#2757 UMFANG - Symbolic Use of Light

is a well-named album. Simple, with soft edges, little arpeggios and wobbles and shimmers repeat slightly offcenter, the click of sunrise through fenceposts, the shape of light through leaves. Even when you find and edge to hold onto (title track) it fidgets out of the corner of your eye, an unplanned navigation of your living room at 4am. Remarkably simple in tone and structure, but the closer you look, the more it vibrates. A pretty, intricate treasure for the experimental electronic music enthusiast 4/5

#2756 Karen Gwyer - Rembo

God I love song titles. These 4 pairs play like Kentucky Route Zero conversations, deadpanned koans like: 7. Did You Hear the Owls Last Night? 8. Yes, but I Didn't Know They Were Owls. Gwyer adapted her live show's methods to make this album, lending it more soul than your average set of wobbly techno thumpers 3.5/5

#2755 The Veils - Total Depravity

When they go for it, the Veils are worthy backing the most-harrowing Roadhouse scene, all simmering NiN menace and Tom Waits mythmaking - Axolotl and King of Chrome are highlights, rippling with electronic disturbances and howling unease.

But they don't hit those highs often enough, and the album's heavy with filler, or of intentional watering-down, some muddy blend of War on Drugs and late-era Black Keys. It's boring, stinking of too much money and too many producers 3/5

#2754 Laurel Halo - Dust

Skittering, wobbly, untuned. You get the sense of bottom-up experimental music: regular songs fucked with haphazardly until they don't sound like regular songs anymore, without any larger vision. Unpleasant to listen to and not interesting enough to justify it 2.5/5

#2753 Octo Octa - Where Are We Going?

Big, loping house that feels effortlessly right. Deep bass, deep grooves, flecked with little melodies and flourishes, almost too smooth. Lush, organic, a great albumlong listen (excepting Adrift: clumsy, and too long) 4/5

#2752 Eluvium - Shuffle Drones

A+ for concept, A- for listening. 

23 tracks, the titles of which, when listed in order, describe their intended method of listening, which is: out of order, and on infinite repeat.

Such a listen will have a single constant sketched through it, a tense, thin, sustained violin note, wobbling uncertain under Atlasian strain, upon which each of the 32-second tracks* adds some surge of strings, some gloaming horn wash, some parallel violin line, some stretched 3-note micromelody, rising into place, and then fading away in time for a clean handoff to the next. The rhythm is like the slow breathing of a lover drifting to sleep.

Each track causes its own resonance. Uncertainty, resignation, hope, ennui, like a daydream across a set of loosely connected memories, nostalgia slipping so easily into regret into determination.

I've put in three sessions**, each at least long enough to make it through the whole cycle twice, and they've felt more or less the same, but connected to different feelings. Always a little sad, but flecked with acceptance. Few albums deliver this well on concept and execution. A beautiful little record that fits right into this technological and emotional moment 4.5/5

* except for the last track, titled 'thank you' which adds an extra 11 seconds. discuss?

** not counting that time when I accidentally left it looping for 24+ hours, as discovered via a friend's spotify account while out of the house, a fact that amused me beyond explanation and which has ruined my lastfm scrobbling data forever

#2751 The Gories - I Know You Fine, But How You Doin'

Jack White called them the best garage rock band since the 60's and I absolutely believe that he believes that: it's hard to imagine they weren't an influence on the early White Stripes sound.

He might even be right, too; the Gories cut right to the sound's ugly, faltering heart. The playing's so loose, the instruments so fucking fuzzed out, all the vocals yelped and sneered out of tune and off-time. A glorious collision of blues, rockabily and punk, every song effortlessly dirty and utterly sincere 4/5

#2750 Ted Cazey - Walls EP

A lot of these tricks are pretty played out by now, but I dunno, they still kinda make me feel good. Fuzzy-neon synth lines, big bass throbs, droppy swoops and (crucially!) frail almost-human vocal snippets carve shortcuts to vulnerable acquiescence in this dumb decade and I'm past resisting 4/5

#2749 Total Control - Laughing at the System

Clattering, buzzing post-punk, marching into dystopian nowhere. There's scant little rage, no mirth at all, just a dozen lines about laughing, deadpanned over lethargic synth/guitar riffs with a tendency to bloom right as the song ends.

And that's the confounding thing about this one - it's not miserable. There's a quiet acceptance to Total Control's plod through the wasteland, giving the flashes of light and color the honor of the time it takes to pass them, but no more. A record for melting the highs and lows to a sleepy downward slide 3.5/5

#2748 Dela - Atmosphere Airlines Vol.1

An unspectacular collection of beats+raps, unimproved by concept-album interruptions from an uncharming flight attendant. It's a decent bit of background mixtape, but with no standout tracks and no real album flow, it's hard to recommend especially strongly 3/5

#2747 Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan - Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan

in which a band takes its awkward billing and turns it into an awkward album title. 

RfCK's RfCK doubles down on all the strings/horns/crooning of Rufusized without breaking through to anything soulful. Like, Rufus got you back to his place with some funky dance moves and you're in his bedroom and he's doing this, little bedroom sexy dance. For a while. And you're like, are we gonna fuck, or should I just head back to the club, or what 2.5/5

#2746 Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan - Rufusized

Khan's got a great voice, and there's some fun funk to be found here, but I'm not sure funk's supposed to be fun. Funk's dirty and desperate, less Parliament more Funkadelic. It's called funk, funk like a cheese or a cab has. Keep the fun out of funk, that's what I always say. And that's not even getting to the soppy MOR skippables. A couple good tracks, but nothing special 3/5

#2745 Ron Gallo - Heavy Meta

Heavy Meta kicks off with all the fuzz and yelp of a garage rock re-re-revival, but Gallo's not satisfied with being the next Ty Segall. The second side's long-ringing guitar meanderings reveal dreams of being the next Kurt Vile, too. In between, some Jack White-worthy swings of well-structured slow-motion take hold.

All good things, but this space is well-tilled in 2017; Gallo's gotta find another gear if he's going to get my attention. The best moments are the flashes of deadpan punk resignation - 'why do you have kids?' - 'all that I said was nothing' - and ironically, his best and most memorable sequence, closing out the album begins with 'I will be forgotten in two generations...' Maybe, maybe not 3.5/5

#2744 Lonnie Donegan - Donegan on Stage (Castle Records, 2006 CD Version)

The king of skiffle bangs out 15 rambling, shuffling, live rollicks on this CD edition of Donegan on Stage. It's textured, lively, energetic stuff, weaving American traditional threads through wide-eyed British enthusiasm - a fine listen and a standout footnote for the rock history enthusiast 3.5/5

#2743 Twisted Sister - Stay Hungry

In which Twisted Sister push the glam rock aside, shed their club-slumming past, and go full arena-metal. We're Not Gonna Take It // I Wanna Rock are statements of purpose in the simplest, vaguest, fist-pumpingest terms possible, and in between Alice Cooperey evil-lite and lo-cal-horror make appearances, going theatrical and marquis-topping bold. It's their biggest, goofiest album, one they deserve to get to make, but I miss the underdog grit 3/5

#2742 - Oddisee - The Odd Tape

A tidy blend of sampled and live - the instruments bristle with jazzy inflection, but they're all looped out in such patient patterns that it escapes the jazz-hip-hop trap. You can almost see the band, all brushy drums and breathy reeds, skipping in place at Oddisee's whim, riding every highlight into Squarepusher skitteriness, Daedelus dreamscapes, and coffeeshop-ready headbobbery (I say only half backhandedly) 3.5/5

#2741 J.K. and Co.- Suddenly One Summer

A swirling, beautiful little psychedelic record that slips through your fingers again and again. Innocent little songs drop trails of pretty moments, blissfully unaware of songwriting convention, a generosity of instruments and sounds spattered everywhere. The Zombies gone (late-era) Bon Iver, billowing strange 4/5

#2740 Twisted Sister - You Can't Stop Rock n Roll

Twisted Sister's second album's cleaner and catchier than their debut. Every song's a super-streamlined by-the-book rocker, riding its hook so steadily that you'll be banging along by the bridge. But that's about it - there's not one thing that will bite or surprise 3/5

#2739 Renaissance - Ashes are Burning

The second Annie Haslam Renaissance album's a little more balanced than Prologue - her performance is more collaborative, and the rest of the band's more assertive. It's very pretty, but that magic's still gone. You can feel a producer's hand behind every string section and over-the-top vocal harmony, and it all feels more designed than conjured 3/5

#2738 Renaissance - Prologue

Early Renaissance worked because it had balance: all those vocals and pianos and strings and guitars and bass and, fucking melotrons or whatever - it all worked together. Everything rotated, receded, evolved, making room for everything else, to make sure the space was richly filled. The band was never about any one person, and all of the vocals were there to serve the larger purpose.

When Annie Haslam came on board, that richness was flattened into backing band duty. Her voice is ever-present and high in the mix, and her performance is endlessly showy. Her vocals carve a ragged valley through the middle of what the band was doing; they're hot sauce in your scotch. There's stretches of the good stuff, but its mostly window dressing on a suddenly-soulless piece of ornate adult contemporary 2.5/5

#2737 Renaissance - Illusion

For me, this is peak Renaissance, as transportive as prog gets. All those dense pianos, all those vocal aaaahs, layers on layers. Really beautiful stuff. Love is All, man, I was out on a walk in the first Boston snow and that song just about took my knees out.

Full disclosure, I think this just hits at some animal emotional center from my formative days, drawing on some of the baroque quaintness of Mellon Collie's 2nd disc, with a dash of the Pumpkins' most mysteriously affecting guitarwork, those jazzy baselines rolling like Jimmy's drums somehow. AND it sounds like Genesis. Yeah, that's the highway to the center of my heart 4.5/5

#2736 Dr. Know - Plug-In Jesus And Burn Valu Pak

No wonder Slayer covered these guys on Undisputed Attitude. Dr. Know sprint through thrash-adjacent sloppy hardcore, vomiting lyrics as depraved as anything off of Reign in Blood. The sequencing is super weird on this hacky combo pack compilation, but it works - a bunch of tracks off their brilliant, borderline-painful '84 debut, a surprisingly-hooky dip through their '85 EP, before closing, inevitably, with Fist Fuck. Which is an even nastier song than its name suggests. It's about as punk as punk gets 4/5

#2735 Slayer - Undisputed Attitude

Slayer does a pretty good impression of a hardcore punk band, surprising nobody. Araya's vocals aren't quite right, but the rest of the band's as effortlessly breakneck as ever. There's not a lot of depth to it, but you ever need to get pumped up to fucking kill somebody, this'll do 3.5/5

#2734 Renaissance - Renaissance

I love prog. Proggy prog prog.

Those rippling piano runs, a Renaissance signature, are in their purest form here.

Prog gets knocked for intellectualizing rock with classical scaffolding, but the best classical was a gutpunch, the rock of its era, slicing to the emotional centers. And that's the side of quote//unquote classical you get here, that hypnosis by myriad notes, that jazzy bassline rambling, that surrender to sheer density, with those rock and roll backbeat shortcuts to what-you-need. Those ghostly vocals, reaching out for Radiohead songs still so long in the future

It's all very pretty, all strangely outside the hand of man, a more-mysterious version of everything good about early Genesis, which is to say very good indeed.

Jettison ye notions of coolness and you'll find something that people worked very hard on, trying to make the best songs ever, and coming surprisingly close. A swirling, euphoric masterpiece of weightlessly arty music 4.5/5

#2732 The Walkmen - Pussy Cats Startting the Walkmen

Why? Why remake this lazy album lazily, track by track, note by note? It probably wasn't very hard to make, so I guess maybe the question is, why not? I guess you got me there.

Harry Nilsson's original Pussy Cats failed to improve on any of the songs it covered, but at least he gave them his own spin. The Walkmen just recreate Nilsson's spin precisely - even recreating seemingly spontaneous moments like the singalongs on Loop De Loop and the namedrops on Rock Around the Clock. It's not that it's an altogether bad listen, exactly, but it's a confoundingly pointless creation I can't find any reason to revisit, other than out of morbid curiosity 2.5/5

#2731 Harry Nilsson - Pussy Cats

Why? I guess because Nilsson and John Lennon needed a project, so they banged out a bunch of songs, mostly covers. None of its essential, none of the covers improve greatly on the originals, except for the Dylan song which was improved by replacing Bob Dylan.

The second side's the only one worth hearing, the mournful Save the Last Dance for Me // Black Sails pair's interweaved with the rollicking Loop De Loop // Rock Around the Clock set. It's a dizzying bit of sequencing that's actually a lot of fun. But mostly, Pussy Cats feels lazy; it's nothing you'd give a second listen if it wasn't for the famous names on it 3/5

#2730 Twisted Sister - Under the Blade

Glam rock was more or less dead by 1982, but Twisted Sister'd been doing it too damn long to change horses. Their debut's a fearless, fabulous hard-rock listen, all anthemic fistpumpers packed with screaming guitars and sneering vocals. The production's a little flat, and the rhythm section's a little stiff, but that's kinda just the era for you. Its enough to make you wish they'd made it big sooner 3.5/5

#2729 King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Polygondwanaland

KGLW continue their run as best psychedelic band going, putting out their 4th (!) album of the year (the second great one). If they're trying to outrun the expiration on some kind of deal with the devil, they're getting their souls' worth.

Polygondwanaland's sound matches its title, it's a meandering, bewildering, some hybrid of their Microtonal strangeness and Murder of the Universe's existential post-body horror, with a sinister synth serpent lurking in the reeds. A few of these riffs and rhythms are starting to sound familiar, but it feels like a callback, another thread running through some shapeshifting tapestry that feels like it'll go on forever.

People are slowly catching on. Let's reconvene in 20 years and check in on this prediction: these guys are going to be _the cult rock band of the 10's 4/5

#2728 Alice Cooper - Welcome to My Nightmare

Cooper's back in concept album mode for his first proper solo outing, putting out his creepiest set yet. He really does have a knack for offcenter structures, they do more to put you on your back foot than all the bugs and necrophelia stuff. It's goofy (Vincent Price!) and some of the pacing drags, especially towards the end, but it's as listenable as the best of his stuff, sneaking toetaps and shivers in through the back door 3.5/5

#2727 Alice Cooper - Billion Dollar Babies

After School's Out, Cooper flipped from sinister everyman to sinister overlord, a ringleader of a distopian creepshow of larger scale and scope, tracing a Whosian arc from disaffected youth to firebreathing rabblerouser. The riffs are bigger and hookier, the vocals bolder and glammier, but you'll miss the understated uncanniness and savvy structure of School's Out - ending on a shlocky shoulda-been B-side like I Love the Dead's just sloppy 3.5/5

#2726 Alice Cooper - School's Out

Songs like No More Mr. Nice Guy and School's Out make it easy to dismiss Cooper's stuff as dopey pop. But his albums are a lot more artful than you might expect. School's Out gets by on strange structures, whether its songs that zig where you expect them to zag, or an overall album structure that subverts the pacing you're expecting. There's no overt horror elements to speak of, but you're still left feeling like something uncanny's happened, as the whole album kind of slips through your fingers. An intriguing, mysterious little maze of hooks and asides that's a lot more subtle than the title track sets you up to expect 4/5

#2725 Leon Russell - Leon Russell

A rollicking set of southern yowlers, stewing some combination of Joe Cocker's desperation, Dr. John's piano madness, and the Stones' honkytonk revival. Potent! But Russel's debut never really finds any one thing it does better than anyone else, never puts its stamp on the sound. Solid but unspectacular 3.5/5

#2724 Joe Cocker - With A Little Help From My Friends

Man I love that album cover, Cocker all reared up, belting out a note // getting ready to launch into another, looking out of frame, maybe back at his band, maybe up to His Friends. It's got a live energy that matches what's on the record.

Cocker can sing, hot goddamn, and his band right rips, all those soaring gospel backings and organs take it higher and higher. Every song's an experience (Dylan song excepted, as usual), the whole album leaving you grinning and spent 4/5

#2723 VA - Agrim Agadez

So much good listening falls under unfamiliar (but interesting) and familiar (but pleasant).

Ten people // ten guitars // ten field recordings from Niger. Nary a word of English, only the barest flirtations with anything Western, except those guitars: strummed, plucked, slammed electric, over shuffling, circular beats - unfamiliar but intimate, welcoming, every string tied to a tincan. There's sincerity and humanity to spare, and you're invited to use your brain as much as you see fit, to ruminate on guitars and the people behind them, or to just slip into the web of rhythm 4/5

#2722 OCS (Thee Oh Sees) - Memory of a Cut Off Head

Thee Oh Sees have a massacre of frustrating albums in their wake (especially Floating Coffin and Putrifiers II) that start strong and unravel into wistful meandering. After the relentless guitarmageddon of Orc, it's inevitable the pendulum would swing back: here's a whole record of wandering freak-folk psychedelia.

That sound's never been their strongest suit, but it at least works better as an albumlong commitment. Memory of a Cut Off Head's a baroque, morbid simmerer, riding slow waves of energy, swirling around a drain of bloody anxiety. It's unique, strange, interesting, occaisionally beautiful - but detached, and never especially enjoyable 3/5

#2721 The Blasters - American Music

Props to The Blasters, who tell you what they're gonna do and then do it. American Music. Good old rockabilly rock and roll, no mixer, no garnish, no chaser.

Big clean guitars and boogie woogie bass lay down the foundation, and other than a wildly-better-than-average drummer, not a single sound or lyric betrays this as coming from 1980. Fans of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Elvis, and (especially!) Gene Vincent will find a lot to like - for better or worse, The Blasters dig right into the sound and don't swerve one lick 3.5/5

#2720 D.O.P. - Musicians of the Mind

Perfectly fine Orby, housey thumpers, but nothing special. A lot of the endlessly-repeated vocal samples ("Let's just party!", "Get out on this dancefloor!", "Oh yeah!") haven't aged well 3/5

#2719 Air France - No Way Down

Air France never put out a proper album, but their last EP's an enjoyable, halcyon little record that basks in the overlap new-era Avalanches' sunny swerving and M83's synthy nostalgia. A mellow listen with just enough details to keep your brain busy 3.5/5

#2718 Hiroshi Yoshimura - Music for Nine Postcards

barely-wobbling rhodes melodies twinkle and loop, while glacial drones shift underneath. deeply eno-inspired ambient music, peaceful, but with a tinge of dissonance that keeps them from being altogether calming. like watching snow fall slowly on a silent street, with the faint awareness that it might bring down a power line 3.5/5

#2717 DJ Nu-Mark - Broken Sunlight

Broken Sunlight's the best of both worlds, a producer record and a DJ mix: sweeping across the hip hop spectrum and off the edges, it's an effortless, sprawling front-to-back listen. The first half's a romp through of laid-back rhymes, groovesome bangers, and soulful desperation, all the scratches and production tricks lurking in supporting roles.

But then Nu-Mark gives you an encore, packing the last 5 tracks with squirrely, adventurous whole-cloth songmaking. He could've done it all along, but he's savvy enough to know when the time's right. Dude's a _producer and a _DJ: he makes the songs and he knows how to use them 4/5

#2716 Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds - Who Built the Moon?

If Liam Gallagher's latest was another lap around the Morning Glory memorial speedway, Noel's turn driving the Oasis time machine pulls it off the track and into a ramp; a few spins into a slow motion slide.

It's telling that Noel attached a band name to his project - the album's got muscle and power, reaching for something bigger than its infamous frontman. A swirling, slinky, buzzy odyssey flows out, with shades of Primal Scream's latent dancability, and a touch of (god forbid!) late-era Blur.

The droning structures descend into watch-checking repetitions, but it's a pleasant kind of boring, fully filling your headspace, taking your brain for a solid little vacation 4/5

#2715 Liam Gallagher - As You Were

The Gallagher brothers release albums within months of eachother, because of course they do. Their two albums act like alternative futures, each taking place a year after What's the Story Morning Glory. In Liam's version, the band goes back to the well, spinning out the same kind of sunny, swaying melodies. Completely pleasant, but sounding like 15 totally solid Oasis B-sides, duly relegated 3/5

#2714 Cut Chemist - The Audience's Listening

The Jurassic 5 DJ makes his solo debut, and his past collaborations with DJ Shadow show through - there's a similar sense of atmosphere and disorientation, it's that same kinda wander through a garden of samples and snippets. Grooves roll in, turntablist flourishes catch the eye; its a rocksolid, well-paced listen that feels like it was worked on very very hard. Which is to say, it hits the head more than the heart, more toetapping than headrolling, never quite sounding like something more meaningful than samples, very well arranged.

Still, for fans of instrumental hiphop, its a masterclass worth studying, a fun puzzle to rustle through the pieces of 4/5

#2713 Paul Cut - Basement Jam

The chopped, Jungle Boogie-sampling opening track's good fun, but it's a red herring. The rest of this EP's more sedate, all groovsome house; low-key, but dancable. It's locked into a deeper part of your backbone, a foundation of warm organs, laced with lively bass, and finished with a wash of old-school synth sweeps. Cut's onto something - this feels like a stepping stone to a breakthrough 3.5/5

#2712 Moebius and Plank - Rastakraut Pasta

There's this bit in Bob's Burgers where Bob gets into a wine-identifying showdown. The mystery wine turns out to be the spit bucket wine. It's a pretty thin joke to write an entire episode backwards to get to.

This says on the tin that it's Reggae-infused Krautrock, but the Reggae's slowdubbed into oblivion, and the rest is otherwise unspectacular, with shades of Super 16 laziness. The combination's double-dull too-close clashing; xanax and vodka, fries and curly fries, tan and taupe 2.5/5

#2711 Tubelord - Our First American Friends

Man, I don't know if all these bands were talking to eachother or what, but there was a great scene of bursting, blistering rock music pouring out of the UK circa 2009. The drums always a fraction of a beat ahead, guitars blasting out overcomplex riffs, the vocals yelping at the desperation of keeping up with the song //

like, life, man.

Good fun, packed with halting start-stops, easier listening than Dananananakroyd, trading some of their raw power for precision, for better or worse: there's no Some Dresses to be found, but it's a Japandroids-level smooth-rolling rider that you can put on and let your toe go to town on 4/5

#2710 Sky Larkin - The Golden Spike

Great, toetapping indie, ready to lean into really bringing the energy on that sweet Dananananakroyd // Campesinos // Tubelord level. 2009 really was a hell of a year for that UK burstrock scene. The chugging and chiming's infectious --- and let me call out the best thing about this record.

Some time around song 8 I click over to the spotify app and I skim that playlist and I'm like, man! 17 songs! I'm already getting kinda restless! And this is a case for not knowing when the end is coming when it comes to temporal media.

Because what the album actually does is end at track 12 (a totally standard ending pace!), rolling out on a glorious climax of proggy organ riffs, burning itself out with aplomb. Album over. Thank you for coming. What a show.

And 10 seconds of silence.

And an encore.

Untitled rolls up slowly, and Handsome slowly gears back in, subclimaxing with these great guitars that, again, would make Steve Hackett blush. And then a couple extra great little ditties, and by the time Sum Assault rides out you're euphoric.

As 17 songs it would feel stretched, overstuffed. But in the listening its just like a great rock show -- you're left wanting a little more and then you get a bit too much, and you walk out feeling dazed and satisfied.

This shit matters. It's so much better than it would've been without that break in pacing. Album flow matters. Audience experience matters because experience matters. Why is this so fucking underappreciated? Fuck, so much better than it has to be. I feel like I want to go back to this again and again, because the music is good, but because it's been laid out for listening, god fucking forbid 4/5

#2709 Andy Fairly - Fishfood vs Birth of Sharon

Clattering horseshit. Andy squeals and roars his deepest, shittiest thoughts over repetitive post-punk sheetmetal. It's impossible to escape how lazy this sounds. It's daring only in that it doesn't bother, where others rightly would have. Talking Heads without the pretentiousness. Fuck this, and fuck Talking Heads while we're on the subject 2/5

#2708 Marika Hackman - I'm Not Your Man

Is it just me, or are women the only ones making good 90's revival rock lately? There's a great strain of buzzing, bristling, charged guitar buzz, backed with similarly-energized sentiment, seething, maybe, against how little has changed, he brushed broadly.

Marika in specific, does not fuck around. And lumping her in with revival, or with anything, seems crass. There's thorns on every song, not a single chorus content to repeat itself without some barb tearing on the way out. It's small the way a knife is - narrow, sharp, incisive. The pacing lags, the pinpricks growing dull by the end, but there's something here 3.5/5

#2707 Woods - City Sun Eater In The River Of Light

Woods' have a groove, a layered sound that's worth riding along to. It's a shame one of those layers is Jeremy Earl's voice; still grating after all these years. There's a real sense of melody and atmosphere here, a clipping sense of rhythm, some burbling economy of mystery, but man that voice is pretty rough 3.5/5

#2706 The Juju Exchange - Exchange

Donnie Trumpet brings his own brand of funky, silky jazz-inflected groovery. It's all well-planned, the Steely Dan of jazz, shades of Hancock, but squirrely enough to feel alive, with unexpected instruments and tones wandering in from here and there, cloaked in reverb, tempos pulsing, and that too-sweet trumpet tone painting too-sweet melodies over top. It toes the line of overproduced, but there's some tap into something real that keeps it kicking. A chill listen for a laid back Summer, if we ever get another one 4/5

#2705 The Deep Freeze Mice - Hang on Constance, Let Me Hear the News

Guardian's got a list of obscure albums, most of which you haven't heard for a reason. But the main exception so far's this one: an often-gorgeous blend of art-rock, new-wave, and experimental nonsense. The bass insists the songs move forward, all those washes of sound keeping the heading, herding all those muttering vocals, erratic tempos and splattered samples into pleasure centers.

Check out Transparent Evil Plays for the microcosm, a shambling mess that breaks into start-stop nothingness before an enchanting bridge belies the wankery that came before and after. Ask Zappa - the secret to getting away with meandering nothingness is to prove you _could_ deliver satisfaction every time, you're just rationing it in the name of the bigger picture. There's a bit of that here - you sense genius, and sign up for whatever combination of bullshit and beauty it delivers 4/5

#2704 Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - The Tourist

Wolf Parade, Arcade Fire, now Clap Your Hands - there's not a lot of new bands making propulsive, pretty clippyclop indie, but some of the old guard's still kicking.

This's probably CYHSY's best front-to-back album, even if it lacks some of the bracing quirks of their early stuff (those opening tracks!). And Alec's nasal whine is still Corgan-tier alienating, but this is a shimmering, pretty, forward-tilted, cloud-breaking little slice of the last generation, full of overblown touches and hooky flourishes. This's the kind of quietly adventurous stuff we got spoiled on in the 00's, be thankful for these vestiges 4/5

#2703 DJ Seinfeld - Time Spent Away From U

Hazy, sentimental, house, all blurry edges and bloomed colors. DJ Seinfeld's sound isn't as synthwave-endebted as the name suggests: the tones are detuned but listenable, with minimum interest in kitsch, taking you on a trip just this side of a good time, riding a half-memory of a moment that seemed very important a long time ago 3.5/5

#2702 Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass - Whipped Cream & Other Delights

Bubbly little Latin ditties, the kind of thing you might find in cowboy-movie Mexico, or backing a Tarantino / Soderbergh mini-montage. It's enjoyable, but man, this is the epitome of melody, written-and-performed, polished squeaky clean until it sounds like library music. There's no vestige of jazz left, no soul left to lose. What's cowboy music good for without that friction? 3/5

#2701 Marilyn Manson - Heaven Upside Down

I reckon Manson's backed off trying to shock anyone anymore. Could he at this point? Would it win any new fans? What would be the utility? He's just kicking out the kind of noisy, distantly-blues-related noise that he's into, cranking riffs through an Albini-puncher, an Atticus-fuzzer, raging against Christianity in terms we're mostly numbed to.

I'm actually pretty into the racket, but it's hard to escape the staleness of the shtick. Actual song titles:
 - KILL4ME
 - JE$u$ CRI$I$
 - WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE
 - SAY10

SAY10. SAY TEN. SAYTEN. SATAN. GET IT. Actual repeated lines from that song include "I say God. And you say Say Ten" and "Cocaine and Abel...". Ok, ok we all got shit doodled in the margins of sprial notebooks. This is totally passable late-industrial polished-not-polished racket, but lyrically it feels phoned in, bordering on self-parody. My decade-long quest to figure out if Manson is a talented provocateur or a total fucking hack continues 3.5/5

#2700 Frank Zappa - Apostrophe

Hot Rats remains my favorite Zappa Album - the purest expression of his mad, jazzy jamming and face-melting guitarwork, without all the goofy thematic trappings. Plenty of goofy trappings here: tales of husky piss, pancake restaurants, and psychedelic charlatans. But in between and underneath, goddamn them grooves. When all the muttering nonsense fades out, good god there's a good band back there making some really insane, really tight racket that will loosen your whole neck and shoulders right on up.

And heck, I admit it, even some of the goofiness won me over

"(this is a dog talking here)"

4/5

#2699 Wolf Parade - Cry Cry Cry

Apologies to the Queen Mary was one of my top 10 albums of the 00's, and Expo '86 is an underappreciated masterpiece. So don't take it too backhanded when I say this is the 3rd best album Wolf Parade's made; it's one of the best indie rock albums in years, whatever's that's worth, a reminder that heartfelt, yelping, borderline-dancable rock still has a pulse.

--

When Lazarus Online lays out its staggeringly straightforward tale of withering hope, you brace yourself for some old testament Modest Mousery. And there's flashes of desperation, bouyed by ragged horn flashes - but for the most part the middle section is a little bloodless, reading from the book of indie stompalong repetition, Wolf Parade gone Spoon. The best thing about Apologies was the way it felt like the wheels could come off at any moment, Spencer Krug hammering down the patches on a ship going down and racing at the jetty at a hundred knots. I miss those stakes, this feels polished for a vigorous festival heeltapping.

But by the 3rd act album highlight Who Are Ya comes along, and its all stuttering delivery and everything coming apart and start stops and you screaming in your head at the rain on a desolate night, and you get that flash of hope.

Not to obsess, but one of the best things about Apologies was its pacing. I challenge you to name a set of 3 second-side songs as good as tracks tracks 7-9 on that album. Nobody saves that kind of fire for their second salvo. Which is to say: After Who Are Ya, the last two tracks make a play for that kind of backloading boldness, as Wolf Parade lean on buzzy synths to raise the stakes and bring frission.

--

It's not fair to expect the kind of life-or-death desperation from a band this deep into its career. That this is the least bit interesting is more than most bands can expect 12 years on. And this has real spark.

It all feels a bit planned, a bit written, a bit knowing about what people will groove to at shows between Apologies' underground hits, but man, 4 honest to god good songs, plus totally servicable stompalongs in between? I'll take it in 2017 4/5

#2698 Pharoah Sanders - Tauhid

Not an easy listen. Free jazz packed with stretches of patient rumbling and slashes of squawking horns, with sections that are harrowing, endless, or both. Anxious and aimless.

But it gets there, making the case for music that is larger and stranger than human aims. Slowly all that meandering and thrashing takes shape, like some ritual in half-light that summoning melodies and beauty, arriving at some elemental and unknowable sound guided by unfamiliar contours. Too meaningful to be improvised, too alien to be composed, shocking that it even exists. It's transportive, if you're willing to be patient, to earn appreciation 4/5

#2697 Edgar Jones - Soothing Music for Stray Cats

A confounding, confusing set of songs out of line with linear time. Leading off with outright jazz, dipping into ghostly doo-wop, New Orleans dirges, R&B revenants, wax cylinder blues. None of the songs _are_ any of these styles exactly. It's all pale reflections, all songs _about_ styles, without any clear vision of their own, and I can't decide if its brilliant or a mess or both, landing somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle that 50's-nicking Zappa, graveyard-wandering Waits, and Play-era Moby adumbrate. A haunted hedgemaze of a record; I don't think I liked it, but bumping around in it was a fun little confoundance.

Definitely recommended to anyone looking for anything different, at least 3.5/5

#2696 Land of Talk - Applause Cheer Boo Hiss

Buzzy, bold, anxious, busy indie, led by Elizabeth Powell's swelling desperation, restless tempos tracking and pushing every song into new corners. Piles of guitars rise to shoegazey depths, waves upon waves, exhausting and thrilling as a ride gone wrong 3.5/5

#2695 Daniele Luppi - Milano

Sounds more like a Parquet Courts album with guest vocals by Karen O, so light is Luppi's touch.

But so what? This would be a fucking incredible Parquet Court album, packed with unexpected chimes and horns and flourishes, slathered in the atmosphere of retro Italian decadence, plus Karen O! An uneasy, overdrunk joy soaks into every measure, a curious, compelling little collision 4/5

#2694 Crass - The Feeding of the Five Thousand

Do They Owe Us a Living? is one of the greatest punk songs of all time. It's as angry and hooky and blunt and recklessly tight as anything out there, branding you with its message in a minute twenty.

And this is one of the great art punk albums, end to end. Harrowing, fearless, slashed with flashes of noise and screed, dropping to seconds of silence in the flash of an A-bomb, but packed with hooky moments and thrilling production. It's as unflinchingly furious and nasty as a totally enjoyable album can be. An unequivocal, bracing classic 4.5/5

#2693 The Jam - In the City

Arguably better than the more polished (great!) All Mod Cons and (also great!) Sound Affects. There's nothing to compete with Tube Station / That's Entertainment, and the pacing drags by comparison, and it's a little hook light, and..

So not as good, but The Jam sound rough, harried, hungry - its more true to the frustration at the heart of their sound, a more-perfect bridge between their punk / retro contradictions, and more exciting in its own way 4/5

#2692 DJ Python - Dulce Compañia

Icy, shimmering ambient / house, sliding into space slowly, finding wormhole shortcuts between Latin offbeats. Spacy, peaceful, but laced with tension, a trip just on the line of too much 3.5/5

#2691 Errorsmith - Superlative Fatigue

Too much human music. We've been at this for what, coming up on 40 years? And electronic music mostly still sounds grasping and immature. Maybe I'm applying rockist impulses where they don't belong, but I feel like I've got to do all the heavy lifting to appreciate some of this shit.

Behond Errorsmith showing off his million-wave additive synthesizer, or something. The first couple tracks are wanky human-not-human showoff reels. When it turns into actual music, sure, those're pretty rich tones, and they skitter like a skitterer do, but it feels like a demo reel more than anything worth hearing in its own right, a bunch of sounds in search of structure, melody, or movement 2.5/5

#2690 Spirit Adrift - Curse of Conception

A doom metal album that can't help but indulge in big soaring 80's guitar operatics.

Or maybe a 80's revival band walking resolutely into swampy suicide.

Out of step in two utterly inconsistent ways, changing tempos and tones constantly and subtly, hopeless and hopeful all at once. A conundrum, a weird piece of metal pieced together by aliens that don't understand human emotions, maybe better for it 3.5/5

#2689 The Rezillos - Can't Stand the Rezillos

Loose-as-fuck newwave/punk, dipping into the goofy scifi tip before just about anyone, with shades of psychobilly rollick creeping in. They sound like they're actually having a good time, very uncool in '78 3.5/5

#2688 Eater - The Album

Covers in punk.  A whole thing there. If you're gonna do it, at least fuck it up.

Eater drags Sweet Jane over the coals, pumping adrenaline into its wistful regret; puts manic uncoolness in the horny desperation of Queen Bitch; and shit, they just just straight knock 3 years off of I'm Eighteen and leave it feeling freshly reckless. The originals follow suit, throbbing along at triplespeed. Eater doesn't have time. They're a band of the moment -- what's punk but a fuckyou to the past and future anyway 4/5

#2687 Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile - Lotta Sea Lice

When you look at Barnett and Vile, its obvious that they should work together and obvious that it probably wasn't going to quite... work. At least not at first.

Barnett's an incredible singer and lyricist who brings enough guitar punch to save her from singer-songwriter doldrums. But she needs that intimacy and presence, she's not one to carry a song with her guitar work (Depreston excepted).

Vile's a meandering mumblepuss, and again, a just-ok guitar player, chopswise. But he gets by on feel, just about the best out there when it comes to weaving atmosphere and stretching space and time with some magical sense of patience and tone.

Which is to say, here's two artists who aren't wizards musically, but who have their own magical thing going that makes them special, and the kind of thing that requires a real commitment to vision. Can that commitment survive collaboration?


Nah. Mostly not. The unsurprisingly front-sequenced Over Everything is the one exception - god its gorgeous, that stretched-out Vile pacing, Barnett meandering over top, and their own special guitar tones dancing over top.

But mostly it's just a bit Travelling Wilburys -- blunted, Courtney's sense of personal relation undercut by Kurt's involvement, with no sense that the songs can bear to wait for his sense of timing to unfold.

It's telling that the two other songs that work are On Script, where Barnett gets full vocal duties, and the guitars surge and pile and sweep away, and the seemingly Barnett-solo Peepin' Tom. The songs where the two sing together just don't land, sapping that sense of the actual.

Yet.

I can see it. These are two pointy objects that don't mesh together naturally. But I can see it working, and I hope they stick with it. This feels slapdash. They both need to bow to eachothers' quirks -- let Courtney sing, let the songs run long, and the whole thing could be a sprawling gorgeous mess. I'd die for an album with 4 ten-minute songs, where her words push and give way to spiraling guitar interplay into forever -- that'd be an album that played to their strengths. This is not that album, yet 3.5/5

#2686 Larry Williams - Here's Larry Williams

It's easy to forget how rock and roll ran its entire course around 55'-57' and disappeared for at least as long.  In retrospect, rock and roll is here to stay / will never die / is only just now dying in 2017. Hah! Hah hah!

By 1957 Larry Williams put out his biggest hit, Short Fat Fanny. It's good fun, but already as played out and derivative as imaginable. Nicking longtime friend Little Richard's delivery, the big dumb sax of a dozen songs, and altogether rolling around in rememberthat. Doubt it? It's right on the sleeve, the lyrics dropping references to Blueberry Hill, Long Tall Sally, Heartbeak Hotel, Tutti Frutti, Hound Dog, Blue Suede Shoes, Jim Dandy, and a little bit of gettin' Fever. It's as overtly postmodern a song as the era's got to offer...57! It's kinda brilliant that roundabout way.

But Williams is riding the last wave in, singing about a brand new dance, and great balls of fire, flogging the innuendo that lead us to rock with only the barest concession the the second entendre. Hell, the serpent eats itself mid-collection: he even calls back to his own Bony Moronie on another song.

It's all good rockin stuff, but man, no wonder people thought rock was over and done as the 50's came to a close - this's a feast of freshly rotten nostalgia 3/5

#2685 Satoshi-Makoto - CZ5000 Sounds Sequences

Listen here!

All made on one synth, blahbitty meow.

The result's perfectly pleasant, but familiar: shades of Eno, Gas, Selected Ambient Works, and general nice-tone chinscratchery. There's a juicy, pastel glow to the sounds, but they're in an awkward middle ground between ambient and melodic. There's a great album in this sound, but this isn't it 3/5

#2684 Yaeji - Yaeji

Cool-warm vocals, a shimmering sense of hipness, glowing synth tones -- all worth something. But this feels detached, clinical even in its grasps at connection. Human music 3/5

#2683 Future and Young Thug - Super Slimey

as I said to Aaron:

man, I don't like this, and I feel like its the same underlying thing that makes me not like a lot of modern hip-hop. its not that i hate autotune, maybe I just dont like the way its done here? And the production seems suitable for being really stoned to, but definitely doesn't get me excited. what am i missing?

2.5/5

#2682 Midnight Oil - Deisel and Dust

Much ballyhooed, downright anointed in the Australian press - maybe for its unflinching look at the blood on the hands of the white man. Noble, but wrapped around a bunch of clunky, repetitive songs, leaning hard on anthemic choruses, cloying synths, and gated snares to make totally anonymous pop music with a thin shell of Big Message 2.5/5

#2681 Horace Silver - Song for My Father

I know nothing about jazz.

Sometimes I start to capitalize the word, like, Jazz, like its a title or a month - such is my intimidation.

There's often more structure than I like: too many of those synchronized lines that undercut the sense of liveness, too much theme-solo-solo-solo-theme. But the atmosphere is varied and inventive, full of exotic little angles, and the super hot tunes (Natives are Restless, Kicker) are as fire as the super slinky tunes (Lonely Woman) are ice, with sprightly, touch-packed piano throughout 4/5

#2680 Steel Pulse - Handsworth Revolution

I know nothing about Reggae, but this sounds totally archetypical - that simmering blend of anger and comfort, completely aware of the problems of the world, decrying them and lifting past them on lilting pulses. Calm but engaged, all tragically familiar and retroactively hopeless in 2017 3.5/5

#2679 A. Savage - Thawing Dawn

Savage ditches the rest of Parquet Courts, goes small and dusty and simple, still sounds like Pavement. It's intimate though, trading searing and seething for simple vocal lines and a resigned wit that could share a tea with Courtney Barnett, no sentiment without its crook and barb but set before you so plainly - it's disarming. Feels like a balm, somehow 3.5/5

#2678 Yves Tumor - Serpent Music

Something dark and primal lurks in this music, some sin or victimization long buried. Pure production-era sounds burble up in vague waves and blistering rushes, while song titles nod to serpents, devotion, creation, perdition, demons, spirits. A harrowing freefall into inkblots and tealeaves, no omen promising or clear, a moonless ride into some swallowing unknown 3.5/5

#2677 Knox Fortune - Paradise

Bonus points for blurring lines - this's some weird piece of bedroom production, wobbled psych-pop, shimmering blue-eyed R&B, and/or..? There's flashes of beauty and novelty, but its mostly too whinny, unfocused, and detuned to make any impact 3/5

#2676 The Damned - Music for Pleasure

The Damned are a top 10 punk band of all time for me, so what happened with this dud, landing right between two classics? It somehow finds the worst of punk fuckitism, sounding poorly recorded and almost completely hookless, without finding any particular spark in the impulsiveness.

___f__l__a__t___ in every way possible, a horrible mix blunting the few high points. Totally skippable -- but strangely fascinating as a study of failure 2.5/5

#2675 Bad Sports - Kings of the Weekend

Perfectly ok chuggy Ramonsian punk revival with one gear, no surprises, and little to differentiate it from a dozen similar bands. Bonus points, though, for songs about girls with the names of my last two exes, plus a song named after my birthday - that's about the weirdest lineup since Why? muttered about Navy Blue Hoodies and Khakis (as was the style that year) (dox'd) 3/5

#2674 Beck - Colors

After 3 albums of totally interchangable, candy-shell whatevers (Guerro/Info/Guilt), Morning Phase was a welcome slice of pretty. But even then, it wasn't _that far from Mutations / Sea Change - certainly nothing to put him back in that run of constant reinvention that was Mellow/Odelay/Mutations/Midnite.

But there was ample cause for hope heading into this new one! 10 minute versions of Defriended and I Won't Be Long, not to mention a fucking _killer 20-minute Phillip Glass tribute, showed that Beck had still the ambition and the talent to make something memorable.

And then the lead singles! Wow and Dreams were full of promise, pop songs bent beyond the familiar.

But what we got was basically the 4th entry in his forgettable-era catalog. Outside of those two singles, only the opening title track brings any of the wobbly invention.

Everything else feels like it could have come out of one of those so-hot-now neural network projects.

Someone Taught an AI to Make Beck Songs and the Results Will Blow Your Mind.

I mean, they're catchy, but in a late-era Weezer kinda way, no sense that Beck means a lick of it, and no sense that he's doing anything artfully from the outside. They're just pop songs, and unconvincing ones. They're packed with lines about how I'm So Free now, without sounding the least bit free; about my Seventh Heaven, without the barest hint of happiness; staying Up All Night, but maybe because you had a cup of coffee too late in your workday.

A deeply disappointing album. Beck can make good songs, he just doesn't seem to have the nerve to make an album's worth anymore. Another nail in the coffin of his legacy 3/5

#2673 Stiv Bators - Disconnected

Debut album from the Dead Boys boy, his strained whining weaving its way through some perfectly pretty, haunted classic rock guitar riffs. A desperate romanticism and real sense of shimmering beauty make this worth a listen 3.5/5

#2672 The Saints - (I'm) Stranded

This's superficially another pile of Ramones-gobbling also-ran songs, but it's somehow more. The production's rough and ferocious, the vocals just slightly Aussie-twanged, and those guitars - mostly those guitars, those leads so goddamn sweet.

And even when they slow down they do it right, even when they sound a little familiar. Messin' with the Kid is basically Knockin on Heavens Door, but with this kinda proto Beta Band chug and soaring bass that takes it to a whole 'nother hypnotic level. And again, goddamn those guitars. Can't stop listening. A rocksolid piece of classic rock / punk 4/5

#2671 Adolescents - Adolescents

Adolescents are a band outrunning themselves - relentless, flustering pacing runs through the whole album. Even when they slow down into metal chug the spitting energy just fills the space with more and more hits and strums and bristling nervousness. This is anxious music, this is music that doesn't turn off, that sluffs off sneers by the dozens, turning at least half its punk anger inward. Impossibly tight, effortlessly hooky, incredibly listenable - especially considering how fast it all pours out. Possible best West Coast punk album of the 80's 4.5/5

#2670 Blue Hawaii - Tenderness

I dig those soft, round synth sounds, that ricepaper production - there's a crisp lightness to its housey disco bounce. But there's not enough to it to sustain an album - the vocals get cloying by the end, the whole sound's too flatly sweet to hold your attention 3/5

#2669 King Krule - The Ooz

I've talked about the production era - as contrast with the performance era - when it comes to this thing we can barely call rock. Sounds aren't made by hands anymore, guitars distilled to texture by the likes of Darkside, Ratatat, and late-era Radiohead.

King Krule's a counterpoint though. Through all the shimmery and murk, all the swampy oilslick shine, through layers and layers of echo remnants, there's this sense of an old soul rocker. Those gravelly vocals, those ringing, rich, intentional guitar moments, those seething saxes. Those saxes, like the ghosts of bleating 50's altos, drifting slow and hollow.

Haunted. Barely there, but rich with gasps of once-was.

It's smokily listenable, even as its utterly uncanny, wandering past any notion of song structure, some unholy marriage of dank detuned electronica, dissonant underground rock, and an old Elvis song on The KLF's radio.

I cannot overstate how surprised I was to learn that this miserable, ancient Waitsian poltergeist is gloaming the body of a 23 yearold redhead. Knock me over with a feather. Sound don't lie though, this kids got serious soul, officiating a wedding of old and new, borrowed and blue, like I haven't heard in ages 4.5/5

#2668 23 Skidoo - Seven Songs

Points for giving me no idea what I'm listening to - the closest I can come is outlining some unholy shape, pegged at the corners by a suite of industrial noisefuckers, sound collage bullshitters, 90's minimalist guitarists and Frank Zappa's horn section. It's a haunted, dusty piece of music that occasionally flares to life, a decrepit hospital going up in flames, a dead body's last sudden thrash. Distant and dissonant and strange, but pretty goddamn listenable, considering 3.5/5

#2667 Front 242 - Front by Front

So I'm listening to this while I play Diablo 3, and they make a good pair: both've got the affectation of menace and darkness while still being perfectly pleasant, with enough buzz and momentum that you hang in there even when it's boring.

Front 242's brand of industrial noise is borderline dancable: just enough edge to get your adrenaline piqued, without falling into unlistenability. It's hasn't aged especially well, sounding pretty tame by modern standards, but an interesting data point on the meet-cute between guitar noise and machine blippery 3/5

#2666 Floraline - Floraline

Super-safe pop rock, with only the smallest flashes of electronic intrigue and funk pluck. Linda Sharp's got a nice voice and a slinky delivery, but all the backing's overproduced into shruggery, no human musicians in sight 2.5/5

#2665 Television Personalities - They Could Have Been Bigger than the Beatles

Arriving in 1982, this album landed at the halfway mark between The Kinks' Lola vs Powerman (1970) and Guided By Voices' Bee Thousand (1994), and that feels about right. It's on one hand a shamelessly retro album, blending garagey crunch (two Creation covers!) with Daviesian half-sneers for contemporary Britain. On the other hand, it's a wanderingly adventurous set that would fit right alongside the best of the American underground of the 80's and 90's, full of half ideas, dissonant tones, and buzzing electronics, unfurling across a Pollardian 16-track sprawl.

Which is all to say: great, weird, inventive fun, heaped with ideas and slathered in wry, offkilter wit 4/5

#2664 Chastity Belt - I Used to Spend so Much Time Alone

I gave Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene a pass for being miserable in miserable times, but at least I sensed a little fire in their belly, down their somewhere.

Or maybe I've just had enough. Chastity Belt's latest is a joyless slog, full of half-time Sonic Youth chiming and endless moaning, lacking all of Time to Go Home's brilliant smolder and flash. It's relatable, personal, hopeless, and true, but so thoroughly defeated that it slumps you over into boredom by the halfway mark 2.5/5

#2663 Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - The Kid

A gem of an album, packed with alien twinkles and tones, all the vocal diffusion and subharmonic wonder of Dan Deacon, Laurie Andersen, and Animal Collective at their best. Impossible to grasp, with all the rotating facetry of peak ambient, given creeping form in all those growing surges. I could hear it a dozen more times and still not quite understand what it's doing 4/5

#2662 Skinnyman - Council Estate of Mind

A bedrock piece of UK hip hop, complicated by its relentless use of samples from a contemporary gritty teledrama called Made in Britain. Via endless samples, Tim Roth's 16 year-old Trevor argues with social workers, raging against the system, fearless and explosive, Will Hunting via Sid Vicious, putting his stamp all over the record.

The actual songs are autobiographical, but disjointed - Skinnyman tips back and forth between superstar swagger and scrappy survivalism, without a clear where-I-came-from / where-I'm-at throughline. Which would be fine, but -- look, it can't be overstated how present those Made in Britain Samples are. It's gotta be 10-20% of the total runtime. Skinnyman wants it both ways, to appropriate all that wit and rage and to tell his own story in intimate terms, winding someone else's narrative through a set of songs that don't follow one themselves.

It's muddy. But in as it bounces around in your memory, it works. The album as made is wildly more interesting than the songs would've been on their own, but it also makes for a pretty specific kind of listen; someone flipping between a radio play and a rap album, connected, but barely.

It helps that the songs're solid, full of exciting production, plenty of variation, and lines at that sweet spot of structure. There's lots of end-of-line rhymers, but its simple enough to have that veneer of improvisation, with just enough doubleups to keep you on your toes. The kid's got real flow.

--

Without a close listen or a little research, you'd be forgiven for thinking all those samples are the man himself, recorded from some actual sessions or something. It'd work better if it were true. All the movie's rage feels unearned, and Skinnyman seems like a bit of a wannabe for latching onto it. But it's a bold move, and a totally unique album.

--

God, I feel like I put a "but" clause in just about every paragraph here -- it's that kind of album though: split, conflicted, and almost certainly more interesting for it 4/5

#2661 Tony Banks - A Curious Feeling

Four-fifths of the way through a survey of Genesis's members solo shit, seeking ammunition for blamelaying around the good/bad that is that deeply conflicted band, I'd come down evenly on the split of Gabriel/Hackett (heroes) // Collins/Rutherford as (villains). Tiebreaker time! Tony Banks on deck.

Tony comes out on the winning side. Tony is Good Genesis. Full stop.

There's a real tension and progression and melody in his solo debut. His riffs on the closing of After the Lie rival anything Genesis (or anyone!) put out. That's a melody and a half and a half. Goddamn. What a wallop.

More so than any other Genesis members' solo stuff you hear these echoes of the full band's greatest hits. All those signature glows and ripples and rumbles and flickers and flairs. It almost feels like Banks saying "all that shit you loved, that was this guy, right here". Flashes of Genesis's highlights abound, his footprint made evident in retrospect. Especially in that strange twilight, post-Gabriel, and even post-Hackett, Banks's classical sense of structure and melody was the last bullwark against pop depravity. You can hear all these great moments from great albums echoed, now with a clearer credit. "You"'s lushness, goddamn.

But to his credit, you don't really get that flagplanting vibe. This is just what's in Banks's heart, and it's been pouring out all along. Mellotrons and analog buzzes pulse out, cementing Banks as a great underappreciated keyboard master of a seminal era of the instrument's evolution.

And not unlike Gabriel's simmering existentialism, there's a really personal arc here, of wondering about the value of contribution, of confronting ending and death. It's...actually, really, really great.

This's everything you'd want from a solo debut. A purification of statement, a dovetail from the work you loved in the band, crystallized into a form previously impossible.

The peak next-level Genesis take used to be prioritizing Hackett over Gabriel, but put Banks in that list. This shit's legit, a real stroke of genius when it comes to texture, structure, and tone 4.5/5

#2660 The Dancing Did - And Did Those Feet

To the extent that you can accept that multiple bands can be the best band ever, the Dancing Dead are the best band ever.

I feel a Nik Cohn level of evangelism around this band.

This album is everything right.

It is Minutemen, The Unicorns, Wire, Boredoms, it is ----------

There's a song called:

The Rhythm Section Sticks Together

and it's the perfect encapsulation, tightness and madcap unpredictability, done in 2 minutes or less.

It's a band aware of itself in only the best way. Packed with half-hooks and darkened energy, that impossible combination of sincerity and technicality that only the abovementioned achieved. The Dancing Did don't sound like anyone else, don't fit cleanly into any sound at all, but spooled out a a strangely natural combination of immediate riffs and crackling patience. It's all so assured, the way a second wave band might when backed by a label or scene or sound, but it's out of thin air circa '82, full of alien strangeness and offkilter menace, always keeping you on the back foot, packing in an extra beat or measure or bridge, or dropping one, like some strange northern Flying Nun cousin.

If I had to send an album into space to tell aliens what art rock was, this would be on the shortlist. Or maybe post-punk, though my grip on that term slips every day. It has every ounce of energy and grit and cleverness, it is ground zero for so many things I love about other bands, at once totally arch and without archness. Any pretension is baked in and not put on. It is narrative and strange and personal and detached, it is Slint and Pixies and Chad VanGaalen and more. It is _ele_ccctr_icc_. Good god, The Headmaster and the Fly. Good god.

An album that connects both musically and attitudewise, on point. It is Is This It, Separation Sunday, Damned Damned Damned, etc.

An album that makes you want to scratch your beard and thrash around and start a band and burn down the world. I know I've been rating shit highly lately, but if you want to spend 40 minutes understanding what I think is right in music you could scarcely do better 4.5/5

#2659 Mike and the Mechanics - Mike and the Mechanics

Solo albums are a convenient way to get at who shaped a band's sound, which is an especially interesting question when it comes to Genesis. Who's responsible for their good-era sound? Peter Gabriel's the poor man's right answer, but that's complicated by the icy strangeness of his run of self-titled albums, and by the outright prog mastery of Steve Hackett's stuff. The latter deserves at least half the credit.

What about the complimentary question: who ruined Genesis? Phil Collins' solo albums are readily recognized as even lamer versions of their late-era gated-snare chorus-piles, but don't underestimate Mike Rutherford! His debut solo-ish outing, which bears his name despite lacking a single vocal turn or solo songwriting credit, is equally uninteresting, dime a dozen, hyperproduced 80's Fun Times! pop. You could do worse if that's what you're in the market for, but why would you be?

Fuckit, up next, let's finish this project and see what Tony Banks got up to 2/5

#2658 The Red Devils - King King

A lively little live romp.

It's weird to hear the singer bark things like "let's do a little blues!" when every song's so deeply indebted to the blues its hardly worth calling out.

Got repeatedly blueballed by songs where some kernel of repetition locked in and promised a gun that never went off. Which I guess is a very rock expectation. But when something tiptoes this close to the edge of blues restraint, its natural to want it to teeter off.

You have to admire that commitment, there's something pure about it. They chose an interesting place to draw the line. This manages to keep a lot of the smolder of the blues without ever quite flashing, and the listen might actually be more exciting for it 3.5/5

#2657 VA - Cold Waves of Color Vol. 2 (1982 - 1985)

Volume 2 opens with synthy surges, the same icy precision of the first Color Tapes comp. But then come the tones: rich, textured, and then come the proper guitars. And we see the split with volume 1, detachment is no longer a strategy, rock immediacy is smoldering: guitar buzz, bass grumbles --- this is the cavalry.

Vol 1 had bedroom closeness. And this still feels small, but the ambition's growing. The nerds are making a pass, defcons are ticking. A thrilling little evolution of this splinter scene 4/5

#2656 John Hassell - Aka / Darbari / Java

Repetition repetition repetition. Ambient washes, loops, pulls, pushes, polyrhythms, suggesting structures. Cover art's perfect, natural curves with baked in little cadences. A mysterious, surging piece of minor genius 3.5/5

#2655 John Coltrane - Transition

I know nothing about jazz but

Kamasi called this a big influence, and that squares. You can hear the loosely contained stacking here, shades of The Epic. There's color here. Players splashing around, rolling off eachother, just on the cusp of listenable. I feel like this is a perfect album I don't get yet. Provisionally 3.5/5

#2654 Mount Kimbie - Love What Survives

James Blake's what's wrong with sorta-experimental music, just all the way up his own ass past listenability. So when he shows up on two tracks here I get my guard up. And superficially this has the same problems.

But it gets there, somehow.

You feel it in the bass on that opening track, those distorted guitars. That willingness to deign to engage on a visceral level. Shades of The Range, tapping into some desperation of yelp and distortion.

Human music, I like it.




I say:

I want something new. Old is boring. All the obviously pleasant sounds are staked out. Sounds outside the explored space are, on the balance, unpleasant. Navigate that. And maybe that's demanding, but that's your fucking JOB.

Mount Kimbie, more so than most, is up to the task, finding the bassline heartbeat that guides you into the other meanderings. It's

a) adventurous

b) not lazy

which's surprisingly scarce.

liable to be a grower 4/5

#2653 Mastodon - Emperor of Sand

This sounds like a fucking incredible lost 90's album, and I mean that in the best, most sincere way.

Listen to the vocal / guitar drones of Precious Stones / Steambeather, and tell me those couldn't be the best lost Soundgarden songs you ever found. Like, with way better drums, vocals, and guitar solos. Fucking, Steambreather's the best song Korn never made.

Mastodon's totally shed its hard metal cred, and I'm ok with that. This is hooky // listenable // great, however you wanna cast it. It swoops and swoons and drops the hammer again and again, striking a balance of hard/soft that our teen year hacks could hardly dream of 4/5

#2652 Mastodon - Cold Dark Place

Mastodon doubles down on the accessible sound of Emperor of Sand, going prettier, more baroque, and piled higher with impossibly choice guitar parts.

Choice. like a cut of meat. a selection that prioritizes QUALITY. I mean Blue Walsh. Goddamn.

By now Mastodon's fully shed any metal expectations. They're just making gorgeous guitar-driven music. Sometimes it sounds like goddamn M. Ward.

This's an EP that exudes __confidence.

Pretty, subtle, all the proginess buried in the folds, all the hatred simmering deep underneath, seducing you and running a cut right along your grinning gut 4/5

#2651 Chad VanGaalen - Light Information

Somewhere in musical space there is a place of power where certain leylines cross. Where lurching dancability, post-punk post-motorik, and searching indie arpeggios convene.

In this place Wolf Parade howls, Interpol interlopes, Unicorns traipse, Arcade Fire flickers past.

Add Chad to this mostly-Canadian pantheon, the nervous energy of his album splinters anxiety into shards of joy and release, an uncorking of everything stopping us up.



I remember the polite fear I felt talking to people in the countryside just outside Toronto circa 2016. This is the natural extention.



I briefly tagged this with Segallsphere, so strongly does it buzz with the energy of Ty Segall, John Dwyer, Mikal Cronin. <- al.="" ashes="" blend="" chad="" clue="" especially="" et="" experimentation="" for="" in="" of="" p="" psychedelia.="" release="" riffage="" searching="" some="" that="" the="" ubovich="">VanGaalen's body horror obsession rides on, never stronger than the Upstream Color nightmare of Host Body, but it seems less about shock value than about a vector for grappling with the basic nightmare that is our own frail architecture, our consciousnesses in jars on stilts.

And through it all, it is hooksome and wholesome and welcoming -- curl up in a sympathetic knot of deeply human warmth and despair 4.5/5

#2650 Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Mambo Nassau

Wildly weird, obliquely cool, way way ahead of its time: it's impossible not to see this as patient zero for the kind of erratic start-stop mania that Deerhoof, Ponytail, Zach Hill got into. Talking Heads taken all the way. All that cheeky yelping, all that livewire bass, pushed out of place by new wave rejectionism, but with this lush African sensibility to make a harrowing kind of sense out of it. On its own unlistenable, unignorable wavelength 4/5

#2649 Mungolian Jetset - Schlungs

What a strange pile of beats and bangers and wobbles and whiplash. Hypnotic, moving in unexpected directions, varying song lengths and tones, attacking the same big, slow bodyrocking weaponry from every angle. The vocals are tacky, mostly, but I'm reminded of Basement Jaxx, who never bothered drawing a hard line between dancable pop and technicolor freakout, in a good way 3.5/5

#2648 Morgan Delt - Phase Zero

This could be another Tame Impala re-re-heating, but it escapes that gravity on the back of that magical production.

There's something upside-down about the sound, something as inverted as that cover art's impossible colors. It's a remarkably vertical album in a way that's hard to explain. Things are in different places in the mix than you expect, everything quiet is close, everything loud is far away, and everything's migrating to and fro as you try to keep a bead on it, turning inside out on every prime-numbered bar. It's intoxicatingly disorienting. The songwriting's a little muddy, but its hardly the point, riding that production alone this's one of the most subtly gorgeous albums I've heard in ages 4/5

#2647 Mr. Fingers - Outer Acid EP

The structure's dead simple, all wash and squiggle at medium pace, though I'll admit something alive in between the beats etc, all patient ecosystem, all emergent pattern 3.5/5

#2646 Gemini - In And Out Of Fog And Lights

Totally fine house. It shimmers here and there, melts away a work hour or two, with plenty of twinkling loops that're prettier than they have to be, but it doesn't altogether blow my hair back. And man, some of the vocal samples are awful, especially track 5's clunky "...I love you..." sample 3/5

#2645 Boof - The Hydrangeas Whisper

Like some flower, some Fibonacci sequence, some fractal, this takes time to reveal its patterns. What seems familiar at first evolves and evolves into something stranger, until you're not sure what kind of album you're listening to, like you're at some 10,000 ft view of other albums you've heard, and all their squares blur into larger blocks. Beats and samples and noise and pulses and hypnosis, a house backbone prickled with ambient and instrumental hiphop and jazz.

Take Emi's M, that samples the main piano hook from Take 5, but doubles up one of its riffs to bump it into 6/8, and saps the whole point of the song. I can't tell if that's hackery or brilliant -- but in the moment it works, this echo of something familiar made hooksome.

Somewhere 7 or so songs in you'll look back and wonder how you got here and feel like you can see the path, like it couldn't have gone any other way. A quietly brilliant record that reveals more the deeper you dig into it 4.5/5

#2644 Golden Retriever (Sweden) - Capablanca

Reportedly recorded and produced on an iphone, and maybe that explains it. There's something pure in this, little tropical plucks, notes let to ring, close-up space, subtle echoes, clicks on loops as beats. Its peaceful, mysterious, simple - the most quietly compelling pebble on the beach 3.5/5

#2643 Pugh Rogefeldt - Ja, dä ä dä!

Maybe I'm just filing them both under "not English" but its hard to get away from the fact this sounds a lot like the best 60's Brazilian rock. It's packed with great beats, riffs, effects, all configured in brilliant combinations that are inspired-by-but-totally-outside what was happening in America. Every single song's a rollicking little experiment gone slightly out of control, those yelps and buzzes right spot on. Never once boring.

Getting ambushed by classic DJ Shadow samples in the wild never gets old either 4.5/5

#2642 Hoops - Hoops EP

Wobbly, twinkling psychadelia, Tame Impala from inside the force bubble. Detuned slurring's a trend I'm not happy to see the return of, but this's a fine little slice of narcotic cloudgazing. Going Strong's a propulsive highlight 3/5

#2641 Snail Mail - Habit EP

I'm all for this female-fronted shoegaze resurgence, it's giving an underexplored space a new lease on life, and all those half-defeated sighs sure do fit the moment. This's a bit too understated though, falling into a subsubscene pretty well dominated by Chastity Belt 3/5

#2640 Metz - Strange Peace

Fuckin Metz. A band that believes in chaos, that I fully believe is an unhinged nightmare live, which is worth one thousand points on wax. The harrowing cleanness of their first album, the numbing relentlessness of their second --- it's all still here, but somehow so much more overwhelming, so multiplied. Maybe its Steve Albini, who has not lost that knack for making those drums PUNC___ though a sludge of his own making.

A bracingly nasty album, sounding not too far from In Utreo, natch. A knockover album that makes my face crunch up and that may be a minor  classic given a little time and justice 4/5

#2639 Daedelus - Labyrinths

I can't decide if I admire or resent Daedelus's utter commitment to his slippery sound: his bursts of skittery beats, his waves of synthy pulses, his washes of imperfect vocal samples. This's as bookishly exciting as anything he's made, never quite finding anything human, but spinning some disorienting storybook approximation that's damned enticing in its own right. It's very LA somehow, straight out of the Museum of Jurassic Technology 3.5/5

#2638 The Electric Prunes - Underground

I went through a phase where I listened to the one great album by every great band, like some halfhearted James Murphy disciple.

Now I circle around to their unloved albums, like a full-fledged snob.

But this unheralded later album by a go-nowhere 60's band is good, I swear!

There's real energy here, a real leg-sweep of psychadelia, you can feel the grasp and the ambition, and it mostly works if you let it. You can feel that stretch, trying to find some next level beyond the initial thrill of psychedelia, all that Byrdsian swoon and romp - yer acid tells you what isn't and you take a swing at what is, and you come up with a handful of sand, but what an act of grasping!

3.5/5

#2637 Martin Newell - The Greatest Living Englishman

Arch sub-Kinksian hyper-British jangle that probably reads as pop brilliance to someone, but it leaves me utterly cold 2/5

#2636 Marie Et Les GarÇons - Marie Et Les GarÇons

Man these French dudes are pretty good with guitars. All that deadpan jangle, so perfect. Such overwhelmingly rich tones. And what do you lose with French lyrics? Just makes newwave sound more detached. The live tracks are pretty limp though. Maybe you had to be there. The mangling of Roadrunner's perverse fun though. Can't tell if this is earthshatteringly great or also-ran 4/5

#2635 Single Frame - Everything Wants To Be Used For What It Was Made For

If I ever got around to a top10 list of personal, irrational cult favorite bands, Single Frame would make it*, guaranteed. There's something about the immediacy of their yelp, their surging synths, they're everything right with music -- all punk sincerity, just tripping over themselves with ----

---- so there's this interview with Brian Eno where he talks about how early stuff from bands are just so thrilled with making __anything.  The novelty is enough of a thrill to spur them forward on its own, and they never get trapped by stewing in perfectionism. That's Single Frame, falling forward too fast, grinning.

That bwoopy synth sound. Those borderline raps. That almost dancable groove. Goddamn. This collection, almost as much as the incomparable Wetheads Come Running, is incomparable. If they were a local band they would be my favorite band 4.5/5

* shortlist inclusions: The Unicorns, Self, Je Suis France, Grasscut

#2634 Mission of Burma - Vs.

So raw, so rash, so frantic, so packed with riffs and ideas - somewhere between Pavement's shapeless noise and Minutemens' kitchensink precision lies this fucking masterpiece. The kind of album we should all try to make, all blunt force trauma delivered with blistering urgency, thrashing against fences to find the weak point 4.5/5

#2633 The Weirdos - Weird World Volume 1

The kinda ramble that makes me wanna fuckin rock and roll, all too-fast hillbilly propulsion, all armswinging romp, drums whipping grunts and sneers into a frenzy, waves of harsh guitars dropping in on every punchline, straddling Pixies-brilliant and Ramones-dumb. Good shit, way ahead of curves 4/5

#2632 Lives of Angels - Elevator to Eden

That guitar. Of all the bands on Color Tapes, Lives of Angels rises above - icy synths and Casio beats are just the backdrop for a hypnotic swoon of chiming lines and moaning vocals, the blueprint for LCD at their most sentimental  (Golden Age!), a more intimate take on New Order's burgeoning post-motorik.

Arch and immediate, distant and personal, a deeply charming, unique, sweep of bedroom genius. That guitar, dropping in on again and again, so frail and clear, wobbling out into the night. The kind of album that makes people want to make albums, in the best way 4.5/5

#2631 B.T. Express - Do It ('Til You're Satisfied)

Exciting at first, but awfully one-dimensional. Every song's essentially It's Your Thing: funk bass, synchronized horn riffs and two pieces of advice: a) do what you want to b) _don't do what you _don't want to. And some overproduced strings, it's got those too, if you're into that in your funk songs.

Grab the title track to mix up a mixtape or two and move on 2.5/5

#2630 VA - Cold Waves of Color (1981-85)

Me, marching band nerd circa 1995: I have these memories of listening to bootleg Pumpkins rarities tapes on buses back from high school field shows, these plaintive, stripped-down covers of Thin Lizzy and Depeche Mode and Fleetwood Mac outlining an intimate kind of sound I wouldn't back into for decades.

There's something about this compilation that reminds me of listening to those tapes. Something about the way the glacial, detached pulse also sounds...warm, as close as bedroom indie mutterings.

Wanderingly experimental, all krauty minimalism and fuzzy analog pulses, the flashes of guitar bent into strange angles. Almost everything here's made by machines, but you can tell that those machines were guided by people, each with the passion to make something beautiful and strange 4/5

#2629 Dan Lissvik - Midnight

Nothing here matches the transcendent mystery of Lissvik's Darkside stuff, but our consolation prize is a showcase of headbobbable space disco to rival Terje/Prins/Lindstom. Hooky as shit on the surface, alive with throaty basslines and popping guitars, but with a tantalizing, ingraspable hint at an album-length throughline that keeps you coming back for more. Deeply assured, time-melting shit 4/5

#2628 The Ruts - The Crack

A feisty little punk band, not afraid to shout the name of its songs in the choruses. Backdrops of shammering guitars and Bad-Brains-lite reggae are solid enough -- that bass is fiery -- but the songwriting comes up short, and the energy doesn't pick up the slack 3/5

#2627 The Exploited - Punks not Dead

Shouting, chanting crowds open the album. Mouths too close to mics. Scotland now. This is not pop-flecked. Violent. Start-stop. Pure trigger pull after trigger pull of fuckthisfuckmefuckyou. An argument over bass tuning interrupts half a song. And its back to tight, focused, blunt force delivered again and again, tin guitars and lead bass and barking barking barking. Urgent, angry, immediate, vital - everything you want from punk 4/5

#2626 The Undertones - The Undertones

I'd always considered Buzzcocks an outlier, but man there were a lot of good pop-indulging punk bands in the late 70s. Here's a bit from Ireland, all jangle and jaunt, more personal than political, Feargal's wobbly exclamations more wrapped up in teenage frustration than nationwide angst. The lynchpin is at the halfway mark -- Here Comes the Summer. Possibly sarcastic. Utterly wallowing in totally successful synth stabs over relentless beats, Centerfield driven to its natural nadir of nihilism. But it's all in the same vein, all relentless chugging, everything the Exploding Hearts would send to the heavens. So unstoppable, so detached, so inventive, so under the underground of the alternative to indie, so ahead -- and so good to listen to, too 4/5

#2625 Sonic Youth - Bad Moon Rising

Not the most listenable Sonic Youth album around. Those calling it a miserable slog aren't wrong. But more so than a lot of their later, more-arch outings, you hear a band making the racket they need to, spooling out something seething and simmering -- and at the last second, unleashing all that energy on the final track. A weirdly tight, explosive, admirable little record 4/5

#2624 Mink Deville - Cabretta

Dude's got personality. Sounding exactly like John Fogerty, Van Morrison, Mick Jagger et al, in turn, is a distracting handicap. But somewhere under there Willy Deville's got his own thing going, backed by a rich soul pulse that was totally out of step with the scene he got lumped into.  The album sounds like a clumsily put together 70's mixtape, but the fact there's one dude behind it's a weird little slice of inspiration that's worth basking in 3.5/5

#2623 The Dickies - Dawn of the Dickies

A mutant mashup of Misfits and ELO, The Dickies aren't afraid of fun, jettisoning political concerns and riding horror/scifi movie themes only as long as they're good for a good time. You can call that a sellout // lack of commitment, or you can bop along to one of the first bands to embrace the fact that all those fast riffs're good to bop to 3.5/5

#2622 Wipers - Is this Real?

Bonus points for that brilliant cover art. Damn.

An album that won't quit for a second. Chugging chugging chugging, a punk album packed with the best of 60's garage stubbornness and prescient underground hookcrafting. Listen to Mystery and count the long-80's bands that coulda been. So much of that blunt-force riffdom would become so commonplace -- wildly ahead of its time, criminally underrecognized 4/5

#2621 Buzzcocks - Another Music in a Different Kitchen

Context: possibly the only band whose greatest hits is regarded by the snobs as their greatest output. Their first actual album contributes all of two songs to that parade of hooksome snotty masterworkery --- that ignored, you'd likely take this as an also-ran album of blunt, slashing nonsense: a solid but not quite noteworthy collection of itchy, frustrated rambling anthems, elevating itself to noteworthy only via the relentless mutant Bo Diddley pulse of Moving Away from Pulsebeat. A prescient hint at the brilliance to come, that 4/5

#2620 Nicholas Jaar - Space is Only Noise

I
m ever a sucker for an album that exists on its won terms.

I want to call this Booksian - can we agree that's where this tree roots? That an uncertain spattering of sounds and snippets and memories was something that started there?

Origins are very uncertain here.

Right at the center
six from the front
six from the back
we get the title track, and the beating heart, a gorgeous pulsar of warm sentiment and body and space.

And on the other sides time is hard to pin down
   over before you know it
sound like anything else you know? 4.5/5

#2619 The Only Ones - Special View

My flag for The Only Ones is planted, but here's a new variation -- a compilation reshuffling songs from their first two albums.

12 songs, but the first six are one of the best sides I've ever heard on any album ever.

The sequencing's frontloaded as shit and the result's way better than their debut, leading with the indomitable Another Girl Another Planet, saving The Whole of the Law for a side-closing hammer-drop. In between its a greatest hits of John Perry guitars. If those guitars propositioned me anything I'd say yes. They are the sexiest thing I've ever heard.

The second half falls off sharply though. Frustrating. I mean, second side's fine, but. Jesus. Can't ignore that first side though. Utterly indispensable, my life up till now incomplete without it 4.5/5

#2618 Stinky Toys - Plastic Faces

Man this shit do interlock. The interplay of the yelping vocals, the prickly guitars, the bristly bass - this is a band with too much energy too burn off, and you can feel that heat.

The vocals are pretty rough, but ___spark___spark_spark___ there's something that _connects__ in that sound, the lost seed of Sleater Kinney. What a tight, desperate piece of sound. It's locked into the moment, flashes from the friction. Every album should give you this kind of glimpse 4/5

#2617 The Adverts - Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts

The archetype, the perfect 2nd wave punk album. One Chord Wonders thumbs its nose at expectations, before explaining that the Adverts are Bored Teenagers, dipping just here and there into politics, horrorcore, and regular old regularism, every song centering on the repetition of its name again and again and again. It's...fucking perfect.

So sincere, so blasted out at speed, that _//_/exact/_//_ balance of precision and fuckitism. Those kids who're all pissed off, but making the racket sound nice, well, that'd be a bonus, right? I mean, why not be a hooky chugging juggernaut? I mean, why sound like shit when you could sound good? A wholly, utterly listenable front-to-back out-and-out masterpiece that sacrifices zero edge 5/5

#2616 The Only Ones - The Only Ones

Man, what a world turned upside down moment. The Whole of the Law always felt like such a _perfect_ Yo La Tengo song, but hearing its original, unexpectedly, 40 years later, is a _trip. Between that and the bracing Another Girl, Another Planet, this gets off to a staggering start.


The Only Ones are officially on some unofficial list of my underappreciated artists. God damn, this sounds like the best of the 90's and 00's, spawning out of a late 70's punk scene they share little with, arguably the 5th best album of 1978*. It's unevenly paced, Breaking Down in particular is a mistake of sequencing, leading with TWotL is a weird move, and the end falls off a bit, but still -- goddamn glorious. John Perry's guitars are the sweetest thing I've ever heard. So so so far ahead of their time, so so so much better than everything else happening. An album made all the more disorienting the more you think you know, packed to bursting with great ideas, glorious execution.

How is this not topping lists. Fuck us all, especially me 4.5/5

* behind, say, Parallel Lines, Some Girls, Chairs Missing, All Mod Cons, give or take, befitting from The Damned dodging to a year on either side

#2615 Jawcrew - Jawcrew

Yelping, angular funk//punk -- all very early 00's, all very Dismemberment Plan, Dananananakroyd, etc. These guys keep you on your toes with synthy blurts and flashes of bracing violence, but it's less hooky than the best of the scene, feeling kitchen sinky by the halfway mark 3/5

#2614 Misfits - Static Age

Chugging, efficiently hooky, two-chord punk, made epic by Danzig's effortlessly powerful vocals. Man I love that dude's voice, full of longing and rotted purpose - you gotta feel like this is where Aussie heroes Royal Headache leapt off from 3.5/5

#2613 Death from Above 1979 - Outrage is Now

DFA1979's jagged edges've been altogether sanded off by now - the buzzy, stuttering start-stop menace of their debut's a distant memory. Now the vocals are autotuned perfection, the production hammering the basslines into acceptable tolerances, smooth as Muse, tight as Queens of the Stone age. These are perfected, domesticated songs, blurring together, with some cringeworthy attempts at lyrical nowism.

All that said, I'll confess, this purebred's got some nice lines. These riffs cut about as sharply those other bands', with unexpected flourishes of synth and distortion bringing strange color to the riffs, like tempered NiN. Sometimes the right knob turn is all it takes to make a hammerdrop crack bone 3.5/5

#2612 Perturbator - New Model

as written to Patrick:

woah, yeah, stoner-metal slow, with lots of ghosts-era NIN kinda noise - pretty apocalyptic stuff, his usual pulse is under there but in the service of DOOM

(3.5/5

#2611 Studio - West Coast

A gloriously laid-back, hooky rock/electronic hybridization, riding endless punchy, hard-edged bass grooves, somewhere between Prins Thomas's space disco and Tycho's rockist meanderings. That bass: quick attack, no decay, spider-stepping across every twinkling echo. The instrumentals fare better than the vocal tracks, every experimental moment blossoming into a satisfying payoff, but it's all top shelf headbusting headbobbery 4.5/5

#2610 For the Carnation - For the Carnation

What a go-nowhere non-album. Sounds like somebody heard Spiderland and thought that slowrolling atmospherics and muttered half-poetry were the ticket to profundity, but forgot to add any of the actual dynamics that made that album pop. The tilt toward trip-hop beats and general overproduction doesn't help 2/5

#2609 999 - 999

Warmed-over plastic punk that falls into an uncomfortable middle ground between gritty and hooky. Overproduction (especially on the vocals) saps any sense of immediacy, and the result's not satisfying enough to justify the loss 2.5/5

#2608 The Damned - Machine Gun Etiquette

Damned Damned Damned was a tight-wound slash of nastiness, but the Damned's second album's a masterpiece of proto-pop-punk, bringing more hooks and sweet guitars than anyone this side of the Buzzcocks, some sinister twin of The Jam. Every song's a doberman, full tilt on a summer's day, full of joy and unpredictable intentions, tripping over itself on its way to romp or destroy, slowing down only rattle back up. Just about the most fun the second wave had to offer 4.5/5

#2607 Moon Mullican - I'll Sail My Ship Alone

Famously a Jerry Lee Louis influencer, Mullican doesn't get enough credit as a rock progenitor, born too early to catch onto a new wave of starmaking. A totally agreeable collection of proto-boogie-woogie, next-gen-ragtime, and general era-bridging. Recommended to rock history nerds more than anyone looking for a good time in 2017, but there's a timeless tune or two in there - good for a poker game of a summer day on the porch 3.5/5

#2606 Suicide - The Second Album

Pretty much what you'd expect when Ric Ocasek mashes against Suicide's seething menace - everything's a little hookier, but that edge holds fast. For my money I'd rather go full mainline Suicide and really feel the burn, but this bites on its own terms 3.5/5

#2605 Orphan Boy - Shop Local

If you're gonna re-re-revival, go Clash-via-Vines//Hives all over again, this is how you do it - lineage is moot when everything's this fucking tight. Muscular, laser-focused garage rock that gets you in the solar plexus. These guys are the real deal, razorblade guitars, lithe bass, and a map to the back of your knees 4/5

#2604 All Night Radio - Spirit Stereo Frequency

Britty 60's revival, with washes of pre-proggy mellotron, overtly Beatlesey production tricks, all pre-Tame-Impala washes and layers. It's a fun, swirly listen, that commits hard, tamed Olivia Tremor Control punched with modern garagey muscle, the thinly-applied KLF-style radio-flipping concept emerging just enough to justify itself, and, heck, Sky Bicycle do charm. 3.5/5 would trip again

#2603 Jonathan Richman And The Modern Lovers - Rock 'n' Roll With The Modern Lovers

Childlike, sloppy nonsense from Jonathan Richman, who seems to think that production, songwriting, and effort are all perversions of some pure human transmission. Isn't all we need just to sing The Wheels on the Bus, spiked with a little bit of what makes me, me, man?

Nah, I mean, songwriting is good. Effort is good. And a pure outpouring only works if you are inherently charming, which this band is not. It's Shaggsian (that's bad). You're left with the impression that the Modern Lovers stumbled ass backwards into their debut underground-success. They took disinterested past cool and into Wasting My Time. There's flashes of charm. And I rather like some of the non-western excursions. But they're all undercut by this sense of indulgent, glorified, half-baked fucking around that doesn't remotely justify itself 2.5/5

#2602 The Prids - Chronosynclastic

The Prid's last album is gloriously, rich and textured, everything great about the hyper-layered 00's revival of the 80's and the underground//shoegaze of the 90's -- that is -- a throughline straight up the gut of the whole idea that more is more, that you can carve a song from a block of shimmering guitar marble, that chiming distortion and cooing vocals and an endless rush of sound can sweep you away.
There's no new ground broken here, aaaaaaand, it might not even really be that great -- but it mixes its priorities and influences in such damn satisfying ratios. Overwhelmingly (over)produced, hitting with headbobbing hookiness as often as gutpunching noise; a sincere, graceful, outpouring of an album, a potent hybridization of The New Pornographers Built to Spill, M83, and yes, just to keep this thread stitching, Broken Social Scene - a surging wash of more more more 4.5/5