the occasional singing saw, in the grand spirit of Okkervil River, Wilco, Band of Horses, and M. Ward. This is a fully realized domain. And unlike all that punk rock I like, there's no sense that the unexpected might happen, but in its place is a fully realized space, nuanced and inevitable, the likes of Guillermo del Toro or Herzog or Tarsem at the peak of their fictions. Guitars pull like worms, loamy textures and turning tones like rising suns at low angles through trees, sounds echoing off the dissipating overcast 4/5

#2357 Aphex Twin - Cheetah

Aphex Twin gets away with a lot. All his non-remixes and throwaways and pisstakes get filed under puckishly brilliant - so too goes his EP named after the notoriously fussy Cheetah ms800? It's unclear the role the synth played in this - it's mostly a series of agreeable, warm, buzzy thumpers that probably wouldn't get a second sniff if not for the ass that farted them.

Don't get me wrong, peak Aphex Twin's the shit. But there's nothing special here. The best bit is center two tracks of aimless, strange noise that sounds like it maybe was actually made on the ms800, so ploddingly abstract and demo-ey as it is -- adding up to 64 seconds of music. the Cirklon tracks are funky and agreeable in a jazz-adjacent old-Aphex kinda way, but this feels like an artist coasting on his second-wave of absence-fueled fame, and its hard not to be a little cynical about it 3/5

#2356 Childish Gambino - Awaken, My Love!

It's hard to escape the idea that Donald Glover's taking the piss. His prior Childish Gambino hiphop turns seemed like earnest variation at best, hokey once-removed Weird Al-ism at worst. And here he turns his eye to funk - specifically drawing /hard/ on Funkadelic spacy groovecraft and Sly communal up-an-attem.

But it's mostly for the best. I mean, first of all, that space hasn't been tapped half as hard as it deserves.

Second, this takes that space and grows it, into something wilder than even Clinton would have necessarily dared. It brings its own juice to the party. That bass, too, damn.

And the vocals are so thoroughly postproductioned: ripped, clipped, autotuned -- but, I buy it, somehow.

And, shit, that second side just gets spacy as shit, losing the thread altogether -- but its weirdly the right move.

This never quite escapes the orbit of its influences, always seeming relative-to, and at times (Zombies) it's just hokey. But it pulls off that Zappa-level yes-and often enough to win my affection, and occasional outright adoration. Derivative or not, it does what it does pretty darn well, and dammit, we're overdue for another dose of this shit 4/5

#2355 Noname - Telefone

Noname's got such a natural flow. Her production's so warm. It's natural, welcoming, glowing. Even as it dips through injustice, through deep-seated, well-earned pain, that never slips into bitterness or resentment.

That buzzy, languid, radiant backing helps, all that glowing bass and languid rhythm.

It's a source of earnestness, hope, positivity reflected off of darkness. In keeping with co-Chicagoan Chance, here pushing towards what needs to happen, what's happening be damned 4/5

#2354 The Rolling Stones - Blue and Lonesome

Stones get back to basics, do some blues covers. It works out about as good as you could hope for: Jagger can shout just fine, the band lays down perfectly good laid-back swagger, and everyone keeps it 100% no-frills. Not a single unexpected thing happens. If you'd walked out of a bar after an anonymous bunch of old guys did this set you'd say "those guys were actually really good" with mild surprise, and for better or worse, nothing'd tip you off that they were once anything more 3/5

#2353 YG - Still Brazy

Boom-bap West coast hip hop with plenty of modern mopey electronic buzz standing in for classic pfunk analog growl. It's got itself a groove, but all that bravado sounds out of time in 2016, and I'm spoiled by all this twisty, freeflowing stuff coming out lately - no patience for rap songs that repeat the name of the song 4 times a chorus x 4 choruses 2.5/5

#2352 Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, Oren Ambarchi - I Wonder If You Noticed "I'm Sorry" Is Such a Lovely Sound It Keeps Things from Getting Worse

Experimental music as vast and meandering as its album/song names. The endless pacing's hypnotic, but it desperately needs O'Rourke's guitar muscle to keep it moving - long stretches are too spare and dissonant to keep an active-listen level of attention 3/5

#2351 Jim O’Rourke / Fennesz - It's Hard for me to Say I'm Sorry

Fizzling, sputtering, beat-ish clips and sizzles, peppered across meandering pushes and pulls of sound. It's pretty, alien, strange, intriguing the closer you look, somehow at once a carefully crafted masterpiece and a dashed-off Pollockian spatter of sounds. The listen blurred reality, even if it failed to take me to a new one 3.5/5

#2350 Mitski - Puberty 2

Mitski's low cooing, too-personal details, and simple, pulsing, chugging, 1-2-3-4 backing give Puberty 2 an icy bedroom-indie intimacy. It's quietly unsettling, making love with a stranger who seems to have known you all their life, cracking your heart to glimpses of beauty (Fireworks!). Xiu Xiu lite, the Princess of Carrot Flowers, an insidiously catchy, strange little record 3.5/5

#2349 Goodie Mob - Soul Food

Classic Southern hip hop, that stutter-step cadence, those slowroll beats, all packed with love and resistance to struggle, overflowing with a sense of place, community, truth, presence. Strong stuff 4/5

ps well shit, some time a couple hundred back I cocked up the numbering. So we jump back up a hundred. The new version, coming some day, will fix all this.

#2248 Nicholas Jaar - Sirens

Jaar doesn't stray too far from his Darkside sound, until he slowly does, riding those mysterious loops and basslines into Spanish crooning, Booksian samples, island bop - its a seductive slide into unfamiliarity.

If you're not familiar with Darkside, shit, well this is a silky, pitch-black, purple-streaked, mysterious, inky, slithering, pulsing little piece of disappear. Doubly worth checking out in that case 3.5/5

#2247 Babymetal - Metal Resistance

There's two obvious routes out of this album: to bristle at its manufactured idol-metal emptiness, or to get past the context and be taken by it's heedless, hooky momentum. I want to be won over, and at times it's grudgingly good fun. But attitude matters in rock, and the lack of credibility undercuts the riffs again and again, and they get less and less thrilling as the album piles them on 2.5/5

#2246 Kyle Dixon - Stranger Things Soundtrack

M83 imagined an 80's that never was, voiced by a music that never really existed. Dixon takes that a step further. His soundtrack drips with menace and romance, with the dark, naive thrill of being young in an uncertain world, full of possibility and fear, pulling hard from M83, and from Kraftwerk's warmest moments, packing every track with blistering, blossoming, analog texture.

The pacing's slow, completionist. This's no Fight Club. It doesn't quite capture the atmosphere, the feel. But the sound's just too sweet to ignore, too packed with endaround pathos, every tone knowing the frequency-key to your heart's darkest maybes 4/5

#2245 Martha - Blisters in the Pit of My Heart

Charmingly British pop-punk, overflowing with tight little guitar hooks and twangy little vocals and a bursting sense of miniature, raging enthusiasm and fidgety rage. Makes me smile, with a Boston (the band) kind of hookiness, like Tom Scholz was turned into a teenager, plopped in England, fully aware that 2016 would find him, 69, irrelevant, but alive 4/5

#2244 Bomb the Music Industry! - Adults!!!...Smart!!! Shithammered!!! And Excited By Nothing!!!!!!!

Maybe  my favorite album title and album cover and album title / album cover combination.

Rosenstock brings  clumsy    enthusiasm  and staggering   fallover  punk energy to  every fragile little  moment, bringing uncool  sincerity back to skittering   ska,  the 'scene ' creeps  through   every  bar, until your jaded heart accepts it's not put on and you just believe it. Do try to keep up 3.5/5

#2243 Jeff Rosenstock - Worry

What a perfect record to find now, so packed with resonant desolation, wrapped in righteous hookiness and joyous zeal.

Themewise its all banal desperation and flailing helplessness that resonates now more than ever - I'll stop saying that someday, i swear. But it feels personal and relatable, built from a sense of place, centered in NY in a way I dont even hate, reflecting the urban pressures in a way that feels universal and welcoming instead of insular and smug.

Musically it's so fucking hooky, so packed with great guitar sounds and shameless pop moves and great little vocal hooks, no clap-clap off-limits, no synth lick or vocal ooooo or doubletime or breakdown forbidden, Weezer + Ted Leo with some actual rage in the clip, especially on that secret ten minute epic, disguised as 7 blasts of punk proper.

Bittersweet and heartbreakingly thrilling, guaranteed to crack my albums of the year list 4.5/5

#2242 Yohuna - Patientness

Those big textured guitars/synths and ghostly vocals and minimally desperate sentiments compliment eachother perfectly, stirring something ominous and soothing. On paper, all that cooing and reverb and general pillowey folk sensibility should repel me, but it's a balm, with just enough invention to sneak around my defenses 3.5/5

#2241 Gun Outfit - Possession Sound

Intellectually great, sure - this's packed with weird tones and keys and inventive moves, pure Sonic Youth // Pavement. But I can't make it halfway through this without getting tired of that disinterested, atonal moaning, succumbing to an overwhelming sense that this whole rock and roll thing is such an exhausting, unpleasant exercise. I don't have enough time in my life to invest in listening to something willfully unpassionate unless the music really makes up for it, and this doesn't come close 2.5/5

#2240 Metallica - Hardwired to Self Destruct

For a few songs, this's way better than you could possibly expect to crawl out of Metallica's dusty, dried-out husk. There's a taste of the old stuff, of unstoppable gallop, of too-appropriate bitter apocalyptica, and some pretty sharp guitar moves. But the momentum runs out. It gets numbing, then boring - the tempos drag into generic sludge, the lyrics reduced to ruminations on high school notebook stuff, on songs called things like ManUNkind and Am I Savage? Still a pleasant surprise, considering 3/5

#2239 A Tribe Called Quest - We Got it from Here...Thank You for Your Service

It's been so hard to find enthusiasm for this project lately - this album in particular feels insurmountable. It's excellent, packed with surprises, inventions, bile, insights, glimpses of joy, with restless, effortlessly intricate production. Fun maybe, there's undeniable chemistry (those handoffs on Dis Generation), but it'll always be haunted by it's post-election status, destined to be a hard album to really enjoy, at least in the short term 4/5

#2238 Dirtwire - Dirtwire

I'm out of patience for the whole Beats Antique exotica triphop thing, and I can't decide if this is just that with a midi instrument change: sitar -> violin / twangy guitars, finger cymbals -> shuffling feet and chains, etc. Either way, the dusty atmosphere's an improvement, mysterious for its familiarity, lending itself to gritty details. Overworked but pleasant enough work music 3/5

#2237 The Men - Devil Music

It's good to hear the Men back to raging - they'd gotten static for a while there. It's all a little formless, mostly unmemorable, but with enough propulsive energy to get you through the workday, and an argument for an asskicking live show. Still wish they could find a way to let all their sides combine forces the way they did on Open Your Heart 3.5/5

#2236 Catherine Wheel - Chrome

Well-balanced sound, nothing gets in the way of anything else, a unified wall of shoegaze guitars that gets fractally more detailed the closer you look. The sentiments are repeated and vague, the tempos and structures unimaginative, the drums 90's-basic - all the better to keep the focus where it belongs. Good to space out to at very high volume 3.5/5

#2235 Guerilla Toss - Eraser Stargazer

Frantic, angular, stabby bouncing, sliced with synths and yelps, Deerhoof meeting Enon for a piss on the 3rd rail. Wildly annoying, but daring and and strange and sincere enough to win you over if you can stand it 3/5

#2234 Mannequin Pussy - Romantic

a lot of crashes, a lot of tincan screaming, a lot of startstop fasterfaster guitars. It goes for the throat (except on the clumsy pop-grasping misstep Denial), keeps the songs punk-short - all good moves, but we've heard all this before, and I'm not moved, too jaded, numb and dumb 3/5

#2233 Boys Noize - Mayday

Oh thank god, we're back where the blog dates (listen dates) are past moment Omega -- aka the #1 non-Hitler moment time travelers got on their todo list. Some day my homegrown blog will handle this shit better. Do see the start of this kick if ive lost you. Reviewed late 11/19 for the record.

--

What a bad name. And the glimpses of homegrown vocals are pretty [fart noise]. But there's an analog soul here, a sense of the actual knobs being turned, if not actual wax leaving hands, a sense of live crackle, of craft, that's invigorating. Mostly it sounds like a poor substitute for a pretty solid live set -- that that doubleedger how you will 3.5/5

#2232 Common - Black Amercia Again

Reviewed late 11/18

aw fuck, here's where we hit the whole post trump thing head on.

because when I heard this circa 11/8, I still had hope, wavering, that shit might be in the right direction.

revisiting that space is a tough spot.

--

I have this pet theory that this and the Tribe album are two sides of the same coin.

I posited to Liam, local hip hop scholar of note, I'm learning -- that one hoped for a Hillary future, and one feared a Trump future. He agreed, that the Common record was way more somber.

He's not wrong, but I'd meant it the other way around: this seemed like the optimistic//Hillary one, to me. But then, maybe its because I heard it before the sword dropped, and the Tribe album after. Also, fuck if I didn't stumble onto The Day Women Took Over the World for the first time day of, and took it as a sign.

"_wrong_"

both recorded before, I'll take this as the final assessment: Common's record took on the Hillary future and wanted to tackle how shit was still broke despite that. Tribe said Trump's coming, but let's get by. paragraphs on a nonsense theory, sorry Common. #secretposttrump etc

--

It's a swirling, rich, poignant record.

It's packed with seething anger, hope, production that wraps around you.

The R&B-tinged romantic interludes (Love Star, Red Wine) don't work for me, but the screeds, the wanders, the retroactive-paeans like The Day Women Took Over, the pain, the *fucking opus* of the title track, the soaring Little Chicago Boy -- goddamn.

when the album bites in is when it works. when it recognizes the shitfuck we're all fucked in, is when it sticks.

it's a liquid record that moves on its own accord.

impossible not to appreciate.

--

even on 11/8 i heard Rain

and John Legend sings.

if its going to rain tomorrow, let it rain

and I felt that shiver of what might (did) come

it's like Common hoped on the previous track, but recognized that his hope might not come, and left this breadcrumb for us, just in case.

and maybe that fear's laced throughout.

this is an era of hip hop that knew there were two ways could go, and one way things were gonna go through weaving though that, and a hope to find that central thread and move it.

you don't hear Common himself all that strongly in this album. It's not a Kanye album, not a Kendrick record like that. it's a world record like that, reaching out low and wide, trying to draw in. and goddamn if we don't need more of that.

and conversely, to bring Kanye into the fold -- there's a Gospel cloth that Common draws himself into with his opening track, dropping reference to Ultralight Beam, which Chance (gospel revivalist himself) guested on -- 2016's getting back to believing, to sharing belief, to spreading the idea that maybe we're - - - -   -  -  -  -    -   -   -    -    -     -

--

"Common's in everything" Jo and I say sometimes, lately. He hosts, voices, advertises -- really turned a corner, culturally, lately. His identity as a rapper seems like an afterthought.

But there's something here.

When he really raps he's got it.

But he doesn't that much. And maybe there's something to that. He's an orchestrator here, laying out the stage and stepping aside, just an MC to a view on the world how he'd like it to be // how he fears it might be, hoping you'll find the way to the right way forward 4/5

#2231 Radiohead - In Rainbows Disc 2

Reviewed late 11/19

Some day I'll stop seeing every record in terms of the new American order, but not just yet. not in the face of prescient terror about Down is the New Up, about this being a nightmare you keep failing to wake from, a (4 minute) warning from two elections before we dropped into the worst timeline.

--

That aside.

0---

It's a bonus disc best cut in half: the first 4 tracks are the kind of moaned-out filler that's been crowding Radiohead EP's since the 90's. The MKs are throwaways, the actual songs go nowhere. But if you slice off those last 4 tracks, you've got a good little listen. Some real heart, some real grasping, some real pain, some real beauty -- that desperation spiked with the abstract that Radiohead does best, cutting to some core of our uncertainty about what this all means/

3.5/5

#2230 Kvelertak - Nattesferd

Reviewed late 11/18

you know what I appreciate?

not giving a fuck about what kind of album you're supposed to be.

this is METAL, legit scandinavian and packed with screaming and tripletime drums and raging guitars and thumpathumpathumpathumpa RAAAGH

but then, through the storm, again and again, a fistful of GODLIGHT, that thing where you just get those fucking //streaks// of light // down // through // the // clouds //

just these searing guitar lines that cut through your heart, these spots where the stars line up, and where all that noise turns into a bird-shaped spaceship and takes you away.

it's impossible to avoid comparison to Fucked Up, who traffic in the same kind of screamy // pristine guitar work, and who, fucking -- well, listen to 1985 and tell me that's not a secret Fucked Up cover.

and every song swings from rough fuckin riffage to full on Boston//Journey sheen and everything in between without a flinch. And fuckit, the latters right fucking enjoyable, so swing hard at it you crazy Norwegian metal gods.

This is how you do not giving a fuck right - not even giving a fuck about how you're supposed to not give a fuck 4/5

#2229 PUP - The Dream is Over

Reviewed late 11/18

somewhere along the wayindie's arch self-awareness smashed into emo's earnest self-assessment and (pop) punk's fuckit-lets-get-fucked-up disregard, and the sparks were a pained-at-my-coping-but-using-my-coping-to-cope scene.

AND God what a glorious convergence, as all the weaknesses of those three scenes cancelled eachother out in a glorious collision of riffs and feelings and FUCKFEELINGS.

FIDLAR's patient zero, maybe from some thread of Wavves, spreading to Car Seat Headrest and now to PUP, who wheels and whines and rages and collapses and asks you to drink and thrash and regret it and drink and thrash and get hurt and not care and not care and regret it and doubt yourself and drink and doubt yourself and drink and drink and drink and try to scrap together why it went wrong and drink and try to scrap together why it all went wrong and finally, sing along.

riding that Weezer-via-Japandroids wave to the skies on the back of ragged collapse, falling apart musically and emotionally, and soaring past itself and looking back with disgust, and whipping a head around into the wind from an open car window and shouting into cold.

the kids are figuring our younger and younger that there's no easy answer, and the rest of us, slow to pick it up, and deeper entrenched, find hope in that, and hold on tight, and slam our heads against headrests 4/5

#2228 Flasher - Flasher

Reviewed 11/18

This is where the whole thing where I date these by listen date, rather than review date, gets awkward. Cause this is dated, what, 11/4? But I'm reviewing this a full 2 weeks later, because this Trump president-elect horseshit took my knees out, fulfilling every horror story I've been telling myself for months, with the best yet to come.

So fuck this blog, etc. Progress stop. Shelter in place.

And I quit weekday drinking, because, let's face it, it was that or FULL BLOMWN ALCOHOLISM. And the difficulty of that revealed a certain degree of Garden Variety Functional kind, but hey, progress. Two weeks of success, by that criteria.

And hey, its Friday. The Friday after the Friday after that sword dropped. And game on, with a full fist of whiskey etc. So ignore the date before that maybe-hopeful single tracker. This is the beginning of the post-Trump era. Let's see how that goes.

Fuck, sorry Flasher, you're getting the full long form treatment for all the wrong reasons.

--

My gut's to dismiss you as NY revival-revival, all that no-wave-lite, all that post-Interpol post-post-punk, all that Velvet-via-Sonic Youth dissonance. And wait, lets give that last one some credit before we switch to the reversal - cmon, Erase Myself, that's basically teenage riot and a dozen other sonic youth songs. And I don't wanna be all hyphonated but

--

oh good, you do come through

give this beastie a full listen, and it walks out in the robes of its arch-assed forebears but it sheds it and struts. you rotate your crops over a long enough timespan and maybe the same grounds worth revisiting.

this is old stuff, but with enough new electricity to make it walk, and enough modern armament and fashion to make it new again --- and if what you're reanimating is genius brain, let us give thanks. sounds fresher on every listen, as those associations fall off one by one 4/5

#2227 Diarrhea Planet - Turn to Gold

Crunchy, efficiently enjoyable pop-punk - the kind of record we don't get much of any more. The Planet churns and chugs and keeps on moving, veering off for a perfect little screaming guitar aside every then and again. A band doin' what they do well 4/5

#2226 Scattle - Only Built 4 Sausage Links

Super Meat Boy's part of this early 10's indie retro game revival: bringing back chunky pixel graphics and punishing//rewarding difficulty. And this's a set of tracks from the newer version of the game that capture that spirit: retro 8-bit skrunch rubbing elbows with slightly-less-retro breakbeats and just-kinda-recently-uncool dubby wobblebobbles.

It's exciting, propulsive stuff - fast tempos, busy textures and short song lengths keep things fresh. Good for typing fast or driving fast or jumping though buzzsaw gauntlets fast 3.5/5

#2225 Modulogeek - Modulogeek

That chunky 8-bit cover might lead you to expect 8-bit bleep-and-buzz -- and there's some of that, and so much more. Variety's the key to this album's magic. In isolation some of its tricks wouldn't work: The Circus Mcgurkus's kid-talking would be too twee, For the Bleeps' Starcraft tutorial samples would be too gimmicky, A Post-Rock Intro's meanderings would be too boring. And even taken as a whole, it'd be a scattershot: those circuit bent squonks, those Books-ian slices of life, those chopped little drum samples.

But they all set eachother up beautifully - it's an album that demands to be listened to straight through. There's a thread that runs, of humanity and vulnerability and happiness and craft. It's the little details, the imprecisions, the seams: the sound of the physical button presses on the toy instrument, the off-center clamoring of vocals, you sense the joy of making music, of trying everything.

It never quite hits the piercing highs of, say, ^ The Books, but it rivals fellow Monome-enthusiast Daedalus's efforts to weave the artificial into the human, to find something familiar and new in the intersection 4.5/5

#2224 Yak - Alas Salvation

I do love it when an album keeps you guessing.

Yak comes thundering out the gate with big overblown bass, writhing vocals, and a general start-stop whiplash Giddy Motors momentum. It's urgent, but the kind of thing that would be exhausting for 30 minutes.

Luckily, Yak swerves, spinning out a couple trippy little meanderers that're more Men-pretty than Animal Collective//Deerhunter-boring, before kicking it back into high gear, and back again and back again. And even across these transitions, the hard/soft angles keep changing, until you've zigzagged yourself diagonally to some unexpected place that was all part of the plan all along.

None of it really blows me away, no one song left much of a mark, but respect to an album that works much, much better than the sum of its parts 3.5/5

#2223 D.R.A.M. - Big Baby D.R.A.M.

At its best, DRAM's latest sounds like Chance's latest, full of sunny little flashes - Broccoli//Cute's a one-two and a half.

But most of the album sounds like the year's other heavy hitter: Drake. Drake sucks.

DRAM keeps moaning and moaning, milking modern-life observations (passwords / wifi / uber), every underfed song vamping on one idea and one verse's-worth of rhymes 2.5/5

#2222 Public Memory - Wuthering Drum

Simmering, sizzling electronic throb and buzz, rendering dark alleys for the muttered vocals to sulk in. Dark, but not depressing; strange, but just short of dissonant; a borderline unpleasant album that's packed with enough mysterious texture and adventurous flashes to draw you in and seduce you into staying 3.5/5

#2221 Luna - Bewitched

A prettier, more assured second album from Luna, doubling down on the Yo La Tengo living room rumbling//muttering and Lou Reed silky serration. The guitars are still strikingly clear, but the rest of the band has risen up to meet them, making for a fuller, more balanced sound. An understated, tuneful, little slice of muso heaven 3.5/5

#2220 Otherkin - The New Vice EP

There's some Vines-ish (remember The Vines?) revival of a revival going around that I stumbled onto on my latest Spotify Related Artists boondoggle. I appreciate that kids are still trying to make rock and roll, but does it all have to be so polished, so unsurprising? Every time this starts to show some teeth it retreats to an unthreatening sneer or well-trod pile of chords or millennial woop (on two different songs! and there's only four songs on here!)

Kids! Take some chances! 2.5/5

#2219 Luna - Lunapark

Slightly mushy early indie, moaning and chiming and buzzing somewhere between Velvet dissonance and shoegaze sheen, kicking up its heels here and there but never quite committing to rock.

But then there's the difference-maker: that keen lead guitar line - slicing through the mix like a ray of light, sliding and screaming and splintering again and again. Never heard anything quite like it, worth the price of admission alone 3.5/5

#2218 Pretty Vicious - Cave Song EP

Man, dude sounds like Arctic Monkeys dude, and the band follows suit.

Like, I had to check to make sure this wasn't some side project.

And on paper they actually pull off the Monkeys' bracing attack, but they're missing some secret ingredient - the lyrical thorns? the surprising structural swerves? the believable bile? there's something subtly Nerf about the sound.

It's a game of inches, rock and roll - better luck next time 3/5

#2217 Baby Strange - Want It Need It

Unconvincing revival of the early 00's garage/scuzz revival plodding along track after track, swinging for some forgotten Ramones-via-Strokes cool, landing in some awkward, uninspiring place between passion and disinterest 2.5/5

#2216 The Van T's - A Coming of Age

Those sheets of tinfoil guitars, layered crosswise with those filigree vocals, cinching together into a very 2016 take on shoegaze, spiked with punk urgency and girl group enchantment. Such a great top-to-bottom sound: tactile, tangible, fascinating, exciting. Looking forward to a full-length 4/5

#2215 Slowdive - Pygmalion

Pitchyfork's [Freudian sic] recent list of best shoegaze album's got me digging, realizing I'm not as into shoegaze as it seems like I should be. But here's a third album, that by Baker's Theory of Third Albums, is the make or break breakoff, where they cast off what got em there and see what's at the heart -- and what Slowdive's casting off is, more or less, shoegaze, altogether.

Everythings stripped down to emptiness, down to what's left when you cast off from Souvlaki Space Station. This has (far) more in common with Laughing Stock or Spiderland than Loveless/Nowhere/etc, drifting off into post-rock reverberation vacuum nothing.

It's gorgeous. Adventurous, daring, beautiful, and their best album, if I can so blaspheme.

Pygmalion's only 48 minutes, but it feels longer, in a good way, melting minutes into hours. And what I'm in love with is the listen, yes, borderline ambient, eternal and strange. But also with the boldness that it takes to make a hard turn into something new, instead of grinding the same sound to death or disappearing for a couple decades (you know who you are).

Majestic, daring stuff that rewards close/repeated listens 4/5

#2214 I Set the Sea on Fire - Sleep Now Suburbia

A throwback 2000's album (too soon?), full of Arcade Fire touchstones -- those boy/girl vocals, those musings of the suburbs (from the opening track to, well, the album title?) and generally being kinda sensitive and ok with it.

In a good way though! It's luscious good fun, packed with bursts of energy, the kinds of moments that make you wanna do that dance, where you kinda just put your head down and your arms up and jam 'em around with nervous-energy burnoff frisson. It's that Britishness, maybe, that sense for cutting to the Supergrass synapse that makes you blow off steam, riding up alongside those horns, popping with a decidedly American, downright pop-ska splintering of inhibition.

Actually you've got to give a lot of scenes credit. Which is to say : I don't come away from this debut with a sense of anything strikingly new, but its a whip-smart combination that'll scratch that seven year itch 4/5

#2213 Spring King - Tell Me If You Like To

Chugging, shoutalong fuzz-rock that's fun enough. But it's all too predictable and gets numbing by halfway through. Every song's got the same basic tone, same basic sound, and even when one strays from the herd, it reveals its intentions and rides them on a straight line, 3 minutes-ish and done 3/5

#2212 Superglu - Horse

Top-tier indie-pop-punk, overflowing with peak-Los-Campesinos-level effortless boy/girl, riffage/pretty hookiness. That flawless chugging backbone, spiked with clap-clap/jangle-jangle new wave hitches and doubleups -- impossible not to grin and dream of a long road into the sun 4.5/5

#2211 Oval - Popp

Glitch pioneers Oval take their signature skips and blips and make them slightly more listenable. Slightly. Still pretty annoying, without the conceptual purity. Don't see the point 2.5/5

#2210 Savoy Motel - Savoy Motel

What a strange, plastic, offkilter piece of strutting - that drooping cartoon note on the cover's just about perfect. Everything's a little too precise, layers of white-edged stickers of horns, guitars, and singing girls, a coloring book drawing of the Thin White Duke and the Midnite Vulture, the robot band at the Love Shack pizza emporium. Around-the-horn cool, unexpectedly danceable, the wireframe precision freeing you from human rhythms: just lock into the cogs and ride the machine 4/5

#2209 Catherine Wheel - Ferment

Everything a shoegaze album should be (maybe, see below), lurching and pulsing and overwhelming, all with that silver cord of melody. Perfect balance in the crystal vocals and the heaped ridges of endless guitar echoes, hazy and buzzy and shining and [all the visuals, in soft focus].

--

I always thought I liked shoegaze - on paper it seems like I should be into all that power, that ambient roar. But so much of it (Loveless, say) is pierced by keening edges, and in all that reverb, the spirit gets lost. Not sure I'm actually a fan.

--

But I like this 4/5

#2208 Stone Temple Pilots - No. 4

A wildly underrated band - Tiny Music's the perfect 3rd-album-swerve masterpiece, and Purple's a (the?) landmark 90's hard rock album. But by the time 1999 rolled around I (/the world?) had moved on.

Justified? Mostly. This retreated from Tiny Music's stark strutting strangeness, without finding Purple's effortless purity, ending up catchyish, but forgettable. Some overabundance of effort robs it of its vitality. Exception for Down and Sour Girl, which were flashes of STP's pure riffage // offkilter lilt, respectively.

I have a whole essay brewing on this band that's leaking out here. Suffice to say, this justifies their legacy only fleetingly 3/5

#2207 Daft Punk / VA - Tron Legacy Reconfigured

Hey Daft Punk fan: this might be more of what you were hoping for.

The remixers attack the hardest, roughest tracks, stretch them out to proper getdown lengths, screw them all around, making 'em even harder, rougher. It's great fun. Everyone brings their own touch, but by stripping off the strings and doubling down on the lightcycle laserblasms, you get more Daft Punk via not-Daft Punk, after all.

If nothing else, falling down the kaleidoscope of soundtrack/Daft Punk/remixer visions again and again's a heady trip worth taking 4/5

#2206 Daft Punk - Tron Legacy OST

This is a soundtrack by Daft Punk -- soundtrack first, Daft Punk second. Taken on those terms, it's totally successful.

There's the ominous pulse of strings, of traditional soundtrack washes ::: pounding empire, washes of the unknown, pregnant tension --- field of black.

And across that you get those gleams, those slashes of beyond-neon, those lightcycle streaks of electronic fizzle, those moments where the spark leaps and cracks the logic.

--

I haven't seen the movie (:/)

But, with the song titles and a little knowledge of the original -- I feel like I have.

--

It's not a great standalone album, no Fight Club or Social Network as electronic soundtracks go, leaning too hard on the same generic falling strings-to-10 progressions. But for the most part it's tense, exciting, and subconsciously evocative of the themes (I assume??) it's backing: a win in my book 3.5/5

#2205 Green River - Dry as a Bone

Patient zero-ish of the Gossard//Ament lineage is a sloppy, angular, start-stop blast of proto-grunge punk. The thin mix, strained vocals and tryhard vibe keep this from really catching fire, but you can feel how the pre-Pearl Jam backbone really wanted to do something //more// -- pushing beats around, messing with lurch and sludge as counterpoints to their purer punk impulses. Underbaked and slightly unlistenable, but a worthwhile slice of history 3/5

#2204 The Incredible Bongo Band - Bongo Rock

Most of this album's cool as shit.

Strutting through a gauntlet of surfy, spy-movie, Tarantino//Oceans11-ready grooves, this is packed with uncut, implacable, headbobbing-assured fuckyes. Sample This, the (Netflix-ready!) doc on the Bongos track Apache points to session legend Jim Gordon, but its clear there's an army of talented, behind-the-scenes rhythmakers who contributed to this sick ass groove -- the Meters gone stoned, The MGs gone exotica.

This only falters when it gets hitched to a melody, especially on gimmicky covers of In a Gadda Da Vida and Satisfaction. This's a sound that works best when the rhythm plays lead. That happens often enough that you can cherrypick songs off here and end up with a 40 minute head start on a fucking killer poker mixtape 4/5

#2203 Digitalism - Mirage

Paced like a live show -- the first half blurring the lines between big dumb electronica and electronica-nicking indie rock, all stompable surges and swooning vocals and anthemic choruses. By the second half, now that everyone's lubed up and the nonbelievers have been converted, its start to get serious -- the beats get big, the pacing slows, the night's set to flower.

It's fine, enjoyable, but all those hedges, those scattershot angles, those pop feints - I'd rather they just committed to the dancables and cut all the grasps at hearts and ladyparts 3/5

#2202 The La's - The La's

At the cross section of Mojo's "top 50 eccentric albums" and a 1990 kick lies that There She Goes band: The La's. Catchy enough, plenty of bump and jangle, with that post-Elvis-Costello//post-Michael-Stipe yowl that seems ready-made for whatever's after the 80's (surprise! not this, actually).

It's pretty, a totally fine trajectory out of the underground, packed with hooksome little gestures, reminding me of the Police, for reasons I can't quite justify.

Didn't make much of an impression on me first listen, but as I write-listen, I'm averaging a "shit, that's actually a pretty sweet little move" per sentence. Fine. Good enough for a provisional 3.5/5

#2201 Wizzard - Wizzard Brew

What a brilliant, woolly lost gem -- a horn-drenched, era-hopping, lo-fi garage-psych masterpiece. The songs lurch with bent honkytonk fever, packed with glammy swoon, retro riffage, and no small amount of piss-take, in the spirit of Zappa, Rundgren, and golden age Kinks. I can't keep a bead on it - for every borrowing*, there's an invention; for every irony, a steely-eyed sincerity.

Need about a dozen more listens before I know what it's deal is, which is good enough for a provisional 4.5/5

* Elvis, Stones, Sabbath, Bowie, LaVern Baker, etc etc etc

#2200 Judas Priest - British Steel

Plodding NWOBHM stalwart, packed with perfectly fine guitar hooks played at stompalong tempos, backing shoutalong choruses. Maybe Breaking the Law, having The Rage, or just being United was real fist-pumping fuck-yeah stuff in 1980, and it might have been a kick to jam to alongside a ten-thousand likeminded folks, but it's pretty thin soup in 2016.

Can't deny Living After Midnight and Metal Gods though. Grudgingly there's enough highlights for at least 3/5

#2199 Temple of the Dog - Temple of the Dog

The Ament/Gossard band between Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam's got nothing on either.

It's a testament to Andrew Wood's genius and Chris Cornell's failures. Where Wood was powerful, Cornell is showy. Where Wood drew you to him, Cornell forces himself upon you.

This is the Chris Cornell show, his vocals mixed too high, composed to prominently, constantly making themselves the point, while (outside a choice solo or ten) the band plods along. It's the kind of frontman excess the 90's were so often so good at getting away from.

Which might be fine, if I liked Chris Cornell's voice.

But I do not.

Footnote'd!

2.5/5

#2198 Mother Love Bone - Apple

More than a before-they-were-in-Pearl-Jam footnote! Mother Love Bone's only album is actually pretty solid in its own right. The riffs are solid, the lyrics invitingly mysterious, with some real swervy, memorable moments (dig that last minute of Stardog Champion!).

Two asides about 90's rock.

First:

This sounds like it was written to be played in the clubs of Seattle. Like, you know how late-era Coldplay and U2 sounds made to be played in arenas? You can hear where a band sees themselves playing in their music, and that tells you a lot about who that band is. And in rock music, who you are _matters_

So who is mother love bone? More so than pearl jam, more so than stone temple pilots or nirvana, it sounds like a band writing songs to play out: intimately, meaningfully - that spirit rendered to tape. And there's something earthy and legitimate and warm and uncommonly rock and roll about that, especially in the production-driven world of the 10's.

Second:

It's easy to see 90's rock as obsessed almost exclusively with 70's hard rock - a back to basics reaction to the 80's flagrant nonsense. But one thread survived: glam rock. It comes out here and there, in British acts like Spacehog and Kula Shaker, in flashes on Tiny Music, Mellon Collie, and Without You I'm Nothing. This's a key touchstone: Andrew Wood moans and writhes and declares himself, like a sexy preacher, like a nightbound dreamer, like a tights-bound space commander.

There's a Guns 'n' Roses thread running though the entire album, the guitars funking and soaring, Wood wailing and mewling - but all the machismo's dropped, it's just that fuckin, ima do me spirit, that strutting confidence, that's left.

--

If I'd come across this in the 90's I would have played it to death. There's something in its sprawling ambition, its sincerity and effortless invention, its offkilter structures. It's that old stuff, that channeling of the rock and roll that gets +10 piercing to your soul.

There's a whole microtreatise here about how 90's music hooks into hearts, but mother jesus this thing is long already.

A grower, sneakily essential if you missed it the first time around 4.5/5

#2197 Prins Thomas - Principe Del Norte Remixed

Principe Del Norte left me a little cold - too ambient, too little emotional undercurrent.

This is better: the remixes (+ a few new originals) don't stray too far afield, but the extra textures, glitches, knobturns; the shifts in tone and color and heart; trackwise and albumwide; keep this background-compelling across its two-hour-twenty (!) minutes 3.5/5

#2196 Easy Star All-Stars - Dub Side of the Moon

The All-Stars surprised me with their take on Ok Computer. It was actually pretty ungimmicky, full of listenable versions that stood on their own and cast new light on the originals.

This's probably the album I'm likely to return to: it's a good spaceout listen, with some fun twists, running off into cloudy outros, making bigger swings on the big moments, and trying weirder takes on the weirder songs.

But there's nothing essential about it. It does not escape the gimmick trap.

Meeting the stoner-ready expansiveness of Dark Side doesn't require much of a stretch, and there's no real heart in the performances. Ok Computer's desperation and tightness made for a more challenging adaptation and a more rewarding listen - if you only hear one ESAS gone-reggae album, start there 3/5

#2195 Joyce Manor - Never Hungover Again

Mildly exciting pop-punk that sounds like a watered-down version of better bands like The Thermals, Cloud Nothings, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Japandoids. The problem's a lack of danger: even when the songs get fast there's no real sense of the wheels coming off. The chords change right on cue, the vocals strain uncharmingly and without no risk of breaking, the words lay out simple problems that'll probably turn out fine.

Not every punk band has to fling itself headlong into the river, but c'mon, at least give us a sweat 2.5/5

#2194 Starcadian - Sunset Blood

Themed like a soundtrack to a Stranger Things-esque 80's/Steven King/sci-fi movie, this album does got its moments of M83/Daftpunk/Vaporwave charm. The standout tracks are the propulsive, delightfully glitchy instrumentals (Sgt Tagowski, Pompey Pirate) that make you want to lightcycle off into the night.

Unfortunately, most of the album leans too hard on robot vocals, lazy disco tempos, and over-simple artificially-sweetened hooks -- it ends up sounding an awful lot like Random Access Memories (which came out six months previous).

Sunset Blood's uneven, and not as strong as Saturdaze, but there's enough hooks, swerves, surprises and robot-pop innovation to make it worth a listen 3.5/5

#2193 Car Seat Headrest - How to Leave Town

Impossibly bedroom. Those drum machine beats, those intimations of weakness.

But where your usual bedroom album is small, full of 3-chord 3-versers about narrow details and universal platitudes, this goes in the total opposite direction.

The songs are sprawling, endless, strange.

The sentiments are so personal they become universal (dig the verse about disillusionment with Brian Wilson), universal doubts made strangely small, wrapping yourself in a comforter against the hugeness of the universe.

Musically its a sloppy mess, lacking most of the hookiness of Teens of Denial, most of the rock power of Teens of Style, laying down scattershot synths and guitars as surging backdrop.

But lyrically, kid had it all along. For a certain band of smart, sensitive, quietly terrified, coping-with-coping-with-being music nerds, Will Toledo is fucking Jesus.

Listening to this, in retrospect, its incredible he progressed from this to Teens of Denial. What the fuck will he do next? 3.5/5

#2192 Drive-By Truckers - American Band

As the record spins up you hear this charming hybrid of Neil Young and Mountain Goats' John Darnielle. The vocal sound strikes you first, and onward to the musical headlong churn, to the combination of large-scale protest and small-scale personal desperation. There's real magic for a few tracks there, as the dawn breaks on America, helpless and hopeful and desolate and dying.

But then some energy's lost, some paucity of ideas is revealed, and the intimate edge falls off, and you're left chugging through another 8 or so lazy tracks, the lockstep choruses buttressed predictably by the verses' underwhelming observations, sounding like B-sides off of Neil Young's lamest swings at relevancy. The songs putt along at halfassed Americana tempos, reveal no new musical ideas, leaning on lyrics that aren't as profound as they hoped they'd be.

There's a spark here that didn't quite catch flame. Here's hoping the Truckers get angry, get weird, get a bug in 'em that inspires them to do something their heroes never would've 3/5

#2191 Trap Them - Crown Feral

That tunnel/cloud/portal on the cover says it all - Trap Them latest is mysterious, disorienting, furiously propulsive, out of control, turned around. There's surges and start-stops and unexpected moves, but the energy's more about hardcore immediacy than prog wankery. There's not so much weird time signatures as a twitchy willingness to stab timing in the neck for a bar or two -- no showy guitar histrionics, just relentless waves of frantic motion.

You get a slow burn to open, and after that you're down the eldritch drain, barely a pause from the ever-changing nightmare thrill-ride, never boring for one second, full of mayfly riffs and punishing changups (those drum bursts on Speak Nigh. motherfucker). A knotty, mysterious, headlong metal album, packed with subtle labyrinths to spend a century or two hurtling through 4/5

#2190 Meshuggah - The Violent Sleep of Reason

Brilliant, mysterious, insidiously simple, super-complex metal. A gigantic, hypnotic knot of guitars thundering at you, a slow-rising tide of destruction, the next hundred years in gristled timelapse. Don't let your ear chase those time signatures, just brace for the slow wash of the inevitable 4/5

#2189 Jimmy Reed - I'm Jimmy Reed

Points for doing it first-ish aside, this's mellow, lazily pleasant, ultimately unspectacular stuff. The mix's thin, the tempo's lazy, the delivery's not especially passionate, the performance's shaky, and there's no deviation from the blues blueprint whatsoever. For some people, that might all be a good thing - this is no-frills stuff in a no-frills genre, but it left me underwhelmed 2.5/5

#2188 Toots and the Maytals - Reggae Got Soul

An album packed with lilting, soulful, searching, light//dark pulse, pulling in a variety of adjacent Jamaican styles. There's desperation and light, the pain and the balm, Toots' voice coming on strong through it all. Rich, enjoyable stuff 3.5/5

#2187 Tycho - Epoch

A perfectly good album, following up on all of the strengths of Awake: those chiming guitars, that chugging pulse, the swirls of unknown electronic bliss. Perfect spaceout/work music.

But Tycho's fallen into the Ratatat/Spoon trap, their albums sound like they're supposed to sound, with only incremental nudges at the edges, lacking the crispness of that instinctive breakthrough expression. Ratatat's latest album ended up becoming my favorite of theirs, and this might take a similar grower-y path, but I can't help but wish Tycho hadn't leveled off so soon 3.5/5

#2186 Starcadian - Saturdaze

Always chasing the Feed Me's Big Adventure dragon - trying to find that sweet spot where someone uses all those superfat synth piles and chippy-chop skitter-drops to make something thrilling, without tipping over into stadium-rave fratiness.

This hits it better than most: an idea-packed, good-fun record with all the best of the 80's revival sound. The stage is set with Kavinsky highway danger, M83 romance, and more screaming guitars and wailing saxes and tom scales than you could possibly need. Throw in some glitchy tricks and some Daft Punk robot-disco - I'll be damned it all works. Despite all the borrowing of borrowing, it pulls it off. A surprisingly cohesive, damned exciting listen,  4/5

#2185 Bon Iver - 22, A Million

I was no big fan of the old Bon Iver - icy, magical, but too whiny, too one-note to hold my attention beyond a listen or two.

But this is different. At its best it's fractured, utterly fragile, crystalline, mysterious, magical.

--

I've spent spare cycles trying to pin down what the 10's sound is, going to be, and 2016 seems to be suggesting that it's the decade of production. I talked about it in my A Moon Shaped Pool review- after the 00's splintering of rock into cute/pretty/wistful/adventurous near-pop, a lot of the interesting music coming along doesn't present rock-traditional performance at all. Any plucking of strings and thrumming of throats is just raw material for something strange and broken - a reflection of our right-fucked, terrified, better-virtual-than-dead present, maybe.

--

Bon Iver's striking reinvention reminds me of Radiohead's latest, but also the autotune-and-worse fuckery of 808s/Fantasy/Yeezus era Kanye, with no small hints of Laurie Anderson's vocal fantasias. The first sound you hear is a held note, buzzing and clipping like a glitched video of a ringing bell, joined by another voice, at least as frail, delivering the least//most reassuring message imaginable through all that tenuousness: "it might be over soon".

It's a staggering way to open a record, and there is only the barest hint of levity - instead the uncertainty turns itself inside out, resolving into a desperate kind of hope. It might be over soon.

A few minutes later comes 715 - Creeks, a fucking landmark track. Just Vernon's voice, twice, dueling dual-autotuned, surging and dropping. Not a single instrument, not a single drum beat, just two minutes of cryptic writhing, chopping you off at the knees. A wildly adventurous, effortlessly effective piece of songwriting.

The album's a bit frontloaded, but it's short, and gets by on its momentum. As the songs grow longer on the second side, as the album's strange surging method becomes familiar, you settle into snow and let the stars burst, marveling at the time dilation of that infintite 34 minutes, over soon, ready to replay.

--

I fetishize, sometimes, the creation born via uncertain means, for alien purpose. But its a fine line between that imagined purpose and chaos, between strange purpose and no purpose at all? 22, A Million rides that line thrillingly close to the edge and lands on four wheels, a highwire wobble resolved, confidence restored, leaving you all the more thrilled for ever doubting it. Even all the cover art symbols, the ascii-fucked song titles, it all works as a strange, novel artifact. I couldn't have seen this coming from Bon Iver - this album gives me hope after all, the long way around 4.5/5

#2184 Baltimora - Living in the Background

Goofy, goodtime euro pop from those Tarzan Boy guys. The rest sounds more or less like you'd expect: very 80's guitars, very 80's synths, with just a touch of nightclub fantasia. Perfectly fine. Not my scene 3/5

#2183 Jack Rose - Raag Manifestos

Rolling, endless waves waves waves of acoustic guitar, surging like tide, crashing onto rocks, Strumming Music taken to biblical extremes. Something like licks, like riffs surface like half drowned dogs, intricate fingerwork swims in the shoals, but all is lost in seas of last measure's notes crashing into the last, crashing into the last, thick with tension and oilslick dread. Elemental, adventurous, brilliantly executed, nearly unbearable 3/5

#2182 The Challengers - Surfbeat

14 garagey covers from burgeoning surf rock scene, banged out with charming roughness. It's not the tightest set around, but all the yelps and missed notes and general honkytonk looseness give it a bit of the old Gene Vincent // Fabulous Wailers spark 3.5/5

#2181 Easy Star All-Stars - Radiodread

There's a whole mini-industry of track-by-track Ok Computer cover albums - this reggae-themed one's better than most.

The artists all play it a little safe, deviating only slightly from the originals, only occasionally finding their own energy to add. But maybe that's because they don't really need to stretch all that far. It's amazing how natural the transformation feels: a testament to the Easy Star All-Stars and an interesting angle on the originals. Airbag's highway throb rolls right onto the offbeat, Toots and the Maytals ease horns and desperation into Let Down, even Meeny Moore's offkilter toasting make a natural fit for Fitter Happier. And heck, the entire too-slow closing trio of songs fits right into the twilight pulse.

Was this angle always there? Or does it just seem natural in retrospect? Its enough to make you want to go listen to OKC with fresh ears - a pretty neat achievement in its own right 3.5/5

#2180 The Cure - Disintegration

Never been a big Cure guy - too synthy, too 80's, too goddamn mopey.

I changed my mind for a second there: Disintegration's bigger, artier, grander, more interesting than you might have guessed by their radio hits. The glistening Plainsong's patient and gorgeous. And did you know Pictures of You is seven and a half minutes long? Like, in a good way?

But then Smith just doesn't know when to quit, and the album's crippled by endless, endless, endless wallowing, climaxing in The Same Deep Water As You. Surely they could have resigned that whining 9-minute bedroom meander to absolutely fucking nowhere to a rarities collection. And then its 8 minutes more, and 7 more, and Jesus I am really regretting starting a conversation with the sad kid in the corner of this party.


Interviews suggest the oppressive tone was intentional: a sincere gesture // and artistic act of commitment. Mission accomplished then - the album's hell to listen to, the best moment buried in waves of indulgent misery 2.5/5

#2179 VA - Johnny Greenwood is the Controller

Radiohead guitarist curates a collection for Trojan records' 40th anniversary. The flow's dark and dubby, well-paced and varied - a little too murky for pleasant listening, but you'll feel like you've gotten the full tour 3.5/5

#2178 Jimmy Cliff - The Harder They Come Soundtrack

Jamacian music before it got all Marley and Me, bristling with sunlight and sadness, pulsing bass and funky touches, letting that reggae pulse wander free. A ridiculously solid, well-paced collection - even the repeated alternate versions at the end kinda work, all part of the endless float 4/5

#2177 Emancipator - Seven Seas

Downmixed beats, lazy horns and flutes, a hundred little exotic touches airbrushed into place. Trip-hop-lite's a played out space, but this gets a pass on the back of its endless blur of understated details, ascending to the rank of perfectly fine mellow background music 3/5

#2176 Laurie Spiegel - The Expanding Universe (Original 1980 Edition)

A masterpiece of tone, shaping simple analog parts into graceful acts of warmth, texture, imagery.

The centerpiece is the sidelong title track, an endless minimal raga of slow, deep electronic drones, so patiently paced, so richly realized, capable of removing your body, of becoming void and light, of shifting your thinking, removing your priorities. Gorgeous, simple, quietly perfectly realized.

But the other 3 tracks are brilliant in their own right, and help ease you into place for your intergalactic disintegration. You drive to the facility to Patchwork, bleeping with light futurism and blinking lights and passing cars, beatless motorik eutopia. And as you pass through the halls and settle into your suit, Old Wave and Pentachome split the difference, falling further and further into pure tone exploration till you're gone.

(So yes, stick with the original 4-track release: the 2012 CD release packs 5 tracks in the middle (and plenty on the end) that disrupt the well-paced original)

4/5

#2175 Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster & Panaiotis - Deep Listening

Some of my favorite ambient music is physical - see the recently-reviewed Strumming Music's map of instrument bodies, or Disintegration Loops' tales of tape death. The cistern is the star here, the drones, moans, groans secondary, means to the ends of feeling distance, enclosure, roundness, darkness, of giving birth to strange harmonics, of becoming the space of your head. A brilliant, darkly beautiful experiment 4/5

#2174 Ezale - The Tonite Show with Ezale

Rap for a light stupor on the couch as the party goes by agreeablely, loose rhymes, loose beats, retro synths, lite popped bass keep it lazy. Echoing shadow repetitions of every line keep you bobbing in double vision, smiling just this side of wasted 3.5/5

#2173 Epsilons - Epsilons

Exactly the album you'd expect to find if you plotted the line backwards through Ty Segall's career.

His first real band's first real album, all frantic garagey punk, Segall yelping, guitars chugging, with that rolling 60's organ giving an extra retro spike. Every song's got its mission of self-destruction, throttling at you for a minute or two and out 3.5/5

#2172 Cymbals Eat Guitars - Pretty Years

There's a lot to like here - that big fuzzy bass, the spike of horns on Wish, the dense, sparkly production, the occasional ripping guitar sound.

But: I've been trying to figure out what the 2010's sound is, how it differs from the 00's. And I think its here.

Cymbals' best song is Indiana, off 2009's Why There are Mountains. Very indie song, very 00's, all railing and smallness and bigness and feeling. And most importantly, it has room to let a single instrument soar, to let a single melody sing, to let a sound stand out there on its own and express itself.

Pretty Years, appropriately named, is very 2010's, just packed to the gills with production and sound, everything phalanxed against examination, pointed towards a soaring chorus that will surely carry you away. And sometimes that charge leads someplace great (Finally, Wish) but mostly it just sounds like repetitive, indistinct mush, too busy trying to impress you to get to know you.

This's never really been my favorite band. Lose left me cold. Heck, looking back, I even did a What's Wrong with Rock state of the nation on that review - something about this band just seems at the center of the problem for me. And something about watching them play it Lose-safe again, now with more layers of shimmer, charts a course towards an everything-but-guitars future where every feeling gets its own forcefield. And that's fine, progress etc. but I guess I'm getting left behind 3/5

#2171 Preoccupations - Preoccupations

this is peak tension, all that post-post-post punk pulse, all that anxious buzz, all that deadpan ranting, all that motorik coming at you fur immer. it's the best and worst of Preoccupations to say: this is the latest incarnation in That Velvet Underground Sound -- via Joy Division via Interpol via et cetera.

maybe that's a wave that has to crash against us every now and again. updated for the latest despair, pulsing with the latest technology, giving us that blanket to swirl ourselves up in so we can make the world a little smaller, letting the walls of that tiny reverb be the boundaries of our understanding.

I want to reject this, to take the arch stance against familiarity but. dammit. we do need it now and again. the hole we go down's always there, it's comforting to know that it's there, growing along us, that there's some pocket of the world that knows and doesn't care that we can fall down. Preoccupations have taken up that dreary standard with stern eyes and a steady hand and phalanx of effects and drones and sounds and all of it - and maybe its just about time 4/5

#2170 King - We Are King

King take R&B girl group vocals in a different direction: this is no singing + backing band afterthought.

We Are King goes whole-sound, weaving a lush, lightly funky, wavering electronic forest that the ladies' voices slither though as equals, harmonized, modified, gone ethereal and back, sneaking in the gaps in the mix. The sound's rich and balanced, filled with sidequests and mysteries. Normally this isn't really my scene, but the whole album's so sneakily original - I've never heard anything quite like it, and goddamn if you don't get points for that around here 4/5

#2169 The Coffin Daggers - Aggravatin' Rhythms

Surfy psychobilly coming at you with ominous organs, growling bass, and an endless arsenal of snarling, loopy guitar lines. It's good, stomping fun, full of punked Wailers // Gene Vincent energy, chilled in the Pacific, and all powered up with modern guitar crunch 3.5/5

#2168 The Bambi Molesters - Sonic Bullets: 13 from the Hip

More than just surf rock, these Croatian badasses weave a whole web of 60's cool, riffing on spy movie slink, spanish horns, western ominousness, and sure, yes, tons and tons of rolling guitars and drums. It's not just lighthearted fun, every song's got its own little thorns, some sense of mystery and impending adventure, some glimmer of a scene rolling out like a wave. A great listen, overflowing with melody and invention 4/5

#2167 Klaypex - Loose Dirt

Giant dubstep wobbles. They're the mascot for some for the dumbest, laziest music of the era, but when they're chopped, warped, really fucked into a mess, you gotta admit, they get you in the gut.

Loose Dirt's one of the good ones. The giant buzzy slashes are restless and bristly, bent into actual songs with emotions beyond FUCK YESH, with moves other than DROP. It's actually pretty dense, unpredictable stuff, and anything that rocketfuel my workday without making me feel like a /complete/ tool is worth keeping in the clip 4/5

#2166 Blanck Mass - Dumb Flesh

Man, that album art's perfect. Title too. Dumb Flesh is organic and unfamiliar, human and bent in half, wobbling and folding, bursting out into beats that make you feel like something bad's about to happen. There's no horror you can point to, but the uneasy pulses lock together and circle you - you're the only one who doesn't know what's going on at this party.

The production's amazing, blending walls of noise, squoggled vocals, ambient buzzes and other unnameables into a cohesive, mutating sound - M83 after it died and came back from the sematary.

More impressive than interesting, and more interesting than enjoyable, but fans of busy, nervous eletronic fuckery will find a lot to enjoy 3.5/5

#2165 Archie Bell and the Drells - Tighten Up

There's something intangibly appealing about this one. The irresistible, breezy funkiness of the title track; the ramshackle covers; the rich, swooping ballads - there's a sense of a real _band_ back there, packed with energy and urgency. Four black kids from Texas made this record, banged it out after Bell came back from Vietnam, and it sparks with the power of fun where you can find it 3.5/5

#2164 Charlemagne Palestine - Strumming Music for Piano, Harpsichord and Strings

Fact I learned: the Bosendorfer piano has an extra set of low strings that add richness to its sound, not so much because the performer necessarily hits the extra keys, but because the strings incidentally vibrate slightly as the piano is played, adding subtle harmonics and tones.

There's probably no purer demonstration of this effect than Strumming for Bosendorfer Piano. Palestine wangs on the piano repetitively, slowly shifting his technique and focus, until you loose track of the notes, and the singing, ethereal tones of the major and minor vibrations of every string on the piano slowly coalesce and shift.

This's perilously close to being wanky process music, where the concept is a substitute for anything interesting about the sound itself, but there's three important points here:
1) the sound itself is just straight up more beautiful than most. So rich and layed and otherworldly, never quite the same over the course of its hour
2) there's a human element here. I love Andy Battaglia's description of Palestine's physical coaxing of the notes from the piano. This is not just wailing on a piano by rote: there's a real sense of interaction, interplay, seduction.
3) you can feel the piano, know the piano. I've long thought of repetitive music having a physicality, and here's a sonar map of the piano itself. You come to feel hammers, strings, fiber, wood. It's intimate.

A gorgeous, subtly fascinating recording.

The other two tracks are less effective on all three counts: the sounds simply aren't as beautiful, Palestine's absence as performer is noticeable, and the instruments' physicality isn't as thoroughly embodied.

The harpsichord succeeds somewhat, because Harpsichords are weird. You can start to see the physical/sonic relationship of their little picks as the notes bloom and blend - but without the same ability to reverberate the entire object, the same sense of wholeness never arrives.

Same goes for the strings. Being played repetitively and constantly is kinda their thing already, and no new sense of them arrives - it's just arty classical music.

But the piano piece is plenty: an hour's worth of truly successful experimental music that's essential for anyone with the patience for such nonsense 4.5/5

#2163 Rhythm and Sound - The Versions

Dark, pulsing dub that's ever-changing , always, if slowly, ever-changing - electronic fizzles and glitches join the usual beats and bass, a seething variety of reverb and effects lend depth and mystery to the pulses. Never quite interesting, never nearly boring - a rich instrumental underworld to get lost in 3.5/5

#2162 Benji Hughes - Songs in the Key of Animals

A quirky little burbler with a Zappa-lite bent-pop sensibility, like some loungey noontime cousin of Midnite Vultures, music for a techincolor pool party happening. Girls chirp and ooo, falsettos ring out Hughes' signature baritone singing wanders through here and there, the Greek chorus to scene's spinning dalliances.

Nothing falls quite where its supposed to, unexpected instruments twinkle across swaying beats, and it's fun letting it wander across your expectations. More listens required 4/5

#2161 Roomrunner - Separate

Big grungy walls of guitars and big grungy moaning make for a big grungy slab of whatever. The buzz-and-crunch croissant is satisfying, but there's not a single memorable songwriting moment to save this from the bargain bin 2.5/5

#2160 The Isley Brothers - It's Our Thing

Super-compact funk-shaped soul, each song built on a core vocal hook repeated over a ratsnest of guitars and horns. It's got its own cool swagger, but lacks the invention and daring that makes funk proper so thrilling. The underwhelming slow songs don't help either 3/5

#2159 Daniel Lanois - Goodbye to Language

Lanois bends pedal steel and lap steel into gold, sliced and swooped, all clipped attacks and dying decays, layered into ambient alien pulse. It ties into my sense-memory of the finest moments of the KLF's Chill Out, wrapped around with a Books-ian knack for finding the emotional center of a snippet of sound. It's beautiful.

The only shame is that it never really finds an album, let alone _songs_. There's no landmark or progression across the 12 arbitrary delineations on the disc, no climax or fade out as it ends, just suddenly the album isn't playing anymore.

On one hand, it reinforces the otherworldy quality - as if these were field recordings with no regard for listener experience baked-in. But it seems like a missed opportunity, never elevating the listen beyond its central trick, which lolls repeating until it feels a gimmick 3.5/5

#2158 Fucked Up - Hidden World

The Fucked Up sound: Damian's barking // straightforward punk chug, spiked with irresistible hooks, piled up into proggy monuments of inscrutable structure. Here from the beginning, still exhausting.

The problem, as always, is that even as the guitars shift and swerve, they're always going going going exhaustively, with only the tiniest reprieves. And Damian's percussive shouting only has one gear, all full volume, full force at the edge of his biology, at all times. It's like eating 8 slices of deep dish pizza, each with a different set of delicious artisanal toppings: each one's great, and the experience, moment to moment, is packed with variety, but by the end all you remember is THAT DAY I ATE ALL THAT PIZZA.

David Comes to Life benefited from some themes and a loose narrative to help give landmark and purpose to the journey, but this is just blistering.

Don't get me wrong, it's great. Unmissable. And probably more packed with good guitar parts than anything else they've done. And I wouldn't change a thing: this is the Fucked Up sound, may it never be diluted. Just letting you know what you're in for - show up with an empty stomach 4/5

#2157 Eluvium - False Readings On

I dinged Nightmare Ending for its lack of emotional resonance, but Matt Cooper's got no such problems here. The gigantic surges of strings and synths rise up like the tide, like the sun, like time-lapse fields of grass, tapping into some part of you that feels temporary and small and blowing your dust to the wind. It is a state of constant Sigur Ros climax, of Basinski frailty, of ambient Eno squared - too far, maybe, impressive and daunting and exhausting, death by a thousand shimmering sounds 3.5/5

#2156 Milk Music - Cruise Your Illusion

I hear these guys get tagged with "grunge" and that's lazy bullshit - grunge says lack of caring, lack of hooks, lack of hope.

This is all hope, all spirit. If you've gotta play the comparison game, go with The Men's hypnotic//soaring structures, Jeff the Brotherhood's spunky charm, Japandroids' grasping at the universe - and gigantic stacks of fuzzy guitars like you piled up all three. And you should know if those're my three data points, I'm all in, riding these waves of buzz and desperate optimism to the heavens 4.5/5

#2155 Peanut Butter Wolf - My Vinyl Weighs a Ton

PBW keeps things simple - you feel the physical wax spinning into beats and backing, no whiff of DJShadow-style stacks of tricks and tracks.

The languishing, stoned vibe throws off some of the first rappers, sounding out of synch, wobbling on bikes too slow. But the instrumentals and turntablism fare better, and by the time you're a handful of tracks deep everything falls into place and you settle into the cut until you're swallowed up - a pretty heady groove once you get into it 3.5/5

#2154 Wipers - Youth of America

A hidden post-punk gem, Wipers chug and pulse with rocksolid tension and cool, spiked with hooky little rips and jags and exclamations. Propulsive in labyrinthine patterns, never standing still, never going anywhere, building walls of fuzz higher and higher just to give themselves something to knock over, climaxing in the writhing 10-minute title track.

I'm wildly consistent about the credit I give for getting in first, but I can't get away from appreciating that this was some cuttingedge shit in 1981 - shades of Gang of Four, Television, and all the greats, taken to frantic new extremes 4.5/5

#2153 Dead Moon - In the Graveyard

Noisy, ragged garage rock that pops with desperation and energy, every song on just this side of the end. Everything falls apart and shrieks and clatters, with an everpresent, wobbly surf surge keeping things mysterious. Exciting, messy stuff 3.5/5

#2152 Beat Happening - Jamboree

Lo-fi production, relentless chugging guitars, unflinching deadpan delivery -- I'm down with all that when it's backed up by hooks and songwriting (GBV, Pavement,Sonic Youth), but this is a plod to nowhere. What was clever in 1988, sounds lazy 30 years later.

The only thing that holds up is its indie-pop encapsulation of micro-scene, that inspiration that You Can Too, Kid. If you want to find your way to a place where your most personal thoughts are special and matter to your friends and your lack of grand inspiration's a roundabout advantage (and I say this all without malice or irony - what a wonderful mindset to find!) this bygone artifact might inspire 3/5

#2151 Todd Terry - Todd Terry Presents Ready for a New Day

Very 90's house music: all the ladies belting out inspiration, all the tacky horns and shouty samples, all the over and over and over and over again. It gets by from time to time on a certain disinterested cool, and occasionally a little heat sparks through, but it mostly sounds underbaked and boring - time's not been kind 2.5/5

#2150 Funk Factory - Funk Factory

A wildly writhing album -- a tangle of funk guitars, burbling bass, soulful rhythms, jazzy flourishes, swooping choral oooohs and scattershot vocal pops. Organ swoops through and out to space. Guitars light the floor on fire and jump out the window. Synthy burbles melt faces and melt themselves.

Superficially there's flashes of p-funk, and prescient touches of Kamasi Washington, but Funk Factory's soulmate might be Zappa - this is as restless as his bent pop, as knottily jazzy as his Hot Rats instrumentals.

Fuck, even that doesn't do this justice - one of the most lively, unpredictable albums I'ver heard in a while, a band twisting hard through chicanes only they can see 4/5

#2149 NZCA Lines - Infinite Summer

This starts off so promisingly, that cover art, those gigantic synths and heartbreaking string swirls - this is gonna be a journey, man. But what you get is another indie-dance-lite knockoff - there's whiny Hot Chip whining over every whiny song, packed with tacky Cut Copy beats and familiar Neon Indian bendups, hammered into predictable here-comes-the-chorus structures.

The production itself's got promise, but it's been buried in annoying tropes 2.5/5

#2148 Sepultura - Arise

Sepultura's fast becoming one of my favorite late80s/early90s metal bands - just the right balance of shriek/bark, fast/slow, complex/simple, diverse/steady.

This's much more straightforward than their later stuff: scant little Brazilian influences or rattly bass, but it's still got enough writing energy and proggy touches (that solo on Desperate Cry!) to keep you chugging 3.5/5

#2147 The Flamingo - Playlist: The Best of the Flamingos

Best known as the I Only Have Eyes for You guys - nothing on here lives up to that masterpiece, and some of the recording's clipped but the endless doowop lushness is right pleasant. Strings and oohing and aahhing and layers on layers on layers to sink into, without a single misplaced note to break the spell, you could drift away to worse 3.5/5

#2146 Holy Fuck - Congrats

Incredibly dense, buzzy, angular, hooky, surging mostly-instrumental writhing. It will make you feel like a spaceage badass, working your way through impossible corridors, pulse engines at your back.

The vocals that there are or new, but they're so splintered and chopped, the Holy Fuck formula's not changed all that drastically (the watery Go Teamism of Neon Dad excepted).

The sound's less noisy, less hard-edged, a sleeker set of morphing shapes to disappear into, an overwhelming noise that makes you want to dance like your body's melting out from under you 4/5

#2145 Quilt - Plaza

Perfectly pretty indie, the kind of thing that girls with high-waisted shorts and bangs bob back and forth agreeably to at shows.

It's funny how context matters: a first listen at work left me cold. It's all a little arch and Costa Mesa arpeggiated. But tonight when I just need something to bop me through some couching and reading, it's right enough. Understated, lilting Seattle-via-Boston, shades of Elliot Smith and the Shins, floating by with clouded sparkles and hazy glints 3.5/5

#2144 The Dirty Nil - Higher Power

An album that starts off trying too hard, packed with Japandroids ISN'T THIS FUN and Pavement archness, thrashing SO HARD to impress you. It gets better as it moves past some jitters and settles into itself, but there's still something a bit unnatural about it all. The first few songs also suffer from disconnected engineering - the vocals sound like they're coming in from a different room, mixed strange and subtly out of step with the music.

I bother wringing this all out because there's a lot to like here. The guitar sound is fucking monstrous, and when the band gets out of its own way it's got a loose scruffy charm - succeeding and rocking ass through zen rejection.

I'd love to hear the band's earlier stuff, before they felt obligated to live up to their big chance 3.5/5

#2143 Motion Graphics - Motion Graphics

Perfect cover art - detailed, detached, itchy, glitchy, fragile.

Snips and samples, Oval-lite gitches, hypermodern virtual life sliced into digital confetti and glued back together carefully and harshly. Joe Williams croon-mutters matching ruminations Hot-Chippily, buried in the mix. It's a serviceable chin scratcher, but too twisted up and fussy to be emotionally or viscerally satisfying 3/5

#2142 Basic Bastard - The Album

Minimal, repetitive house - the tones're warm and natural, the vocals spare and smooth, the vibe cool and easy to have on in the background. Good work music 3.5/5

#2141 Model 500 - Classics

Busy, exciting stuff from techno godfather Juan Atkins. Every song's restless, packed with squiggles and doubleups and shifts and squonks, pouring out mechanical and funky all at once, taking the Kraftwerk man-machine out to party hard.

The sound's analog//retro, and you can hear all the moving parts, but they whir too well, too fast, stay locked too tight, defying to you to disenchant them 4/5

#2140 Bohren & der Club of Gore - Piano Nights

Local metal drummer posted some ominous, oilslick night shots of Boston and called BudCoG the soundtrack. Sounds about right.

Call it stoner metal jazz - piano and sax and brushy drums slowed way, way down, dragged down into a streetlight void of wavering, endless synths, rendered uncanny and ominous and poisonous, but beautiful, an Edward Hopper left in a mouldering basement for a decade or two 3.5/5

#2139 William Tyler - Deseret Canyon

Tyler's got a knack for infusing complex classical guitar runs with imperfect inflections and dusty longing. There's peacefulness and simmering desire that glint with magic. It lacks that perfect pacing and atmospheric shimmer that make Modern Country such a masterpiece, but it'll sweep your extra cycles away just fine 3.5/5

#2138 Studio OST - Scenes (2012-2015)

Spacy electronic drifting. Spacy like, outer space. Like, the universe is so boring. Pretty in an endless, soft-focus nebulae kind of way - atmosphere for the void 3/5

#2137 Scott Gunn - Eyes on the Lines

A pleasant, well-produced album with no alarms and no surprises - electric guitars chugging and swooping along mid-tempo with plenty of reverby half-country flourishes. An even-smoother My Morning Jacket little wafter that you'll probably like better the less you think about it 3/5

#2136 Scott Hirsh - Blue Rider Songs

A right pleasant drift of country swoon and honkytonk shuffle, with the occaisional blissful drift right on up into the moon. It's understated, My Morning Jacket or Wilco without the unbecoming ambition, just a humble passing through, little flourishes in the form of a rumbling sax accent, a lady passing though for the chorus, a few unfortunate Framptony guitar parts.

Still! It mostly puts right about the right amount of chrome on the worndown sound - at very least, Raga of the Sea and Blue within Blue are worth your 6 minutes to melt to 3.5/5

#2135 Holger Czukay - Movie

Take everything endless about Can and everything scattershot about bent-pop Zappa and here you are. Czukay's solo debut takes disco jangle and a splattering of samples and folds it all into aimless krautrock jams, a dizzying, hypnotic piece of puckish madness.

Cool in the Pool is its Frontier Psychiatrist, that one track when the adventurousness condenses into something downright hooky, but the rest is all over the place ever-boring/ever-exciting - a gem if you're in the market for something unique 3.5/5

#2134 Midriffs - Subtle Luxuries

Listen / buy here!

There's a great little surfy pop-punk scene here in Boston. Personal favs Vundabar are the perfect example - the two bands have a similar racket: those those startstops, those keeeee guitars, those oooooooOOOOOOooooos.

But Midriffs got their own thing going, scraping your knees with rattling FIDLAR scuzznshriek, always ready to fall backwards into a spacy aside, tripping onward, unpolished and vital 4/5

#2133 Nevermen - Nevermen

I want to like this. It's squirmy, dabbling in psychadelic swooning, meandering noises, bursts of hard guitars, and the occasional hip hop blast. But it just doesn't work. Musically it comes close, but those vocals are at odds with eachother, cooing, chiming singsonging, rapping, Nu-Metal rapping, Nu-Metal screaming, and on and on.

Nevermen seem to simultaneously want to be intellectual and experimental and indie and hard and intense and revolutionary. It's a tonal mess that comes across as trying way too hard too do way many things and doesn't end up pulling off any of them 2.5/5

#2132 Dr. Feelgood - Down by the Jetty

I keep expecting to like these classic pub rock albums better, but this just sounds like - well - a pretty decent band you might see at a bar on any given night. Fair enough.

Lee Brilleaux brings some bark and grit, and the spikey guitar playing bristles up the faster songs, but it's a totally anonymous sound in 2016 2.5/5

#2131 Eggs Over Easy - Good 'n' Cheap

This's a fun nugget for the amateur music historian, a '72 nudge on the British pendulum, away from prog and general rock bombast, back to blues-revival grit, leading to pub rock and punk by extension, arriving right alongside Americana classics like Exile and Muswell Hillbillies. Neat, right?

Absent that context, it doesn't sound like anything all that special though. Pretty similar to stuff that came before and after, every song plodding along with dust and rustle and a distant memory of the blues. It makes for a slow-day listen, but drained of any ambition other than to shake off the frills it ends up feeling uninspired 3/5

#2130 Africaine 808 - Basar

Labyrinthine, slow-writhing electronic music. A tangle of non-Western beats skitter and pulse, driven by their own motives, while pulses and squiggles and drifting Orbitalisms dance over top.

A sludgy lull around Nation / Ready for Something New nearly kills the momentum, and the whole thing runs a bit long, but I'm reminded distantly of Since I Left You - it's an album with its own agenda, that moves at its own pace, running across personal, secret contours that could take years to map 3.5/5

#2129 Dire Straits - Dire Straits

The humble, pub-rock shuffle-and-groan makes for a right pleasant pulse, and that signature clean guitar sound's as pretty as it ever got. Other than Sultans of Swing (still one their best songs) there's nothing that sticks, but it'll get you though the afternoon 3.5/5

#2128 Mean Jeans - Tight New Dimension

Chuggy Ramonesey dumbness with a spike of fuckit funtimes - somewhere between FIDLAR and Jeff the Brotherhood on the SOFUCKINWASTED scale. Riffy fun, probably a grinner live. There's songs named Croozin' and Are There Bears in Heaven and 4 Coors Meal -- what more could I add?  3.5/5

#2127 William Tyler - Modern Country

Jesus there've been a lot of really unexpectedly great albums coming along this year.

That clean guitar it rings off the universe and back, coming back with miles attached, backed by the wandering buzz of electronics and electrics, a bunch of country-adjacent and country-opposite sounds coming together to make one of the most gorgeous ambient records I've ever heard, like every great Yo La Tengo moment distilled and evaporated -- such an unlikely source, made of such unexpected, anonymized, endless parts.

Those first and last songs, they take me mind out gently, turn it to dust, and blow.

I don't even want to ruin it with more words. An impossibly beautiful album 4.5/5

#2126a Thee Oh Sees - A Weird Exits

Thee Oh Sees always had promise, some shredding genius always lurking in between their go-nowhere soundscapes. But motherfucker are they on the rise. Following their true-form arrival on Mutilator, they pile on with their heaviest, most solid record yet. It lack's Mutilators thrilling rush, but holy fuck that guitar // bass production is on another level, it is a thousand pound sword swung with precision and power, those riffs are _cut_, they hit you like a ton of damn bricks again and again. One of the great guitar records of the modern era that's doomed to go underappreciated 4.5/5

#2126 Car Seat Headrest - Teens of Style

God its so inevitable that this was the album that preceded the excellent Teens of Denial, a post-written prequel that sets it all up. It's those same soaring OOOAAAAAAAS with perfect crunch crunch crunch crunch, but with the muddy bedroom sound to match Denial's bedroom-gone-legit gutpunch. Toledo's drowning in the mix, railing against the pillowey suffocation of adulthood. There's those same incisions, those moments of clarity, a brilliant, personal, struggling little lo-fi gem.

It makes me appreciate Denial that much more, how thoroughly that latest album weaponizes this potent isotope. A minor majesty in its own right 4/5

#2125 Bongzilla - Gateway

Full on stoner metal. Every song's named after weed, packed with samples about weed, rolling the same rock-solid, dead-simple zone:

enormous
monolith of
fuzzedout
guitars rolling
out fast-slow
over and over
and over and over

Unexciting but unboring, catchy in its relentless Sabbathy way. You barely even notice the goofy goblin voice, just raspy mist between the stones. Flashless, flawless music for working or not working at all 3.5/5

#2124 Brainiac - Hissing Prigs in Static Couture

Noisy, wailing punk, spiked with electronic fuckery and dissnonant guitars - this should be right in my wheelhouse. But it sounds sloppy, substituting scattershot dissonance for songcraft, its gimmicks aging about as well as its n3mb3rs 4s v0w3ls song title gimmick 2.5/5

#2123 Big Black - Songs About Fucking

This is a machine that makes rock and roll songs. It doesn't work very well. It lacks that human touch. It is rusty and perfect. It grinds its gears. It does not care. This is actually very rock and roll. Especially in 1987. It is not angry. You're angry. That's on you, you fucking, person 3.5/5

#2122 Amigo the Devil - Manimals

What a well-named act.

All four tracks pulse with dark molasses, death pulling in close for a kiss, telling you it won't be alright, but that's alright -- with all the vital sting of a half-remembered Scandinavian fairy tale, shadow cast through Warren Zevon's LA streetlight shimmer. Unsettling, slinking, impossible to put your finger on, impossible to ignore 3.5/5

#2121 Eddie Hazel - Game, Dames And Guitar Thangs

Man, that doubly, wubbly, guitar sound, as heard w/ Funkadelic, now dancing through smooth, strange covers and a handful of loosey goosey jams. Barely any songs here, but it's all worth it for that one of a kind, effortlessly sweet ghost of a guitar sound 3.5/5

#2120 The Pretty Things - The Pretty Things

Modestly better than average blues-driven 60's garage rock. It's played nice and loose, the mix is torn wide open, and dude can wail -- harmonica can too.

Packed with Bo Diddley beats and Rolling touchstones, worth hearing if you're into this kind of thing, but there's nothing here that's going to shake your foundation loose 3/5

#2119 LLoyd Price - Lloyd Price Greatest Hits: The ABC Paramount Recordings

Great singer, smooth songs, all coasting on that New Orleans beat, every verse sliding on a pillowey, swinging, backsinging setup and a bah-dap! bah-dap! bah-dap! payoff. It just all waves back and forth like in the laziest breeze, like right nice with a cool drink 3.5/5

#2118 Dinosaur Jr. - Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not

Man, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with all these new albums from all these 90's underground bands.

Pleasant enough, as usual - the vocals croon effortlessly, the guitars crunch agreeably, but there's nothing new by 2016 standards, nothing new by Dinosaur Jr. standards, and none of the songs surprise within themselves - it's all totally fine and not one note stuck with me 3/5

#2117 Rival Consoles - Night Melody

I just can't get enough of that frayed-edge synth, that frail, sighing whine, that ruffled buzz.

Night Melody lives up to its name, ringing endless and dark and mysterious, with blood that flows and a mind that thinks too much until it doesn't think at all. A loose house backbone comes and goes, but the beat's an afterthought, a side effect of a sound that exists to color the dark spots of your brain 4/5

#2116 Thor - Keep the Dogs Away

Have you seen the Thor doc that's on Netflix right now? Mildly recommended, a profile of obsession, a man with nowhere left to turn but back to his coulda-(maybe)-been band again and again and again.

And wouldn't you know it, their first big (kinda) album's actually kinda good. Dead dumb simple, KISS without the theatrics, with an understated glammy streak, like caveman Queen...but cool? The band sounds downright disconnected sometimes, borderline Lou Reed - maybe because they're really focusing on playing real good, but maybe they're just... that cool? It's actually not very metal at all, that album cover and being named fucking THOR notwithstanding. As the mostly unsurprising songs plod along there's an unselfconscious charisma that just kind of works.

I mean, take it all with a grain of salt, maybe I'm just charmed by the underdog story. They're not The Beatles, but hell, they might raise a smile 3.5/5

#2115 The Range - Potential

The Range's best tracks have always combined plaintive British muttering with big uncertain bass and twinkling frailty - a crossroads of nerves and hope. It's strange then how the most overtly vocal-laden tracks on his new one don't really land. Maybe they're too self-aware, come on too strong.

The mysterious, mumbled, fumbled, fractured middle passages are full of pulsing heart, worming around in all-black backdrop. It's a magical little something, not altogether different than his other stuff, lacking the shock of the new, but probably the right place for the newcomer to start 3.5/5

#2114 Paul and Linda McCartney - Ram

A wildly difficult album to remove from its context: nobody liked this when it came out, if you believe the stories. Beatles breaking up, everyone expecting a trajectory towards the important and serious, John doubling down on some unattainable, mostly unlistenable revolution, and taking all the piss on the way up.

And here comes this small, pleasant, strange thing.

It's rather beautiful. An olive branch back to Brian Wilson, burbling with lushness and harmonies and quirky asides, every song so modest, turning on itself, light changing on the same old scene, not one passes without some metamorphosis, some complication that elevates. The artfulness is understated, but there's richness to spare. It gets uneven in the second half, and it's a little bit oversweet in spots, sure, but it's too packed with interesting little angles to dare to ignore. It never succumbs to formula, never get predictable, lulling you to lean into each of its gentle curves.

That old test: if this had come from a non-ex-Beatle it would be at worst, a cult classic of massive proportions.

4.5/5

#2113 High on Fire - The Art of Self Defense

As GIGANTIC FUCKING RIFFS p l a y e d   s u p e r   f u c k i n g   s l o w   f o r   M A X I M U M   P O W E R go this is about as good as it gets. Those riffs roar like glaciers full of mammoth ghosts, like the mountain come for vengeance, like elemental grudge pulsing under the site of the slaughter. The fact it's melodic, super listenable, hooky as shit, seems like a countertragic accident.

Maybe these were the songs locked in Sleep's hourlong, belligerent Dopesmoker, thunderously cracking their necks and looking for food 4/5

#2112 Car Seat Headrest - Teens of Denial

I drive a lot these days, to and from work, and man it drains. I do hate driving. But today I had a feeling I haven't had in a long time - where I was so wrapped up in moving along at speed while the music blasted, where I just wanted to keep going, like I used to in California, where I would take the turn around Santa Vittoria an extra time or two or three just to let the sound keep pouring in.

You can't do that in Boston, you'll fall down a ratsnest of one-ways and end up in fucking Quincy, so I had to settle for a sit in a parking garage in Waltham while the track finished out its last couple minutes, reminding me for my walk to the office that friends are better with drugs are better with friends are better with drugs are better with friends are better with drugs are better with friends are better with drugs.

--

I said out loud, quietly but dramatically, a bit sincerely: "this album saved my life this morning", on that drive this morning. Also, "this album is fucking incredible". And that was before I was 4 tracks in! On the way home I picked up where I left off and, 36 years old, cried a little at 65 on 95.

It's been a weird month.

This is peak fucking emo. Toledo yelps and barks like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah // Bright Eyes, guitars chime along Built to Spill // Sonic Youth off-center, the whole thing poring out Modest Mouse // Pavement, soaring like Surfer Blood // Boston, and my namedrop well runs dry, and all those points of reference make for a constellation of striking elevation. Artsy crashes into ramshackle crashes into pop until you lose the thread, and your shields are down, chiming repetition hypnotizing, unexpected shifts destabilizing, wrong chords unbalancing, making sure you're good and defenseless for when the guitars swell enormous, for when the voices double and triple, or when the beat doubles up and yougetsweptupineuphoric pop. punk. ecstasy.

It's fucking staggering, even as the bass hints at Don't Stop Believing, even as the guitars chime Marquee Moon, it's such a spear of sincerity, through Wikipedia's page about depression, through the discomfort of being waytoohigh, through not knowing how to be a person and soaring on the wings of "it'll be alright" delivered with a touch of doubt but no single homeopathic trace of irony.

--

It's the rare beast rock opera. The epic sweep, the disregard for tightness or pacing, the unashamed stage-musical grasps at your heart. It's the kind of thing we need now and again, a Separation Sunday deep dive.

Teens in Denial probably doesn't have the cohesion, the eternal connection-making to have that kind of longevity, but its bold, staggering sweep, its complete fucking fearlessness to go on for X verses, Y repetitions, Z minutes, not giving one solitary shit, while still keeping your rapt attention, is a revelation. It switches up zigging when its supposed to zag, and ZAGGING when its supposed to zag, so even the obvious moments dodge cliche. That it casually drops a flailing 8 minutes in the 2 slot, goes on a 26 minute, 3-song jag near the end, closes out on a nearly-nothing final observation, all without seeming pretentious, all while just blasting you into - - - - -

Fucking brilliant. Rock lives for one day

5/5