#2469 Jawbox - Novelty

Propulsive, crashing guitars piled into shoegazey layers, with bog-standard 90's moan-and-groan vocals steering the ship. Solid, tactile, textured, noisy, aggressive, with just enough touch of the underground to give it grit. You can just feel these guys laying it on thick, trying to wash the small-stage headbobbers out to sea 4/5

#2468 Gorillaz - Humanz

Why bother putting the 4 virtual band members on the album cover?

The project has never felt less like the product of a band, virtual or otherwise. Hell, even 2d/Albarn disappears for stretches, as an endless parade of guest vocalists wander through the interminably long album's endless hallways of samey beats. I count 24 guest vocalists across the albums 19 tracks (not counting 7 interludes (!)). Does Russel/Remi even show up on this album?

How can an album sound like too much and too little at the same time?

The songs blur (npi) together, every one of the too many of them going on too long, most of them wallowing in an Everyday Robots malaise. The Gorillaz project seemed to give Damon a brief relief from his post-13 misery, but that cloud's wandered back in.

I worry about that guy.

There's signs of life in the middle, with bonkers verses from De La and Danny Brown, little flashes of musical invention. And Busted and Blue's got heart. But the 19 tracks (!) outside that window are limp as shit, and even those work only in spite of the bandless, halfhearted production. A frustrating, soulless album, even inspiring me to go on too damn long 2.5/5

#2467 The Dils - Class War

A sloppy, snotty ramshackle collection of mostly-live early punk tracks. An at-the-time landmark, but it holds up poorly, caring too much relative to how little it achieves, with a terrible non-mix that leaves vocals leaning clumsily into your ear 2.5/5

#2466 The Nerves - One Way Ticket

You know what song made me really perk up on Blondie? Hanging on the Telephone. Great song. Turns out it was a cover. Shit. These guys were the ones.

And these guys rule, full of all the same taut, swaggering cool that Blondie had at their best, retro//modern all at once, half Everly Brothers, half Gang of Four, sensitive boys gone sideways, like a knife in the ribs in a final, loving embrace. Thrillingly cool shit 4/5

#2465 Dag Vag - Dag Vag

An enigmatic, fascinating bit of Swedish 70's rock. Reggae-soaked, alternately pretty and inscrutable, with the occasional truly gorgeous guitar solo. Seriously, Va Spelar Det For Roll, that's the sweetest thing I've heard in a long, long time. Uneven, but fascinating - highly recommended to anyone who's heard it all 4/5

#2464 Drive Like Jehu - Yank Crime

Seemingly (corrections welcome!) patient zero on this kind of knotted, frantic, yelping prog-punk, spawning everything from Dismemberment Plan (prettier) to Giddy Motors (heavier). Mission of Burma and other 80's (post?) punks were there, but this is another level of schizophrenia, that head-down start-stop perfection grinding against headless emo barking. Exciting, admirable, mostly unlistenable 3.5/5

#2463 !!! - Shake the Shudder

!!!'s (punctuation!) settled into their sound. 2015's As If had some brilliant moments, but it felt like gimmickry. Here's a full album of disco revival, brassy divas, growly electronics, funk guitars, all packed into an endless groove that's the best (only?) argument against dancepunk's fad status. This's the real deal 4/5

#2462 Wavves - You're Welcome

Wavves was born from mess, a bratty fallapart that was the best // worst thing about them. Followed by an awkward transition phase where they tried to shape up and be a real act, to underwhelming effect - lacking that blazing disregard, not arriving at anything worth being so serious about.

But with You're Welcome, they're out the other side. Here's a full-fledged album that takes advantage of the lack of messiness, that takes that effort and puts it to work on some killer hooks, weird little swervy stompers that've been rattling around in my head for days.

Flecks of electronics, doubled up detunes, further dips into surf rock proper - its way beyond stoner punk, into some kind of blasted piece of catchy weird, tendrils of The Mint Chicks (Million Enemies!) and The Russian Futurists (Come to the Valley!) arriving at what MGMT was going for, maybe. The first great front-to-back album from Wavves. If it lacks the dizzying highs of their larval stage, we'll just have to settle for 35 minutes of zero-filler delirium 4/5

#2461 Madlib - The Beats (Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton Soundtrack)

17 tidy minutes of classic Madlib - irresistable bass flowing like silk under a scrapbook of looping castoff microhooks. A catchy, colorful deep-groove teaser 3.5/5

#2460 Evelyn "Champagne" King - Smooth Talk

King swaggers over hard-edged bass and horns, blurring the line between disco and funk. Till I Come Off the Road rivals Aretha's best, brassiest kiss-offs, and Dancin' Dancin' Dancin's a blitz of beats and hooks that does what it says on the tin. Exciting, thoroughly enjoyable stuff 4/5

#2459 Melba Moore - Melba

The upbeat disco songs are good, lush fun (Pick Me Up I'll Dance!), but countless soppy, overlong pop/soul ballads kill the momentum 3/5

#2458 Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats - A Little Something More From

The Sweats' latest goes full Kobe on Rateliff - the horns and organs are all pleasant enough, but everybody stays out of the way, barely a hook or memorable moment to be found, letting the captain carry the team. They're good vocals, full of raspy character and real passion, but it makes for a flat, strangely unexciting album 2.5/5

#2457 Pogo - Kindred Shadow

Pogo's not fully baked on this one: the catchy samples, the choppity vocals, everything that made Weightless so great is here, but it's all a bit one-dimensional and twee. Pleasant, but hold out for his opus 3.5/5

#2456 Je Suis France - Coleslaw III Drymouth

Listen here!

Still weird, kicking into full joyful jams, sliding in alongside Jeff the Brotherhood, Sleeping Beauties, The Men, Japandroids, and countless other all-stars. The France's always been catchy, but this's their bedroom//garage magic brought under the lights for you to pump your fist along to. There's a scant handful of bands that just _pour_ out ideas with this kind of hit rate 4.5/5

#2455 Je Suis France - Let's Give 'Em Something to Talk About

Listen here!

Still one of the best bands under the radar, going small and catchy and constantly unexpected. Not their weirdest album (still Afrikan Majik), but maybe their quirkiest, their most GBV-leaning, packed with delightfully strange moments. From the singsong Ten Thousand Hands High to the yelping ecstasy of Get Liberal, it's 17 songs that go by like a breeze 4.5/5

#2454 Je Suis France - Fantastic Area

A severely overlooked band, destined to be a cult favorite // hidden gem if there's any justice in the world. The France is as hooky and inventive as GBV, with a Pavement//Parquet Courts sense of ramshackle reluctant joy, all shaggy edges and hazy weekends, thrashing out songs with effortless edge and wry humor (see the casiotone microbreakdown on Outdoor Industry), all those Modest Mouse minor atonalities and Single Frame asides.

Their second-ish (maybe?) album lacks the sprawling ambition of Afrikan Majik, and doesn't reach the catch highs of their later stuff, but its an excellent, noisy blast of ideas, all good fun, a set by the best, cleverest local band in town 4/5

#2453 Madlib - Rock Konducta Pt 1.

A ramshackle ramble of samples from a whole nother scene -- a ravaging wave of prog/kraut/psych slivers bent into hiphop shapes and its mostly brilliant. The track titles alone are a scavenger hunt for the nerds, snippets repeat, build atmosphere, and all those weird textures get pulled into atmosphere. All those perfect motoriks and bonkers X/Y signatures get twisted and tamed into grooveready throughlines.
Easily overlooked cause Madlib's a beast, but this's one of the strangest, boldest pieces of instrumental hip hop around - don't sleep 4.5/5

#2452 French 79 - Angel

Bweeeeaeaaaaah -- bwaaaaaaaahhhhhhh.

Perfect tones will carry you a long way, the kind of looping buzzy, post-moby surges that Tycho wields, 5 tracks of unstoppable texture to smother yourself in, clipped into beats at the rare of your heart. Just cant get enough 4/5

#2451 Gaz Coombes - Matador

Supergrass got so damn boring by the end, losing touch with the scrappy energy that made them so appealing in the first place. But the former frontman's second solo outing opens strong! There's a flash of what Gaz might've been going for: buzzy bass, fidgety electronics, and swooning vocals make epic, glammy gestures. It's pretty good. And then it's gone.

The album's desperately frontloaded, and after the first few tracks mostly there's layers of backing vocals and other production nonsense in the space where the hooks should be. Eventually its all a bit Coldplay, with all the trappings of something moving, but no heart 3/5

#2450 Nightstop - Streetwalker

The 80's revival instrumental/electronic thing gets staler by the minute, but this's got the hulking bouncer synths and insistent, striding momentum to get your blood pumping. The pacing drags on the slower tracks, but suggestions of a vampire prostitute protagonist (?) inject enough simmering atmosphere to get you back to the bangers 3.5/5

#2449 Captain Beyond - Sufficiently Breathless

Can we start with an ever-overdue tribute to the ever-underappreciated Je Suis France - who named their 16 minute (!) opening (!) song on Afrikan Majik (?) after a riff on a song by an obscure 70's sub-supergroup's opening song? Those guys still rule.

Captain Beyond rules too - the perfect obscure band to fetishize. A mishmash of Iron Butterfly / Deep Purple / [etc] castoffs, some of whom got fired --- ? --- fucking, I can't be expected to parse that halfassed piece of wikipedia. I got a day job.

-----

A great, romping rambing, propulsive pile of shuffly acoustics, ragged electrics, splattered drums - I felt at peace and excited throughout. A delightful slice of spacey 70's hard rock that I've totally not done justice to with this strangely suitable hot mess 4/5

#2448 Foli Jackson - The White Lodge EP

Listen here!

A Major Briggs sample aside, the Twin Peaks connection's tenuous, but Foli continues to find pathos and simmering mystery in the lo-fi crannies of his samples, filled with earthy, original approaches. Mysterious, affecting, inscrutable stuff, patterns in stop-motion paint drying, in watching life go from suspended animation 3.5/5

#2447 The National - High Violet

This music passed right through me, like so much lately. And it feels so overstuffed as to have no hard edges, blowing by like the wind of a million million molecules of vanishing individual force. But some twine-become-rope backbone, in the form of that bludgeoning baritone, leaves a bruise in the passing.

A deeply, barely-there album that pokes its head up every now and then, even just to deliver the word "lemonworld" and to take out your knees, a whale or dolphin, some thing outside noticing whose sleek form undercuts you just at the moment of least expecting 4/5 

#2446 Muse - Origin of Symmetry

There's an appealing plasticity to those opening little plinking keystrokes. Like maybe some piece of arty artifice is within reach, like maybe this will be more than just a wall of big-shit guitars and thundering lead bass. But those illusions are dispelled circa 1:24 and 1:38, respectively.

And then its more. And more and more. And its giant clockwork basslines crushing skulls to dust, and its those vocal lines that range from nasal clenching to hooting falsetto, and nothing in between.

It's thrilling for 10 minutes or so, but it's pummeling for the next 45, a machine with one gear which is to COME AT YOU WITH EVERYTHING. All Michael Bay bombastics, all ENTIRE WORLD AT STAKE, all CLIMAX CLIMAX CLIMAX CLIMAX _w_h_i_n_g_i_n_g___t_e_n_s_i_o_n_ CLIMAX CLIMAX CLIMAX CLIMAX.

And shit, some of those climaxes are good. And those bass lines are pretty sick. And you almost admire it all, in its commitment. And when the production kicks in, you can just feel where they put their focus, on the big hits of Hyper Music and Feeling Good where you just go "we got ourselves a hit!" But on the balance it's such a blunt instrument, an H-bomb in the loudness wars, a relentless assault that leaves you numb more than it makes you feel anything in particular 3.5/5

#2445 Slowdive - Slowdive

A preposterously solid shoegaze revival - less epic but no less successful than the even-less-likely MBV. The hit ratio on LONG overdue followup albums is impossible lately. Cmon NMH you can do this. A great wash of guitars and voices and reverb and reverb and noise and sound and sound. Simply wonderful stuff 4/5

#2444 Pogo - Weightless

Kid's a genius. Scattershot plunderphonics halfway between John Oswald's unlistenable busyness and Avalanches goodtimes firecracking - unafraid of autotuning everything into melodic shapes beyond their creators' imaginations. Threads of gimmicky sampling (Data & Picard!) are _far_ better than expected, packed with pathos. Exuberant pop gets tuned to blinding dayglo on Cupboard Shaker, and There You Are slingshots past Max Tundra and Skylar Spence into some aspartame taffy beyond, settling into proper instrumental hiphop groovecraft. A wildly inventive, splattering, explosion of light - a week-making delight.

Seriously. Data and Picard saved my life tonight 4.5/5

#2443 Elastica - Elastica

The parallels to Parallel Lines, from sound to aesthetic, are tough to ignore and totally lived up to. The next wave of new wave, end to end with perfect, instantcrafted moments - totally 90's and totally timeless. Holds up like hell, rocksolid riff and swagger 4/5

#2442 Parquet Courts - Human Performance

Possibly the most band band album imaginable - imaginative, strange, inventive, unpredictable, but strangely ununexpectedly so. The kind of album that would have been a fucking //classic// in the 80's but we've had Pavement, Minutemen, Modest Mouse, Beck, to say nothing of Television, Wire, Gang of Four, The Jam, The Kinks.

Which are great bands to sound like! And this is like, the best fucking Five Guys burger you've ever had - borderline fresh, made with care. And you can't fault anyone involved. These guys are KILLING what they do. But what they do is MAPPED OUT, and they never find the dragons 3.5/5

#2441 Jean Michel Jarre - Zoolook (2014 Remaster)

An album that presents two conflicting views at once:
 - On one hand, a pretentious bit of optimism. The myriad language samples, the world-ly rhythms, a very 80's "we're all just human beings" bit of tripe under the surface.
 - On the other hand, a shellshocked bit of futureterror; horns and strings menacing, a synthetic funk thresher chopping voices to pieces, a world reduced to misaligned soundbytes.

It's the latter that makes this essential listening, an early glimpse of the kind of digital collapse that Zooropa and The Bends would smash into in the 90's. The opening epic Ethnicolor's the absolute standout, a genuine mindfuck, a swirling, bewildering trip down the rabbithole, totally beyond instrument and beyond production. Ahead of its time even still. The rest is mixed, sometimes grating, often cloying - I wouldn't blame you for skipping it. But stick around for that first 12 minutes and behold 4/5

#2440 King Diamond - Abigail

King Diamond's having a bit of a moment lately - there's something pure in just how far they take the gothic metal thing, all-in on the searing falsettos, spooky tales, and shredding guitar solos.

The make-or-break's gonna be those vocals. They arrive at some kind of shrill majesty, but they're undeniably really fucking annoying to human ears.  Everything else holds up like hell - the story//symbols//numerology are all great campy fun, and the guitars are white-hot joy. The utter shamelessness is a sight to behold - but man, them vocals. Your mileage may vary 3.5/5

#2439 Surfer Blood - Snowdonia

Surfer Blood's lost. Lost their touch, or something. A hookish album here and there, with a few moments to breathe, but so little's memorable, so little even approaches the fart of Astro Coast's shadow, that it's hard to get worked up 3/5

#2438 Valgeir Sigurðsson - Dissonance

You know how Moby had that map of every chord and how it affects the human heart? And how he'd chart a course to the exact emotional space he demanded you arrive at?

Sigrosson's music sounds like it was mapped on the forbidden section, a sweeping line across the regions marked Here Be Dragons. Every anxious moment builds on the last, an ever-climbing Jenga tower of simmering tension. But Beautiful. And that's how he seduces you, spurring you to stack the tower of your own inevitable topping brick by brick.

And I evoke Moby because for the first 45 minutes, it's all a bit clinical. The best bit is the third of the three suites, 1875 really pulling out the stops and kicking your legs out, finding some move beyond a pummeling of the book of chords, some movement that leaves a pit in your heart that you scramble to explain.

This's a challenging pile of strings, stacked the the sky against you, a series of sounds designed to take you down in increments, and to keep you complicit in the process; a real act of musical emotional abuse. Admirable, in its way. But it cannot be recommended in good conscience 3/5

#2437 Sophia Kennedy - Sophia Kennedy

A deadly trap for the avid music listener in 2017.

A clever, snaking album that defies comparison to any easy landmark, footholds only in the un-pin-downable, in Eleanor Friedberger, Max Tundra, Stephin Merritt, Laurie Anderson - those who would drag every ancient pop song structure through countless modern wringers until it lies gasping and unrecognizable. 

A sweeping piece of songcraft in the jazz//tinpan tradition, utterly out of step, and chopped to bits by a reckless robot hand, dabbling in samplerism, ambience, and worse.

A bewildering, fascinating listen, packed with clever moves and melodies and turns of phrase, undercut by its strangeness, its scarce willingness find common ground, its defiance keeping you at stiff arm's length, making you put in the work.

Worth it, I think, I say, hamstrung 4/5

#2436 Yucky Duster - Yucky Duster

About as good as hooky, plainspoken, hipshot indie pop-punk gets. Zero pretension, kids banging out Pavement songs about cast-off thoughts with bratty, lo-fi disregard, rolling around in all kinds of girl-group // new//no-wave rollick, tripping over fits of sneering sniggers saddled with zero fucks 4/5

#2435 The Thermals - We Disappear

What if trying to be more than you are is your defining trait? Is there any way to be yourself, or is sincerity a tail you're doomed to chase? This is the fingertrap the Thermals are ever stuck in, always reaching for something they can't grasp, ever coming up short, the shortcoming becoming their defining quality. I love that they reach, truly, in theory, but nothing they've put out since More Parts Per Million has a favorable do / try ratio.

This is their best in ages, the first half speckled with fetching hooks, but none of it feels comfortable with itself, some young adult awkwardness clinging on for dear life 3.5/5