#2757 UMFANG - Symbolic Use of Light

is a well-named album. Simple, with soft edges, little arpeggios and wobbles and shimmers repeat slightly offcenter, the click of sunrise through fenceposts, the shape of light through leaves. Even when you find and edge to hold onto (title track) it fidgets out of the corner of your eye, an unplanned navigation of your living room at 4am. Remarkably simple in tone and structure, but the closer you look, the more it vibrates. A pretty, intricate treasure for the experimental electronic music enthusiast 4/5

#2756 Karen Gwyer - Rembo

God I love song titles. These 4 pairs play like Kentucky Route Zero conversations, deadpanned koans like: 7. Did You Hear the Owls Last Night? 8. Yes, but I Didn't Know They Were Owls. Gwyer adapted her live show's methods to make this album, lending it more soul than your average set of wobbly techno thumpers 3.5/5

#2755 The Veils - Total Depravity

When they go for it, the Veils are worthy backing the most-harrowing Roadhouse scene, all simmering NiN menace and Tom Waits mythmaking - Axolotl and King of Chrome are highlights, rippling with electronic disturbances and howling unease.

But they don't hit those highs often enough, and the album's heavy with filler, or of intentional watering-down, some muddy blend of War on Drugs and late-era Black Keys. It's boring, stinking of too much money and too many producers 3/5

#2754 Laurel Halo - Dust

Skittering, wobbly, untuned. You get the sense of bottom-up experimental music: regular songs fucked with haphazardly until they don't sound like regular songs anymore, without any larger vision. Unpleasant to listen to and not interesting enough to justify it 2.5/5

#2753 Octo Octa - Where Are We Going?

Big, loping house that feels effortlessly right. Deep bass, deep grooves, flecked with little melodies and flourishes, almost too smooth. Lush, organic, a great albumlong listen (excepting Adrift: clumsy, and too long) 4/5

#2752 Eluvium - Shuffle Drones

A+ for concept, A- for listening. 

23 tracks, the titles of which, when listed in order, describe their intended method of listening, which is: out of order, and on infinite repeat.

Such a listen will have a single constant sketched through it, a tense, thin, sustained violin note, wobbling uncertain under Atlasian strain, upon which each of the 32-second tracks* adds some surge of strings, some gloaming horn wash, some parallel violin line, some stretched 3-note micromelody, rising into place, and then fading away in time for a clean handoff to the next. The rhythm is like the slow breathing of a lover drifting to sleep.

Each track causes its own resonance. Uncertainty, resignation, hope, ennui, like a daydream across a set of loosely connected memories, nostalgia slipping so easily into regret into determination.

I've put in three sessions**, each at least long enough to make it through the whole cycle twice, and they've felt more or less the same, but connected to different feelings. Always a little sad, but flecked with acceptance. Few albums deliver this well on concept and execution. A beautiful little record that fits right into this technological and emotional moment 4.5/5

* except for the last track, titled 'thank you' which adds an extra 11 seconds. discuss?

** not counting that time when I accidentally left it looping for 24+ hours, as discovered via a friend's spotify account while out of the house, a fact that amused me beyond explanation and which has ruined my lastfm scrobbling data forever

#2751 The Gories - I Know You Fine, But How You Doin'

Jack White called them the best garage rock band since the 60's and I absolutely believe that he believes that: it's hard to imagine they weren't an influence on the early White Stripes sound.

He might even be right, too; the Gories cut right to the sound's ugly, faltering heart. The playing's so loose, the instruments so fucking fuzzed out, all the vocals yelped and sneered out of tune and off-time. A glorious collision of blues, rockabily and punk, every song effortlessly dirty and utterly sincere 4/5

#2750 Ted Cazey - Walls EP

A lot of these tricks are pretty played out by now, but I dunno, they still kinda make me feel good. Fuzzy-neon synth lines, big bass throbs, droppy swoops and (crucially!) frail almost-human vocal snippets carve shortcuts to vulnerable acquiescence in this dumb decade and I'm past resisting 4/5

#2749 Total Control - Laughing at the System

Clattering, buzzing post-punk, marching into dystopian nowhere. There's scant little rage, no mirth at all, just a dozen lines about laughing, deadpanned over lethargic synth/guitar riffs with a tendency to bloom right as the song ends.

And that's the confounding thing about this one - it's not miserable. There's a quiet acceptance to Total Control's plod through the wasteland, giving the flashes of light and color the honor of the time it takes to pass them, but no more. A record for melting the highs and lows to a sleepy downward slide 3.5/5

#2748 Dela - Atmosphere Airlines Vol.1

An unspectacular collection of beats+raps, unimproved by concept-album interruptions from an uncharming flight attendant. It's a decent bit of background mixtape, but with no standout tracks and no real album flow, it's hard to recommend especially strongly 3/5

#2747 Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan - Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan

in which a band takes its awkward billing and turns it into an awkward album title. 

RfCK's RfCK doubles down on all the strings/horns/crooning of Rufusized without breaking through to anything soulful. Like, Rufus got you back to his place with some funky dance moves and you're in his bedroom and he's doing this, little bedroom sexy dance. For a while. And you're like, are we gonna fuck, or should I just head back to the club, or what 2.5/5

#2746 Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan - Rufusized

Khan's got a great voice, and there's some fun funk to be found here, but I'm not sure funk's supposed to be fun. Funk's dirty and desperate, less Parliament more Funkadelic. It's called funk, funk like a cheese or a cab has. Keep the fun out of funk, that's what I always say. And that's not even getting to the soppy MOR skippables. A couple good tracks, but nothing special 3/5

#2745 Ron Gallo - Heavy Meta

Heavy Meta kicks off with all the fuzz and yelp of a garage rock re-re-revival, but Gallo's not satisfied with being the next Ty Segall. The second side's long-ringing guitar meanderings reveal dreams of being the next Kurt Vile, too. In between, some Jack White-worthy swings of well-structured slow-motion take hold.

All good things, but this space is well-tilled in 2017; Gallo's gotta find another gear if he's going to get my attention. The best moments are the flashes of deadpan punk resignation - 'why do you have kids?' - 'all that I said was nothing' - and ironically, his best and most memorable sequence, closing out the album begins with 'I will be forgotten in two generations...' Maybe, maybe not 3.5/5

#2744 Lonnie Donegan - Donegan on Stage (Castle Records, 2006 CD Version)

The king of skiffle bangs out 15 rambling, shuffling, live rollicks on this CD edition of Donegan on Stage. It's textured, lively, energetic stuff, weaving American traditional threads through wide-eyed British enthusiasm - a fine listen and a standout footnote for the rock history enthusiast 3.5/5

#2743 Twisted Sister - Stay Hungry

In which Twisted Sister push the glam rock aside, shed their club-slumming past, and go full arena-metal. We're Not Gonna Take It // I Wanna Rock are statements of purpose in the simplest, vaguest, fist-pumpingest terms possible, and in between Alice Cooperey evil-lite and lo-cal-horror make appearances, going theatrical and marquis-topping bold. It's their biggest, goofiest album, one they deserve to get to make, but I miss the underdog grit 3/5

#2742 - Oddisee - The Odd Tape

A tidy blend of sampled and live - the instruments bristle with jazzy inflection, but they're all looped out in such patient patterns that it escapes the jazz-hip-hop trap. You can almost see the band, all brushy drums and breathy reeds, skipping in place at Oddisee's whim, riding every highlight into Squarepusher skitteriness, Daedelus dreamscapes, and coffeeshop-ready headbobbery (I say only half backhandedly) 3.5/5

#2741 J.K. and Co.- Suddenly One Summer

A swirling, beautiful little psychedelic record that slips through your fingers again and again. Innocent little songs drop trails of pretty moments, blissfully unaware of songwriting convention, a generosity of instruments and sounds spattered everywhere. The Zombies gone (late-era) Bon Iver, billowing strange 4/5

#2740 Twisted Sister - You Can't Stop Rock n Roll

Twisted Sister's second album's cleaner and catchier than their debut. Every song's a super-streamlined by-the-book rocker, riding its hook so steadily that you'll be banging along by the bridge. But that's about it - there's not one thing that will bite or surprise 3/5

#2739 Renaissance - Ashes are Burning

The second Annie Haslam Renaissance album's a little more balanced than Prologue - her performance is more collaborative, and the rest of the band's more assertive. It's very pretty, but that magic's still gone. You can feel a producer's hand behind every string section and over-the-top vocal harmony, and it all feels more designed than conjured 3/5

#2738 Renaissance - Prologue

Early Renaissance worked because it had balance: all those vocals and pianos and strings and guitars and bass and, fucking melotrons or whatever - it all worked together. Everything rotated, receded, evolved, making room for everything else, to make sure the space was richly filled. The band was never about any one person, and all of the vocals were there to serve the larger purpose.

When Annie Haslam came on board, that richness was flattened into backing band duty. Her voice is ever-present and high in the mix, and her performance is endlessly showy. Her vocals carve a ragged valley through the middle of what the band was doing; they're hot sauce in your scotch. There's stretches of the good stuff, but its mostly window dressing on a suddenly-soulless piece of ornate adult contemporary 2.5/5

#2737 Renaissance - Illusion

For me, this is peak Renaissance, as transportive as prog gets. All those dense pianos, all those vocal aaaahs, layers on layers. Really beautiful stuff. Love is All, man, I was out on a walk in the first Boston snow and that song just about took my knees out.

Full disclosure, I think this just hits at some animal emotional center from my formative days, drawing on some of the baroque quaintness of Mellon Collie's 2nd disc, with a dash of the Pumpkins' most mysteriously affecting guitarwork, those jazzy baselines rolling like Jimmy's drums somehow. AND it sounds like Genesis. Yeah, that's the highway to the center of my heart 4.5/5

#2736 Dr. Know - Plug-In Jesus And Burn Valu Pak

No wonder Slayer covered these guys on Undisputed Attitude. Dr. Know sprint through thrash-adjacent sloppy hardcore, vomiting lyrics as depraved as anything off of Reign in Blood. The sequencing is super weird on this hacky combo pack compilation, but it works - a bunch of tracks off their brilliant, borderline-painful '84 debut, a surprisingly-hooky dip through their '85 EP, before closing, inevitably, with Fist Fuck. Which is an even nastier song than its name suggests. It's about as punk as punk gets 4/5

#2735 Slayer - Undisputed Attitude

Slayer does a pretty good impression of a hardcore punk band, surprising nobody. Araya's vocals aren't quite right, but the rest of the band's as effortlessly breakneck as ever. There's not a lot of depth to it, but you ever need to get pumped up to fucking kill somebody, this'll do 3.5/5

#2734 Renaissance - Renaissance

I love prog. Proggy prog prog.

Those rippling piano runs, a Renaissance signature, are in their purest form here.

Prog gets knocked for intellectualizing rock with classical scaffolding, but the best classical was a gutpunch, the rock of its era, slicing to the emotional centers. And that's the side of quote//unquote classical you get here, that hypnosis by myriad notes, that jazzy bassline rambling, that surrender to sheer density, with those rock and roll backbeat shortcuts to what-you-need. Those ghostly vocals, reaching out for Radiohead songs still so long in the future

It's all very pretty, all strangely outside the hand of man, a more-mysterious version of everything good about early Genesis, which is to say very good indeed.

Jettison ye notions of coolness and you'll find something that people worked very hard on, trying to make the best songs ever, and coming surprisingly close. A swirling, euphoric masterpiece of weightlessly arty music 4.5/5

#2732 The Walkmen - Pussy Cats Startting the Walkmen

Why? Why remake this lazy album lazily, track by track, note by note? It probably wasn't very hard to make, so I guess maybe the question is, why not? I guess you got me there.

Harry Nilsson's original Pussy Cats failed to improve on any of the songs it covered, but at least he gave them his own spin. The Walkmen just recreate Nilsson's spin precisely - even recreating seemingly spontaneous moments like the singalongs on Loop De Loop and the namedrops on Rock Around the Clock. It's not that it's an altogether bad listen, exactly, but it's a confoundingly pointless creation I can't find any reason to revisit, other than out of morbid curiosity 2.5/5

#2731 Harry Nilsson - Pussy Cats

Why? I guess because Nilsson and John Lennon needed a project, so they banged out a bunch of songs, mostly covers. None of its essential, none of the covers improve greatly on the originals, except for the Dylan song which was improved by replacing Bob Dylan.

The second side's the only one worth hearing, the mournful Save the Last Dance for Me // Black Sails pair's interweaved with the rollicking Loop De Loop // Rock Around the Clock set. It's a dizzying bit of sequencing that's actually a lot of fun. But mostly, Pussy Cats feels lazy; it's nothing you'd give a second listen if it wasn't for the famous names on it 3/5

#2730 Twisted Sister - Under the Blade

Glam rock was more or less dead by 1982, but Twisted Sister'd been doing it too damn long to change horses. Their debut's a fearless, fabulous hard-rock listen, all anthemic fistpumpers packed with screaming guitars and sneering vocals. The production's a little flat, and the rhythm section's a little stiff, but that's kinda just the era for you. Its enough to make you wish they'd made it big sooner 3.5/5

#2729 King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Polygondwanaland

KGLW continue their run as best psychedelic band going, putting out their 4th (!) album of the year (the second great one). If they're trying to outrun the expiration on some kind of deal with the devil, they're getting their souls' worth.

Polygondwanaland's sound matches its title, it's a meandering, bewildering, some hybrid of their Microtonal strangeness and Murder of the Universe's existential post-body horror, with a sinister synth serpent lurking in the reeds. A few of these riffs and rhythms are starting to sound familiar, but it feels like a callback, another thread running through some shapeshifting tapestry that feels like it'll go on forever.

People are slowly catching on. Let's reconvene in 20 years and check in on this prediction: these guys are going to be _the cult rock band of the 10's 4/5