#2021 The Outlaws - The Outlaws

With a tour of second-tier southern rock in my rearview, tire scraps of almost-got-there's arch like crashlanded crows, I wake up in the real thing.

The Outlaws bring real chops, legitimate bipadipabiddabiddabiddabip guitar runs to the table, and back it up with some real rich harmonies, and just enough looseness to keep the whole thing legit. The too-fast moves and too-sweet singing offset eachother - it never descend into wank, never gets cloying, just gets swept up in its own momentum.

I buy it.

Hearing those sweet vocals too, strikes into focus how bullshit I find all the hoarse, hoary hrunting those other southern rock dudes stab with. Whole kick this week's run me across a few band that almost worked for me, but that just didn't hit the sweet spot - these guys found it. Top tier stuff 4.5/5

#2020 Molly Hatchet - Molly Hatchet

Also-ran southern rock week continues!

This *almost* gets there. Almost becomes post-southern-rock, almost works as hyperreflection, some kind of Girl Talk roundthehornin', especially on that reference-packed, winking Gator Country. I love me a reference-packer.

It's good fun, just shredding in all its overproduced self-aware glory, and I almost love it for all its badness. But it slips back into the valley. Limp pacing and a handful of repetitive songs with nowhere to go finally doom Molly Hatchet's debut to accidental forgetability 3/5

#2019 Black Oak Arkansas - High on the Hog

It's __fine__

Good even, just a bit sterile; not James Gang loose, not Skynyrd precise, just very second wave - and some of it (Happy Hooker, Jim Dandy) is just goofy as shit.

Points for Moonshine Sonata, which manages to be the freest and most composed and best track on the album, and just about the most perfectly named thing I ever did come across.

Otherwise its just southern rock, also ran, dog won't hunt 3/5

#2018 James Gang - Yer' Album

A jammy album that's saved from the "jammy album" tag by it's varied pacing, stirring together:
 - short non-song interludes; 
 - regular'ol rock songs clocking in at radio-ready 3-4 minutes;
 - longer winding raveups that benefit from a democratic mix and structure, letting the bass rise way on up to the front as a first class instrument, letting pianos get their licks in, before pouring the inevitable doses of guitar over top;

never diving into formlessness for too long, never letting you get too settled into a particular pattern.

Most importantly there's playfulness, in the studio snippets, in the loose feel - dudes seem like they're having real fun, like they're a real band. That's a piece of magic that's tough to come by 4/5

#2017 Ty Segall - Emotional Mugger

Fitting this was first released on VHS tapes. It's ragged, cracky, a little behind, Segall still haunted by his T. Rex project. Guitar textures remain unbeatable, but riffwise the sound crawls and wallows and slinks, everything wearing masks of itself and lurching, uncanny and distorted, ignorant of pacing's good taste. It's possibly brilliant, melted and strange, not fun exactly, the drugs tipping over into scary, best appreciated in the details and tones - the actual songs and sound Cronenberged past empathy 3.5/5

#2016 Whilk and Misky - The First Sip

If I came across these guys on the way out of the Middle East after a show at down I'd stop in and slink against my baby for a song or two. It's got a lazy kinda groove that might lead you to slump against it if the night was just right.

But its just too uncool - too slick, too starbucks-ready, too John Meyer, too Thievery Corporation, too Jamiroquai. Can't get with it 2.5/5

#2015 Charlie and the Moonhearts / Teen Anger - Split EP

As a Mikal Cronin fan, I came for Charlie // Moonhearts, and they win the split.

6 tracks of surf-flecked punkrockabilly turned to 11. In the spirit Coachwhips via just-reviewed Epsilons, they rip and roar like a wave ride gone wrong, crashing into rocks, exploding with concussion starshow.

Goddamn the Cronin/Segall/Dwyer crew was doing some good shit in the 00's.
Teen Anger pitch in 5 more tracks and they're good, sleazy punk stompers, plus some breakneck plunges, but they're upstaged, sounding familiar by comparison. Still good fun - you'll get your 26 minutes-worth 4/5

#2014 Epsilons - Killed 'Em Deader 'N A Six Card Poker Hand

A frantic wave of unhinged boogie-woogie rockabilly gone punk, thrashing nonstop, band falling down the stairs with a manic grin.

Is it any surprise that Ty Segall's involved? He's in half the shit I review here.

Epsilons was one of his first bands, and it shows - there's a thrilling sloppiness, a total lack of stakes that he's rarely captured since, shades of fellow scenester Jon Dwyer's Coachwhips, in retrospect. It's dead simple, with less guitar fireworks (and 800% more organ drones) than his best stuff, but it's a blast, and a fun data point for connoisseurs of the segalsphere 4/5

#2013 Savages - Silence Yourself

Savages layer up a sound stack right good, packed with growling bass, phaser-edged guitar and a reverb-rich//sheetmetal-sheared heavy glaive sound. The sound is good.

But Savages don't really have anywhere to go with it - outside of the slowburning opener and closer, all the songs run together, and the fact that Jehnny Beth's inflected yowl sounds so damn Brownsteinian doesn't help the band stand out.

I hear echoes of all those guitars and purrs all smeared together - it lacks specific moments, and falls short of greatness as a soft-focus monument 3.5/5

#2012 NTFO, Karmon and Betoko - Wowshit EP

3 slowburning, minimal, house//techno trips, growing slowly and mysteriously on that _bum_ PAP! _bum_ PAP! backbone forever. Each track has its little surprises, its little organic moments, but Betoko's closer is the highlight, with that justright growling warble synthline, winding between robot Phil Collins fills and the end of the night 3.5/5

#2011 Boris - Noise

Can't keep Boris down. The sludge/noise/doom masters went alt-rock-pop on New Album (now their second-newest album), sounding "did you mislabel this, Spotify?" levels out of character.

From across the gap they've built a bridge backwards - their now-new album Noise is melodic and hooky and accessible (making Pink sound like Metal Machine Music), but it works in actual savagery, scale, experimentalism, and, well, noise, descending into waves of feedback for 5, 8, 15 minutes at a time, bringing the old stuff, the raw power, the bottomless descents, the walls of feedback death.

Is this phase 2 of a reboot? Was New Album an audience broadener and Noise a way to bring the two bases back together? Goddammit New Album, derailing this whole post from beyond the grave.

Noise is a great journey, all over the map, weaving hooks, melody, crushing weight, and epic length, totally unwilling to be pinned down. Its split personality keeps it from having an obvious role in your record collection, but when you're willing to let some brilliant guitar lords lead, you'd be hard pressed to find a more expansive tour 4/5

#2010 Zed's Dead - Somewhere Else

Pretty good for arena-ready dubstep. It's peppered with quonks and wubs and ladies singing and all the usual pop-EDM nonsense, but it's not bad: restless, inventive, restrained, built for nightlong ebb and flows instead of quietBuildDROP-repeat. Dips into hip hop, horns, and understated atmospherics keep it interesting - better than usual given the scene 3.5/5

#2009 Griz - Say it Loud

The giant electronic bulldozer, coming to plow you into a dance hole, banging you over the head with EDM build-n-drop, mashed up samples, rockist riffage, and waves of horns, including dollop after dollop of sax riffs, more more more of everything.

It does what it comes to do. And props to Griz's show for whipping out a live horn to bring a little performance to the picture. It's telling that the best live moment I've seen from him is a mashup of RJD2's Ghostwriter - that big comin'foryah horn riff seems like the seed for Griz's entire philosophy.

Say it Loud's sincere like that. You can tell Kwiecinski's trying to do something new, something good, that he wants to move we the people. But as an album that first 6 track sequence is too blunt, too brutalist, too DANCE MOTHERFUCKER to listen to with headphones, and that's the only way it's gonna happen for an old fucker like me these days. Interludes on the second side start to break up the pacing but its too little too late, sequenced all wrong, I'm already dead 3/5

#2008 Beach Fossils - Clash the Truth

You'd think I'd love this, with all those post-surfy guitars, that big fat picked bass, those chiming atmospherics - whiffs of Surfer Blood, Tokyo Police Club, and the better end of Deerhunter.

I mean, Astro Coast was my favorite album of 2010, and these guys pull off a lot of the same tricks.

But I don't love it. I like it? But there's something
too arch
too Brooklyn
too calculated
too performed
some lack of danger in that clockwork New York motorik
something that keeps me from falling in love

I'm left looking for those unique moments, those kicky hitches, those perfect turns of phrase that make those other bands soar. Something lost in the translation, some failure to connect.

Good, frustratingly short of great 3.5/5

#2007 Judah and the Lion - Kids These Days

Good, humble boys with song titles like "Kickin' da Leaves", with two different songs that repeat "we don't have any money", with back to back songs that talk about how they're scared. Humble music for people who think the Decemberists are too literary, who think Mumford got too big.

And it won't take long to hear every single Mumford trick (bursts of banjos, swells of vocal harmony, doe-eyed wonder), plus every single Decemberists trick (reedy singing, indie acoustics, doe-eyed wonder). They reach for the stars with every climax, but sand off any angle that's remotely interesting or the least bit inaccessible.

They're probably very nice kids, but the music is derivative and generic to the point of embarrassment 2/5

#2006 Keys N Krates - Every Nite EP

It clearly took KnK some time to find their groove - this earlier EP lacks the pacing and heart of their later stuff. The live drums + tightly chopped samples formula is in place, but it's not effortless yet. This feels more like a demo: compared to Midnite Mass it's clumsy and abrupt 3/5

#2005 Dungen - Allas Sak

Maybe its those whorls of quilling paper on the cover talking, Dungen's latest is all about swirls of color, swooping up through eachother without intersecting. Guitars and Swedish lyrics waft through space with a weightless, inevitable drift.

It's beautiful, graceful, well-paced // beyond pacing -> loose // tight. A gorgeous slice of psychedelia, evoking all manner of abstract imagery, layers upon layers, remaining blurry but separate, sweeping you away before you know what hit you 4/5

#2004 Leon Bridges - Coming Home

There is not one single thing that betrays Bridges' album's masquerade as an honest to god 60's soul record. That scratch'n'hiss sound, that sand'n'splinter rasp, that overflowing mix, those flickering harmonies, those swinging simple lines - its so unadorned, so pure.

Truth be told, I found it a bit boring the first time through, but after a calendar year shotguned already of minor injuries, illnesses, and bills that follow, it's a balm. Its little catches, so muted, lying there just for you to fall into. It's a rare, understated, magnanimous thing that you'd be well served to take into your home // heart this 2016, a seed that's sure to take root 4/5

#2003 Keys N Krates - Midnite Mass EP

These dudes pull off my favorite trick in music: plucking all the bangin, heartbustin hearts from the chest of bullshit styles and making em sing.

Big dumb trap skitter'n'BWAAAP skinned and made thrilling, listenable, dancable, soulful. Dudes get pacing, get repetition, get progression, get how to strip a song down to its skeleton until it cuts to the bone. Shades of Feed Me, Girl Talk, The Range - high praise.

Every song has its one tiny, laserfocused sample at its core and wraps it in swoop and swoon. I listened to this over and over again today and it hooked right up into my shit.

You know why it works? You can't get this kind of soul with hit-play. Dig live drums, dig a dude legit on the pads and turntables, see this quick one, or this one. Method matters. 4.5/5

#2002 Dead Boys - Young, Loud and Snotty

Over the holidays I watched this disappointingly limpdicked movie about CBGB with my parents* (rip Alan Rickman too now, man), but upsides included:
 - I totally thought Television came later. I guess I should stop calling them post-punk.
 - I gotta stop calling //anyone// "post-punk", I swing that thing around and slap everybody with it. While we're making new years resolutions, I gotta cut down on "Lynchian"**. Douche.
 - I ran into one band I'd never heard, Hilly's own little Dead Boys

This here, their one album, it hits a real sweet spot. Sloppy, shrieking and overblown, a mass of arms swinging in one direction with drunk fixation. But hook'ed. Accidental little startstops, sweeps, stutters, crashes of guitar that land on their feet unlikely, like you had a thousand Dead Boys at two thousand guitars and waited three thousand years for 11 songs to fall out. Somehow they did with only 5 dead boys and a handful of days. Lucky.

The mix is all over the place, the production just stitching the scraps together and letting the fraying fly, it's a fascinating trainwreck, an underappreciated punk nugget 4/5

* props to mom and pop though, pretty hip holiday movie choice!
** unlikely

#2001 Shamir - Ratchet

Kid can sing, kid's got swagger, got swing, flipping between James Murphy deadpan, Twin Shadow yearning, and general giveafuck rap with backflip ease. That backing, too - so squonky, so raw, bent into all the shapes: shiteating Spank Rock fun, Hot Chip longing, and raveups worthy of, well, LCD Soundsystem.

That's a lot of checked boxes: fun, cool, weird, hooky, danceable - an effortlessly diverse, listenable bent-pop masterpiece 4.5/5

#2000 Plini - The End of Everything

Virtuoso! Those guitar runs, they are fast - those time signatures weird - those the layers very, very layered. But its so broad, so calculated and cloying, with no edge at all. It's a clockwork gizmo in a Swiss Sharper Image, a christmas gift Sting buys his kids on the way to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert. No heart, no guts, not for me 2.5/5

#1999 Vulfpeck - Thrill of the Arts

A tight, clean little indie-funk outfit. Falsettos and lilywhite soul croons rub shoulders with layered Stevie Wonder pure production. Musically, they pull it off.

But the tone, the swagger, the heart and soul of funk and soul, it's all wrong.

It's a fun record, but in a goofy kind of Spongebath whitewashy, winky kind of way, till it becomes novelty. Christmas in LA, the Funky Duck who "gave the first TED talk", basketball as love metaphors stretched to breaking - I can't get with it. If you're gonna lead the people in the club to a higher place, you gotta convince them you know where you're going - these guys seem like they're just fooling around 3/5

#1998 Luke Slater - Freek Funk

Reviews of Alright on Top gave nods to Slater's older stuff, so I gave him a second chance - sure enough, you strip off those vocals and the partytime ambitions and the guy's got chops.

Spacey textures and hyperspace hypnosis hub out from Technobase Alpha: patient growers, bristly bangers, headbobbers and headrobbers, mixing in touches of house, pinches of breakbeat, transitions like - ---  ---- --- -- - 3.5/5

#1997 Luke Slater - Alright On Top

Goofy maximalist party techno, packed with vocals, every song the pop-swingingest track on a Chemical Brothers album; subpar Basement Jaxx; amateurish Air remixes. There's pulse in places, but the pacing's off, the backing clumsy, but the vocals are the real problem, strained and thin, uncool and unconvincing 2/5

#1996 David Bowie - Blackstar

I date these things by the listen date. So I first heard this before Bowie passed, am now reviewing it after, creating an impossible gulf. I think back - up till January 7 it was easy to think that Bowie would keep putting out messy, interesting, muddled records forever; that he'd always at least tease us with that talent. That he'd strangely always be there, like Jagger, like Cash.

In your mind isn't Cash still here somehow?

And then January 8th, that rush. Bowie creating something so swirling and dark, that taps right into the Brainfeeder/Kamasi/Kendrick thing that's been bubbling bubbling bubbling. This vital, enveloping, uncanny cloud. That paranoia and fear felt like ours, a Radiohead-level tapping of our anxieties, asking where the fuck did the Monday go, that suffocation, but strange starlight through the blackness. Radiohead's unavoidable, a cloud of Amnesiac's lurching, King of Limbs' skitter and drone, that pique of unexpected thrill, of being wrapped up in breathplay terrorgrip exhilaration, oily and dark, sucked down like Yar // Riker into some thing that knows beyond.

Am I just overcorrecting when I retroactively heard something hopeful on that Friday afternoon?

But then that Monday and I heard on the radio, watched news pour down my feed. Where the fuck.

And now it all looks different, those cries of I'm dying [to?/too?] on Dollar Days, the things you can't give away, the xrays and home of Sue, he died and another cried, lines and lines and lines that you can sink into right to the end.

It's a dark, gorgeous album that envelops, full of strange angles that I'm still stumbling through. It feels effortlessly brought into being, maybe though that clarity of having nothing left to lose, a lurching record with an irrefutable life of its own.

=====

Bowie's final days, at least to the outside world, have been nothing but grace. Striking videos, manic//carefree smiles, a humble unattended cremation, and a secret taken right to the end. No farewell tickertape, no victory lap, just...*poof*, a classic magic trick. Talking with other fans we remark how cool Bowie was, 69 years old and right to the end. It's hard not to see the album as an extension of that trick, the smoke that tied up our minds while the man slid offstage.

Cheers Bowie, you'll be missed 4.5/5

#1995 Portugal, The Man - The Satanic Satanist

Slinky, catchy in places, but there's something obvious, something overthought, something indie-festival-ready about the sound. That falsetto // beat puree's a little too Temples, a little too Broken Bells (even if this came before both).

It's music that's had every threat of the unexpected bred out of it till there's no stakes at all 2.5/5

#1994 Carly Rae Jepsen - Emotion

Jepsen's latest is everything pop should be: catchy, well-produced, addictive. She's cute just shy of cloying, flashing a heart when there's four on the board, winding through sampler of M83/Cut Copy late 00's electronic sweep and scope and swoon. Around the 3rd time I listened to it, once it got good and familiar, it stole cycles and dulled the world right good.

But this is pure pop backsolved from the chorus, no alarms and no surprises, no traps like the ones Lorde, Grimes, or SwiffyT conditioned us to hope for. By the time I hit track 7 of 14 (!) I'm getting restless, applicator hitting the backstop 3/5

#1993 The Seeds - The Seeds

Nasty early garage - a little blunt, never quite igniting like the best of them, just working its way through the night. But it's _right_ somehow: surfy guitars, fuzzfuzzed bass, endless organs, ragged rants, all in the right ratios, till it hypnotizes like caveman LCD Soundsystem. Too many of the tracks drop out of Pushing Too Hard's mold, but that samey sound just -works- somehow, grinding on and on and right on in 4/5