#2596 Dan Melchior - Fire Breathing Clones on Cellular Phones

Can always use more Cowgirl in the Sand guitars! Perfectly nice one-man, I-made-an-album album. The songs are a little too repetitive and Melchior's solos occasionally degrade into practice scales, but its charmingly rough around the edges, and the saxes are a nice gravelly flourish 3/5

#2595 Billy Childish and Dan Melchior - Devil in the Flesh

Ragged, rootsy blues, covered in Lomax-level grit - it's a recording made of wood and nails and dust, for better or worse. Catchier than most such basics though 3.5/5

#2594 Slayer - Divine Intervention

After Seasons, Slayer regressed into too-clean production that undercut their menace, and Araya's vocals are exposed, as goofy as South of Heaven all over again. But Divine Intervention mostly makes up for it by being fast as shit, Bostaph's drums on a rampage, guitars gamely galloping to keep up.

Just look at those album covers though, man. Seasons is all raw symbolism -- this one's is all Giger airbrushed slickness. It's brilliant and brutal, but a million miles from the genuine savagery of Slayer of old, a killing machine that keeps the blood off the hands of man 3.5/5

#2593 Slayer - Seasons in the Abyss

Reign in Blood's the best metal album of all time, but South of Heaven's sterile production left me cold. This lands somewhere in between - the production's awesomely overwhelming: Araya's vocals aren't as exposed as they were on South, and the waves of chugging drums and guitar are given free reign to ruin. There's bracing start-stops, unexpected shifts, truly melodic moments, all without breaking relentless, menacing stride. It lacks the fire of Reign, but its the closest Slayer'd ever get again 4/5

#2592 Colin Stetson - All this I do for Glory

The best possible listening experience for this album is to go into it totally cold, and have nothing explained to you. In that context, it's a harrowing, engaging, rich listen that undercuts your understanding of how sounds get made, that hypnotizes, staggers (before, admittedly, getting a little boring by the end)

I read this deviates little from his previous work. Couldn't say. But if you're a fan of weird new shit, and this is the first you've heard of Colin Stetson, I can recommend this surging nightmare full-throatedly - it is patient and ancient and impossible and like nothing you've heard 3.5/5

#2591 Orange Juice - Rip it Up

Arch, post-new-wave, disco-flecked, horn soaked, Smiths-chasing pop-infected nonsense that thinks it can have it both ways, indulging in awful long-70's indulgences while holding it at arm's length with a unconvincing veneer of irony. A few hooks aside, this is bullshit for hipsters trying to stay one step ahead of the curve 2.5/5

#2590 Swell Maps - International Rescue

Ridiculously good, ridiculously overlooked (post?) punk band, deigning to play some killer bass lines over waves of perfectly fucked sheetmetal guitars. There's that first hint of detachment, and a seemingly accidental knack for a killer hook.

Through a quirk of Spotify date-attaching, I thought this was a modern band from the Parquet Courts-via-Pavement scene and totally believed it. But that dead backwards - these guys were way ahead of the curve, and this career-hopping collection's a great listen for fans of dissonant, hooky disinterest 4/5

#2589 Queens of the Stone Age - Villains

This seems like a really good Queens of the Stone Age album, packed with great guitars, punchy beats, and subtly unpredictable structures. I want to say this this is their best album in years, but if you shuffled the songs on their last 4 albums I don't think I could do better than two coin flips at telling you which went with which.

Let's say this, this will change exactly zero minds on whether Queens of the Stone Age is a good band.

I had a good time listening 4/5

#2588 Liars - TFCF

I have a playlist on Spotify called Hard Liars - it's all the shit that drew me to Liars in the first place, those cut T-1000 riffs and menacing deadpan deliveries: post-punk perfected. And that playlist has like 5 songs from their first album. And 3 or so from each of their next few. And then a token song from each of their latest. And I don't think anything off this new album's going to make the cut. And yet.

Liars always did what they wanted, dividing critics and fans proper alike with their second album's sludgy weirdness, doubling down again and again into meandering production holes thereafter. Arguably all that rejection of listenability's even _more_ post-punk, but in practice it was so bo.o.o.o.r.i.ng.

But it works here. It's an Angus solo album now, lack of name change notwithstanding. That perfect cover photo, so strange, so visceral, so sad. And as solo records go, it's personal, but its also seemingly a breakup album about the band itself. And the meandering, icy, strangeness feels so heartfelt, so direct, it just _works_. There is the sense of the singer being as lost as you are in these spaces, an entrancing sense of mystery, peppered with some of the prettiest moments to ever come out of the Liars name, some hint of desperation giving this all __stakes.

"ok, that's it. those are all the songs I really like. so I hope that you [???] now. and I hope that you have a really great break. and I'm thinking of you. __all the time. . . was that kinda close?" [giant bass wobble]

so goes a distorted confessional closing out the fourth track, laying it all out there. fuck. I'm calling everything a classic lately, but man I've got good albums from War on Drugs, Liars, Thee Oh Sees, and I got an LCD and a BSS in the clip. A good week for music right when we could use it 4/5

#2587 Thee Oh Sees - Orc

Thee Oh Sees will not be stopped, and are unassailably the best guitar band going right now. While also-rans like Ty Segall and King Gizzard fuck around with detuned softspoken nonsense, these dudes are keeping their foot on the goddamn gas, riding a three-album hit streak of bonkers distortion-drenched, high-powered rock velocity.

Orc lands somewhere between the bristly energy of Mutilator and the superhuman force of Weird Exits -- it's the Sees most enjoyable experimental album, and also their most adventurous heavy album. Keys to the Castle's an 8 minute wanderer that hypnotizes you with visceral guitars and distant strings into a place beyond the notion of boredom. Elsewhere ringing organs and shrieking yelps and electronic fizzes and guitars and guitars and guitars drive you to the edge of a 60's that never was. Destined to be a cult favorite, at worst, if there's any justice in the world 4.5/5

ps: something I thing about a lot. In the 90's we looked back on the great albums from the 60's, and found hidden gems that rose up from among the major label dreck by the collective force of good taste. And I guess I assume something similar will happen to the good albums of this time, that albums we love now will have cache in 30 years. But maybe its another time, another world, where ease of production and diffusion of opinion will retard the necessary upwelling. Also, trick question, this whole place's gonna be a dead space rock some time between now and the 8th Trump administration

#2586 Joseph Shabason - Aytche

A smotheringly soft, warm swirl of wobbly acoustic bass, breathy horns, echoing soft piano -- all offset by icy electronic washes and twinkles, and the occasional blast of guitar horror. The analog/artificial divide's palpable, strangely tense, occasionally beautiful, like an artier version of Bon Iver's latest. A fascinating production-era hybrid that I want to love, but it just isn't that good to listen to. Might have been a real classic if it could've found a little more heart in those echoes 3.5/5

#2585 The War on Drugs - A Deeper Understanding

There's something perfect about this album, like Oh Inverted World, like Is This It, like Since I Left You -- like those early indie glimpses of the Production Era, where we could have these records that existed just outside our conception of their making. This has the makings of those slow-growing classics.

It's not that there's anything blindingly spectacular here. But it's a crystallization of the War on Drugs sound, taking the highlights of Lost in the Dream and scattering them across a runtime. It's the meandering patience of Neil Young, the wandering of Springsteen at his most desolate, some version of Dylan that deigned to speak plainly about his lot.

And it's all over that punchy motorik, that beat leaning forward 15 degrees when its going fast and when its going slow, that road overgrown with lush, perfect production, swelling with a thousand pianos and strums and restless bass and subtle chimes and twinkling electronics and sneaky ferocious guitar lines. Nothing steps out of line, but the collective force is overwhelming, especially when you're long-conned into vulnerability to those guitars. There's nothing virtuoso about them on the face of it, but they'll take out each of your shaky knees.

That cover photo's perfect, Granduciel looking over a shoulder, maybe a little surprised, bloomed by too little light, surrounded by the implements of sound. He is you, when you get in there. This is our Steely Dan maybe, with a dash of Dire Straits, likely to be victim to various waves of backlash, but the purest, most affecting thing around if you open yourself to it 4.5/5

-- update 1/25/18

It's funny how this feels like every War on Drugs album, like the only one there ever was. For better or worse. It sands off the highs of, say, Under the Pressure, but raises all boats on the sea of sentiment. Nothing here surprises, but that weary, human, pulsing, striving energy comes through.

When a band's __thing is to be the sustain on your life's one note, maybe a pernicious consistency aint such a bad thing. Keep me rolling War on Drugs, as the beautiful nerds I went to college with might say, one day more

#2584 Donald Fagan - The Nightfly

Just when you thought the Steely Dan scene couldn't get any smoother, Donald goes solo, goes digital, and it works like clockwork. Warron Zevon beerlight spills in soft focus over everything, wistful contentment billows across the floor, bitterness there only to be melted. Fagan's a fully-sated vampire, observing everything at a detached distance, smiling with half a mouth, an eternity's worth of nights to savor 4/5

#2583 Ornette Coleman - This is Our Music

As always: I know nothing about jazz.

This teeters on the cusp of nothingness and does not fall.

The fact that the connections between the players are so tenuous, so invented as they go -- it gives that high wire quality, makes it all the more thrilling when they meet in midair.

The kind of thing that makes people hate jazz.

But damn when you watch that trumpet lock into the undercarriage of that sax on Kaleidoscope, when you feel _it happening, it's all worth it 3.5/5

#2582 The Mekons - Fear and Whiskey

The Mekons documentary cuts both ways.

It'll make you appreciate the dedication behind the Mekons: they're a punk band that outgrew the scene's limitations and embraced uncool country, spinning out this sweeping set of lilting underground tales. Most charitably, they're a band that rejects everything, including what punk's supposed to be, and their relentless persistence has got to be worth something.

On the other hand, The Mekons' story centers around a bunch of art school wanks who wanted to say something, and kinda farted around at various ways to frame it, without ever really risking anything. The deadpan feels preordained, and half as hooky as anything Gang of Four put out. The mysterious, infectious little asides aside, it's really an underwhelming bit of indie pop blown out of proportion 3/5

#2581 Acid King - Zoroaster

They don't go full Dopesmoker, there's 10 songs here, averaging a mere 4 minutes each. But Acid King locks into exactly one stoner metal groove for this 40 minute outing, rolling midtempo, packed with endless heavy bass and thick fuzz, plowing your face into hedgerows in slow motion. It's hooky, in its plodding way, but I'd like something more exciting // more committed to denying excitement 3/5

#2580 Nina Simone - Wild is the Wind

Staggering, as always. Simone's voice is peerless, her words unstoppable. The sound is ancient, deeply, richly pained, with fragile and powerful force behind every syllable, moving forward at unexpected cadences on its own time. The space between notes is vertiginous, strung together by ropes that might snap, because they choose to let you drop. A harrowing, bracing listen, as always 4/5

#2578 Jane Berkin and Serge Gainsbourg - Jane Berkin and Serge Gainsbourg

Exquisitely French, drippingly sexy lounge music, soaked with strings, shuffly drums, and punchy rock organs. This it doesn't exist just for your lovemaking. It seems by all accounts like a sincere expression of Gainsbourg's overflowing affection for his new love - even the Birkin-fronted songs feel like gifts he's given her, landscapes to romp around in, gamely embraced. So much breathiness, so much gesture and sweep, so much inflection and insinuation, chiming head-tilts, half-whispers close enough to feel 3.5/5

#2577 Syd Barrett - The Madcap Laughs

A sloppy stumble of rambling lyrics and loosely-connected strums, piano clatters, and other backings. Barret strains to reach some lines, while others reverberate too-close. It's all an underwhelming mess that's impossible to ignore, sneaking in backdoors, Terrapin's haunting backbone reflected again and again 3.5/5

#2576 Harry Partch - The World of Harry Partch

Custom-scale, custom-instrument, high-art nonsense that achieves hypnosis eventually, as it deprograms your ear out of 12-pitch expectation. The three compositions demonstrate an arrogant lack of experience design, a flagrant disregard for ready enjoyment. And yet the acoustic detail of these objects making near-music is rich and unique enough...

Look. Pretentious horseshit mostly, smacking of indulgent laziness, substituting deconstruction for construction. And yet it stumbled into enough intrigue out of sheer blind boldness that I can't help but recommend it to the terminally bored like me 3.5/5

#2575 Blood, Sweat and Tears - Blood, Sweat and Tears

An album later, and a surprising number of new players later, BST comes out punchier, poppier, a bit more written, still not jazz, still a pretty great piece of late-sixties proto-pop-rock 3.5/5

#2574 Bill Evans Trio - Sunday at the Village Vanguard

People more into jazz* than I must have contemplated this more than I: what if bassist Scott LaFaro hadn't died 10 days after these sessions were recorded? We wouldn't have had his compositions and best performances front and center, and we might have missed out on a jazz classic?*

There's wonderful Minutemenian balance in the three performances, but bringing the bass to the fore (even in the Trio named elsewhere) is exhilarating, and the performances live up. A gorgeous balance of cool and hot, flecked with just the right amount of audience ambiance, a special night out or three caught on wax 4/5

* Baker Knows Nothing About Jazz

#2573 Various Artists - Five Years of Loving Notes

Super warm electronic music, filled in with artsy little gimmicks and groovesome basslines. It's a little bit mid-10's tryhard in is dissonant dalliances, but there's enough to like here emotionally and intellectually to earn a modest recommendation 3.5/5

#2572 Blood Sweat and Tears - Child is Father to the Man

A sweeping, grasping, emotional, rock album, flecked with funk, packed with big ambitions and big gestures that were way ahead of their time in 1968. Just don't buy the "jazz rock" label, adding horns and syncopating your rhythm section a bit doesn't earn you hybrid status. Rad bass parts though, and dig the complex song structures that trapdoor into more than you were expecting again and again 3.5/5

#2571 The Maddox Brothers and Rose - From Dancefloor to Devotion

One night a bunch of us got to talking about some hipster hypothetical about what artist's oeuvre would be send to aliens to explain rock and roll. And someone throws out something along the lines of "Elvis, cause he did it first". And I knew I didn't agree, but I couldn't place why, and thereby I cede all high ground on the subject -- if he was wrong, I was as wrong. But I knew we were wrong, even then.

Recently, I read some bit by Nick Tosches, and he makes the point convincingly: Rock and roll had already come and gone, and Elvis was just the first of its 9 resurrections. It died the first time by Haley's Rock Around the Clock, a bit of  populist schlock, months before Elvis even broke.

And fucking, Elvis broke on a string of covers that I won't deign to recount, and Thomas Kinkade-ing rock and roll only earns him so much credit. And if you need further proof, look at The Maddox Bros' song: Death of Rock and Roll, a cover itself of I Got a Woman. And just look at how the snake of rock and roll had started eating itself, and generally getting lame as shit, before Elvis cut one note.

--

The hot numbers on this album are a who's who of shit that was already played out by the 50's, and a testament to what a slopped reheat rock was before Elvis, sure, jolted it back to life, a lightning bolt of a performer with a magic touch.

But don't call him the first.

This album's a microcosm of the "first rock and roll record" project. And I don't mean to shortchange the brothers and Rose their shot at a review. But their stuff, esp on the first proper hot half (Dancefloor) is just in the sweetspot of people getting hot on this stuff before it sat out -- and off it takes me on this jag.

It's good stuff, a great history lesson, if nothing else. A fireball at best, to the willing.

I'm cooler on the latter "Devotional" half.

But a damned listenable, essential signpost none the less, for anyone with the barest interest i rock history. You can't do a lot better than this for a snapshot 4/5

#2570 The Districts - Popular Manipulations

dissonance and desperation, punched with mechanical precision on just-the-right beats, blushed with atmosphere, the great next coming of Interpol.

From the perspective of The actual Districts, it's pure third-albumism at its best. That first-era rollicking slam-and-yelp that melted away on Flourish // Spoil is altogether gone, and the simmer of frustrating adulthood and mortality infects every vein. It's all haze and hopelessness now, churning against the night.

These kids were always impossibly precocious, and here they are as twenty-something middle-aged men, railing with their increased prescience, through waves and waves of cringing buzzes and nervous reverb, useless washes of beauty in the face of blackness 4/5

#2569 Soft Machine - Third

A proper experimental record just by the way it paces its four jams for four sidelong ~19 minute rambletimes. Equal parts Zappa, Miles, and regular old jam band nonsense, these are rambling, looping, loping plodders - filled with enough interlock and hints of hookiness to keep you hazily bobbing for the hour+. Adventurous stuff, but it demands either close listening or total backgrounding - anything in between and it collapses into its own basic obnoxiousness 3.5/5

#2568 Link Wray - Link Wray

I feel drowned sometimes in the flow of great stuff to listen to. you know Rumble etc, but lesser, sell-out Link Wray needs your attention, too, says a certain indie rag? and they're right?

Like some hybrid of Exile-era Stones and a post-Beatles solo project*, slingshotting around the same rootsy baselines gone pop-ish, this is all good, all good.  Wray's vocals creak and croak just right, guitars packed with slide and chug and buzz and vibration from beyond. Songs are simple and textured, music too, no thing out of place that isn't supposed to be on this one 4.5/5

* example: opener La De Da sounds like a hybrid of some precog stripped-down ancestor of Harrison's Wah-Wah and a regular-time progenitor of the Stones' Tumbling Dice. Complicated

#2567 Leon Redbone - On the Track

40 years ago this was a revival. Weird.

A shuffling, dusty piece of moaning, bare-bones ragtime, scant few drums to speak of, just the thump of a horn, a tap of a foot, a fingernail on acoustic body to keep time. The devil's in the details, in Redbone's big, wobbling warble, in the super-close, super-crisp production, you are right up in the room, which feels of porches, floorboards, sunsets through one tree, while strings and harmonicas and other ghosts coast by.

Surely made in a studio proper, and distant from real troubles, but Redbone sells it 4/5

#2566 Klaatu - 3:47 EST

pretty excellent, pretty, proggy surf music. bryan scary inspiration probably. people (literally, look it up) thought it was the next wave of the beatles and got pissed it wasn't. my advice is do the opposite 4.5/5

#2565 Flash and the Pan - Flash and the Pan

that cover sums up the modern era too right? sunglasses and cool poses drowned in kitch and mushroom clouds. dissonant deadpan, detuned, useful idiot bullshit new wave too dead too fake to be more than arch 3/5

#2564 The Village Stompers - The Original Washington Square

plucky horndrenched horseshit that's plenty pleasant, called folk because of coincidences of naming, but basically just dixieland jazz. fun, fine 3.5/5

#2563 Weedeater - God Luck and Good Speed

A damn near perfect stoner metal album, sludgy and patient as shit, but with hooks to spare, each one a layered and toothsome guitar croissant. Goblin voice is a drag, but slow//fast strategy, smattered with soft interludes at the halfway and the closing, give it albumspan pacing that, while lacking the purity of, say, Dopesmoker, makes for a smoothriding listen. Plenty of landmarks on your slow decent to none-of-this, from its feats of fiery muscular striding to simmering incense meltdown monuments, all without the barest whiff of effort 4.5/5

#2562 The Yawpers - American Man

Dirtbag rockers who know how to kick in a GIANT kickin. 3 piece, but with the power of production. Every expanse of spare plucking and muttering is a setup for a tidal wave of buzz, simmering anger into fatfuck delta swagger.

The title track's satire, self-loathing first person, right? It's hard to tell patriotism from patriotic self-disgust these days. I sense that the boys are a bit of both -- who's more fit to be disgusted by this country than someone who loves it? Loving America's a fucking complicated proposition these days.

Nate Cook's rasp wears a little thin by the end, and there's not enough variety to fully keep your attention, but there's a real shitkicking rock band in there, and for the first few giant climaxes, its a thrill (bet they're rippin live 3.5/5

#2561 House of Feelings - Last Chance EP

Soooooo warrrrrm.

Where it comes up sub-LCD on the deadpan sentiments, it makes up with goosebumped synth buzz, packed with texture and analog embrace. Best around. Dancable, groovable, a little steeped in house / dancepunk leftovers, but making a mean fuckin hash from em 4/5

#2560 G&G Sindikatas - Isvien

I understood zero words of these hard-hitting Lithuanian hiphop wizards' missives. But like Odelay's legend, maybe its the cadence and sound that matters, because this shit hits hard again and again and again. The production's spiked with horns and laced with loping bass, perforated with Eminem-style syllables, guttural drags, constant rolls -- headbobbing end to end.

Ridiculously highly recommended to anyone who wants to let raw instrumental//vocal percussion take over their shit for an hour or so, language be damned* 4/5

* god I hope these guys aren't secretly like fucked up white supremacists or some shit

#2558 Philip Glass - Glassworks

With only a passing glimpse of the critical impression of Philip Glass, I know I'm wandering into well-trod territory. The intelligencia's been all through here, tamed the beasts, beat down the grasses. And I can only retrace the fact that the repetition entrances, that the imperfection becomes figure to its ground, that every thing is in its right place, that the chords rise and fall until your breath follows suit.

It's fucking perfect. It coaxes meaning from the moment of listening.

It's the kind of album that makes me lament this project, the forward passage of time - what better words might I have spilled about Dan Deacon, Beck, Basinski, Atticus Ross, to say nothing of the just-reviewed Sontag Shogun and Cornelius, a dozen others (but especially Dan Deacon, jesus).

What's the the Mint Chicks said? You're bored because you're boring.

I try to keep a finger on the scale around here, to check whether something's actually worth listening to, pretension and reputation aside. I feel like these 10-seconds-stretched-to-7-minute stemwinders could be called boring. But with only the barest inclination to dig into the details, I think you'll find ever-increasing layers of doubt, tipping over into violent disagrement with the idea that there's anything boring about any of this -- there's near-infinite details to dig into, if you have even the most basic inclination. Consider yourself encouraged to find it 4.5/5

#2557 Flash Trading - The Golden Mile

So promising, all those warm retro tones, all those sizzling hihats, all those caffinated acid fizzles. But then those vocals come in, floating disconnected from the synths and it sounds like the past and it sounds like itself. And the frontloaded melodies melt into mediocrity, and it becomes another by the numbers combinatorial exercise 2.5/5

#2556 Konx-Om-Pax - Caramel

More of this. Noisy, blasted, detuned, stretched, to what end?

Somewhere on the internet, someone found some new knobs to twist, and they turn regular sounds into alien garbage. And I've seen flashes of that coalescing into something worth hearing, but most of it's Arca-adjacent fucked-for-its-own-sake garbage. File this under the latter 2/5

#2555 Michal Minert - Space Jazz

God this overflows with things to like. Packed with djshadowready soulful samples, justice-big electroriffs, blasts of horns, prefuse startstops, washes of reverb, slashes of rightangle rap -- like, who the fuck is this kid? Cursory reading says he tours with a full on fucking band and goddamn I want to see _that_

It's spacy, sure, but immediate, empathetic, hard-edged, thrilling -_ all this kind of bracing shit that is the negative space of not space and not jazz and coming at ya hard. I mean, put on Another World and tell me you're sitting still and I'll shut this whole motherfucker down. That shit is _fire_ and the rest is reflected heat 4.5/5

#2554 BadBadNotGood / VA - Late Night Tales

A soulful, surging night music mixtape, glancing off of little tropical//global inflections, blurring together damned smoothly. I was unfamiliar with the vast majority of tracks (and some are outright rarities for anyone), giving the listen a smooth anonymity, making the Beach Boys' Don't Talk a little jarring. Also, the Lydia Lunch spoken-word nightmare is an awful note to end on, as if the guys didn't have the nerve to just make a good mix and had to put an arty stamp on it 3.5/5

#2553 Cornelius - Mellow Waves

Cornelius's songs have gotten so smooth, so pretty, that you barely notice how weird they are, how packed with squalls of noise, offkilter offbeats, fizzling electronics. All things I like, and yet this left me a little cold. There's little true boldness, few memorable melodies, and obviously the mostly-Japanese lyrics make it a little harder for the non-speaker to connect to. It's an album that's better the close you listen to it, but that you might not find the need to 3.5/5

#2551 Siriusmo - Enthusiast

Siriusmo is, full stop, one of the best electronic musicmakers going right now, and he keeps getting better. I couldn't be more pumped for his upcoming album. In the meantime, this, his 2013 masterpiece made it onto Spotify, and it's a lively, thrilling little listen, evoking all the most-enjoyable moments from Squarepusher and Aphex Twin, plus the rockist nerve to go big on the fuzz, dotted with madcap bursts of rap and luscious organ washes.

Friedrich lists Squarepusher as an inspiration, and it shows - there's shades of the same stuttering breakdowns and jazzy inflections. But it's so much more than that. Siriusmo's got the science and the heart, a master of crafting nasty tones, a proper player's sense of inflection, bringing so much nuance and organic sprightliness to every melody.

On the album scale, its a little slow to build, but once it turns the corner on the delightfully squelchy title track, its onward into blistering hip hop, and back, and back again, before settling into pretty pure tonality and wild experimentation - all of it completely enjoyable. It's all wildly inventive, all delivered effortlessly, a terribly rare hybrid of headtickling nuance and headbobbing power 4.5/5

#2550 Dip in the Pool - Brown Eyes

Smooth, sunny crooning over Starbucks-ready horns and shuffly drums, sounding strangely French in its coy lilting, never really getting your attention. It's all very one note, overstaying its welcome even at 26 minutes 2.5/5

#2549 Strip Steve - Micro Mega

More mega than micro -- there's glitches and squiggles and big 10's detune-surges, but mostly it's bigass beats. Basement Jaxx beats, disco beats, house beats, big thumps punctuated with blasts of bass and samples and squonks. It's a good balance - never overintellectualized, never one-dimensional, the microscope/pipe on the cover summing it up nicely 4/5