#2220 Otherkin - The New Vice EP

There's some Vines-ish (remember The Vines?) revival of a revival going around that I stumbled onto on my latest Spotify Related Artists boondoggle. I appreciate that kids are still trying to make rock and roll, but does it all have to be so polished, so unsurprising? Every time this starts to show some teeth it retreats to an unthreatening sneer or well-trod pile of chords or millennial woop (on two different songs! and there's only four songs on here!)

Kids! Take some chances! 2.5/5

#2219 Luna - Lunapark

Slightly mushy early indie, moaning and chiming and buzzing somewhere between Velvet dissonance and shoegaze sheen, kicking up its heels here and there but never quite committing to rock.

But then there's the difference-maker: that keen lead guitar line - slicing through the mix like a ray of light, sliding and screaming and splintering again and again. Never heard anything quite like it, worth the price of admission alone 3.5/5

#2218 Pretty Vicious - Cave Song EP

Man, dude sounds like Arctic Monkeys dude, and the band follows suit.

Like, I had to check to make sure this wasn't some side project.

And on paper they actually pull off the Monkeys' bracing attack, but they're missing some secret ingredient - the lyrical thorns? the surprising structural swerves? the believable bile? there's something subtly Nerf about the sound.

It's a game of inches, rock and roll - better luck next time 3/5

#2217 Baby Strange - Want It Need It

Unconvincing revival of the early 00's garage/scuzz revival plodding along track after track, swinging for some forgotten Ramones-via-Strokes cool, landing in some awkward, uninspiring place between passion and disinterest 2.5/5

#2216 The Van T's - A Coming of Age

Those sheets of tinfoil guitars, layered crosswise with those filigree vocals, cinching together into a very 2016 take on shoegaze, spiked with punk urgency and girl group enchantment. Such a great top-to-bottom sound: tactile, tangible, fascinating, exciting. Looking forward to a full-length 4/5

#2215 Slowdive - Pygmalion

Pitchyfork's [Freudian sic] recent list of best shoegaze album's got me digging, realizing I'm not as into shoegaze as it seems like I should be. But here's a third album, that by Baker's Theory of Third Albums, is the make or break breakoff, where they cast off what got em there and see what's at the heart -- and what Slowdive's casting off is, more or less, shoegaze, altogether.

Everythings stripped down to emptiness, down to what's left when you cast off from Souvlaki Space Station. This has (far) more in common with Laughing Stock or Spiderland than Loveless/Nowhere/etc, drifting off into post-rock reverberation vacuum nothing.

It's gorgeous. Adventurous, daring, beautiful, and their best album, if I can so blaspheme.

Pygmalion's only 48 minutes, but it feels longer, in a good way, melting minutes into hours. And what I'm in love with is the listen, yes, borderline ambient, eternal and strange. But also with the boldness that it takes to make a hard turn into something new, instead of grinding the same sound to death or disappearing for a couple decades (you know who you are).

Majestic, daring stuff that rewards close/repeated listens 4/5

#2214 I Set the Sea on Fire - Sleep Now Suburbia

A throwback 2000's album (too soon?), full of Arcade Fire touchstones -- those boy/girl vocals, those musings of the suburbs (from the opening track to, well, the album title?) and generally being kinda sensitive and ok with it.

In a good way though! It's luscious good fun, packed with bursts of energy, the kinds of moments that make you wanna do that dance, where you kinda just put your head down and your arms up and jam 'em around with nervous-energy burnoff frisson. It's that Britishness, maybe, that sense for cutting to the Supergrass synapse that makes you blow off steam, riding up alongside those horns, popping with a decidedly American, downright pop-ska splintering of inhibition.

Actually you've got to give a lot of scenes credit. Which is to say : I don't come away from this debut with a sense of anything strikingly new, but its a whip-smart combination that'll scratch that seven year itch 4/5

#2213 Spring King - Tell Me If You Like To

Chugging, shoutalong fuzz-rock that's fun enough. But it's all too predictable and gets numbing by halfway through. Every song's got the same basic tone, same basic sound, and even when one strays from the herd, it reveals its intentions and rides them on a straight line, 3 minutes-ish and done 3/5

#2212 Superglu - Horse

Top-tier indie-pop-punk, overflowing with peak-Los-Campesinos-level effortless boy/girl, riffage/pretty hookiness. That flawless chugging backbone, spiked with clap-clap/jangle-jangle new wave hitches and doubleups -- impossible not to grin and dream of a long road into the sun 4.5/5

#2211 Oval - Popp

Glitch pioneers Oval take their signature skips and blips and make them slightly more listenable. Slightly. Still pretty annoying, without the conceptual purity. Don't see the point 2.5/5

#2210 Savoy Motel - Savoy Motel

What a strange, plastic, offkilter piece of strutting - that drooping cartoon note on the cover's just about perfect. Everything's a little too precise, layers of white-edged stickers of horns, guitars, and singing girls, a coloring book drawing of the Thin White Duke and the Midnite Vulture, the robot band at the Love Shack pizza emporium. Around-the-horn cool, unexpectedly danceable, the wireframe precision freeing you from human rhythms: just lock into the cogs and ride the machine 4/5

#2209 Catherine Wheel - Ferment

Everything a shoegaze album should be (maybe, see below), lurching and pulsing and overwhelming, all with that silver cord of melody. Perfect balance in the crystal vocals and the heaped ridges of endless guitar echoes, hazy and buzzy and shining and [all the visuals, in soft focus].

--

I always thought I liked shoegaze - on paper it seems like I should be into all that power, that ambient roar. But so much of it (Loveless, say) is pierced by keening edges, and in all that reverb, the spirit gets lost. Not sure I'm actually a fan.

--

But I like this 4/5

#2208 Stone Temple Pilots - No. 4

A wildly underrated band - Tiny Music's the perfect 3rd-album-swerve masterpiece, and Purple's a (the?) landmark 90's hard rock album. But by the time 1999 rolled around I (/the world?) had moved on.

Justified? Mostly. This retreated from Tiny Music's stark strutting strangeness, without finding Purple's effortless purity, ending up catchyish, but forgettable. Some overabundance of effort robs it of its vitality. Exception for Down and Sour Girl, which were flashes of STP's pure riffage // offkilter lilt, respectively.

I have a whole essay brewing on this band that's leaking out here. Suffice to say, this justifies their legacy only fleetingly 3/5

#2207 Daft Punk / VA - Tron Legacy Reconfigured

Hey Daft Punk fan: this might be more of what you were hoping for.

The remixers attack the hardest, roughest tracks, stretch them out to proper getdown lengths, screw them all around, making 'em even harder, rougher. It's great fun. Everyone brings their own touch, but by stripping off the strings and doubling down on the lightcycle laserblasms, you get more Daft Punk via not-Daft Punk, after all.

If nothing else, falling down the kaleidoscope of soundtrack/Daft Punk/remixer visions again and again's a heady trip worth taking 4/5

#2206 Daft Punk - Tron Legacy OST

This is a soundtrack by Daft Punk -- soundtrack first, Daft Punk second. Taken on those terms, it's totally successful.

There's the ominous pulse of strings, of traditional soundtrack washes ::: pounding empire, washes of the unknown, pregnant tension --- field of black.

And across that you get those gleams, those slashes of beyond-neon, those lightcycle streaks of electronic fizzle, those moments where the spark leaps and cracks the logic.

--

I haven't seen the movie (:/)

But, with the song titles and a little knowledge of the original -- I feel like I have.

--

It's not a great standalone album, no Fight Club or Social Network as electronic soundtracks go, leaning too hard on the same generic falling strings-to-10 progressions. But for the most part it's tense, exciting, and subconsciously evocative of the themes (I assume??) it's backing: a win in my book 3.5/5

#2205 Green River - Dry as a Bone

Patient zero-ish of the Gossard//Ament lineage is a sloppy, angular, start-stop blast of proto-grunge punk. The thin mix, strained vocals and tryhard vibe keep this from really catching fire, but you can feel how the pre-Pearl Jam backbone really wanted to do something //more// -- pushing beats around, messing with lurch and sludge as counterpoints to their purer punk impulses. Underbaked and slightly unlistenable, but a worthwhile slice of history 3/5

#2204 The Incredible Bongo Band - Bongo Rock

Most of this album's cool as shit.

Strutting through a gauntlet of surfy, spy-movie, Tarantino//Oceans11-ready grooves, this is packed with uncut, implacable, headbobbing-assured fuckyes. Sample This, the (Netflix-ready!) doc on the Bongos track Apache points to session legend Jim Gordon, but its clear there's an army of talented, behind-the-scenes rhythmakers who contributed to this sick ass groove -- the Meters gone stoned, The MGs gone exotica.

This only falters when it gets hitched to a melody, especially on gimmicky covers of In a Gadda Da Vida and Satisfaction. This's a sound that works best when the rhythm plays lead. That happens often enough that you can cherrypick songs off here and end up with a 40 minute head start on a fucking killer poker mixtape 4/5

#2203 Digitalism - Mirage

Paced like a live show -- the first half blurring the lines between big dumb electronica and electronica-nicking indie rock, all stompable surges and swooning vocals and anthemic choruses. By the second half, now that everyone's lubed up and the nonbelievers have been converted, its start to get serious -- the beats get big, the pacing slows, the night's set to flower.

It's fine, enjoyable, but all those hedges, those scattershot angles, those pop feints - I'd rather they just committed to the dancables and cut all the grasps at hearts and ladyparts 3/5

#2202 The La's - The La's

At the cross section of Mojo's "top 50 eccentric albums" and a 1990 kick lies that There She Goes band: The La's. Catchy enough, plenty of bump and jangle, with that post-Elvis-Costello//post-Michael-Stipe yowl that seems ready-made for whatever's after the 80's (surprise! not this, actually).

It's pretty, a totally fine trajectory out of the underground, packed with hooksome little gestures, reminding me of the Police, for reasons I can't quite justify.

Didn't make much of an impression on me first listen, but as I write-listen, I'm averaging a "shit, that's actually a pretty sweet little move" per sentence. Fine. Good enough for a provisional 3.5/5

#2201 Wizzard - Wizzard Brew

What a brilliant, woolly lost gem -- a horn-drenched, era-hopping, lo-fi garage-psych masterpiece. The songs lurch with bent honkytonk fever, packed with glammy swoon, retro riffage, and no small amount of piss-take, in the spirit of Zappa, Rundgren, and golden age Kinks. I can't keep a bead on it - for every borrowing*, there's an invention; for every irony, a steely-eyed sincerity.

Need about a dozen more listens before I know what it's deal is, which is good enough for a provisional 4.5/5

* Elvis, Stones, Sabbath, Bowie, LaVern Baker, etc etc etc

#2200 Judas Priest - British Steel

Plodding NWOBHM stalwart, packed with perfectly fine guitar hooks played at stompalong tempos, backing shoutalong choruses. Maybe Breaking the Law, having The Rage, or just being United was real fist-pumping fuck-yeah stuff in 1980, and it might have been a kick to jam to alongside a ten-thousand likeminded folks, but it's pretty thin soup in 2016.

Can't deny Living After Midnight and Metal Gods though. Grudgingly there's enough highlights for at least 3/5

#2199 Temple of the Dog - Temple of the Dog

The Ament/Gossard band between Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam's got nothing on either.

It's a testament to Andrew Wood's genius and Chris Cornell's failures. Where Wood was powerful, Cornell is showy. Where Wood drew you to him, Cornell forces himself upon you.

This is the Chris Cornell show, his vocals mixed too high, composed to prominently, constantly making themselves the point, while (outside a choice solo or ten) the band plods along. It's the kind of frontman excess the 90's were so often so good at getting away from.

Which might be fine, if I liked Chris Cornell's voice.

But I do not.

Footnote'd!

2.5/5

#2198 Mother Love Bone - Apple

More than a before-they-were-in-Pearl-Jam footnote! Mother Love Bone's only album is actually pretty solid in its own right. The riffs are solid, the lyrics invitingly mysterious, with some real swervy, memorable moments (dig that last minute of Stardog Champion!).

Two asides about 90's rock.

First:

This sounds like it was written to be played in the clubs of Seattle. Like, you know how late-era Coldplay and U2 sounds made to be played in arenas? You can hear where a band sees themselves playing in their music, and that tells you a lot about who that band is. And in rock music, who you are _matters_

So who is mother love bone? More so than pearl jam, more so than stone temple pilots or nirvana, it sounds like a band writing songs to play out: intimately, meaningfully - that spirit rendered to tape. And there's something earthy and legitimate and warm and uncommonly rock and roll about that, especially in the production-driven world of the 10's.

Second:

It's easy to see 90's rock as obsessed almost exclusively with 70's hard rock - a back to basics reaction to the 80's flagrant nonsense. But one thread survived: glam rock. It comes out here and there, in British acts like Spacehog and Kula Shaker, in flashes on Tiny Music, Mellon Collie, and Without You I'm Nothing. This's a key touchstone: Andrew Wood moans and writhes and declares himself, like a sexy preacher, like a nightbound dreamer, like a tights-bound space commander.

There's a Guns 'n' Roses thread running though the entire album, the guitars funking and soaring, Wood wailing and mewling - but all the machismo's dropped, it's just that fuckin, ima do me spirit, that strutting confidence, that's left.

--

If I'd come across this in the 90's I would have played it to death. There's something in its sprawling ambition, its sincerity and effortless invention, its offkilter structures. It's that old stuff, that channeling of the rock and roll that gets +10 piercing to your soul.

There's a whole microtreatise here about how 90's music hooks into hearts, but mother jesus this thing is long already.

A grower, sneakily essential if you missed it the first time around 4.5/5

#2197 Prins Thomas - Principe Del Norte Remixed

Principe Del Norte left me a little cold - too ambient, too little emotional undercurrent.

This is better: the remixes (+ a few new originals) don't stray too far afield, but the extra textures, glitches, knobturns; the shifts in tone and color and heart; trackwise and albumwide; keep this background-compelling across its two-hour-twenty (!) minutes 3.5/5

#2196 Easy Star All-Stars - Dub Side of the Moon

The All-Stars surprised me with their take on Ok Computer. It was actually pretty ungimmicky, full of listenable versions that stood on their own and cast new light on the originals.

This's probably the album I'm likely to return to: it's a good spaceout listen, with some fun twists, running off into cloudy outros, making bigger swings on the big moments, and trying weirder takes on the weirder songs.

But there's nothing essential about it. It does not escape the gimmick trap.

Meeting the stoner-ready expansiveness of Dark Side doesn't require much of a stretch, and there's no real heart in the performances. Ok Computer's desperation and tightness made for a more challenging adaptation and a more rewarding listen - if you only hear one ESAS gone-reggae album, start there 3/5

#2195 Joyce Manor - Never Hungover Again

Mildly exciting pop-punk that sounds like a watered-down version of better bands like The Thermals, Cloud Nothings, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Japandoids. The problem's a lack of danger: even when the songs get fast there's no real sense of the wheels coming off. The chords change right on cue, the vocals strain uncharmingly and without no risk of breaking, the words lay out simple problems that'll probably turn out fine.

Not every punk band has to fling itself headlong into the river, but c'mon, at least give us a sweat 2.5/5

#2194 Starcadian - Sunset Blood

Themed like a soundtrack to a Stranger Things-esque 80's/Steven King/sci-fi movie, this album does got its moments of M83/Daftpunk/Vaporwave charm. The standout tracks are the propulsive, delightfully glitchy instrumentals (Sgt Tagowski, Pompey Pirate) that make you want to lightcycle off into the night.

Unfortunately, most of the album leans too hard on robot vocals, lazy disco tempos, and over-simple artificially-sweetened hooks -- it ends up sounding an awful lot like Random Access Memories (which came out six months previous).

Sunset Blood's uneven, and not as strong as Saturdaze, but there's enough hooks, swerves, surprises and robot-pop innovation to make it worth a listen 3.5/5

#2193 Car Seat Headrest - How to Leave Town

Impossibly bedroom. Those drum machine beats, those intimations of weakness.

But where your usual bedroom album is small, full of 3-chord 3-versers about narrow details and universal platitudes, this goes in the total opposite direction.

The songs are sprawling, endless, strange.

The sentiments are so personal they become universal (dig the verse about disillusionment with Brian Wilson), universal doubts made strangely small, wrapping yourself in a comforter against the hugeness of the universe.

Musically its a sloppy mess, lacking most of the hookiness of Teens of Denial, most of the rock power of Teens of Style, laying down scattershot synths and guitars as surging backdrop.

But lyrically, kid had it all along. For a certain band of smart, sensitive, quietly terrified, coping-with-coping-with-being music nerds, Will Toledo is fucking Jesus.

Listening to this, in retrospect, its incredible he progressed from this to Teens of Denial. What the fuck will he do next? 3.5/5

#2192 Drive-By Truckers - American Band

As the record spins up you hear this charming hybrid of Neil Young and Mountain Goats' John Darnielle. The vocal sound strikes you first, and onward to the musical headlong churn, to the combination of large-scale protest and small-scale personal desperation. There's real magic for a few tracks there, as the dawn breaks on America, helpless and hopeful and desolate and dying.

But then some energy's lost, some paucity of ideas is revealed, and the intimate edge falls off, and you're left chugging through another 8 or so lazy tracks, the lockstep choruses buttressed predictably by the verses' underwhelming observations, sounding like B-sides off of Neil Young's lamest swings at relevancy. The songs putt along at halfassed Americana tempos, reveal no new musical ideas, leaning on lyrics that aren't as profound as they hoped they'd be.

There's a spark here that didn't quite catch flame. Here's hoping the Truckers get angry, get weird, get a bug in 'em that inspires them to do something their heroes never would've 3/5

#2191 Trap Them - Crown Feral

That tunnel/cloud/portal on the cover says it all - Trap Them latest is mysterious, disorienting, furiously propulsive, out of control, turned around. There's surges and start-stops and unexpected moves, but the energy's more about hardcore immediacy than prog wankery. There's not so much weird time signatures as a twitchy willingness to stab timing in the neck for a bar or two -- no showy guitar histrionics, just relentless waves of frantic motion.

You get a slow burn to open, and after that you're down the eldritch drain, barely a pause from the ever-changing nightmare thrill-ride, never boring for one second, full of mayfly riffs and punishing changups (those drum bursts on Speak Nigh. motherfucker). A knotty, mysterious, headlong metal album, packed with subtle labyrinths to spend a century or two hurtling through 4/5

#2190 Meshuggah - The Violent Sleep of Reason

Brilliant, mysterious, insidiously simple, super-complex metal. A gigantic, hypnotic knot of guitars thundering at you, a slow-rising tide of destruction, the next hundred years in gristled timelapse. Don't let your ear chase those time signatures, just brace for the slow wash of the inevitable 4/5

#2189 Jimmy Reed - I'm Jimmy Reed

Points for doing it first-ish aside, this's mellow, lazily pleasant, ultimately unspectacular stuff. The mix's thin, the tempo's lazy, the delivery's not especially passionate, the performance's shaky, and there's no deviation from the blues blueprint whatsoever. For some people, that might all be a good thing - this is no-frills stuff in a no-frills genre, but it left me underwhelmed 2.5/5

#2188 Toots and the Maytals - Reggae Got Soul

An album packed with lilting, soulful, searching, light//dark pulse, pulling in a variety of adjacent Jamaican styles. There's desperation and light, the pain and the balm, Toots' voice coming on strong through it all. Rich, enjoyable stuff 3.5/5

#2187 Tycho - Epoch

A perfectly good album, following up on all of the strengths of Awake: those chiming guitars, that chugging pulse, the swirls of unknown electronic bliss. Perfect spaceout/work music.

But Tycho's fallen into the Ratatat/Spoon trap, their albums sound like they're supposed to sound, with only incremental nudges at the edges, lacking the crispness of that instinctive breakthrough expression. Ratatat's latest album ended up becoming my favorite of theirs, and this might take a similar grower-y path, but I can't help but wish Tycho hadn't leveled off so soon 3.5/5

#2186 Starcadian - Saturdaze

Always chasing the Feed Me's Big Adventure dragon - trying to find that sweet spot where someone uses all those superfat synth piles and chippy-chop skitter-drops to make something thrilling, without tipping over into stadium-rave fratiness.

This hits it better than most: an idea-packed, good-fun record with all the best of the 80's revival sound. The stage is set with Kavinsky highway danger, M83 romance, and more screaming guitars and wailing saxes and tom scales than you could possibly need. Throw in some glitchy tricks and some Daft Punk robot-disco - I'll be damned it all works. Despite all the borrowing of borrowing, it pulls it off. A surprisingly cohesive, damned exciting listen,  4/5

#2185 Bon Iver - 22, A Million

I was no big fan of the old Bon Iver - icy, magical, but too whiny, too one-note to hold my attention beyond a listen or two.

But this is different. At its best it's fractured, utterly fragile, crystalline, mysterious, magical.

--

I've spent spare cycles trying to pin down what the 10's sound is, going to be, and 2016 seems to be suggesting that it's the decade of production. I talked about it in my A Moon Shaped Pool review- after the 00's splintering of rock into cute/pretty/wistful/adventurous near-pop, a lot of the interesting music coming along doesn't present rock-traditional performance at all. Any plucking of strings and thrumming of throats is just raw material for something strange and broken - a reflection of our right-fucked, terrified, better-virtual-than-dead present, maybe.

--

Bon Iver's striking reinvention reminds me of Radiohead's latest, but also the autotune-and-worse fuckery of 808s/Fantasy/Yeezus era Kanye, with no small hints of Laurie Anderson's vocal fantasias. The first sound you hear is a held note, buzzing and clipping like a glitched video of a ringing bell, joined by another voice, at least as frail, delivering the least//most reassuring message imaginable through all that tenuousness: "it might be over soon".

It's a staggering way to open a record, and there is only the barest hint of levity - instead the uncertainty turns itself inside out, resolving into a desperate kind of hope. It might be over soon.

A few minutes later comes 715 - Creeks, a fucking landmark track. Just Vernon's voice, twice, dueling dual-autotuned, surging and dropping. Not a single instrument, not a single drum beat, just two minutes of cryptic writhing, chopping you off at the knees. A wildly adventurous, effortlessly effective piece of songwriting.

The album's a bit frontloaded, but it's short, and gets by on its momentum. As the songs grow longer on the second side, as the album's strange surging method becomes familiar, you settle into snow and let the stars burst, marveling at the time dilation of that infintite 34 minutes, over soon, ready to replay.

--

I fetishize, sometimes, the creation born via uncertain means, for alien purpose. But its a fine line between that imagined purpose and chaos, between strange purpose and no purpose at all? 22, A Million rides that line thrillingly close to the edge and lands on four wheels, a highwire wobble resolved, confidence restored, leaving you all the more thrilled for ever doubting it. Even all the cover art symbols, the ascii-fucked song titles, it all works as a strange, novel artifact. I couldn't have seen this coming from Bon Iver - this album gives me hope after all, the long way around 4.5/5

#2184 Baltimora - Living in the Background

Goofy, goodtime euro pop from those Tarzan Boy guys. The rest sounds more or less like you'd expect: very 80's guitars, very 80's synths, with just a touch of nightclub fantasia. Perfectly fine. Not my scene 3/5

#2183 Jack Rose - Raag Manifestos

Rolling, endless waves waves waves of acoustic guitar, surging like tide, crashing onto rocks, Strumming Music taken to biblical extremes. Something like licks, like riffs surface like half drowned dogs, intricate fingerwork swims in the shoals, but all is lost in seas of last measure's notes crashing into the last, crashing into the last, thick with tension and oilslick dread. Elemental, adventurous, brilliantly executed, nearly unbearable 3/5