#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