#2481 The Verve - Urban Hymns

The Verve and Oasis. British, disfunctional, overhyped, both best when they just let the damn guitars cut loose. Definitely Maybe had some excellent swirling guitar raveouts, and Urban Hymns does too, sounding like the best of Swervedriver and Kulashaker swirled in psychedelic soup.

The Verve's problem's when they try to get sentimental or important, which they does constantly, with Ashcroft moaning life's solution over waves and waves of strings and strings and strings. Who do we blame for the fact that the hits are some of the worst songs on the album? There's actually a lot to like here, it's just not where you expect to find it 3.5/5

#2480 School for Robots - Song of the Century

Listen here!

Curtis's got a natural knack for melody, a Davies//Lynne sense of quaint/strange/universal tunefulness - a slightly square sound, and I mean that in the best possible way. Plays a mean guitar too.

This's a pretty good little three-song-glimpse, from the Pink Floyd ecstasy//agony of I Can't Feel Anything, to the overtly Muswell jauntiness of Why Be Depressed. A Boston band with a ton of potential to make something great outside the city's usual scene 4/5

#2479 Karima Walker - Hands in our Names

That cover image - geometric, offcenter, textured, printed, earthy, abstract, cozy, uninterested, eternal.

The contradiction of Karima Walker's latest is in its warmness and coldness, its folk heart and its electronic body, its intimate coos in your ear and its vast, patient emptiness.

Every word feels meant and important, even as they're sliced into nothingness, or echoed and panned helixical around your head; even as they're separated by yawning seas of prickle and buzz, as if Walker has no control over the album's structure. She has put messages in bottles, written with great desperation, in hopes you might find them, yellowed and smudged, someday.

Something unhuman and uninterested in humanity dominates, with glimpses of what matters in between. It's the kind of earned audacity you'd see in The Microphones or Olivia Tremor Control, with Anna Meredith's daring sense of sound. The kind of thing you with Brian Eno could pull off a little more often. Excellent, exciting, eternal stuff 4.5/5

#2478 VA - Tautara

After a week of New Zealand albums, it was near-impossible to peel my memory of my listen of this away as a separate object. Take that as a good sign, maybe - a perfect encapsulation of all that's chuggy and jangly, scuzzy and weird, about the scene, and a perfect place to start if you're new to it 4/5

#2477 Jay Som - Everybody Works

Indie rock with an otherworldly tint, every guitar and voice individually wrapped in a haze of handcrafted reverb, sparking with buzzy energy when they get too close. Structurally its all bog standard, packed with B+ choruses, but that production's actually pretty special, good for a hazy, hypnotic little driftaway 3.5/5

#2476a Ragnar Grippe - Sand

The more ambient you listen to, the more you appreciate good ambient.

12 or so semi-interesting noises, faded in and out, padded with doubly many more, allowed to wander for 50 minutes, with no particular direction or inspiration, like poor improv comedy, made only the more tolerable by the fact you can get some work done while it spins itself out 2.5/5

#2476 Street Chant - Hauora

New Zealand week goes modern - chugging/swirly/chiming guitars fill every beat of perfectly-pleasant pop-punk // indie glory. There's a quietly joyous sense of doing it all, I picture a different set of pedals for every song. The songs are mostly straightforward, but each has a moment where the band pivots into some kind of extra layer, or hook, or instrument, some extra mile to show you that they really care 3.5/5

#2475 The Verlaines - Hallelujah all the Way Home

Juvenilia, The Verlaines' signature album, kicked off by namedropping Rennaisance painting and Decadent poets. That out-of-step Decemberists-via-Smiths thread is on full display on their debut, cooing pretty shufflers offset by desperate lo-fi punk blasts, all backed by their signature waves of relentless acoustic strums, bouncing along and on and on. Charmingly off-center, bristling with energy, a perfect encapsulation of the Dunedin scene 4/5

#2474 3ds - Hellzapoppin

The uncanniness of New Zealand week continues, now a bit later in the Dunedin scene, and more than ever it sounds strange and familiar, like and not like what came before and after, a centroid in a non-Euclidian US music space, arrived at by incorrect methods.

If the core of the usual scene is on the line from REM to GBV, this is on some parallel Sonic Youth->Pavement track, dissonance and prettiness in a tenuous truce, never quite sitting still, pulling guitar tricks from every corner. Too confusing to be exactly enjoyable, unpredictable enough to be irresistible anyway 4/5

#2473 Jah9 - 9

Reggae's a backbone for a sprawling, quietly experimental, soothingly strange album. The spell's broken by some clumsily blunt messaging, but the heart's in the right place 3/5

#2472 The Jean-Paul Sarte Experience - Love Songs

JSPE is in that NZ scene, but it's more overtly retro-leaning than most, full of psychadelic touches and garage rock scuzz and a song (aptly!) called Bo Diddley. There's a proto-grunge hopelessness, as the songs plod agreeably, hooky in spite of the latent weight of their feelings, like deep cuts off The Bends. Good for a mopey, stony afternoon 3.5/5

#2471 The Kingsbury Manx - Bronze Age

The Manx's Well Whatever is one of my favorite indie songs of all time, and there's more of that magic here than any of their other albums: that wistful breeze of strummy guitars, shuffly drums, meandering horns. There's something in the cadence, the texture of the timing, that makes Bronze Age's songs just drift, an Inverted World floating by your rainy windowsill, ready for a smile and a sigh and a putter to the bathroom and what's it matter what next 4/5

#2470 The Bats - The Law of Things

Chiming, jangly, cooing rock, the lighter side of the Kiwi 80's scene. Good, sunny fun for a while, but the tempos drag, the songs get complacent, and the energy drains by the end 3/5

#2469 The Verlaines - Juvenilia

It's New Zealand week again! Get ready to hear the word "jangly" a lot.

Bouncing, jangly guitar rock that would sound 90's-sitcom-theme-song-ready, if not for those baroque edges, those simmering patient stretches, that strained accent, that prescient light dissonance. The there's flecks of American indie/underground/alternative in every chord, crystallized into weird shapes, a catchy, offkilter romp through the present and future of a half dozen bands.

Specifically: Unicorns fans, did you hear that I Was Born a Unicorn-into-Jellybones guitar part at 2:25 of New Kind of Hero? Neat.

4/5

#2468b Tall Dwarfs - Hello Cruel World

At first it's the best of lo-fi, and so early! So much of GBV's crunchy hookiness, with a Frogsey yowl that stays just NMH-strange without going full Sockeye.

A haunting, empty, confidence strangeness.

And then it just turns to mush in your hands and runs downs onto your floor and congeals and dries and cakes and resists all velocity of scrubbing, 12 songs past its expiration by the 9th. Like, did the painful dirging of Louis need a first and second? It's willful, lazy mud by the second half. Still more interesting than something without the nerve 3.5/5

#2468a Tiny Bradshaw - Breakin' up the House

Goodole rhythm and blues => pre-rock, swinging and bopping with swinging horns, backing guitar trickles, and a torrent of bawdy double-entendres. A fine time, but this collection's an overdeep exploration of an awfully specific sound: unerringly repetitive, grinding the same groove every night 3.5/5

#2468 Jurassic Shark - 2013-2015

Lo-fi surf punk revival pt. 2 continued, this time with a yowling indie-ragged frontman and a desperate, chugging jangle as the engine, laced with surfy guitar lines. Too fraught to be beachbound fun, more likely a soundtrack to those moments when the frivolity's done, and here you are in your room, as the worries you tried to swim away find home. Probably a stomping good time live too 3.5/5

#2467 Surf Curse - Buds

Somewhere back west, lo-fi surf punk is on its second wave, and it is good.

Picking up where Wavves and Fidlar left off, jettisoning the slow stuff, sanding off the hard edges, leaving just that core sunny, propulsive chug, Astro Coast-era Surfer Blood at its briskest (and a matching Twin Peaks song to boot). Good, loose fun 4/5

#2466 The Styrines - Essential Styrenes Vol. 1 (1975-1979)

A punk-before-punk band, but the label doesn't do justice.

Early Styrenes were a shambling beast, a band held together by loose tethers, all the parts rolling ahead of and all over themselves, a shaggy shambler popping with guitar squiggles, offkilter drums, squalls of horns, and jangled pianos. And it all just..works, just hangs together just tightly enough to be totally listenable. Better yet, those moments where the near-chaos comes together into catchy transcendence: a chugging refrain, a crystal-clear guitar moment, a soothing sax.

They were ahead of their time, but they were retro too, with a Small Faces melodic inventiveness, spiked by the best of the garage weirdos, like the best 60's band you've never heard of.

Real rock and roll, whatever the labels, a band going hard at a target only they can see 4.5/5

#2465 Deux - Decadence

Utterly minimal, icy new wave (?). Casio backbeats, two wandering analog synth lines, two cooing, deadpanning singers. It does the very specific things it sets out to do: pulls off cool, pulls off pretty, pulls of mysterious. The commitment to the sound's refreshing 3.5/5

#2464 Jeff Rosenstock - I Look Like Shit

Rosenstock's solo debut is all raw feeling, too ragged and free to be emo, and all the more disarming for it, the former Bomb the Music industry frontman throwing himself into the music with a plain-faced existential howl.

The energy is small and angry and energetic, all the mood swings of a too-aware cusp into the 30's, bolstered by a couple of well-chosen, well-executed covers. It'd be a mope if it wasn't so much fun - music is the cure, all hooks and jerks running to stay ahead of the future 4/5

#2463 Sheer Mag - Compilation (I, II, III)

My love of II is large, and here its sandwiched by two other EPs, no points for guessing the names.

Tina's blownout shouting's the perfect rough edge on those super-fucking tasty Thin Lizzy guitar lines. Kyle's the star here though - those melodies just pour out. Can't Stop Fighting's impossible. Those riffs. I want to take serve them [for] dinner.

The first EP's not up to the rest, still a little threadbare and underfed, but those last 8 are enough to get you real, real excited about the proper full-length debut 4/5

#2462 VA - Gouldian Finch

Now what I'm with isn't it.

Trying to get with a single thing on the Bonnaroo '17 Other tent's lineup has been an exercise in futility

San Holo showed up on this compilation and it's gonna have to be close enough. Every song's full of distorted vocals, romantic swoons, and late-dubstep bwoooms. Still pretty cloying, but packed with enough little emotional angles and sound inventions that I grumpily enjoyed it. I could see getting swept up in the moment 3.5/5

#2461 Not Waving - Animals

Slowmoving layers of buzz and drone and fractured samples and surging energy shift over eachother slowly, never quite of the same world - that cover art's perfect. Atticus Ross anxiety and momentum ooze from every measure, a listen filled with the pins and needles of anticipation 4/5

#2461 Powell - Sport

It feels like ages since I've been able to say this, but here's an album that doesn't sound like anything else out there, defying convention, at least slightly, on all the levels. It's all familiar-adjacent..? Electronic noise//melody and looped guitars and samples that wander in and out of frame again and again and again, with parts missing, all bumping into eachother at a poorly programmed robot party. The flow and feel have elements of hooky electronica grooves, rockist buildups, trip-hop atmospherics, and mashup accidentals, but Sport belongs to none of those traditions.

The closer you listen the stranger it becomes. The song's don't seem constructed by any mindset I've encountered. There's a logic, but it seems to have arisen emergently. It's rarely surprising, exactly, but never predictable, and given humanity especially by the epic throwdown on Skype, swinging an electronic-sounding album back into DJ territory.

And through all that, there is a groove. There is headbobbing and moments of minimalist poignancy on the order of The Range or The Books and swervy expectation defying maneuvers. Exciting shit that I'm still trying to wrap my head around 4.5/5

#2460 Zach Hill - Face Tat

God I love that album title and cover, a perfect fit for Hill's awkward, intense non-grooves. The drums are obviously the star, all angles and elbows, blanketed with unbearable electronics and squealing guitar confessions, Lightning Bolt gone pop-ish. It's as exhausting as it sounds, but the glimpses of hooks make it mostly worth the work 3/5

#2459 Glows in the Dark - Research and Development

Part of the long-overdue turning point in jazz and hip hop's decade's-long clumsy getting-to-know-eachother process. The horns are lay down smoky atmospherics, and the rhymes settle to meet them; an underground kind of sound, belied by a deft, rich smoothness. Everything hooks together nicely, a quietly, intimately cool album 4/5

#2458 Sweet Valley - Jenova

The third of 4 albums the brothers pushed out in 2012 -- its continuation of the flow strangeness and insidious hooks are testament to their talent, but by now the sound's starting to show its limitations.

The detuned samples wander in just this side of listenable, blossoming unexpectedly, sliced by offkilter samples, an avalanche of sounds from an infinite library. But it's uglier, most scattered than Eternal Champ, lacking that album's human core and headbobbing backalleys. By comparison, this just sounds like fucking around, lacking that sweat//luck magic that grabbed you by the ass last time around 3/5

#2457 Alex Cuervo - 4-Song Solo EP

It's weird. I like this, but even though its sub-10-minutes long, by the time it's over I can barely remember a thing about it. This kind of chug is just too familiar by now, Bass Drum of Death deadened by Deerhunter drugs, its edge falling off by degrees. bigger dose needed 3/5

#2456 Eat Electricity - Tooth House and Sick Teen

Listen / buy here!

I dig Geoff's note on his bandcamp, and his music drips with that kind of homemade one-man layer-plus-layer production. He's got a Matt Mahaffey talent for melody, alongside a knack for texture, a krauty rhythmmotor, and no small dose of vibrant baselines. It adds up to a really pretty Tycho/Cavern of Antimatter rock/electronic pulse, with flecks of Atticus Ross's rusty darkness - relaxing, propsulsive, intricate, accessible, with little flashes of Grasscut/Moby inexplicable emotion [soundslike bomb]]

The way you can kind of see the method shining through, the seams on the layers, breaks the spell a bit, but the knack's undeniable, momentum's irresistible. A great hidden gem from young 2017 4.5/5

#2455 Detroit Pulse Machine - Polygraph

Noisy, clausterphobic techno (?), the kinda stuff vampires dance to in a slightly-cooler version of a Blade movie. Ink bleeds through every beat, everything a half-step too slow until dank sexiness emerges, blinded by sweat and darkness and glint 3/5

#2454 Stick Pulse Projekt - Let Da Musik Talk

Soulful, quietly adventurous dub, with a real sense of community and simmering dissatisfaction and sending out feelers for allies around the world. This kind of global rhythm-nicking has been tainted by the Starbucks-ready Bonobo-types, but if you can get past that it's a quietly inventive album, weaving a soothing tapestry of atmospheres 3/5

#2453 Sonic Pulse - Lager than Live

Stuck in a rut with all the same bands and all the same scenes, I've taken to searching random words and plucking albums that have interesting names / covers. Cratestreaming. Streamdigging? Workinonit.

Turns out these guys are from Boston, and cover the Adventure Time theme.

Off to a good start.

Just check that logo, with the soniC Pulse battleaxe. Check that impossible cartoon lady, all boobs and beer and boobs. Check songs called Queen of Beers, Bong Zombies, and -- fucking, combining all aspects of DnD nerdery and Andrew WK shitcockery with banal punnishness: Eye of the Beerholder. I've never seen a song title sum up a band so well.

It's all good, dumb as shit fun. Totally committed to a lack of commitment, utterly unabashed lets-get-fucked-up rock and roll, the real Wyld Stallyns, when Bill and Ted grow up and get dumb jobs and get baked and accept the joys of their lives as they actually are.

Accepting the joy of life as it actually is, that's all Sonic Pulse delivers.

Who could ask for anything more 3.5/5

#2452 Baio - The Names

An occasionally-deliciously-textured electronic album marred by whiny vocals and general pop grasping: content-free sub-Hot-Chip choruses smother every interesting production move. The highlight's the instrumental All the Idiots, that finds unspoken moonlight pathos just this side of The Range, but its not where Baio's heart's at 3/5

#2451 Ohio Players - Skin Tight

The kind of borderline porn soundtrack funk/soul that Conchords are always riffing on, especially It's Your Night. Jesus. That's pure hamfisted seduction yowling. The band's talented, but every song goes on a bit too long. Churning in place, and absent dancability, I'm hard-pressed to find the utility 3/5

#2450 Meatbodies - Alice

I guess you can't just make big meaty body riffs forever. Ubovich has gone the Ty Segall route, swinging T-Rex glammy one moment, melting into pure drone-sludge the next, generally straying from the clear path of asskicking, to mixed effect. I admire the spirit of adventure, I just wish it was as _good_ as the debut, you know? I guess this is growing up 3.5/5

#2449 Thelonious Monk - Monk's Music

Fuck I dunno. I know nothing about jazz and I'm tired of faking it. Mostly solos. Strikes me as more for the nerds than most. Jazz jazz. 3/5

#2448 Buzzcocks - Spiral Scratch

The leap forward from Time's Up to this properly-recorded EP's pretty incredible. The drumming gone from a liability to a star, those nervous, sparking fills packing every measure. And that lushness of guitar sound, that bratty catchiness, that offkilter energy, that expansion of punk beyond a bad attitude, all born before your eyes.

Arguably more important than their debut, and a lot more fun (though Singles Going Steady remains the go-to) 4/5

#2447 Buzzcocks - Time's Up

A nasty, sloppy punk debut, with only the barest flashes of the 'cocks proto-pop-punk hookiness. Essential history, but not the kind of thing you'd give a second listen otherwise 3/5

#2446 Mind Over Mirrors - Undying Color

Those big, slow sawtooths, waves of waves, all Eno and Laurie Spiegel, with the occasional squals of analog drums and strings and all, moaning muttering over top like a dip into Spiderland or Laughing Stock. Slices of dissonance, a relief map of tones, concentric disappearings. Itchily intriguing,  without ever quite ascending 3.5/5

#2445 Larry Levan - Live at the Paradise Garage

The legendary, LCD-LME-namedropped scene. Pure energy, everything good about disco as it edges into funk and something even funkier. Strings in the backdrop, but crisscrossed with slashes of horns, bass, pops, blasts and irresistible exhortations to get on up. A perfectly-paced redemption of the most-assailed style around 4.5/5

#2444 Charles Bradley - Changes

There's still nothing to differentiate modern shouter Charles Bradley from an honest to god old school soul god. Not even a natural-fit Black Sabbath cover blows his cover. He still rocks and rollicks, jerks and cruises, bolstered by a buttery-crisp backing band and gracefully vinyl-flecked production. Exciting, powerful stuff 4/5

#2443 Dimitri From Paris ‎– Disco Forever (The Sound Of Underground Disco)

It's a cute gimmick: a DJ mix, plus 2 discs of the full source tracks. It'd be more interesting if the mix was stronger - it's a little too cool, never quite inspiring to dance, and the source tracks fall into the same trap on a longer timeline. Solid, smooth, never quite catching fire 3.5/5

#2442 Tkay Maidza - TKAY

TKAY's debut full-length starts off strong, with just enough strange Spankrock/Shamir/MIA-lite banging to give it edge. A little repetitive, but funky, original.

It's a trap though. That repetition was an omen. This is a pop horse with hiphop stripes, and it dissolves before your eyes into bland, vaguely dancable, repetitive choruses. The big beats melt away, the vocals lose all their edge, and its watery, synthy filler with 9 more tracks left to go and oh god dammit 3/5

#2441 Six by Seven - The Closer You Get

A relief from that Grandaddy letdown -- here's an album that does the reverse trick, sounding pigeonholeable as part of a long-90's Brit/Rocktronic/breakbeat/post-Primalscream/etcetcetc, but then grows into something more sprawling and subtle and interesting, first into a pretty ok emo-ish Bends-era Radiohead clone, and then into some hybrid that swirls all those influences so hard that it becomes its own appreciable hybrid, mule gone M.U.L.E., a sea of subtly dense drones rising above its origins.

It's a sneaky trap for the snarky critic, a falsely superficial album that's actually a sensitive, dark, inventive knob turn on rock and roll, dressed up in familiar clothes, but with a surprise hiding.

I'm reminded a bit of Blur's '97 self-titled, a surprisingly great album readily misread as pastiche. Curious to see how this holds up 4/5

#2440 Grandaddy - Last Place

What a heartbreaker.

Those first two tracks, fuuuuuck.

Two of the best tracks of Grandaddy's entire career, those big, frail 90's proto-indie synths leading into all that crunch and swooping vocal and small desperation and flailing hope.

Brush with the Wild, special mention to the bit about the fox; it makes me weak in the knees again and again, a hangman's drop of spare sounds and spare words. God. It brings me to damn near tears or further five out of five times. An all time great 30 seconds of indie imagery and crippling pretty. An early frontrunner for song of the year.

I can't even in the relisten.

--

But goddammit. Nothing that comes after lives up to it by a longshot, feeling like filler, like career revivalism.

I can't even explain how pumped I was 8 minutes and 30 seconds into this album. My hands poised over the five slash five keys, but then, it's just not there. What a joy that a band ten years off the trail had two such great songs in them, and some small flashes afterward (Boat in the Barn sinks in, who couldn't use an update from Jed?) but an agonizingly frontloaded album that gets points for those eight and a half at least 3.5/5

#2439 Thundercat - Drunk

Thundercat gone full Zappa. He pairs his jazzy, offkilter, lilting basslines with matching singing, packing the album with rise-and-fall non-rhymes about all weirdness of all stripes. For all the impossible Jaco/Squarepusher skittering bass jitters, there's floating, strangely hooky lines about diving headfirst into Japanese culture, maining Johnny Cage, and how cool it would be to be a cat (what with them 9 lives -- lines that hang around unresolved, loose threads from your mind fuzz.

Unmellow, not quite exciting, and the endless falsetto gets exhausting, but it demands to be heard once, riding a loose throughline of resigned disorientation that feels appropriate for 2017 4/5

#2438 Alpha Wave Movement - The Edge of Infinity

Packed with slowrolling electronic push-pulls, Edge of Infinity's fully in 2001's gravity - plenty of Jupiter-bound mindbending, check. But also slow pans across the universe and its stark inhabitants, and even a big giant chord buildup on a track called Monolith, all a hopeless grasp at describing a universe, vast, wonderful, cold, empty, uncaring, if not malevolent.

A nice enough 90's ambient spaceout in the Orbital vein, with a little extra sinister simmer 3.5/5

#2437 Ruth - Polaroid/Roman/Photo

The cover's uncomfortable organic/not claustrophobia sums things up pretty well - when this isn't vibrating with icy intensity, it's outright probing and squealing and rubbing against you inappropriately. French musings wisp over broken-synth plods, a GVB song's steel skeleton. She Brings the Rain's the highlight, making its sexy menace explicit over sulking bass and Velvet guitars.

Fascinating in flashes, but it's an anxious, unbearable marathon by the time the 10-minute go-nowhere closer winds down 2.5/5

#2436 Surkin - Advanced Entertainment System EP

A sampler of ravey bangers, big beat rollers, and wobbled-out experimental bumping. Solid, but there's nothing standout on it, and it definitely lacks the scope and flow of Surkin's opus USA 3.5/5

#2435 Nackt - Virex

Glacially-shifting, subtly propulsive, ethereal house from the late Johnny Igaz. It's impossible not to hear it today without hearing some extra sense of elevation and grace. The sound never strays far, but it grows and develops and makes itself at home in the back of your mind. An understated, assured, quietly beautiful record 3.5/5