#2651 Chad VanGaalen - Light Information

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

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

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



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



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

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

#2650 Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Mambo Nassau

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

#2649 Mungolian Jetset - Schlungs

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

#2648 Morgan Delt - Phase Zero

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

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

#2647 Mr. Fingers - Outer Acid EP

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

#2646 Gemini - In And Out Of Fog And Lights

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

#2645 Boof - The Hydrangeas Whisper

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

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

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

#2644 Golden Retriever (Sweden) - Capablanca

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

#2643 Pugh Rogefeldt - Ja, dä ä dä!

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

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

#2642 Hoops - Hoops EP

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

#2641 Snail Mail - Habit EP

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

#2640 Metz - Strange Peace

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

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

#2639 Daedelus - Labyrinths

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

#2638 The Electric Prunes - Underground

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

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

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

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

3.5/5

#2637 Martin Newell - The Greatest Living Englishman

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

#2636 Marie Et Les GarÇons - Marie Et Les GarÇons

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

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

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

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

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

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

#2634 Mission of Burma - Vs.

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

#2633 The Weirdos - Weird World Volume 1

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

#2632 Lives of Angels - Elevator to Eden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#2629 Dan Lissvik - Midnight

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

#2628 The Ruts - The Crack

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

#2627 The Exploited - Punks not Dead

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

#2626 The Undertones - The Undertones

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

#2625 Sonic Youth - Bad Moon Rising

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

#2624 Mink Deville - Cabretta

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

#2623 The Dickies - Dawn of the Dickies

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

#2622 Wipers - Is this Real?

Bonus points for that brilliant cover art. Damn.

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

#2621 Buzzcocks - Another Music in a Different Kitchen

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

#2620 Nicholas Jaar - Space is Only Noise

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

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

Origins are very uncertain here.

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

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

#2619 The Only Ones - Special View

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

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

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

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

#2618 Stinky Toys - Plastic Faces

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

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

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

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

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

#2616 The Only Ones - The Only Ones

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


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

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

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

#2615 Jawcrew - Jawcrew

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

#2614 Misfits - Static Age

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

#2613 Death from Above 1979 - Outrage is Now

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

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

#2612 Perturbator - New Model

as written to Patrick:

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

(3.5/5

#2611 Studio - West Coast

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

#2610 For the Carnation - For the Carnation

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

#2609 999 - 999

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

#2608 The Damned - Machine Gun Etiquette

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

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

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

#2606 Suicide - The Second Album

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

#2605 Orphan Boy - Shop Local

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

#2604 All Night Radio - Spirit Stereo Frequency

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

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

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

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

#2602 The Prids - Chronosynclastic

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

#2601 Broken Social Scene - Hug of Thunder

I remember when it all kind of crested last year, wondering what music would come out of this era. And here we are this season, the wave of the American situation, swelling on the production cycle, comes crashing. Albums by 00's darlings LCD, Arcade Fire, Liars, Thee Oh Sees, and now BSS, all slightly miserable. Onward and aware that this might be music no person not yet already born will ever hear.

And there's this unwillingness to smooth it all over. Here, in the form of this horrid piece of pacing, and endless parade of 4 minute songs, from a band that once let it breathe, this feels like an asthma attack. It feels like a band that thinks each song might be its last, dissonance overflowing every island.

They chug on. Shimmering guitars and this increasingly-fashionable unstoppable approach to post-motorik. There's nothing here that snaps me out, but maybe there's no out-snapping. A dirge even by the standards set before. Golden ages are over. We don't believe in god. We push on, because we must, but fun seems like an unaffordable luxury.

There's flashes of energy, but they feel like the thrashings of a drowning dog. The production itself an act of desperation, dancing in quicksand.

And yet, those horrid horns push us on, more lost than ever, they push us forward. Those chiming voices say "all right all right all right" and repeat what they feel, and crack and crash and hold you close in a sweat-drenched run in slow motion, repeating mantras, trying to convince themselves, too. And in the deep crannies lie wonderful details, little overlaps of vocals, little crackles of production, these cadences of half-smiled survival, small hopes fitting through gaps too small for sweeping gestures.

Yet another footnote for some hopeful future thesis about this era's immolating survival rock 4/5

#2600 LCD Soundsystem - American Dream

I've put this on a couple nights now, and it just puts me to sleep. Bear with me.

LCD used to get you ready to fuckinrock, used to reinforce your most romantic notions and buttress your deepest and most petty fears. They used to have you reaching for the stars.

But there's something in this new one that lulls me into the ground. It is the sound of a sympathetic, familiar guide who seems to have given up, and who invites you to give up too, and suddenly, unexpectedly, my worries are eroded, and I might be able to go to sleep tonight without a fight.

How could you make an LCD Soundsystem album in 2017? When the band's come and gone and come back, into a party that's fallen apart in the interim, where everyone is sick, and someone's making increasingly believable threats, and the cops aren't coming, and would it be better or worse if they were.

You do it with an album with song titles in all lowercase. With a title that's half-ironic, half-defeated, half-here, and sentiments that follow suit. It's music to die to, with the thinnest possible layers all piled one on the next. It's music that stretches slowly, just this side of boring, reprogramming your heartbeats, not to dance, but to the rhythm that's needed to make it to tomorrow and the next year and the next term of four, or four terms more, as the situation demands.

Counterpoint: "you should be uncomfortable!" Murphy exclaims. This is a full panic record, one that recognizes that the world is not ok, that maybe the place for wry winks about Losing My Edge aren't going to fly. But man it's exhausting.

More so than any of their previous albums, it feels like the work of a band. And it feels like a rock album, full of weight. And it feels like an experimental album, mostly devoid of hooks, here to melt your space-time, a downtrodden album that feels akin to Everything Now, another miserable, simmering piece of disco-adjacent sludge -- mostly unpleasant, but the medicine we need, maybe.

"I'm still trying...to wake up / I'm still trying...to wake up"

If I've been too subtle lately, let me be clear. The world is in a very bad place and so am I. And so are musicians with any awareness of the world whatsoever. And if we have the luxury of existence in a few decades, and the unlikely luxury of history was we know it by then, then that history will look back on this time with much interest, and all the miserable, peaceful, angry, soporific, desperate albums like this will tell the tale 4/5

#2599 King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Sketches of Brunswick East

I just can't get with King/Wizard's slower, softer stuff. Their latest is seasickeningly jazzy, lilting relentlessly on brushy drums and sunny sketches. The vocals are a problem - those wiggly falsettos set me on edge, but the lack of real hooks or focus is the deal-breaker. Too frilly to rock out to, too weird to chill out to - points for uniqueness, another feather in the cap of the most prolific good band going, but it's a useless outing 3/5

#2598 Tera Melos - Trash Generator

Frantic start-stop electronics-drenched art-punk that will hash you to Polysics and Brainiac/Enon.

Half the appeal's in the details of the details of the subject matter, with song titles like System Preferences, Warpless Run, and Men's Shirt, rolling around in the hopeless minutia we're all drowning in. It's catchy, easy/hard stuff that I'll bet's a hoot live, but it could use a pretty island or to to give you respite from that chop 3.5/5

#2597 Perturbator - Dangerous Days

I've got this playlist brewing of forward-leaning, nightdriving, electronic music. Nothing too dancy, nothing too overtly 80's revival, nothing too chiptuned, nothing telegraphed, nothing pigeonholed, and definitely nothing slow - just a dozen half-off motorik tracks that pulls you into the next lane left again and again.

This'd fit right in. M83 and Justice in a lightcycle race, those big surging synths, those glacial guitar-impersonators, with clicky beats and plinky arpeggios that pepper the space with anticipation and tension. From the hooky openings to the epic closer - a near-perfect epic rockist beatclipper 4/5