#2061 Rocket from the Crypt - Scream Dracula Scream

The classic 90's album: the major-label debut that smooths off the sound's every hard edge for easier entry into the masses' asses. It's mostly propulsive, occasionally hooky, but with none of that grit and none of that whiplash unpredictability, trading Circa: Now's 2 minute / 8 minute songs for a bog-standard cadence of 14 swings at singledom, leaning on radio-ready choruses and undemanding production. Same old story, again and again 3/5

#2060 Rocket from the Crypt - Circa: Now!

Rough-edged, supersolid post-underground // 90's crunch, overpacked with swooping, overblown guitars punctured with Albini-hard drums. Ever-scrappy, restless, never boring, alternating punk efficiency and epic scope -- and damn if that big deep sax backing isn't the swaggering special sauce 4/5

#2059 The Sultans - Shipwrecked

Part of John Reis's San Diego scene, this's one of the most straightforward records in his output: tuneful, ragged, propulsive, sub-3-minute songs, packed with easy hooks, never quite settling into place - punk rock Magnetic Fields. Dude really was an unstoppable song machine on the order of Pollard/Merritt/Corgan.

Cheap whiskey on Circle-K ice, sitting on the patio, sweat beading slowly, waiting for the boot to come and kick it to pieces. Fun shit 3.5/5

#2058 The Hotelier - Goodness

I admit it: I found the trappings of this album, its song titles, its cover art, its overall attitude, so annoying that I can't even really take any of the actual music seriously. It has a stink of insincerity that undercuts the one thing emo's supposed to have going for it.

The opening track is a laid-bare dear-diary spoken word field recording that starts, I swear to god:

"We sit and we talk, not of much but of little. I see the moon, and the moon sees me. I would smile, but it would be meaningless. I wouldn't want it to be"

Oh? You wouldn't...what?

It's even worse in practice than it reads here. And it goes on - non-poetry that assumes unearned buyin. Maybe for the hardcore fans who have clutched this band to their tear-soaked bosom this is a revelation. But it's the most cringeworthy thing I've ever heard on a record. Even the spontaneous details, the rustle of paper, the big inhales, it all feels choreographed, a cloying audio selfie.

--

Ever since a very nice fellow from a band I harshly reviewed commented here, I have to admit, I've occasionally pulled my punches. Because hey, someone worked really hard on that album, and however insignificant my little blog is, there's a nonzero chance my words will find them and affect their life for the worse. This isn't my job, I'm not duty-bound to be objective. I can steer you away without ripping assholes unduly.

And yet, this one bugged me bad. And here I've only talked about this first track but, man does it get things off on the wrong foot in a terrible way. And besides, the rest of the album's got the same underlying problems: it's main virtue is its feelings laid bare - but they seems honed into place, the Ivan Drago of emo. And those song titles, designed for post-twee Andersenian miniaturism; coordinates, and meta-notes, and high school poem titles. And that "controversial" naked old people album cover. That shit hasn't been edgy since 1969.

--

On the offchance that you're the probably totally nice kids from The Hotelier, look, you're probably totally nice. And there's a chance this record is from the heart. And if so, well, your album just did not connect with me. I was really put off by parts of it, and I couldn't get past it, and that's on me. It was never for me anyway, so no skin off yall's asses. I wish you all the best as people. Yours truly, a withered old shitheel.

But if I'm right, and any part of this whole mess was designed to sell records, if you've manufactured sincerity in any way, you've done something grosser than the average sellout, and you should take a good hard look at yourself. I hope I'm wrong, I really do. But I can't shake the feeling that this is some slick shit.

So for completely nonmusical reasons, I did not like this album at all (though between you and me, the music did not at all blow my hair back either) 1.5/5

#2057 The Fugs - The Fugs First Album

Gotta give credit to coming first. Before Ween, before Sockeye, before the Frogs, before the Shaggs, there was the Fugs, who I feel comfortable calling the first major Idiot Rock Band. Protopunk jesters, flinging nonsense, flopping libido, flagging tuneless tastelessness and yet. . . there's something like genius in the void

what is there in the world but girls, trying (failing) to get high, seizing the day, boobs (a lot), repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition and __nothing__

a tuneless, unlistenable masterpiece, saved by its null brilliance, and the bracing reality that this kind of rock nihilism was way ahead of its time 3.5/5

#2056 Wire - Nocturnal Koreans

70's art punks, now in their 60's, making highly-produced, mid-tempo rock songs - what could go wrong?

But I'll be damned, it's actually pretty good. It's slick and unchallenging, but when your basic melodies and production details are this solid I'll forgive it. This is The Strokes via Grandaddy, endless soft-focus motorik gliding past pastoral scenes of the future.

Outdoor Miner, from 1978's Chairs Missing is the missing link here. It had a sensitive, quietly catchy tunefulness that justifies this whole approach as part of the Wire sound. What fascinating fellows, I'm glad they're still at it 3.5/5

#2055 Wolf Parade - EP 4

It's been six years since Expo 86, eleven since the legendary Apologies to the Queen Mary, but Wolf Parade hasn't missed a beat - three of the four songs here are great, overflowing with desperate romanticism, building churning momentum into near-dancable ambushes.

The EP's the perfect format here: no room for the pacing to drag, no need for a breather or interlude, just 4 songs, each with its own beat shift // structural swerve // lyrical kneecapper. Floating World's the only dud, a little too predictable, a little too familiar, but EP 4's still a quietly thrilling 12 minutes, highly recommended to Wolf Parade fans and newcomers alike 4/5

#2054 Islands - Taste

Bless Islands for their two-albums-at-once gambit. Mixing and matching all this bloopblippery with the more traditional stuff on SIRHAS would have been sloppy - both albums are more cohesive this way.

This is the less interesting half of the pie though. The icy electronics are out of step, at odds with the rock band at the heart, and some exceptions notwithstanding (Outspoken Dirtbiker) it feels as soulless and forgettable as a Hot Hot Heat album. One out of two aint bad, as we dream of a proper Unicorns reunion 3/5

#2053 Islands - Should I Remain Here at Sea?

Two good signs on a record:
1) "Is this a cover?"
2) "I should put this on that mix.."

Look, there's nothing spectacular here, certainly nothing like the Unicorns transcendence of 2003, but it's so solid at what it does. It's justnow classic rock, sounding like a lost gem of the just-gone 00's, the best Islands album since their debut. It's a tight little grower, understated and mellow and sensitive and totally worth your time if you're into indie rock at all 4/5

#2052 Chance the Rapper - Coloring Book

Hip hop continues to gobble up the space left by receding rock. We're post-positive hip hop - you can just tell the details of your specific experience, humbly, as a lens for broader life, without it being a reactionary act.

Chance just loves music, his friends, and god, and he wants to share that with you, and you're brought along as a side effect, not as an act of evangelism. The only enemy is the record label, an obstacle to Chance's love, a detail of his lived experience that comes to light.

There's no call to arms, no show of bravado, no earthmoving message. Subjectmatterwise, it has almost nothing to do with the traditions of hip hop. But it works, as folk music, as sharing through song, as a woven glimpse into what is humbly on the man's mind and in his heart.

The small moments (Summer Friends, Smoke Break) are transportive and soothing. The big moments are thrilling (Blessings, Finish Line / Drown / Blessings). Even the more traditional chorus-driven bangers (No Problems, All Night) are important.

I tried to make a mix of all of Chance's awesome gospel tinged work and it didn't work. This album knows what it's doing, stacking hooks against softness against memory against release, flowing downriver and upwards.

It's beautiful record, full of small details, majestic gestures, and perfect pacing. Dude's one of the best going 4.5/5

#2051 Pantha Du Prince - Black Noise

Is there any more important album title in the history of electronic music than Music Has the Right to Children? It's 1998, electronic music is just cresting, and BoC comes right back over the top of those who would call it cold, distant, mechanical.

This is Pantha Du Prince right in the thick of that search for the ghost in the machine, finding a root to the truth of life, the universe, letting field recordings that are naught-but-real in on the manufactured clips and blips and letting god sort em out. It's unknowable, slithery, fascinating, all with pulse and groove, asserting its rights with rough edges and fizzled textures every time you get complacent about your superiority 3.5/5

#2050 Danzig - Danzig

Boston sports radio guy was talking this album up, praising its production.

It's pure - stripped, bleached bone dry, neutered kicks and declawed snares letting those snakeskin riffs on through, so Danzig can wail like Morrison flayed on top.

It's hooky in places, the skeleton of Sabbaths' greatest hits - but that production's the best and worth thing about it, it's the architectural outline of a hard rock / metal track, traced again and again and 8 times more 3.5/5

#2049 Pantha Du Prince - The Triad

Damn if this doesn't strike the right balance, sounding alien and unknown, but with that roadmap to the backdoor of your heart-brain, halfway between Boards of Canada and Moby circa Play, set to brittle little techno splines. Those little surges, layered to underslip your footholds, but cutting distinct paths to trace around your head.

Mysterious, listenable stuff 3.5/5

#2048 Modern Baseball - Holy Ghost

Modern Baseball's an emo band, I'm told, and you hear shades of that in those little details, that plainspoken vulnerability, that wistful romanticism. But, at least here, the band's grown up into something with a little bit of wear on its tires, sounding more Mountain Goats and Okkervile River than My Chemical Romance, with some pretty legit guitar crunch to back it up.

And sure, its too much goddamn fun, your calf-jittering toetaps sending your brain morse code that you're listening to something too enjoyable to take seriously. But I don't know man, how do you hear Mass and not just want to take off in a car on the longest highway you can find until the sunset consumes you. Maybe it had the hometown inside track on my Boston-trapped heart, but damn if it didn't get me all skyward 4/5

#2047 Twin Peaks - Down in Heaven

Twin Peaks were always scuzzy half-art punks to me, so the turn to sunburned Americana's a surprise.

Their latest's a warm fuse that crackles and glows in circles through the dust, under sunlit gaps in shed walls, into handdug basements and back. But there's no powderkeg at the end - the smoke and motion is means and the ends, round and and round till the haze is blown out to the fields and surrounding towns.

When I say I hear shades of The Men, Tapes'n'Tapes, and Blizten Trapper, bands with that same knack for making something unexpected and inevitable, its a compliment. But mostly Down in Heaven draws from that early 70's America-via-England tradition, equal parts Exile and Hillbillies, stomping and wailing, and never waiting for nothing to change.

Twang, swagger, grit, blownout desperation, accoustic meets buzzy bass and piano, horns in the wings when the moment's right. Remarkably cohesive, totally assured, totally outside what's going on right now - it's striking. A lowkey gem, lost in time, getting better with age 4.5/5

#2046 Rocket From The Tombs - The Day the Earth Met the Rocket From The Tombs

A collection of demos, live recordings, etc from one of the greatest garage bands that never was.

Kicking off your scuzzed-up record with an extra-scuzzy cover is standard practice, but trying to out-scuzz a scuzz masterclass like Raw Power's a bold fuckin move, and the result's so intense you don't even notice its an instrumental. Later, a 19 second cover of Satisfaction tells you everything you need to know about that. They pull it all off, the "studio" tracks are overblown, desperate, blasted, frantic, and exciting; the live ones're even sloppier, but with a genuine sense that something terrible could happen at any moment.

A proper album wouldn't have worked anyway - this is battered to pieces, rusted and on fire, bristling with stakes, a fuck-this to the fuck-this scene, with just enough focus to keep you listening for what's next 4/5

#2045 Nothing - Tired of Tomorrow

Early on Nothing's latest packs fuzz on fuzz into monuments to emo existentialism, going from full on shoegaze, into Silversun-via-Pumpkins crunch, into a riff on Shine's thunderous centerpiece. It's tasty, wall-of-guitars stuff.

But when the guitar muscle dies off, and all you're left with is hopeless wondering, it just gets pathetic. Unfortunately the understuffed, mopey, repetitive songs (including all four of the last four) outnumber the ones that're worth hearing 3/5

#2044 Hooded Fang - Venus on Edge

Frustrating! I want to like this more than I do. All that surfy energy from their last one turned up to 11. But something about it smacks of effort, loses that cool. It's that local band that has to take it to the next level and adds flourishes and production and complexity and reaches outside what comes naturally, until something singular and righteous is lost. Sad! 3/5

#2043 Hooded Fang - Gravez

Galloping, surfy, effortlessly hooky pop-punk - I thought only local boys Vundabar were capable of this kind of joyful clatter. Cavernous reverb-steeped vocals over angular, too-fast, chiming chug make for a delightful, foot-jittering listen 4/5

#2042 Kaytranada - 99/9%

A mildly inventive, quietly eccentric, ultimately harmless blend of hip hop, soul, and light jazz. It's perfectly listenable, with a silky flow between styles, but nothing grabs you, the pleasant electronic pulses and cooing vocals melting into a 90s-housey inoffensive timeender 3/5

#2041 Massive Attack - Blue Lines

Deeply uncool in retrospect: this sound's swirled up with so much of the 90's' worst.

But this did do it first. And better, actually.

It lands. All those raps and clippy beats and dubby pulses and swelling organs and glowing samples, it's all just strange enough, just earthy enough, all glowing with just enough beerlight and slithering sexy menace to keep you feeling - - alright, alright - - grudgingly, pretty goddamn great 3.5/5

#2040 Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool

=== The Light Album =

Come and hear the end of the rock band called Radiohead, gawk at the rainbow they've been chasing for decades, the meeting of the beams cast by Kid A, Amnesiac, and In Rainbows, focused by The King of Limbs. Probably not their best album (definitely not if you came for the guitars), but it aches with opus.

--

By now it's clear: rock was a chrysalis stage for Radiohead, a tradition they've spent the last 33 years shedding. From forgettable crunch came decade-defining mutation, followed by molting, molting, molting: dead skin snares and vestigial guitars falling from every album, the sound falling further and further into pure production. And now the figure/ground's finally flipped.

If the platonic Rock Album is all about performance captured, if it's the cured essence of 3-5 folks playing guitar/guitar/bass/drums, set to tape, readymade for your listen at a press - - well, there's no trace of that tradition here.

That backbeat firmament is scarce: rhythms blipped out as violins, pulses, hisses as often as drums. Guitars are guest stars. A company of othersounds surge into your headspace in washes: strings glare and glower, choruses blossom like sunlight over mountains, pianos flicker doubled through windows, synthesized hybrids bloom like lens flares.

There's barely a glimpse of electronica / IDM, that convenient not-rock diversion for decades; this is something different. Less pointedly strange, more of its own accord.

The songs never seem to go where you expect, until you stop expecting. Each hooks into the next so fluidly that you end up disoriented. It's a listen in blur, memory and senses, shedding the idea of a band altogether. It swoons with alien orchestral exotica, James Bond slither, crystalline shimmer. Wildly spatial production puts drums in attics, vocals in backalleys, strings in the yard and closing in fast, hard pans, desperation balance.

=== Pool ==

The contradiction at the heart of this album is this: it draws deeply from the past to become bracingly original.

It pulls from the whole of Radiohead's 21st century catalog, is peppered with songs penned decades ago, reminds you at times of the great weird songs of the past: Kid A/In Limbo/Pyramid Song/Spinning Plates/Weird Fishes. But all that weirdness is standard here: what was once a flourish or a gimmick is now the whole and substance of the work - it's the leap between the room with the cubist painting and the entire cubist castle.

I'm a rock guy, and I'll always be wistful for Paranoid Android/National Anthem/2+2=5/Myxomatosis hammerdroppers. But I'm also a sucker for albumwide commitment to a sound. It's one thing to make an album sprinkled with oilslick strangeness, another to dive into a the depths. There's no hedge here, no midgame Optimistic/Knives Out/Dollars and Sense anchors, no errors of pacing, no misplaced song or rest, not one clumsy note to break the spell.

--

Radiohead's found newer, stranger creatures on this deep dive. At times it feels made of light, at others it slips beneath the surface. The strings onrushing, undersea beasts appearing out of darkness, jellyfish synths sparking bioluminescence, choruses shimmering, glimpses of a deep-distant moon through tides and schools, swirling around the negative space of expectations.

It's a counterpoint to The King of Limbs, that deeply underground album, with all of this light - and yet touched by the same inky darkness. It is easy to get trapped in those vertical sounds: dirges from the oubliette on Identikit, the sky falling on Tinker Tailor, the muttering from the back of your mind on The Numbers. It carries that weight of The End.

This is probably not Radiohead's best album, certainly not their most important. But it's their most perfect. It doesn't have the highs of OKC, the startling inventiveness of Kid A, but it feels created-fully-formed. It is completely consistent in itself in a way that lends transcendence.

Aside: I want new Radiohead albums as much as the next guy, but this would make a hell of an album to close out a career on, sinking into darkness, dissolving into light.

=== The Moon The Moon ===

Is it good?

It's gorgeous. Mysterious, haunting, unknowable, original. An instant cult classic. I called The King of Limbs a minor masterpiece - this sounds major.

The atmosphere, the emptiness, the lightness, the loss that comes from floating through a song with a ghost of a chorus; that ambushes you with operatic squalls, that trapdoors its guitar parts, that tethers you to strings and kicks the anchor. It's an album that gloams with energy and color from the front and the back and left and right and above and below, all repetition in the details but blooming and dying unexpectedly, with only a passing interest in being listened to, songs unfolding as if they'd only turn out this way this one time, as if every listen might come to rest somewhere different, as if this experience was a unique one, laid out just this one time just for you.

It's an album that feels more familiar and more unique the more you revisit it, a reoccurring dream that reveals the strangeness of its logic, little by little, morning after morning after morning.

4.5/5

#2039 Comets on Fire - Blue Cathedral

I'm torn: I love me some heady prog, and I love me some fuckit garagerock nonsense - but trying to combine them risks being the worst of both worlds.

The opening salvo rages and it's a headbobber. And Pussy Foot the Duke is a mysterious, swirling bit of Gratefuldeadism, and momentum starts to build... but just when you start to get into the knotted energy, overflowing into endearing looseness - you picture these dudes, eyes on instruments, trying very hard to play very well, yelling very loud, trying to be just the best the best the best band, and - - crack - - there's no transcendent spell, no reptile impulse. It all reads like blueprint.

On paper this is the roadmap to my wretched heart - in the performance it just comes across as overwrought and muso, a framed painting of fire 3/5

#2038 King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Paper Mache Dream Balloon

King Gizzard remains one of the last, quietly-best rock bands of the era.

I was frustrated by career-highlight I'm in Your Mind Fuzz - it came on like a thunderstorm apocalypse and went out like a flowered field. The boys've been nice enough to fence off the flowers and just commit to an album to 'em. Bouncy folk-prog, a step away from the Tremor Control at their lightest, all agreeable, flecked with flutes and harmonica and wild nothings.

I suspect its a grower - for now I'm a bit confounded by the combination of brittle sun grass crispness and drips of trippy headspace. What a wildly curious magical band these guys are 4/5

#2037 Pity Sex - White Hot Moon

Sweet, luscious shoegaze, prettier and crunchier than actual 90's shoegaze ever was. Man are those riffs lush, those high/low // boy/girl vocals, pure cotton candy caramel swirl, impossible nostalgia. Pillowey guitars, through the Silversun and beyond, a pure texture confection, decadent and disposable and delicious, a sigh too perfect to hold in your hands 4/5

#2036 King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Nonagon Infinity

Opening salvo doubles as well-earned climax.
Masters of endless riff that grows, erupts, removes faces.
Title mantras repeated repeated situating on the nonagon.
Riffs, everywhere riffs, exhausting good time.
Loop-ready structure makes endless endless.
Guitars, guitars, dashes of harmonica, synth, guitars. 
Heady psychadelia disorients, melts time.
Themes, lines, reoccur again and again, weaving connections.
Riffs, everywhere riffs, unstoppable endless riffs, face over.
4/5

#2035 Terry Riley - Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector

I love Riley's minimalism when it hypnotizes, and the title track finds that stride from time to time. But the grounded instrumentation of the Kronos Quartet dispels all magic, the majority of the recording sounding like a showy wank. I'm impressed they strung this all together, but I am not overwhelmed.

Philistine doubledown: I straight don't like the sounds of these instruments on their own. Maybe its the production, maybe or my tin ears, but the cadenzas interspersed through Cadenza on the Night Plain were a gauntlet to be endured 2.5/5

#2034 Nathan Fake - Steam Days

I'm sure it was a lot of work to put all this blippa bloppa ticca takka together, but it sounds goddamn lazy. No heart, no pace, no tune, no invention, just forgettable electronic skipping along well-worn paths. The kind of album where you assume the tracks were named afterwards - the intentions backfit to the accidents 2/5