#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

#2111 Cave In - Until Your Heart Stops

Superfast metal packed with proggy start-stops and tempo swerves - Cave In's first album walks the tightrope: it switches it up too often to be boring, but locks into a groove just often enough to give you a foothold, teasing you with the possibility of headbodding until it twists your head off, suckerpunching from every angle, every riff a setup for its opposite, tight into slurred into fast into half-time into double-time into dropped-beat dancebreakers - - and then pretty little indie-adjacent interludes

then haunted empty halls

bonus: enough flayed screaming keeping it out of Dream Theater territory 3.5/5