#2548 Ben Lukas Boysen - Golden Times 1

Profoundly powerful cocktail of sparking, minimal strings; simmering low, lurching high -- cracked with fizzled electronic glitches -- washed with fully-loaded synth waves. A masterpiece of minimal//maximal soundcraft, with negative space that threatens to swallow you up, a hole you fall farther into the deeper you look 4/5

#2547 Sontag Shogun - Patterns for Resonant Space

We can call Tame Impala 60's. We know what kind of guitar sounds we mean when we say "70's rock". Don't get me started on the 80's. And god knows we're having a pretty sweet 90's revival lately: you know what that means, I can see your accidental scowl and grudging toetap from here.

But what's the 00's sound? It was too soon to define it for a while, but that excuse is running thin.

It was an era of "indie", where prettiness and intellect arose, where a less-superficial // still-overpolished version of 80's artifice came along right on schedule.

But -- the early 00's in particular -- were an impossibly generative era in...post rock? It's an overloaded term. Not all that mathy, muso bullshit, but a splintering of indie - a truly generative moment where ideas about how you could bend and break the rock template exploded, a flash, 2002-2004, where that 90's underground thing swung back around, with more production tricks and more ambition. It was the golden age of internet fandom, Pitchfork in particular, which deserves credit (admit it!) for bringing albums like Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone, One Word Extinguisher, Thunder Lightning Strike, Dead Cities Red Seas Lost Ghosts, and Thought for Food to the attention of thousands, inroads//outroads to//from a disintegrating concept of rock music.

--

It's those last two, in particular, that comes to mind here.


There is so much space in these songs.

Emotion hit only indirectly.

Rattle, hiss, incident, accident.

And somehow its a discredit to just call this an electronic album, or an experimental album, because it comes from that rock sense; somewhere down there; of reaching for your heart. Not telling your body to dance, not telling your head to call chin_scratch(), but to really engage you, on pop-parallel vectors.

I've listened to this twice now, and both times I've felt wrung out.

--

Pitchfork, still kicking, did some retroactive reviews of a bunch of Brian Eno albums today. And they praised his genius, his innovation, his embrace of the unpredictable, his outsider stance.

But most of his shit, truth be told, has always left me cold. It seems like an arch exercise, mostly.

--

This record though, does not feel like an exercise.

It is outside, and peering in with interest, and throwing down ropes, and building bridges best it knows how.

Piano notes ring long. Rattle and dust drum up. Space and place are conjured effortlessly, ghosts summoned by ghosts. Even the samples acknowledges that they're samples, a girl muttering "I'm not doing it as well as last time -- did I say other things?" Burning the authenticity of the moment and arriving at a new one in one fell swoop.

My whole prelude is all to say - I've been chasing that era, the early 00's, for a decade plus, now. That feeling of something that's not what I've heard before. And I've found little that didn't feel new for its own sake, that didn't feel detuned just to escape well-trod tunings.

But this excites me. It's new, inventive, evocative, promising -- so refreshingly new and promising.

I'd thought, for a while there, that there was no good sonic space to mine. That we could only drag back the weeds of far lands and chew them in collective consensus on their exotic greatness. But this is a little flash of hope 4.5/5

#2546 Gojira - Magma

Epic, heavy, sludgy metal, but so accessible. Some softer version of peak Boris, a padded Fucked Up, a slower, smoother Mastadon, shoegaze sauce melting all those obsidian angles. Guitars stacked to the sun and blurred to pretty, vocals doubled and tripled into airbrushed glory. Super fucking listenable, an ambient metal masterpiece 4/5

#2545 Arcade Fire - Everything Now

I have this tendency, the causality of which is unclear, to love the outlier album people seemed disappointed by.

A lover of Vitalogy, of Zooropa, of Amnesiac, Surrender, Congratulations, Nimrod, Tiny Music, Adore*

Possible theories:
a) everyone's blinded by expectation and ignores something perfectly good on its own merits
b) I'm a contrarian douche who wants to like the thing nobody else does
c) I wasn't actually that into what Pearl Jam, U2, Chemical Brothers, MGMT, et al. were doing, so a swerve into the bushes came upon me

Sometimes I call this the 3rd album phenomenon. I compiled that list without a thought for that parallel track, but backtracing that covers 3 of those, more if you're willing to start 1 at the first popular album.

--

But now, what a trap this little beastie is.

Consensuswise, is this a "disappointing album"?

Do I love it?

hrm

--

Brasstacks:

It's a listless little shit, full of reluctantly danceable backbeats, reminding me of another love-hate victim, the bloodless, even-more-unabashedly-disco RAM.

But I can't help but feel like some of the backlash has involved the _concept_ of Arcade Fire - their rightfully-hateable dress-coded shows, their sub-Radiohead post-media-media blitz, their run of mostly-undeservedly critically-unassailable albums, their unrelentingly arch primness in the face of a world that makes all that horseshit seem frivolous. And more specifically, their idea that this album was some statement on the superficial simmering we're all cooking in, while itself seeming tied up in it, sneering smugly down from tippy-toes.

--

But I think this album knows that there's no room for Arcade Fire in this world. What move's left to them, a band that started their career with an album ruminating in hopelessness and death, grasping the barest sunbeam through ever-shut shutters? Are they supposed to keep dancing and fighting when the entire world is, by any reasonable approximation COMPLETELY FUCKED ?

Maybe rolling around in the pit, a gallows shuffle as the last gasp of Reflektor's dance, a dying twitch of a disco hip-flick, maybe that's all there is.

--

Look, I like this record a lot. I think its hooky, and desperate in its late-era Flaming Lips kinda way without being actually depressing. On my third listen, spaced from the first two, I already remembered the throughlines. And if its limp its because we live in limp times. And if we find an era beyond this, I think we'll look back at this as the miserable Arcade Fire album, and be reminded of why 4.5/5

* jk, fuck adore*

* though you know what? I'll be there's a contingent of people out there who weren't that into Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie who love that one.

#2544 Young Marco - 4 Our Generation

These tags get harder to pick - the hottest pop music's electronic-backed hip-hop-flecked soul-adjacent auto-tuned crooning. Drake's banked a few billion streams on that recipe. And Young Marco's in that space, album cover packed with gear, sneaks, phone drama, semi-obscure movie poster. The songs go wide, all about love, leaving lovers, literally: prom.

Hook: tonight is prom (3x).

It's got a little charm, all that silverly backing, all those slippery structures. But it's got it's eye on the formula and never does anything to escape that orbit 3/5

#2543 Califone - Quicksand / Cradle Snakes

A mysterious combination of experimental and and dusty and patient and acoustic.

Notes and tones are dotted sparingly - plenty of empty space in between for reverb to creep across - plenty of time to let the sounds really roll around in your mouth - the surges of straightforward energy feeling welcome and earned.

Searing feedback flashes across twangy strings, half Songs: Ohia, half The Books, all a striking reminder of that great moment of production and invention of we had in 2003 4.5/5

#2542 Magical Power Mako - Super Record

Sprightly, super-listenable jams, packed with unexpected textures and agreeable hooks, with artful flourishes that never pull your eye off the ball. World music without a clear point of origin, blurring lines and blowing minds, super-early Genesis, into PFunk, into Stevie Wonder, into Boredoms, into Grateful Dead, into wherever next, slowly and with great grace and care 4/5

#2541 Gal Costa - India

The kind of album it feels crass to review in this format.

Costa's voice is as punchy and immediate as ever, and it's backed by crystal-clear, endlessly changing backing by a who's who of Tropicalia greats. Funk, exotica, strings, bass, bossa nova, reverb, piano, jazz, guitar, tension and slack -- a slow motion starburst of brilliant sounds 4/5

#2540 Quindar - Hip Mobility

The artists' statement talks a lot about NASA samples but it's all noise. This is perfectly pleasant bloopity meandering, full of poppy warmth and big-moment TV-show-soundtracking, with some copy attached. There's a couple snippets of control room banter, but this's no Race for Space 3/5

#2539 Nine Inch Nails - Less Than

Nine Inch Nails' 21st century output's always felt a little understuffed* -- the EP format's a good fit. There's a drip-feed of interesting applications of that electronics//guitar//noise//anger//piano-reverb cocktail, so give it up in sensible doses. There's nothing here we haven't seen before, but it's in slightly different configurations and interesting enough when we have the space to forget the last batch.

Before we dismiss this for good: a few words for The Background World, which ends with 8 minutes of slowly-degrading repetition. It's a poor-man's Disintegration Loops, trading analog decay for knob-turning obliteration, and most notably putting just a little     gap     between the repetitions --- breaking the flow. But maybe that negative space, as a fencepost, makes for a final, hard-edged distinction to erase, as we fall into a full-scale clattering buzz.

Familiar, sure, but _just_ different enough to give you a chin-scratch, which is a sweet-spot I don't get to roll around in often enough 3.5/5

* except when it goes around the horn, sprawling its balls off on the endless Ghosts collection

#2538 Shigeto - No Better Time Than Now

A pretty mix of spacy synths and skittery beats, with organ pulses that bring it within a Palin's Alaska of that Brainfeeder instrumental vibe. Programmed backdrops with a throughline of live keyboard mastery, a jazzy feel over icy soundscapes, flirting with weird offbeats but always coming home to your headbobs. A subtle, clever little groover 4/5

#2537 Flipper - Generic

A monument to that spot where punk's already bored with itself and giving up on anger as means for change, a decade-scale harbinger of grunge. Dissonant and sneering and halfassed and halfway hooky in spite of itself - especially on slowmotion rockabilly carcrash nightmare opus Sex Bomb 4/5

#2536 The Glass Family - Electric Band

The ultimate also-ran psychedelic band, The Glass Family opened for a who's who of 60's bands in a where's where of California hotspots. Without being unduly uncharitable, you can see why they never quite made it - their debut's solid, but squarely second-tier, equal parts British wistfulness, Doorsey meltdowns, and organ-drenched garage-rock stomp. It's all perfectly good, but all a little familiar, a half-step slow, it's moments landing halfway there, nothing really rising above the rest of the generation.

Fans of the era will enjoy this overlooked album, but it's nowhere anyone should start 3.5/5

#2535 Air - Le Voyage Dans la Lune

A surprisingly great burst of anachronistic mystery from the erstwhile masters of effortless euro-cool atmosphere. This theoretically soundtracks the silent film of the (roughly) same name, but fuck if I've been able to pin down how its 31 minutes would track down to 16 of visuals?

So file this under inspired-by, but tag it Soundtrack, because it has that kind of feel - inspiring mystery and adventure and sounds out of time, packed with odd rhythms, curious instrumentation, otherworldy pulses, ever-expanding ambition.

A wildly unique little slice of delightful musical strange 4/5

#2534 Terrace Martin / The Polyseeds - Sounds of Crenshaw Vol. 1

Jazzy, tipsy beats laced with horns, weird wobbles, all that Brainfeeder-style LA sound, all that slowed-down pfunk slowed down even further, all simmer and soak. Dense, strange, full of texture and dark color 3.5/5

#2533 Future of the Left - The Peace and Truce of Future of the Left

In a time like this, what self-respecting band still has enough sense to make arguments? Anyone remotely paying attention's gone mad, and Future of the Left has totally lost the thread, rattling off a cavalcade of jagged nonsense. Gaspy, raspy half-sequiturs assembly-line-fed into a churning furnace of loping riffs, machine music capturing the sense of the time better than anything more logical could dream of 4/5

#2532 Sheer Mag - Need to Feel Your Love

Sheer Mag's long-awaited full length is more or less what you'd expect: a cleaner, tighter version of their 70's guitar-rock / giveafuck-punk cocktail. Tina Halladay's firecrackers vocals clap you on the ears, brash and raspy as ever -- but take em away and you couldn't pick the album out of a bargain-bin lineup of Thin Lizzy, Kiss, and Dire Straits' greatest, smoothest hits.

Super-sweet guitar grooves + fiery vocals, can't complain. But it's hard not to remember when Sheer Mag was more than the sum of its parts 3.5/5

#2531 Ride - Weather Diaries

First MBV, now this. Our notion that 90's reunions (thanks Pixies) have to suck is all rattled.

Ride's latest is a trip.

Fight me, but Nowhere's kinda one note. And maybe that's shoegaze's thing, but I vastly prefer this - the kind of album I would have gone __deep__ on in the 90's when you could maybe only buy an album or two a month. I would've dug the fuck into this one. No song's the same, with melodies, synths, washes, different notions of what is it is to be /enjoyable to listen to/ swirling to the fore.

And that album flow, damn. It hypnotizes you, peaking quietly around Cali, and then _*poof*_

gone just as you're getting into it

a serious leave em wanting more move

they don't make em like this anymore.

a rich, readily enjoyable album ripe for hundreds of listens and half-listens 4.5/5

#2530 Misfits - Walk Among Us

Good goddamn fun. There is nothing wrong with this. All momentum, all ghoulish rollick, perfectly delivered. A subtle foothold into pop-punk, effortlessly energetic, a shamelessly frivolous tumbling act of fuckit toppleover 4/5

#2529 The Weirdos - Destroy All Music

Compilation:

 Breakdown:
  - 4 song demo
  - 3 of those songs done up proper-wise in the studio
  - 6 song proper-proper followup

 Observations:
  - i love me some raw power, but the produced versions are just flat-out better. Look no further than those clean guitars and backing vocals on Life of Crime. That's just better; punk ramshackle be damned. These guys were never quite nuts enough to get by on pure viscera, too much talent, too much eye for melody to hold back.
 - to wit -- the six songs off [Who? What? When? Where? Why] are where its at. At 1979, this is way ahead of the curve, ahead of basically everybody other than the Buzzcocks at just being good goddamn fun. Still snotty, still pissed, but packed with hooks, dynamics, rockabilly jaunt, all kinds of delightfully despicable concessions to being good to actually listen to, pure Pixies progenitors.
 
 The pop//punk contradiction goes on forever, but this's gold to a particular sect of believers 4/5

#2528 Bent Shapes - Wolves of Want

Pop-punk // indie revival continues, all with that driving neo-motorik, every measure leaning forward into some sunny somewhere. Nothing here bites as good as a dozen others, but a most-welcome also-ran, packed with pretty boy/girls, light guitar chimes, driven by those ppoppadop beats 3.5/5

#2527 Sw. - The Album

Minimal, warm pulses, flecked with tropical touches, sampled invisibly, subtly great. A barely-there masterpiece of loops and energy. Sometimes zero wrong steps are better than one great one 4/5

#2526 Guerilla Toss - GT Ultra

Cars//B52s gone Devo//Polysics, all that shouting uncool//cool splintered through cantcontain energy, all eratic synths, all at lines that make no sense. New Wave taken to its natural destination, just short of unlistenable, the unexpected thrashing just this side of sexy. Never simple, never boring. We'll take it 3.5/5

#2525 Bombay Bicycle Club - So Long, See You Tomorrow

A totally lame Vampire Weekend // post-britpop-also-ran proto-acolyte redeems itself, improbably, with an album that's kind of all over the fucking place, packed with 'world music' beats, electronic bullshit, Avalanchey samples, and a general willingness to reach to get to your heart, a full SFA-Guerilla move into the unknown, for all the good//bad that implies.

Difficult to pin down. There's hints of [the worst] at every turn, but you see it increasingly in the distance as you whip by. I do not hate this, not even a little bit. In fact, I'm baffled how much I like it, as BBC explodes through every dead end with gentle, unexpected colorful force. This is at once totally dismissable and my favorite thing I've heard all month. Fall into it and you may find a lot to love, plenty of big soft sounds to roll around in for days 4/5

#2524 Jim-E Stack - Tell Me I Belong

I could not be less shocked to learn that Jim-E and The Range did a collaboration: the same ethereal, ghostly sample approach is on full display, and it is good.

Minimal bloops and clips, soul snippets, big washes of synths//tones//emotions, popped with dancy little flourishes, chopped ever so slightly, no detail taking your attention away from the larger, wider, fuller expanse of space and tone and place and emotion.

This will make any moment nighttime, and that night will be a little fuzzier than most, a little more meaningful, a little more sparked with contrast 4/5

#2523 Boris - Dear

Boris's always been all over the map, from noise to is-this-the-right-Boris-Spotify?-pop, and back. And Pink's always been their pinnacle of incredibly heavy, listenable sludgy//hooky deep metal, and this's as close as they've ever gotten to that peak.

If Pink was Mulholland Drive in its crystalization of weird//accessible, Dear is Twin Peaks: The Return -- demanding of patience, with flashes of brilliance in a sea of simmering, intricate frustration: worth it if you can tolerate the slow bits, and if you can find your way to really just fucking roll around in em, to nor just survive em but see all that dead space as part of the essential experience, then [mwah] // [Italian pizza guy making kissy fingertips explosion gesture] 4/5

#2522 Bjørn Torske and Prins Thomas - Square One

Prins Thomas's wandered far from the delightful krautrock of his debut, stumbling this time into a swamp of world beats and shadowy drones. Those goodold guitars rise here and there, that motorik heart still beats, but it's half-drowned in a murky, joyless album 2.5/5

#2521 DJ Taye - Move Out EP

Footwork got soul, loops loops loops, wobble wash wave, skitter skitter.

head bob to ellipticals, real cool shit,  slow      slow      slow      slowfast --- streeeeeeeetch andcolaps.

hyperactive chillout for the hypercool 3.5/5

#2520 Great Grandpa - Plastic Cough

  All that chuggy chug is so back, this second-wave stoner//surf thing, these big metal-via-Weezer riffs, all hazy memories of the 90's, so part of that movement they even reference the same season* of the Simpsons as (current tour mates!) Rozwell Kid, rife with references to weed and favorite shows; this wave of last gasp against giving up --

-- and man, it all feels ripe right about now. Who can even 3.5/5

* three

#2519 Whyte Horses - Pop or Not

All those indie 60's revival tributaries find pool here. There's hooks here and there, the odd production trick, but it's a fractal of familiarity: nasal vocals repeating the same microchoruses over Tame Impala // Olivia Tremor Control 60's re-re-revival 2.5/5

#2518 Kelly Lee Owens - Kelly Lee Owens

Icy minimalism meet warm analog synth layers, deadpan vocals meet ethereal crooning -- Owens' debut LP is a grand tour of old//new electronic sensibilities, atmospheric and entrancing. The dalliances with straightforward vocals are disappointing, but the tiny house pulses on Evolution and Cbm are perfect, and the closing raga leaves you eager for what's next 4/5

#2517 The Wytches - All Your Happy Life

All that heavy guitar, all that strained moaning, all that production heft - how can it all add up to so little? Much thrashing and wailing, all passing right through you like the unremembered 90's 2.5/5

#2516 Helios - Unomia

Totally fine ambient washes with twinkling arpeggios, tarted up with analog flourishes and soundtracky atmospherics. Nothing especially exciting about it, perfectly passable work music 3/5

#2515 Diet Cig - Swear I'm Good at This

Frantic, self-doubting, shambling two-piece rock, wracked with doubts and jangleapart hooks. It's a lively little sparker - but it seems a bit put on at times, a bit too Hot Now, pitched to what the listener wants reflected. I'm a cynical shit sometimes 3/5

#2514 The Courtneys - Courtneys II

There's a great surge of women making shoegazey, noisy, incisive rock these days. This doesn't quite get there; every song's half an idea short of earning its running time, and the subject matter lacks the bite of the best. But they chug along gamely, piling pounds of chiming guitars over neo-motorik // classic girl-group beats, a crystalline thing hanging from your rearview that'll brighten up a couple Summer weekends 3/5

#2513 Bill Orcutt - Bill Orcutt

Exciting, free-flowing guitar noise - scattershot tones that coalesce into loose melodies and fall apart again, crashing against their own reverberations. Aphex-loose covers of White Christmas and Over the Rainbow bury the signature melodies in the bayou, a bony jolt of the original jutting out now and again as an afterthought. The guitar sound is crisp, harsh, with a striking sense of the room, putting you right in the strings, battered by echoes.

A real argument for music as insight into how a mind works - Orcutt's got some odd angles 3.5/5

#2512 Cul De Sac - Death of the Sun

A wide open ambient expanse, rippling with guitar arpeggios and brushed with strings and drones and noise and hum. Halfway between post-rock mathiness and jam-band organics, this busy, patient, interesting, frustrating, stuff 3.5/5

#2511 Glenn Jones - The Wanting

Six strings, how many sounds can you make with that chorus of voices, abstracting out all that actual finger bother? That's the kind of question Jones answers.

You can listen to this one in two ways -- to meticulously backtrace the semi-impossible shapes of hands and strings that could have lead you here, to see those flesh maneuvers retrospectively, to watch them find pause and release upon each piece of tension.
;
or to let it roll over you as abstracted ragas of interconnected sound, every reverberation washing over the last, riding the blur of vibrations, bounced from wooden homes to recorded outlands.

Both work, at once even, maybe - a rich piece of maneuvering worth hearing however you hear 4/5

#2510 Chris Forsyth - The Rarity of Experience

Jammy, melodic double-guitar swirls, all perfectly proficient, perfectly polished -- but an act of  unspooling, with flashes of unexpected synth texture and bellowing reverberation. Completely listenable, totally enjoyable, but with a plastic sheen that undercuts the liveness, in some uncanny valley of loose//tight, and damn those vocals.

Let's put The First Ten Minutes of Cocksucker Blues in the song name hall of fame though 4/5

#2509 Gaussian Curve - The Distance

Ambient's hard to get right. Mellow's hard to get right.

It's hard to make it sound easy. You can be soulless and underconsidered in a second, and efforts to escape that pull are doomed to backfire.

It's rare to find something that sidesteps that, but here you have it.

There's real voice, real space, real atmosphere here. Spiderland patience alongside Laughing Stock warmth, some half speed instrumental version of Skylarking - gloaming synths growing Eno slow, but without all that trashy crystallization to place, just letting things hang in song titles like The Distance; Breathe; Suspended Motion.

You can feel someone pulling on those strings - the math is only the grid, the lines are handdrawn 4/5

#2508 Ogre You Asshole - 浮かれている人

Bounces along agreeably, packed with chiming guitars, restless synth flourishes, retro-pop asides, buzzy bridges - a kaleidoscope of indie complications. But the non-Japanese listener's held back by the Japanese lyrics: this lacks the Boris//Polysics//Pillows ability to punch through language, and you're left on the outside of a pretty cool party 3.5/5

#2507 Flat Worms - Red Hot Sand

I get flashbacks - to the Vines to England to The Future of the Left to the best of the garage rock revival revival. And that brings that smell of plastic, of oiled manufacture -- but also of sweat, of oil, of futurist grit and freighttrain momentum. And it's that chugging intro, that tension, that Je Suis France Americanism, the force of Men --- a tightening knot of a 5 minute slowburn, and a 2 and a 1 ---- 9 minutes and eight seconds later and I am excited about this fucking band 4.5/5

#2506 King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Murder of the Universe

King Gizzard's endless parade of opus-scale offerings rolls on unabated. Fresh off the infinite Nonagon and their Microtonal earwarper, Murder of the Universe is three mini-concept albums strung together, each feeling full-length, the whole experience stretching way beyond its exhausting 46 minutes. The band's usual rolling, relentless backbone's there, packed with screeching expulsions, swirling nauseatingly through high-concept structures, climaxing in a disgusting, mind-melting universe-murdering wave of cyborgs, clones and vomit. That's not colorful description - that's more or less the literal plot.

It's a heady, heavy, metal masterpiece, a bad trip of epic proportions, the kind of thing you strap in for, classic hardcore Floyd hole shit.

The narration, first by Leah Senior, then by a British text-to-speech program, is the worst aspect of the album, but it wouldn't work with out it. All that talking's right up on top of the mix, a bold move that differentiates the otherwise-familiar riffs from the band's dozen previous dalliances, forwarding narrative beyond what you could accomplish with singing. But it's _ever_ _present_, somethings leaving the music as something of an afterthought, as background music to a books-on-tape reading of some Dickian nightmare, and it's as great and awful as it sounds 4/5

#2505 Chuck Johnson - Balsams

There's so much to love here.

The pedal steel of some ascendant trinity of Sigur Ros, William Tyler, and KLF circa Chill Out [[so much for no-namedropping!]], the washy synths, the patient sense of space. On paper, I love the plan. But somehow in the execution it doesn't quite transcend, doesn't reach the highs of any of those bands, feeling slightly tense, slightly taut, simmering in new tensions instead of washing them away.

It's hard to fine _just_the_right_tones_, and I'm happy to have another pony in that stable, but it comes up just short 3.5/5