#2033 The Rolling Stones - Undercover

Stones get no respect. Did you know they put out 11 albums that produced #1 singles? That's some Beatles/Elvis bullshit. By my count they have at least 10 great albums. But most peoples' record on them seems to go Satisfaction->Some other song?->Start Me Up?->30 years of "those guys still around?". Maybe those rough 30 years tarnished their image.

This was their first album in 14 years to fail to go to #1, the beginning of the end. It's forgettable. No real bite, no real hookiness, lousy pacing, too-crisp 80's drums. Everything is a halfhearted version of something they'd done before. They held their own through disco, but this was a soulless step too far.

The 80's! Those 10 years ruined every band. I was listening to Don't Come Around Here No More the other night and wondering how Tom Petty got a pass on sounding every bit as plastic and limp as every shitty pop act of the era. I digress 2.5/5

#2032 The Four Tops - The Four Tops

If you're gonna go male-singer Motown-lush this is the blueprint. Everything does surge and swoon, headphones overstuffed with sweetness and sadness. Classic sound. Fair enough.

But as a straighthrough album-style listen its a disaster. So samey, levelwise and tempowise and tonewise (only exception: Tea House in China Town's menacing swagger). Every song is about love; approximately every one of them is about love you've lost. HDH locked into a subject and a sound and threw 11 versions at the wall till singles stuck - the process isn't overwhelmingly worth your time 3/5

#2031 Mono / Poly - Golden Skies

I've been giving the detuned//slurred thing the benefit of the doubt because this brainfeeder scene's got a better touch with it than most, but this tips back over the line. It's hypnotic, trippy, occaisionally beautiful, but feels less like the high and more like the hangover, dissonance for the sake of difference, synth science over songcraft 2.5/5

#2030 Matthewdavid - In My World

Brainfeeder trawl continues!

I don't know what I've been listening to. It goes right through me without leaving any words to scrape down and smear on my keyboard.

It's not strange in any violent way: it's beats and singing and samples and...sounds. I just know that it's pretty and sexy and vulnerable, and makes you feel the same. It's a little drunk, and a little broken. Everything slips through your fingers, nothing coalesces into objects you can pocket or catalog.

There might be something amazingly original happening here but I keep coming out the other side with nothing but lost time. Points for leaving me at a loss 4/5

#2029 Lapalux - Lustmore

Wobbled and slurred and dumb and readymade for my hating - but it actually kind of works. It's just patient enough, just understated, hooky and soulful enough, to be strangely hypnotic and just this side of enjoyable. It's being a bit too stoned - a little out of control, a little nauseous, and just on the cusp of deciding whether to go with it 3.5/5

#2028 Jaimeo Brown Transcendence - Work Songs

Samples of songs and sounds of hardship run through the backbone, pathos and grit and transcendence and perseverance come through, and connect you to a human experience.

But it's all undercut by the actual music. The guitars on Mississippi are overproduced and gross; the horns and drums on Lazarus are rhythmically disconnected from the desperate trudge, and Safflower descends into muzak schmaltz. That's a 3 song stretch that shows the whole problem: this bongs out gimmick, and not with a sincere engagement with the actual field recordings. It sounds ready to be plugged on NPR, sold at Starbucks, and hailed as the second coming of Moby's Play (which at least managed to be hooksome along the way) 2.5/5

#2027 Badbadnotgood - III

Rock autopsy pt 3.


You know how an east coast twonce might say St Croix's is the new St Barts?

Is dark, loose jazz the new rock? Nobody wants to be the next Eddie Van Halen. And there's no room to be the next Yes/Rush/Tortoise/Radiohead. If you're a young upstart and you want to make music that makes an impact, maybe rock's not the way to go anymore.

Cause I hear some young upstarts here, and they're sharp and inventive. And they're making jazz, loosely. No slavish devotion to solo structures or modes or conventions, but they're making funky music with piano and horns, lacking backbeats, going all hiphop if not outright broken to bits. I hear effort and effortlessness and grit and heart, bass rolling across the gas and brake, drums with skitter and don't-quit. I feel like these are kids who would be making some really lively,  really tight rock and roll if that was still a thing people did. Call that a compliment 4/5

#2026 Thundercat - The Golden Age of Apocalypse

What a delightful, sprightly, wobbly thing - bass played all loose and burbling, popping right against electronics, strings, singing, melting time. Flashes of Squarepusher at his most listenable.

It's no wonder this guy's a hot commodity right now: he's got a peerless knack making adventurous music that's effortless to listen to, that sounds effortless to make, just pouring out of the earth, loamy and rooty and delicious and strange 4/5

#2025 Terrace Martin - Velvet Portraits

I've been facing a crisis over the loss of rock and roll lately. Indie's well and truly dead, garage revival's running out of veins to mine, punk thrashes in place - everything's giving over to a new, ugly breed of electronic fuckery. Nobody's got new ideas for guitars.

Rock'll be back someday. But in the meantime, maybe it'll be the Brainfeeder+Friends crew who pulls us through, these guys dabbling in inky jazz and atmospheric hip hop, making chillout music that'll make you think and make you stand. Martin's latest features a dozen guests and shuffles through a dozen styles: it's a night-drenched album where electric pulses and autotune specters rub up against slinky horns, clear-eyed exaltations, and P-funk throb. A rich, quietly exciting record that rewards slow, repeated listens 4/5

#2024 Sunn O))) - Monoliths and Dimensions

There are surely people out there who can tell one Sunn record from another - this one is very loud, very patient, very ominous and evil, and slow.

I'm sure there are people who deeply appreciate the techniques used to make guitars sound so big, so elemental, so able to make an album that is very loud, very patient, very ominous and evil, and slow.

And some folks will just be impressed by someone doing something harder than anyone's done before. And this album, as such albums go, is very loud, very patient, very ominous and evil, and slow. It's a challenge to listen to, Metal Machine Music almost, but damn it does get in your head, will make you feel sick, infected. Impressive. Though it doesn't really even succeed on an atmospheric level, for me: guttural doom moaning sounding all Spooky Halloween Sounds CD Vol III.

But I have to admit, even as loud, patient, ominous, evil, slow albums go, this one is very loud, very patient, very ominous and evil, and slow 3/5

#2023 Lost Sounds - Lost Sounds

Lost Sounds' last album, the main release not covered by the stunning Blac Static comp -- still vicious, still unstoppable. I could complain about the lack of guitars - those synths aren't just buzzy texture anymore, they're fullfledged fighterjet blitzleaders, Reatard's carcrash riffs relegated to backing on most tracks. And I could carp about the Alicja-lead songs sapping some of the album's urgency: she's great, as a counterpoint to Jay and on her own, but Jay's undeniably the heart of the band, and he disappears at times.

But you at least trade faceshattering power for some of the prettiest punk rock moments this side of David Comes to Life. Take Mechanical Feelings, packing two and a half minutes with a lifetime of frustration, a sixpack of Polysics-via-Devo squonkbombs, and startstop swerves into delicate beauty that could end the world.

Could you tell in 2004 that this was the end? There's that sense of exploration out of obligation, that moment a band doesn't have to hunt and just checks out what's over the next hill out of curiosity, the birth of leisure killing punk urgency. Was there a synth/guitar power struggle? A fight over vocal duties? Think Trompe le Monde: a perfectly great album undercut by the momentum of its wild past 4/5

#2022 VA - Los Nuggetz: Volume Uno

A reminder that garage rock is more rough than diamonds, no matter where its from. A pretty forgettable collection of Spanish-language mostly-covers, none of which bring much memorable heat. The few originals fare better, but you can do a lot better elsewhere 2.5/5

#2021 Lost Sounds - Blac Static

Huge Jay Reatard fan who apparently overlooked his early band altogether. Fan fail. Also accidentally stumbled into a compilation first. What a jerk.

But hot goddamn. Punk rock 2000.

Frantic, erratic, hooky as shit, packed with face-busting Single Frame synth hooks - this'll get you jittering in your seat, will fuck up your whole work day. It's so tightly packed, so knotted with energy delivered so precisely, a furious hot//ice assassin. This is electricity itself, deadly and unpredictable, sparking by immutable rules until you don't understand how the world works 4.5/5

#2020 Los York's - '67

I'm spoiled by Los Dug Dug's - Los York's are *just* a great Spanish-language garage rock band: a little romantic, a little angry (those Blue Caps background howls!), a little pretty, a little inventive, with a surfy flourish. A tight little record that'll give any fan of the scene a good time 4/5

#2019 Los Dug Dug's - Smog

Best band I've discovered so far this year, hands down. Their second album's packed with blasted production, wildly original songwriting, half a dozen jaw-dropping blownout guitar moments, and a pivot to Spanish singing that sounds so right.

Raging riffs, sparse accoustic breakdowns, flaming flutes, infernal drums, patches of prog in the dead-dirt garagey stomp - and man, that gigantic, unstoppable 3rd track's a classic.

LDD were fearless and exciting and unlike any garage rock band of the era. Essential 4.5/5

#2018 Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

I haven't had one of those "how have I never heard this before?" records in a while, but call this the latest.

Man those synth tones are killer, loped into lazy hooks + deadpanned scifi dreads. Alienating and catchy, the last human in the kraftwerk dystopia. It's not gimmicky, not arch, not art // not pop. Cars is a classic, but my highlight pick goes to M.e. - that bassy buzz is the best sound I've heard in ages, withering vocals and last-leaf plucks complete the robot heart.

Classic 4.5/5

#2017 Sonny Bono - Inner Views

The endless opening track's a tease. It's so committed to its relentless droning and pounding, so packed with subtle dynamic shifts (those drums!), surging and dropping and filled with muttering asides and cues - - it actually sounds pretty live. Like a real goddamn jam. Like, pretty great. But something about its square rhymes, nudgy references, off-center attitude that just sounds (Lindsay Planner nailed it) kinda narc-y.

By the end I came down on its side, on the strength of those backing musicians and their bristling looseness. It's a lot of fun once you get past Bono himself.

The rest of the album though, good god. What a bunch of clumsy, artless, schlock.

1. Open an album with a 13-minute jam.
2. Follow with 4-minute pop songs.
3. Make the latter the watch-checkingly repetitive ones.
Achievement unlocked.
3/5

#2016 Skinny Puppy - VIVIsectVI

Remind me why we give a shit about Pretty Hate Machine again? Last year I naively called the production on NIN's debut "visionary", but it's miles behind Skinny Puppy's 6th (!) album that beat it by a year.

The noise is busier, more inventive, more satisfying, the textures more varied, the experience more exciting. Unlistenable, but with hints of fun: near-dancy, pop-adjacent boops and buzzes in a shitstorm of shrapnel. Themewise it's the usual doom and gloom, but at least it's global-scale; maybe people just find spilled-milk suicide screeching more relatable. At least this commits 3.5/5

#2105 Moby - Hotel Ambient

Does Moby suck?

Sure.

But that grandmaster electronica seller-outer, that random hardcore dabbler, that hypervegan, superchristian, political paradox extraordinaire - he did have a way with chords.

And Play was pretty great if you could get past all the context, right?

But man does Animal Rights leave you battered. That tourism keeps me wary of an ambient record where Moby goes fuckit, I can do that, I'm fuckin superspecial Moby, I'm gonna outeno Eno, and Dick James can eat one.

And mostly he misses the point with this erstwhile bonus disc cum release proper. Most of the tracks are boring, aimless: mistaking emptiness for purity. But here and there -- dude does have a way with chords -- something human and emotive comes in and its actually kind of great.

But mostly its what you'd expect: throwaway privileged dabblerism, and not much of a fronttoback listen 3/5

#2104 Pneu - Destination Qualite

Super-tight, super-loud angular start-stop guitar rock -- blistering little fills and arpeggios shuddering around the curves, snapping at right angles -- flipping from fast to less-fast, from 4/4 to ?/? on a dime -- islands of backbeat in seas of frenetic mess.

Obvious shades of Fang Island, Dananananakroyd, Ponytail, Deerhoof - but those bands all gave soul to the chaos by putting a human voice in the mix, even if it was just soaring exaltation or wordless yelp-squeal. Hell, even Lightning Bolt's mic-in-mouth barking helped bring the beat of a vicious black heart.

Pneu's all instrumental, and the work's impressive. Thrilling in small doses. And in the radio-scan waves of micro-songs there're some fleeting gems. And hell, maybe throwing out every structural signpost and rhythmic guideline without giving any kind of access to the humans behind the noise is a special kind of punk rock move. But it makes the whole thing sound soulless, and gives you no reason to listen other than to admire their start/stop chops 3/5

#2103 Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - EARS

The opening track bewilders, as those wings open. Skittering analog patterns and swooping, drooping drones, giving way to unexpected distorted vocals and unknown blossoms of texture and tone. It's an exciting start.

But over the next 6 tracks, numbness sets in. The same arpeggios and voices are joined by horns and looping reeds and swooping flutes, amounting to nothing. Not a thing connects, it all sounds arch, arty, detached.

It's like you've entered a magical garden, and you gasp as the gates open onto a new world. But it becomes clear that all the strange plants; breathing, pulsing, ejecting pollen; could not be less interested in you. And you think they're cool, kinda. But you're a meaningless technicality on a closed system that will chug along without you forever ; ; alienating ; ; compelling only on the most intellectual level.

Exception for the closing 11-minute epic though, a track that finally brings some sweep and scope and uplift and energy, evoking late-sequence Dan Deacon tracks, with tones that finally seem to be willing to engage with you and fly through your centers that trigger your actual feelings.

It's frustrating to have such compelling bookends on such a soulless core. Smith clearly has talent, but seems swept up in living up to some abstract notion of artfulness that undermines her ability to make human music 3/5

#2102 Deftones - Around the Fur

Shades of Tool, Korn, Rage, SOAD.

Around the Fur piles on the guitars and lets them ring at full force, moans and screams blasting over the top. This is pure late-90's, predicting the 00's worst nu-metal and best near-proggy-start-stoppery.

These dudes are loud and angry and nasty, shades of thrash and punk, but there's production and composition and thoughtful experience honing every corner, predicting Dismemberment Plan, Single Frame, Giddy Motors, to name a handful of randos, smashing rawness against attention to detail into paradox nailbomb.

It sounds deeply uncool as a 2016 first-listen, but credit for reinventing knotty structures + mindless fury for a new generation 3.5/5

#2101 Flying Saucer Attack - Flying Saucer Attack

One of the noisiest shoegaze albums around, all frayed edges and chainsaw links whirring by - Ride meets Guided By Voices, that home recording sound giving everything a live, buzzy edge.

And I don't go GBV as my signpost because there's none of those laser leads - this is pure landscape, pure texture, nothing allowed to rise to the top and take over: vocals, melodies, basslines, all gasping out of the waves of noise like a half-drowned dog.

An experimental album with the process showing through - sounding damn composed for being scraped off the bathroom floor 3.5/5

#2100 Los Dug Dug's - Los Dug Dug's

Where's this one been all my life? A bitchin slice of psychadelia gone across the ocean and south of the border and around the horn. Rough, sludgy, trippy, with a dusty desperation, a ramshackle looseness, a mystified sense of mysticism and bracing sincerity.

Los Dug Dug's sound's swept up in their psychadelic influences, yet so assured of their own magical approach to the sound. It's impossible not to compare to peak Tropicalia [Os Mutantes, thatdamn fuzz guitar]; there's so much energy here, reflected back onto the American 60's with laser focus and prismatic refraction 4/5

#2099 M83 - Junk

What's Gonzalez playing at here? Is this just a pisstake? A panic move?

Look. It happens, especially after a giant double album. Billy Corgan broke up with guitars, Genesis jettisoned Peter Gabriel, Gunsnroses put out an album called " "The Spaghetti Incident?" " (?), and Aphex Twin straight nonexisted for a decade or so.

So M83 puts out an album with a post-post-post-ironic terrible cover, calls it "Junk", and fills it with junk - just castoff b-side-sounding lukewarm sub-pop nonsense, with none of the hookiness of their hits, none of the emotional sweep of their recent highlights, none of the wall of sound scope of their early shit, kicking out everything about the band except "the 80's" leaving a hacky, unmemorable pastiche, Random Access Memories without the sneaky greatness.


This is an ok album // a bad M83 album.

It's a mistake; a total abandonment of everything that made the band worth hearing. It will not be remembered fondly, other than as "that weird shitty thing they did after Hurry Up"

You make your big opus, spanning two discs -- and then what?

Let's hope this is just a fuckoff to shake off expectations and not the last gasp of a dying act past its lifespan 2.5/5

#2098 Bombino - Azel

I enjoyed Bomino's breakout a lot, and this is richer, subtler, and the one I'd want on a desert island - but strangely hookless. After listening to it I just had Nomad tracks running through my head all day 3.5/5

#2097 Trad, Gras och Stenar - Trad, Gras och Stenar

What a gloriously scattered mess, has there ever been an album structured quite like it?

 - 8 minute cover
 - 11 minute cover
 - 3 minute jam that devolves into 2 minutes of field recording
 - 2 minute live freakout
 - 6 minutes of whistles, clapping and chanting
 - 5 minutes of mouth harp, sitar drones, and Swedish sing-moaning

it's the most uneven thing I've ever heard - again, to the point of gloriousness. 19 minutes of All Along the Watchtower into Satisfaction is the highlight, the latter getting exploded out into psychadelic genius till you don't know which way is up. The rest seems there just as a counterbalance, to keep it unpigeonholed. Mission accomplished, I guess, shit 4/5

#2096 Hollins and Starr - Sidewalks Talking

Mellow, drifting, lightly trippy, buoyed on those flute sounds that stay just this side of Jethro Tull, just far enough away from yacht rock.

It's funny what difference two songs make, staked out in the right spots - Hard Headed Woman is a full on freakout, and Digress is a scattered tapefuck interlude worthy of Zappa/Ween/Frogs, and they help draw attention to the artsty flourishes that luck in the inbetween: jazzy touches, proggy breaks, late Talk Talk minimalism.

A fascinating//listenable sneaky-psychedelic hidden gem 4/5

#2095 Kebnekajse - Kebnekajse II

More trippy shit from Sweden. The opening, swooping folkys bits don't move me, but when this gets heavy it gets heavy, an adventurous, enigmatic, richly textured, wildly detailed piece of proto-prog 3.5/5

#2094 Baby Grandmothers - Baby Grandmothers

Part of Sweden's surprisingly lively 60's psychedelic scene. Rhythm section locks in and slips about with endearing looseness; walls of acid guitar noise wash over in waves and waves; shifts are glacial and subconscious. A good way to lose an hour 4/5

#2093 The Misunderstood - Before the Dream Faded

SOMEBODY came across a good list of obscure 60's psychadelic albums.

Good list, despite the fact that this particular record didn't quite melt my face off. Some nice buzzy production and wheelsoff performances, but it's all too bluesey, too derivative to be especially noteworthy 3/5

#2092 Autolux - Pussy's Dead

Icy. Somewhere between late Radiohead skitter and Spoon lockstep. A MBV tape left in the sun until the guitars melt off and the beat slips between the rotors.

Tone and rhythm finds subtle ways to falter. Bass comes in too hard. Vocals slip and sleep.

Negative space leaves weird.

A fascinating, spare, exciting record, that gets so far into your head with so little 4/5

#2091 dvsn - SEPT 5TH

Rock's mostly dead, and we spent a decade or so coming to terms, thrashing around in the ashes. And in its place we've gone post-performance, deep into pure production, tone removed from instruments, the whole of modern music diving into the crannies of 90's experimentalism and beyond.

And it's infecting All The Music. This is an R&B album, with all that sexy crooning, that emphasis on vocal and emotion. But the real star is the production, and this has no lingering connection to motown etc, this is surging pulses beyond note, rhythms beyond beat, abstract background that hooks into hearts in roundabout longways we're not used to defending against, sweeping those voices up against themselves.

And it hits on another modern trend, this vulnerability, this abandonment of swagger - weak's the new strong, nicking the 90s' best tricks yet again. This is the dark side of sex, made so unsexy it goes around the horn X times and unasks the question.

Mysterious, wildly modern, piquingly difficult, maybe important 3.5/5

#2090 Nisennenmondai - #N/A

Krautrock with a bum wheel, steady on the gas. The man-machine is broken and re-fused and still pursuing purpose at optimal efficiency. You wait underground for the buzzing and skittering and muffled squeaking overhead to stop, but the parade of wheels and feet and gears is endless and you do not have enough air 3.5/5