#3279 Deafhaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

Pitchfork's Sam Sadomsky already crushed it out of the park, pointing out this is the best Smashing Pumpkins album in years. Those guitars're so noisy, and then so sweet. And the goblin shrieking's annoying, but is it any worse than the nasal king of gloom? It's brutal to think that in an alternate world, Billy could have kept pushing into the noisy corners Mellon Collie peeked under, instead of retreating into Green Album mediocrity.

A noisy, ambitious, tuneful mess of an album that I'd rather listen to than a hundred gutless alt-McCartneys 4/5

#3278 Booker Stardrum - Temporary Etc.

The live//not beats are clever and woolly, too bad they're slathered in atonal, unlistenable tones. A dissonant, sloppy mess 2.5/5

#3277 Cotton Jones - Paranoid Cocoon

Too-clean psychedelia and obvious production sap some of the magic from The River Strumming's sound. Pretty, but sounding crassly custom-designed for what's left of the rock festival scene 3/5

#3276 Cotton Jones - The River Strumming

Spacy, slowmotion honkytonky psycadelia, Americana clouds from far far away. That delicious drift away from obvious sources of creation, layers and reverb and performance in weird rooms making this more than the notes on the page 4/5

#3275 Locomotiv GT - Mindig Magasabbra

Competently cops a half-dozen American music styles. Listenable enough, but tough to dig into the individuality absent understanding Hungarian 3.5/5

#3274 Robyn - Honey

Generic pleading over generic beats, icy sub-Madonna whatever. The production's got an appealing crispness, and Robyns' got a great voice, but I'm not sure what that even means anymore. Adds up to ____poof__ 2.5/5

#3273 Mitski - Be the Cowboy

Mysterious, vulnerable, lush, sparse. Mitski has a touch. She breathes the word "husband" and knocks you over with how seldom you hear that word in popular music, committing to the idea that they're _doing _better and _sticking _together. It's as subtly stunning as any moment around, and a standin for half-dozen lesser triumphs.

Production blossoms, artificial and close. Bjork with warmth.

A beautiful, subtly difficult album, barbs hidden in velvet strokes 4.5/5

#3272 King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Eyes Like the Sky

Listen / buy here!

Holy shit. This is how you wed narrative and music. As thunderously powerful as a twangy riff's ever been. Every song's tone works in lockstep with its dusty storytelling, a plot that swerves and elides just as needed. Evocative, riveting, adventurous, must-hear for any fan of interesting music 4.5/5

#3271 The Murlocs - Young Blindness

All the Murlocs albums mostly sound the same, but this one's really struggling to stand out. A real sophomore slump, surfier than Loopholes, totally agreeable. Good! But stuck pretty firmly in its forebears footsteps 3.5/5

#3270 Czarface - First Weapon Drawn

There's some catchy, soulsome loops back there, but man it's all fully and totally derailed by all its clumsy attempts at storytelling. The ratio's all wrong, you can't get in the groove at all before some clunky announcer narrates the plot or some cringey radioplay acting forwards a pro-wrestling plot to nowhere. I can't figure out how you listen to this, everything good about it's undercut doubletime by some amateur nonsense 2.5/5

#3269 The Murlocs - Loopholes

All the Murlocs albums mostly sound the same, and this one sounds more the same than most, a nascent, lazy seed. That garage crunch's mostwelcome, swinging and harmonica-propelled into the sun, soaring and slouching into nothing 3.5/5

#3268 The Murlocs - Old Locomotive

All the Murlocs albums mostly sound the same, but this is their best so far, spikier, trippier, more thrilling. All that Australian garagey joy crystallizing into something special 4/5

#3267 Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska

Not a lyrics guy, but alright. More than the sum of their parts, these 10 songs gather us up, we coast dwellers, and tell what desperation looks like. Occasionally cartoonish, but mostly these tales of nothing-left-to-lose land, the spare production stretching out like the sky, stunning in flat endlessness 4/5

#3266 Masayoshi Fujita - Schaum

Mysterious and wonderful and alien, except when it's slapdash and lazy. A hundred noises drift in and out, just sometimes a curtain drops on the concrete dystopian wonderscape and you go -- oh, it's just some guy fuckin around dropping whatever he's got 3/5

#3265a Terry Riley - You're No Good

Beyond the obvious hyperbole about how ahead of its time it was, the proto-sampler opus mostly holds up. Its sprawling length gives time for the endless repetitions to sink in and hypnotize, even if some of the overlaid synth lines are clunkers 3.5/5

#3265 Sam Gendel - 4444

Jazzy, nuanced guitar brushes and bristles, minimal and close. It'd read like arty post-rock if not for its staggering awkwardness. The cringey vocals are hushed and overdone. Mentioning oxford commas during an acoustic rap is unrecoverable 2.5/5

#3264 Darondo - Let My People Go

Green-high crooning with textured backing. The funky first couple tracks are good fun, and Didn't I brings that rolling organ, but after that Darondo's cracking yelp gets grating and the songwriting's out of ideas 3/5

#3263 Fishmans - Night Cruising 2018

Meandering, smoky dub, spiked with Japanese mystery. I don't think I like it, but it's so deliriously, slitheringly strange I can't resist, bass rolling up in slow motion across short syllables reverbed into infinity; all I want to do is eat fish and smoke opium and never wake up 3.5/5

#3262 Swamp Dogg - Total Destruction to Your Mind

A sneakily strange album, kicking off with a few slowed-down, Staxy soul numbers, which, sure, hooksome enough - before dipping into Seussical/Silversteinian fantasy, songs reading more as parables and jokes than anything you'd like, listen to. Once you've heard the punchline of The World Beyond, do you ever need to hear it ever again? 3/5

#3261 Swamp Dogg - Love, Loss and Auto-Tune

There's something about the way autotune fractures that lends vulnerability, that reads as paradoxically human. Goddamn, does it work here, against all odds does it somehow sound perfectly natural alongside analog soul rumble and swirly electronic nonsense, blistering and splitting the pain in Swamp Dogg's delivery. This smells, on paper, by all accounts, like a cheap, desperate grasp at relevance, but dammit they pull it off, trashing the boundaries between legitimate and pop, ending up with one of the most unexpectedly great albums of the year 4.5/5

#3260 Kelley Stoltz - Double Exposure

Completely enjoyable pop-rock, effortlessly rattled off like an ex-Beatle or prolific producer-type might do. There's that solo-artist overcrispness, and a general unwillingness to go for the throat, but its all solid as shit. Unassailably good. Killer cover art's a bonus 4/5

#3259 Arvo Party - Arvo Party

Stark, dystopian ambiance, laced with drones, every beat and melody flecked with analog rust. But it's got a soul, bringing some hope or heartache to every song - landscapey music that keeps sight of its protagonist, and wants to see a happy ending against all odds 3.5/5

#3258 Arvo Party - II

The brutalist cityscape of Arvo Party's debut still pulses, but from farther away now. Hiss and static cake everything, as if we've slipped from the present tense into digital artifacts, piecing together what's left. When 37 Degrees cracks open into its euphoric midway point, the beats and synths surge to meet the heart, but they're skipping when they should be looping, some fraction of their frequencies worn away. It's a subtly enchanting effect. A mysterious, textured album with a lot to dig through 3.5/5

#3257 Al Lover - Interference Patterns

Half an hour of artless, dissonant drones without emotion or invention 2/5

#3256 Ty Segall - Fudge Sandwich

As usual, Ty puts his stamp on every last cover on this covers album: some're fuzzed to death, some chilled out, some melted into nothingness, none treated all that reverently. And man, I love the song choices: getting some deep cut weird prog/kraut shit in there.

But it feels like that's the best part: like showing off the breadth of references almost came before making an album for listening to. The fuzzed out songs are the best, but feel a little by the numbers 20 or so albums into his career. Is it too glib to pin this to its title/art? I like fudge and I love sandwiches, but the whole record feels slapdash, like less than the sum of its parts 3.5/5

#3255 Pere Ubu - Carnival of Souls

Mostly unlistenable beyond the bracing opener, a dissonant, rambling, yelping mess. Carnival of Soul does have one great trick: its breadcrumb trail of allusions. Little riffs and half-quotes from a dozen classic songs dot the album, nurturing an uncanniness worthy of its name 3/5

#3254 Great Northern - Remind Me Where the Light Is

Pretty, soaring indie rock that's married to its 4/4s for 4 minutes, with no production detail or decision sticking out in the least. But it's a nice enough little escape, like smoothed-out Arcade Fire 3.5/5

#3253 Keith Keniff - Branches

Shimmering, twinkling soundtrackery, pianos and bells and strings all plinking and popping endlessly, the glitchy Booksian hestitations bringing the most interesting moments. Uncertain of whether to be peaceful or ominous, never finding a structure that supports both 3/5

#3252 Cameron McGill and What Army - Is a Beast

Like U2* covering Josh Ritter - soaring, sky-grasping anthems, streaked with sunburns and the dust of the road. Pleasant enough, but pretty firmly locked into its 4-minute 3-chorus cadences 3/5

* or less charitably, Coldplay

#3251 VA - Colours of Funk

Platonic library music funk, as hot as background music's allowed to be. More exciting than most - at least half these songs would be totally excellent opening themes for retro cop shows 3.5/5

#3250 Yo La Tengo - There's a Riot Going On

Yo La Tengo is finally out of fire, making their most uniformly mellow, uniformly pretty record yet. Boring, cooing early songs like Shade of Blue and She May, She Might play almost as self-parody, but by the midway point everything opens into moonlit ambiance, and a creeping uncertainty fills the air. It's almost freeing. The title subverting Sly's, where we're not in the fight, we're watching it happen helpless in slow motion with a deepening numbness 4/5

#3249 Tapes 'n Tapes - Tapes 'n Tapes

A re-release of the band's little-known debut shows they had that spiky, manic energy from the jump, overflowing with jagged, joyous, strained exclamations 4/5

#3247 Documenta - Drone Pop #2

Documenta's previously watery YoLatengoism gets a spike of krauty propulsiveness, making for an albums that's slightly more exciting, but still mostly forgettable 3/5

#3246 Signal Hill - Self-Titled

One chiming guitar in each ear, dueling studious arpeggiations in some mathy dilution of post-rock soundtracking zzz 2.5/5

#3245 Documenta - Drone Pop #1

Totally fine, utterly featureless shoegaze. That fat surfy guitar sound's gorgeous, but this is otherwise a drop in a sea of chiming arpeggios and endless washes 3/5

#3244 Documenta - Lady with the Ring

A celebration of the EP form, full of gorgeous guitars, evocative soundscapes, and Booksian storytelling snippets, tightly tied together with no note out of place. A folktale of death, dread, rebirth and death told so clearly and concisely for maximum punch -- miles ahead of Documenta's previously unspectacular shoegazery 4/5

#3243 Queensryche - Operation: Mindcrime

A hair metal concept album about mind control and dystopian revolution that has aged _real badly. Indulgent skits, shrieking vocals, and a general air of self-importance make for a record that's impossible to take seriously and impossible to enjoy frivolously 2/5

#3242 ANMLPLNT - Fall Asleep

A gorgeous, haunted, slitheringly sad record, finding beauty in a dying world. Birds falling from the sky and burning butterflies populate a surreal Mangumesque dreamscape, punctuated by staggering roars of obsidian guitars, landing all the gut punch of a great art film 4/5

#3241 The Blaze - Dancehall

What seemed fresh at EP scale seems uninspired by track 10: the Blaze's haunted, downtuned, searching sound remains unchanged and unexpanded on their full length debut. The thrill of strange emotion is there at first, but dulls 3/5

#3240 Binary Star - Lighty

Talk about groups you assumed you'd never hear from again - what a fun surprise. Rhymes complex as ever, packed with rhymes knots and lyrical micropuzzles. The production's hooky, headbobbing shit, reminiscent of the latest Tribe. But man those lines are dense, every bar tetrissed up, every space packed syllables and meanings. It's a little exhausting. A good problem to have but... 4/5

#3239 Binary Star - Ears Apart

...the companion disc show what a Binary Star reunion really should look like. The jitters out, the production and the rhyming find a looser flow on Ears Apart, the samples given room to roam, some soul seeping in. Still packed to bursting with rhymes, a rush of years of lines pouring out like this is their last chance, half-hidden meanings laced in the gaps, a nervous, intellectual punch to the skull 4.5/5

#3238 The Smashing Pumpkins - Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP : No Past. No Future oh come the fuck on

Look, I recently willingly spent 3 hours listening to Mellon Collie demos and outtakes, but I've got my limits. If your album's got more letters in its name than minutes of music, maybe you've gone too far. Even by 2010s-Pumpkins standards, SaOSBV1/LPNPNFNS is impossibly empty, without a single memorable line or hook in its entire 31 minutes. Even Monuments had Drum and Fife! And why squander one of the 90s' most understatedly great drummers on dreary, sub-Adore 1-and-2-ands? The Rick Rubin production's pretty and feels good in the ear, but it's gallingly synthetic, like he took every song apart and hand-washed each frequency before weaving them all back together.

Weird thing is, gun to my head, if I could only listen to one post-Adore Pumpkins album ever again it might be this one. At least they committed! If Billy really can't write a song for shit anymore, might as well make the cleanest, glossiest sound imaginable, with nary a Heavy Metal Machine of Ghost Child in sight, just shiny shiny shiny all the way down. For all my intellectual gnashing of teeth, when this was over I put it on again because it was just so easy to listen to, which makes it better than average by any reasonable metric 3/5

#3237 Slift - La Planete Inexploree

Rolling bass and jammy psych-rock guitars falling down the stairs forever. This's by all reckoning indistinguishable from a heavy-era King Gizzard album, right down to the busy beats, the growl-and-yelp vocals, the guitar tone, and the everything else. I want to love this, but the path's pretty well trod 3.5/5

#3236 The Beths - Future Me Hates Me

Pop-punk as sunny and toe tapping as a summer drive through trees. Packed with reassuring backing vocals and dozens of sweet guitar moves, never once unpleasant, in fact awfully joyful for an album mostly about self-loathing 4/5

#3235 The Surfing Magazines - The Surfing Magazines

A tense, buzzing little record masquerading as a laid-back one. Rhythm sections shy about the groove, chirping guitar lines skittering around the songs like trapped animals. Admirably arty but not that good for listening to 3/5

#3234 The Midnight - Nocturnal

Less heavy-handed than Kids' rotten nostalgia, but still awfully one-dimensional in its neon-drenched nightscaping. Saxes are a nice touch 3/5

#3233 The Midnight - Kids

There's a lot of 80's-tinged, nostalgia-driven synth music out there, but none as brazen as Kids.

Kids, which you'll note is called "Kids", is cloyingly, cartoonishly nostalgic.

Kids (featuring songs called Kids, Youth, Saturday Mornings, Arcade Dreams), has teal and pink cover art, set in a mall, complete with neon signs, arcade games, a soda machine and a timestamp in the corner, putting this in the era of VHS. And yes, as a bonus, in case you didn't get it, in case it was too subtle, procedes to WRITE OUT IN TEXT ON THE COVER OF THE ALBUM that the year is 1985, and fuckit, let's put the time right as you're probably getting out of school you doe-eyed escapee of your miserable present.

I'd call it parody if I didn't know better.

The actual music is as ham-fisted, with only the reprise of the title track actually touching any part of this black, deeply-bored-with-this-shit heart of mine 2.5/5

#3232 The Glands - The Glands

Scrappy, angular rock from the school of Built to Spill. Platonic indie rock: pleasant and clever and slight 3.5/5

#3231 Party Walsh - Not the Same as it Used to Be

Listen / buy here!

The EP undersells their live energy, with the vocals too high in the mix, but it's an agreeable swish of mod-y Americana - not too many folks making music quite like this anymore (School for Robots excepted!) 3/5

#3230 Perturbator - I Am the Night

Another menacing soundtrack from Perturbator. Atmospheric as ever, but brooding, samey, and inessential compared to his later, more exiting (Dangerous Days), more interesting (New Model) albums 3/5

#3229 Homeboy Sandman and Edan - Humble Pi

Edan's back! As knotty as percussive as ever, with Homeboy Sandman a perfect complement, with wooly, hard-hitting production underneath. Packed with great swerves, intricate and blunt - exciting shit. Hope for a proper followup to Beauty and the Beat 4/5

#3228 E-40 - In a Major Way

E-40's tenspeed flow's a thrill to follow; he does keep you on your toes. His easy charisma's easy to like, but the sub-barebones production and bloated pacing drag it down 3.5/5

#3227 Kelpe - Ex-Aquarium

Bristling with ideas, but never pushy about it. An electronic, sampled, moving, shifting matrix of soft spines, blurring lines between glitchy and jazzy, soft and hard. Kelpe never quite tip their hand into any particular approach, slinking through house and techno and instrumental hip hop and plunderphonics and rockist leanings and ambient corruptions, some elegant median of Aphex Twin, The Books, and Chemical Brothers circa Surrender. It's all awfully good listening, never ever boring or unpleasant, changing out from under you with transparent grace 4.5/5

#3226 DOA - Something Better Change

Scrappy, toetapping punk that's not afraid of a pretty moment, a searing guitar line or otherwise having a sneering good time 3.5/5

#3225 The Bats - Daddy's Highway

Classic Flying Nun jangle and coo, with lopey bass and boy-girl vocals to swoon to. Pretty, wistful and sweet, if a bit samey by the end 3.5/5

#3224 Fat Mattress - Fat Mattress

Solid, agreeable, clever psychedelia with flecks of country, like some lost Byrds transition album. No one song will blow you away, but it's album so roundly enjoyable it's tough not to recommend 4/5

#3223 Doug Hream Blunt - My Name is Doug Hream Blunt

As repetitive and outsider as pseudo-labelmate William Onyeabor, but without any soul or hooks. Thin and uncharmingly clumsy. Sometimes obscure, out-out-phase music didn't catch on for a reason 2/5

#3222 Sun Araw - The Saddle of the Increate

Starts off fun. Weird noises with plenty of space to breathe. Booksy playfulness. Chill Out having a seizure. Cowboy emphemera: a slide guitar snippet, a jangle of spurs, bottles and cans, dozens of half-phrases about horses and plains and men and cactuses. As if drawn from a hat. Jerky rhythms.

After about 10 minutes it gets a little old, though.

And after 20 its real old.

This dude is still just saying the weirdest shit.

Is this all this record does?

At the 40 minute mark everything goes a bit soft and you're awakening from VR sickness after a month on the range and there's a giddy, disoriented glee.

After 76 minutes, though.

An hour and sixteen minutes!

76 minutes and zero hooks later.

Man.

It's pretty annoying again 3/5

#3221 Ashra - Blackouts

A gorgeous, understated mesh of chiming guitar lines and electronic washes, plinking synth arpeggios weaving through waves of reverb, steeped with endless krautrock patience 4/5

#3220 Occam's Laser - Occult 88

Not as epic as, say, Carpenter Brut, but as consistently bangin as any other 80's-synth-horror act out there. Occult 88 nails that growling synth-guitar crunch, with just the right ratio of wistful washes and just a pinch of spooky sample nonsense 3.5/5

#3219 Occam's Laser - The Grid

An understated tribute to the first Tron movie, committed to vintage synths, icy washes, and brittle arpeggios, nailing the past-future moment. Works best in the space between background and foreground, a trippy little technology time machine 3.5/5

#3218 Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Blood Lust

Chugging, fuzzed-out stoner rock drenched in falsetto. Solid headbobbery, nothing special 3/5

#3217 Aceyalone - A Book of Human Language

Textbook Project Blowed backpack knottiness: torrents of rhymes, sounding improvised, loose, crosscut with veins of meticulous double-meaning. The lines are interesting for as long as you can keep your attention on them, but the album's overlong and pretentious, the conceptual framing never adding up to anything. The jazzy, upright-drenched production's laid back and deep-grooved, but too one-dimensional to carry you to the 68 minute mark 3/5

#3216 Ochre - Lemodie

Skittery, spacey eletronic fussery that can't decide if it's trying to be Aphex Twin or Orbital and ends up less interesting and less enjoyable than either. I can't come up with a situation where I'd want to listen to something this hazily nervous 2.5/5

#3215 Bomb the Music Industry! - Album Minus Band

Angry, frantic, engaged, everything you want from punk. But something more, something in the hairy, unpredictable, thrashing, swerving energy that reminds you bittersweetly of life itself. Those nuts song titles, those little pretty asides, those synthy touches, the hitches from battering hyperspeed 4/4s to ska ch-chug, endless whiplash changes. As _fucking _alive as any album you'll find. Jeff Rosenstock is the best bandleader in 21st century rock and its not close 4.5/5

#3214 Makaya McCraven - In the Moment

McCraven knows magic comes from moments, none more so than that gorgous bassline that opens and closes the record. Instrumental hip hop takes on jazz noodling come through clear, with groove and dust and a sampler's sense of repetition and cratedigging hope. Crowd snippets reinforce that what you're hearing is created and curated, in that order.

Even though it's chopped after the fact, despite all the scraping explanations of improvisation, this knows the experience of live music better than most. You listen in involuntary anticipation of what's going to happen, and feel others hoping and feeling it around you, and trustfall into waves and waves 4/5

#3213 The Internet - Hive Mind

Sexy, groovesome on paper, but none of it really chills me out or riles me up. Everything at arm's length. No tingle at the head/heart/hips. My bad maybe but 2.5/5

#3212 Makaya McCraven - Universal Beings

McCraven's after-composed improvised jazz masterstroke angle is past its humble excuses, ready to be Serious Jazz, full of knotty half-hooks and tense, arty constructs. In the Moment was stumbling into a backroom and finding magic. Universal Beings is still secret, but well pre-whispered about by droogs, full of knowing cool. Admirable, in a Kubrickian kinda way, but lacking connection 3/5

#3211 Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - King of Cowards

All those big fucker riffs, so scuffed up so right, banged into songs with tempo changes and sections and shit this time. Is it wrong I miss the singleminded churn of Feed the Rats? 8 minutes feels like a pop sellout by comparison 3/5

#3210 Cloud Nothings - Last Building Burning

Cloud Nothings've had some great songs, but no especially solid albums - this included. An electric, roaring opener gets followed by weaker vocals, slower tempos, limp songwriting aimed squarely at talking girls out of getting with mediocre guys, a subject the Hold Steady already owns. The pacing's weird and hollow, even the long song seeming lost 2.5/5

#3209 Junior Senior - Say Hello Wave Goodbye

A limp shadow of the Danish duo's brilliant career. Repetitive songs that nick details and skip all the live playfulness that made their best stuff work. Cheek, puck, surprise, gall: all gone. Just a bunch of too-late dancepunk grasps 2.5/5

#3208 Sleep - The Sciences

The downside of Dopesmoker is everything's going to sound watered down by comparison; that curse's still hanging on. The vocals're dopey, but Sleep's latest is riffier than most stoner stuff, bringing in little drops and interplays lightly. Don't want to _harsh anyone's buzz_. Highlight's Marijuanaut's Theme, that shit _moves 3.5/5

#3207 Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - Feed the Rats

Hell yeah heads say again and again and again. Hard rock revival gone to full stoner length, QotSA stretched to krautrock forever, Sleep with showmanship. What sounds like a hook sounds like a meditation on its 100th repetition, over endless guitar gyres, eruption in looped slow motion 4/5

#3206 Liars - Titles with the Word Fountain

Extra stuff from last year's (surprisingly great!) TFCF that starts off strong. Angus's still inventive as hell for a few songs there, diving into the wildest textures and coming back with improbably melody. But it's a frontloaded, bloated collection: mostly sub-b-side half-ideas by the 1/3rd mark 3/5

#3205 Electrelane - The Power Out

A pretty, alien little indie rock album with intimate production that borders on uncomfortable. The vocals are so _ goddamn _ close _, just right all the way up in your ears. Guitars that aren't afraid to put a finger in your forehead out of nowhere.

And then there's the staggering tempos, mismatched instrumentation, all these structures and dynamics all just 30 degrees askew from expectation. Pretty, maybe brilliant, difficult... and upsetting somehow, like some suppressed memory being vibrated. Deeply fascinating, mysteriously unbearable 3.5/5

#3204 Omnium Gatherum - The Burning Cold

Hyper-technical nerd-metal that's completely comfortable with melody. Right pretty in places, and generally pleasantly overbusy. But the combination of squeaky-clean production and grunty metal-guy growling feels oily in the ear 3.5/5

#3203 The KVB - Only Now Forever

Gothy shoegaze electropop, locking into a beat and swishing it around in endless tones and cavernous croonscapes. I mean it as a half-backhanded compliment when I say: I've never heard a 4-minute song that  felt   like   it    went    on    so     long      3/5

#3202 The Exorcist GBG - The Exorcist GBG

Spooky as fuck but tied to rockist analog humanism. This is what dance music should sound like. Death to fake wobblers, these guys cut to the heart of the matter, and quick 4/5

#3201 Nicolas Godin - Au service de la France

I'm a sucker for the French, I admit it, so let's get it out of the way while I fellate them.

This is everything I love about exotica and lounge and tropicalia and bossa nova and it cool as fuck. Godin gets it, every theme's cooler than the last, a world tour though a spy's eyes, a trip through space and time to all the sexiest, most mysterious corners of the world. Composed or sampled or who knows -- swoon goddamn 4.5/5

#3200 Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

I'm not down with Tom Petty, the dude, which is maybe my problem. Lookit this smug fuck on the cover of this album. Such a fuckin' Willbury, all those overrated shitheels.

The Heartbreakers, they're fine. The songwriting, solid. But there's an empty swagger here I bristle at, some put on Police-sexiness, that -- no thanks.

Breakdown's got its thing, and I can't argue with American Girl's timeless hooks. But man, Petty seems like a shit to me, downhome but keeping us all at arm's length and downward, and that undercuts the whole thing. It's some Phil Collins pussy-reaching shit and I'm not with it 3/5

#3199 Daryll Hall - Sacred Songs

I hate when my thunder gets stolen. Allmusic commenter Nick Austin says:

What would a record sound like recorded by Daryl Hall and Robert Fripp? Like this.

And who's to argue with that. I mean, I love Babs and Bads, but it's as stark a division as you an imagine, an artrock stomp descending into full on Eno-style Frippery on a dime, no attempt to cover for the contrast at all. I kind of admire how harsh the transition is. Never heard anything quite like it.

You'd expect the marriage between Hall and collaborator to be smoother but its like -- my turn fucker -- and the knob turns into full nonsense. What a wildly harsh combination. A genuinely fascinating failure that goes all the way around the horn to brilliant somehow.

Undeserved bonus points around the surge of airplane noise and Tufts chatter that passed by my fall window, right in tune with this album's wiles, right as I closed this out 4/5

#3198 The Cowboys - Volume 4

I like these kids. Flayed, sunburned, in the way only a Texas wastrel and a surfer burnout can have in common. I grapple with what surf and country have in common -- that twang maybe. And I love anything that planks the bridge. These guys drive to the heart of the matter, roll with em into the sunset, westward as far as you dare 4/5

#3197 Goggs - Pre Strike Sweep

The riffs they are heavy and the riffs they are fast, but Goggs' latest as no sense of pacing or contrast or songwriting. A numbing samey shouting blast 3/5

#3196 The Sueves - RIP Clearance Event

As heavy and scuzzy a riffpile as I've heard in a while, the kids aren't fucking around and the production brings it home. Bonus points for the [waves] interludes that break up the racket. A rare gem in a sea of similar screamers 4/5

#3195 Je Suis France - Je Suis France

It's impossible that Je Suis France even had a debut: their countless albums slither in and out of the Jeremy Bearimy, with no throughline of quality or style. Their basic catchy crunch is there from the jump, frayed and manic and spiked with surprises, a friend on a too-fast night drive towards nothing and away from everything 4/5

#3194 Madlib - Shades of Blue: Madlib Invades Blue Note

Sounds like a Madlib beat collection, maybe a little bit cooler. It's not like pillaging jazz is a new gimmick for him. Funky and chill and worth hearing, but the billing's unnecessary 3.5/5

#3193 Je Suis France - Ice Age

Ignore this micro-EP's track breaks: this is as exciting a 9-minute song as you're gonna find. Angry, stupid, strange, packed with hooks, wheeling all over itself in waves of crunch and yelp 4/5

#3192 Je Suis France - Sephardic Negligee

An odds-and-ends record of mostly-throwaway noise experiments. They figured out how to turn these noises into songs on later albums, but skip this unless you really want to hear the sausage getting made 2.5/5

#3191 Je Suis France - By the Condo

One of the most enigmatic, inventive, and utterly underappreciated indie bands of the 21st century: here's yet another album packed with rough, hooky noiseballs, slathered in buzzy electronics and mad asides. I'm not saying JSF was ever going to sell out stadiums, but the fact they're not GBV // Pavement tier indie-famous is a failure of culture.

There's nothing on By the Condo that measures up to their most adventurous highs but its arguably their most straight-up enjoyable album yet, and the pop highs (Distance Makes it Further! Zealand!) are as manically delightful as ever 4/5

#3190 Feral Trash - Trashfiction

Sheets of guitars and shouted complaints like you've heard a thousand times. But Feral Trash finds some magic in wreckage, smashing classic teenage frustrations into 20something is-this-it Fight Club nihilism. Trashfiction stews a dozen ways to be angry and betrayed into a poison that reminds you of all your angstiest moments, all wrapped up in a candy pop-punk pill 4/5

#3189 The Riffs - Death of Glory

Utterly sincere, totally committed anachronistic punk revival with shades of the Exploding Hearts. Chuggy and nasty-lite, with enough sweet guitars to make you smile, but nothing that's going to stand out from the last 40 years of reinventions 3/5

#3188 Bardo Pond / Guru Guru / Acid Mothers Temple - Acid Guru Pond

Sounds exactly like what you'd expect when you put these 3 together. Waves of noise, bleats of sound, vaguely eastern structures. It's as numbing as they come, pouring all the cereals into one big bowl of super cereal and watching the milk turn rainbow sugar, feeling the chaotic pull of at least 2 cooks too many. Too formless for me, but manna for the hardcore I'm sure 3/5

#3187 William Tyler - Live at Third Man Records

Tyler's a heck of a guitar player, and its incredible watching him wring so much out of one instrument and two hands. But it's a more intellectual experience, better suited for close listening; you might miss all the subtle backing and reverb and production touches that gave his records their subliminal emotional force 3.5/5

#3186 Bardo Pond and Yo La Tengo - Parallelogram

The first sidelong track's a masterpiece, those glorious Tengo guitars, no stranger to endless jams, bring searing clarity to Bardo Pond's waves of noise. The spare breakdown in the middle is breathtaking: everything you want from an epic-length song.

The other side's the castoff sludge-twin, sounding like a mangled, postproduction Neu-fucked version of an already boring b-side. Is this really the second-best thing this collaboration came up with? 3.5/5

#3185 Fucked Up - Dose Your Dreams

Fucked Up completes their transformation into a heavy indie band that happens to have a howling lunatic frontman and I'm good with it. Their prettiest, most fun album, full of half-working experiments and clumsy combinations. That's always been my favorite thing about the band -- that and their peerless ability to be ferociously aggressive and deeply wounded and sensitive all at once.

Purists will moan, but if you're not stoked to get down when Talking Pictures hits its dancy breakdown you just don't like music. Obligatory: holy shit this album's and hour and 22 minutes long and does too little to get you to the end, but it works well enough portioned out in slices 4/5

#3184 Tepr - The Deadly Master of Rappers from Hell

This makes me weep for 2003, when Thought for Food (technically 2002), One Word Extinguisher, ( ), and Who Will Cut our Hair when We're Gone, made all seem possible. But then it all just kinda plateaued.

This French album from the same era carries some of that same energy: a bristly restlessness, wrangling minimal, unlistenable sounds in just the right combinations to make something beautiful and emotional and rich*. Melodies and skitters and skips conjure dread, loneliness, hope, awe, making for an instrumental album that's surprisingly thematic, borderline narrative, with glimpses of apartments, mountains, skylines, snow.

Bonus points for the most misleading album title I've seen in years 4/5

* but not taking it as far as Give Up, which, feh

#3183 Tepr - Hypnotease

After a 9 year break, Tepr's back, transformed again. But this time his weapon's poorly-paced dance music, big beats and repetitive samples stepping in place, waiting for the microdrop. Drag 2.5/5

#3182 Tepr - Cote Ouest

Tepr's as great a shapeshifter as I've encountered in a while. Here he jettisons sensitive glitch for big crunchy buzz and swings it in every direction, cranking out bangers, bent-rap throwdowns, sentimental M83 soundscapes, and chiptune stormers. A remarkable, rough-edged smorgasbord 4/5

#3181 J Dilla - Welcome to Detroit

Chilled out and groovesome, with tense, claustrophobic undertones: the act of finding space for good times in a dicey city. Dilla pulls it all off: he's as effortlessly hooky as ever, with an atmospheric throughline that elevates, punched with worthy verses 3.5/5

#3180 Hnry Flwr - Flowerama

Pretty, restless 00's-style indie ballads, each with some wash of synthy backing to blur the edges. Pleasant enough, not especially memorable 3/5

#3179 Marcy Playground - Shapeshifter

Distilled 90's. Nirvana if Nirvana was fun. All those same defanged punk chords sedated to metal tempos, perfect for blank grin bobalongs tipping into giddiness and I have zero problems with that 3.5/5

#3178 Maxwell - Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite

At some point I misnumbered by a 100's digit: we've been in the 3100's for months. WHOOPS. Will write a script to fix someday. Which will make this comment confusing.

-------

So smooth, so sex. Silky as silk, with bodies bumping under. Dark and rich and velvet shimmer all drunken night 3.5/5

#3077 Noname - Room 25

Lithe, electric, humble. Noname's flow's a silk whip crack. She works over erratic jazz beats, hooking in some times, drifting path others, shades of old Busdriver. At worst it sounds like she's not in the room, but when it clicks it's pure Chicago sparks. Noname's pouring all of herself out: womanhood, blackness, scents and memories and reflections, for you to hear or not. That trust's a thrill 4/5

#3076 Baked Beans - Babble

Overblown, overstoned, but insistent, fighting for itself. Surfy relentless chug dipped in the 60's and fried to perfection 4/5

#3075 Japan - Tin Drum

Dragging Low Bowie onward, as post-punk as they come, some devolved secret cousins of soul songs, bent wobbles and wrongnotes lurking in every backalley. Weird warped agony you almost admire but nah 2.5/5

#3074 DJ Shadow - The Mountain Has Fallen

Each of these 4 tracks has its own thing going, each one sharpened to a point. Hooksome, tight, two with rapping, two instrumental, all exciting in their own way.

We take him for granted, but Shadow's still got it 4/5

#3073 Dillard and Clark - Through the Morning, Through the Night

Pleasant enough. Donna Washburn's band-wrecking presence is a sweet touch, and gave us some Burritos besides, so, bonus. Toe-tapping, streaked with blistering bluegrass and wholesome harmonies and I am too sunbathed to complain 3.5/5

#3072 Wussy - Forever Sounds

A slowmotion sunburn of stoner sludge laced with high wires. Like them cover pyramids, fat on the bottom, sharp on top. Grinding you down with shoegaze haze, all the better to see those lasers, all pointed at that 90's-remembering future 3.5/5

#3071 Peter Gabriel - Scratch My Back

Gabriel delivers every cover in this collection like an elegy for a dead world. Just mournful symphonics and words dropping from his mouth like rotted flesh. Even the big climax of My Body is a Cage is strangled into tension, and what a choking hash he makes of Street Spirit. I love that he commits to a sound and bends every song to it, and to that end the choices are inspired. But good god what a hopeless misery 3/5

#3070 Be Bop Deluxe - Sunburst Finish

There's still something frustratingly empty about post-Victim BBD, but their third album slathers on so much gorgeous guitar tone (goddamn those blinding comet lines never get old) and peppers in so many little proggy touches as to be irresistible to a wank-tolerant wanker like me 4/5

#3069 Be Bop Deluxe - Futurama

Swooping guitars with plenty of Elton/Bowie* swooning at the stars. Maid in Heaven's a underappreciated stomper, and Nelson's falling teardrop lines are never sweeter than on Sister Seagull. The songs are all enjoyable, they're just not really _about anything, bringing no personality to speak of, never amounting to anything more than a sequence of very pleasant guitar noises 3.5/5

* I'm not saying Bowie has a two-word trademark on "sad affair", but it does sound like a knock-on bit of microplagiarism on a song that already sounds that much like Life on Mars

#3068 Sandro Perri - In Another Life

LCD / Hot Chip burble and croon, stretched out to impossible proportions and epic reach.

5, 10, 15, 20, 25 minutes

The title track presses on patiently, little guitar phrases and vocal snatches wandering in and out, ruminating on the beyond. Worth the price of admission, even if the meandering second side suite seems dopey by comparison 3.5/5

#3067 Clifford Brown, Max Roach - Brown and Roach Incorporated

know nothing about jazz but

Colorful, playful, structured but unhindered by convention - good squirrely fun 3.5/5

#3066 Sigur Ros - Route One

Mysterious, mostly enjoyable semi-algorithmic meanderings, but a weird middle-ground tease -- you'll likely want to listen to something more focused or go full on and hit the full 24 hour trip. As an ad for the latter its effective enough 3.5/5

#3065 Aphex Twin - Collapse EP

Smoother combinations of James's now-familiar tricks, but nothing especially new, and none of the heart and wit of the stuff from his previous era. Very little here that sticks to the ribs in 2018 2.5/5

#3064 Low - Double Negative

I'm finding cause to talk talk about Laughing Stock a lot lately; but this has that phantom magic, that space between guitar notes. The atmospherics are pure-production era at its purest. The sentiments drowning in themselves. Wish the vocals were better, thin, nasal, detuned, they erode the pained beauty. Three listens deep this hasn't quite taken hold the way I want it to, grasping for handholds 3.5/5

#3063 Jimi Hendrix - The Cry of Love

Lacks his other albums' fireworks, but still overflows with melodies, attitude, texture, and joy. Might even flow better than his other albums, somehow. Deserves to be more fully in the pantheon 4.5/5

#3062 Eric Burdon and War - Eric Burdon Declares War

Burdon seems well-meaning, but a white guy singing about race with a mostly-black band never stops feeling weird. Doubly so because the band seems to indulge him so deeply, vamping endlessly behind half-baked beatpoet rants to nowhere 2.5/5

#3061 Hole - Live Through This

That guitar crunch is sweet, the rage's as valid as ever, but Love's growl-and-yelp sounds forced and out of place amidst all that major label slickness 3/5

#3060 Sweet Trip - velocity:design:comfort

IDM glitchiness is a natural partner for shoegaze, blurring lines nicely. Its a shame the electronic bits are so clunky, if you squint you can see what might have been a really great record 3/5

#3059 Marillion - Script for a Jeter's Tear

This really does sound almost plausibly like the album that Genesis would have made after Hackett left. Except they would have never so flagrantly revisited their own riffs, and even mopey creeper Phil Collins wouldn't have swerved this hard into lovelorn moaning. How does a band nearly-named after a Tolkien book drop all the mythology in favor of 7/4 torch songs? If this was a Genesis album, this would have been their second worst to date*, but still miles better than And Then There Were Three 3/5

* sorry From Genesis to Revelations

#3058 ESG - Come Away with ESG

Stone soup post-punk asking: how far can you strip a song down and have it still sound funky as fuck? Very! The ghosts of drums, the bass working overtime to pull the melody, a dapper disco skeleton, all angles and elbows 4/5

#3057 Tropical Fuck Storm - A Laughing Death in Meatspace

Delirious, swaying, angular rock with anchors on its ankles, bursting and falling flat, Liddiard's vocals laboring to find volume and sharpness, the tempos and tones dragging and detuning, global death in technicolor slow motion 3/5

#3056 Traden - Traden

Wandering, endless jams with enough sweet guitar tones and subtle Swedish texture to make for a right pleasant driftaway 3.5/5

#3055 Arthur Russell - World of Echo

So spare. The ghost of Laughing Stock, just memories of guitars, voices ringing off the sides of implied spaces. Uncomfortable, compelling, unpleasant, brilliant 3.5/5

#3054 AK/DK - Patterns / Harmonics

I have endless appetite for this slowburning neu-motorik movement. AK/DK lays out the Venn diagram of propulsive 00's rock, 60s organ raveups, and nightdrive electronica, smearing out something textured, mysterious, and exciting 4/5

#3053 Funkadelic - Funkadelic

So slow, like Sabbath funk. An insect egg of funk, breaking open in stop motion, grooves dripping out deep and thick, catching fire, thrashing and becoming. Funky as fuck, more so than so much that came after. Essential 4.5/5

#3052 Be Bop Deluxe - Axe Victim

Hews staggeringly close to glam-era Bowie, right down to song titles and specific riffs from specific songs.

And yet goddamn, Bill Nelson's guitar is sweet as they come. And that swooping sentimentality is right up there with its influences; the title track's a worthy little brother to Ziggy's. The rest comes close enough to file this under this criminally underappreciated. Deeply inspired, sure, but not derivative, packed with dozens of classic riffs and stunning moments all its own. Glam fans can not miss 4.5/5

#3051 Asia - Asia

Deeply plastic, superficially virtuosic, slathered in sentimentality and cheap fistpumping anthems. File along the worst of post-Hacket Genesis. But undeniably catchier. That is, disposable --god those vocals--that wildly overpolished production-- but grudgingly pretty fuckin catchy 3/5

#3050 Yves Tumor - Safe in the Hands of Love

At its best: mysterious, slurred, strange, without dipping into unlistenability. That Aphex Twin trick.

Biting viscerally, effectively into the existential terror of the underclasses in some places (Noid), but falling limply into post-NiN ranting in others (Hope in Suffering). Despite flashes of brilliance, mostly the latter: reheated 90's industrial angst 3/5

#3049 War - The World is a Ghetto

War's breakthrough is pleasant, funky, soulful; if a bit overslick. Post-Burton the social message less complicated, for better or worse 3.5/5

#3048 La Femme - Mystere

A deliriously French indie-synth romp, coy and manic and tussled with bristly electronic edges, writhing in the space between synthpop and French garage revival. French. Propulsive and pretty and filled with little surprises 4/5

#3047 Gong - Camembert Electrique

The perfect bridge between 60's psychadelia and 70's prog, with enough impossible flourishes in between to make it beyond description. A messy, unmissable, thrashing golden disaster 4.5/5

#3046 The Electric Prunes - Mass in F Minor

I almost admire Axelrod's flagrant ambition. Entertaining in a B-album kind of way. But man. What a mess. All that church organ and Latin chanting doesn't work as pop or as art. Sounds like something someone made on a bet 3/5

#3045 David Axelrod - Songs of Experience

Baroque, overbearing exotica that reeks of excess. Shadow-sampled The Human Abstract's a gorgeous bit of patience, but the rest is affected and aging badly; unwanted advances at the bar 2.5/5

#3044 Dick Stusso - Nashville Dreams / Sings the Blues

Not since Mellow Gold did I feel such a viscerally dusty sound of unfiltered wastrel thrashabout. This time with a glam streak, born less of any strutting pride than a staggering lack of giving a fuck. 'This is what I'm doing' declares Stusso over wobbly guitar. And you can feel the slump into the gutter throne, a disconnected double slinking into the night.

And then alight, leaping to his feet with that King Khan thrash. The Americana album Lou Reed never made, a smoking shadow of muswell exile. As no-bullshit as they come in the 10's, a folk-flecked masterpiece of texture and tone floating over drum machines or nothing at all, Bee Thousand sundried and blasted, destined to be a cult classic if there's any justice in the world 4.5/5

#3043 Dick Stusso - In Heaven

I like this Stusso dude. He's got soul, somewhere in that Zevon // Parsons, dust-glam stumbledown -__

Not quite as effortlessly blistered as Nashville Dreams, with a gauzy indifference on the dirt and scabs, but still man, overflowing with sincere, fizzling sweetness that's impossible not to love 4/5

#3042 Flasher - Constant Image

Catchy, propulsive, indie, taking zero chances with its very nice strummy, angular-lite niceness. Nary a song straying far north of 3:30, not a single note out of place. And yet, winning me over in the details. Who's Got Time and Business Unusual are highlights. An understated urgency seeping through the tightness 3.5/5

#3041 U.K. - U.K.

Rock demands you move forward, but this too-late post-Boston // Genesis // Yes pop-riffage is good fun, with a hint of chin-scratchery as a stale bonus. Buzzy synths find a comfortable home among all the classical guitar and poppity bass and grasping vocals.

Backhanded praise is the only kind left for those late to a style built on newness. England, man. Lines are tight. My head did bob. Democracy among the parts, born of their impressive lineage maybe, makes for a snaky, enchanting listen for those with leftover patience for enchantment 4/5

#3040 Bruford - Feels Good to Me

God help me i kinda like this. the whitest take on jazz rock imaginable. and that's a statement. crashing against nothing, those scattered vocals so cringey, that forced bass pop and this is why we got punk but man, some of them tones really are sweet and dude _can drum. factory metahooks well made 3.5/5

#3039 10LEC6 - Bone Bame

Feels plastic in your mouth. I can't speak to authenticity, but something was lost in the process, leaving a stink of gimmick 2.5/5

#3038 Teenage Bad Girl - Backwash

Does nothing new, does a vast swath of old things well. Not shy with that bandname and pink/teal cover art. But fuckit. Dancable, energetic, weird; drawing on banging hiphop, big dumb house, dreamy French daftpunk driftaway. The big guitars buzzed back into overblown synth territory, dodging every cheap pitfall. Brainshortcircuit distilled, more then the sum of its parts, possibly brilliant 4/5

#3037 Boyscott - Goose Bumps

A tiny Broken Social Scene -- those plinking angularities, that understated lushness. Quietly gorgeous indie rock, so small and thin, a collectively washing-over. So unassuming, light off lakes, wind in leaves, sun through short pine needles, brought to sparkling life 4/5

#3036 Macintosh Plus - Floral Shoppe

The vaporwave visual aesthetic's tied to its sound, undeniable but hard to pin down. Say, here. Clip art. Incongruity. Geometry. Artificiality. That hazy, disconcerting unease. The music, too slow, melting but melodic. Chopped, overlaid, wrong, inviting you not to mind. The way you remember a time without remembering the details. A feeling smeared across 30 years. Never more clearly on display than on this minor classic. The new psychedelia, the past as anchor to stretch ever-progressing time 3.5/5

#3035 Sparks - In Outer Space

Sparks zag again, back into disco-flecked synthpop, retreating from pop culture into their most intimate album in years. A portrait of insecurity, discomfort with a world built on slickness and grace, bristling at the 80's just as it's getting started. Lucky Me, Lucky You's an understated bit of bittersweetness. I can't shake Boys and Girls in America - that trying, trying.

Musically, Outer Space straddles Heaven and Terminal well enough, but its the return of that restless grasping that carries it 4/5

#3034 Sparks - Angst in My Pants

Sparks find their footing yet again. Russell's toned down the vocal gymnastics, finding a rich, searching sound - the title track and Sherlock Holmes are as soulful as anything Sparks've done. Return-to-form adventurousness and refinements of their latest sounds abound: I Predict would have been perfectly at home as the best song on Big Beat or Whomp. And Moustache is just good Mint Chicks fun.

Some of the pop culture bits fall flat, but mostly Angst's inscrutably great. Shades of Blur at their best. Another baffling data point on the most untrackable career in rock 4/5

#3033 Sparks - Whomp that Sucker

After 9 albums of exploration, Sparks start to spin their wheels, settling into a vaguely campy, arch brand of poppy new-wave. The songs are hook-light and idea-light and borderline annoying, the repetition losing its magic. Outdone in every way by Terminal Jive and Angst 2.5/5

#3032 Thee Oh Sees - Smote Reverser

Oh Sees continue to soldier on in an increasingly barren rock landscape. Not much that's showy*, nothing that's grasping for a larger audience, just a ridiculously assured drive forward, riding that evenkeeled, tight, onward chug//thrash//spasm of guitar, bass, organ, classic Dwyer crooning.

Don't let me undercut. This album is great because the band is great, and this continues Orc's run of no-fat supertight trippy riffage. It's great. More so than most this feels like a sampler for a _blazing live show. It's just that it comes from this hyperprolific lineage (see also Ty and King Gizzard) where you don't notice them. That kid that gets A's all the time and what're you supposed to say with each new report card. Everything you could want from what's left of rock, may it never stop sustaining us 4.5/5

* on the other hand i mean like them drums on the end of Last Peace, say, that makes me apalpitate

#3031 Shirobon - Infinity

Do you want to hear chiptune versions of deadmau5 songs? I agree, the answer is mostly no, but kinda yes maybe? that's more or less the test for this one, ymmv 3.5/5

#3030 PrototypeRaptor - 3-1

Mostly: dubstep sucks and chiptune sucks but somewhere in that venn diagram some roundthehorn switch flips and I rather like this pile of buzzy nonsense. They find some Basement Jaxx indulgent throughline that excuses the crass means to the maximalist ends. Somewhere in the middle I picture this making the nerdier-than-I bob clumsier-than-I at PAX. They have a song called Mode 7, for fuck's sake. Also, PrototypeRaptor. woof. what a name 3.5/5

#3029 Mike Oldfied - Hergest Ridge

If there was any debate about whether Tubular Bells was overrated this settles it - a vastly better album, with more highlights, better flow, and none of the clunky distractions. Tubular Bells is also fine and good - just not a masterpiece so much as arriving at a time and place hungry for a savior. Where Bells chopped sloppily between ideas, Ridge breathes, develops, blossoms, with the hypnosis of ambient achieved through melodies so clean you barely notice their passing.

And its still an indulgent wank. And it's crazy that this topped any country's charts (good trivia there). But better than most if it's what you're in the market for, overflowing with a sense of wonder for the world, riding contours, gasping open into space, a sunrise where you try to suck in the moment and hold it hardened in yourself for later, ideally forever 4.5/5

#3028 Future Teens - Hard Feelings

Self-described bummer pop and there goes my whole take. Big, thin, whole-guitar chords over moaning resignation that finds some spark of hope in giving up. Sharply observed catharsis rock that knows the only way through is down 3.5/5

#3027 Premiata Forneria Marconi - Storia Di Un Minuto

I knocked PFM as Genesis wannabes when I heard Photos of Ghosts, but their debut has its own magic. Still some galloping Nice-via-Knifeism, but its own raucous energy too, some real kneechopping synth beauty, and dozens of elegant surprises. This's a band possessed, pulled by unseen forces and pulling you along. Wildly strange and elegant and mysterious, complex without being showy. How prog outta be 4.5/5

#3026 Giorgio Moroder - From Here to Eternity

Wildly ahead of its time, pidgeonholable as disco only because of its era. Absent context, this is techno, electro, dancepunk, or a half dozen other styles it beat to the punch. Kraftwerk's robot rock with dancefloor pacing, as proto-Daft Punk as they come. So primitive and futuristic. Perfect album title. Man those synth buzzes are thick. Brilliant 4.5/5

#3025 Totalled - Demo

Listen / buy here!

Perfectly enjoyable, totally unadventurous indie bar-rock, the kind that sounds fun to play and let the chips fall where they may. The sheer fatness of Memorial Day's riff's a highlight, but there's not a lot else that stands out 3/5

#3024 Mike Oldfied - Tubular Bells

An experimental instrumental album full of strange sounds, remarkably cleanly-realized -- plus a few moments of truly beautiful, ethereal melody. The focus on the sub-song realizations in isolation, stitched together after the fact, is a double-edged sword. Each section feels free of convention, living outside of existing music. And the ones that work, do they work. Italian chef finger kiss.

But they don't flow into eachother especially well, and _woof some of them fall flat. The side-enders, especially, jesus. The naming of the instruments out loud as they come in is not a gimmick that's aged well, and the Sailor Hornpipe outro's a heinous spell-breaker. Classical-aping clunkers infiltrate most of the best stretches.

--

If you're interested in the history of rock at all, this is a real interesting data point. It _dominated the British charts for _years and sold 15 millions albums worldwide and man its a weird record. Assuredly one of the weirdest to make that kind of impact. It speaks to the post-60's hangover we were facing, maybe: all that hope for music and where did it get us?

It's a bit like how people today root for Tiger to best Nicklaus, James over Jordan.

We're all on team this-generation.

We need to have something that shows us the time we're living in is culturally valid -- that _we're culturally valid. And its hard to escape the idea that this album's success came from some variation of that desire, that lifting it up was some collective delusion that affirmed that we were living in the best time yet.

England in particular, still chasing the British-invasion-high of being the center of culture, seemed to _will this into being a _thing. Fast forward to Oasis. The hype cycle there's its own beast.

It's not that Tubular Bells isn't good, it has its moments. But the idea that two 20-plus minute formless sound-collages was must-have for the general music populace anywhere in the Western world, that it broke records reserved for Jackson and the Beatles, is deeply unusual in the history of modern music. A moment when art music was popular. Man that time seems far away.

--

Tubular Bells is super messy, wildly, uneven, and its legend is blown way out of proportion. But there's a real spark of originality there, and in the post-then-now-now, man you can how rare its particular gift was 4/5

#3023 Sparks - Terminal Jive

After their music-hall//stripped-down-rock//disco albums comes Sparks' new wave album. There might not be a band in the history of rock better able to adapt to the styles of the now (the Stones are an underrated also-ran in this category). And as always (Big Beat excepted) they bring a generous dollop of their own style, blending #1iH's disco with their own slinky sensibilities to end up with something synthy and insistent, something between Blondie, U2, ELO - one band I like and two bands I "actually-like" like. Good, lightly strange fun 3.5/5

#3022 Sparks - No. 1 in Heaven

I can't say more sincerely how much I respect Sparks for so thoroughly selling out. Or, more generously, adopting and adapting to the latest technology. Always genre shapeshifters, always chasing the center of the music soul-body, why not get in bed with the hottest dude in the hottest style (Giorgio) and start ruttin.

On a shrinking path, tightening up, cleaning up, Sparks seemed doomed as the 70s wound down.

But Russel gets back in touch with his most falsetto-drenched lothario-struttin self, backed by relentless, writhing pulses. No 1 in Heaven's at once so true to their early bravado and riding still-cresting wave of synths and driving beats. It's them and not-them in blinding fashion, in a way that splinters what the band is. Lesser bands woulda rode their own rut to nowhere, but here's this pulsing, strange piece of new 4/5

#3021 Sparks - Introducing

Undeniably part of the post-magic 2nd-era genre-driven (Beach-Boys-style pop) Sparks. But wildly better than it gets credit for (way better than Big Beat, say), full of classic melodies, arch asides, joyous convergences. Forever Young's a classic, staking a claim to the basic melody way before the better-known song of the same name, and Occupation's got a message various waves of post-punk are still catching up to. Also, I'm pretty sure Big Surprise is about transexual optimism. I honestly can't tell if these guys are meathead shitheads or pre-Queen queer geniuses or both 4/5

#3020 Greensky Bluegrass - Shouted, Written Down and Quoted

In an era of Wagon Wheel and Mumford its easy to be cynical about deep-feeling bluegrass pluck-and-shuffle. These boys get there though, on through to this hard old heart as old as they singing about being, some Josh Ritter bus to the land of feelings 3.5/5

#3019 Alestorm - Sunset on the Golden Age

Gimmicky pirate-thrash for the Dropkick Murphys set, but heck it commits. Wooden Leg's good fuckin fun. I'll bet they're a blast live 3.5/5

#3018 Sparks - Big Beat

Sparks' seventies low point - worse than the underrated Introducing. Soulless, somehow over- and under-produced, a thin, taut swing at stripped down rock that scuffs and polished when it should have left alone. Is there an undercurrent of closeted thrashing running through this? If so, should've committed; if not it's just humorlessly gross about women 2.5/5

#3017 Sparks - Indescrete

The sunset of classic first-era Sparks arc - our protagonist a shadow now. A bridge to the genre-driven second-era Sparks, dropping backwards into full music hall -- so many horns and strings and quirky flourishes.

Propaganda was peak repetition, riding that hypnosis right on the knife's edge of thrilling. There's flashes of that magic here, the relentless chug of Happy Hunting Ground, the drunken swoon of How Are You Getting Home. But it falters, our hero shuddering on loose legs. Most of the songs are thin, goofy jokes boring after the first chorus. A clumsy stumble. Telling that the cover shows the band crashing to earth 3/5

#3016 Nation of Ulysses - Plays Pretty for Baby

All the way around the horn, post-punk sharpness distilled back into punk, classic frayed, rattling DC freakout. Thrilling frisson 4/5

#3015 Overwerk - Canon

Big bendy buzzes and festival-ready bwoms (Toccata), but with those symphonic intros, apocalyptic choruses, giant church bells, you get the sense Overwerk's shooting for something bigger. Maybe making the case he should've gotten Tron soundtrack job over Daft Punk - Create and Canon Pt. 2 could've fit right in. A bit much at times, not sure if it wants to be important or fun, but solid work // nightdrive material.

Bonus points: after a couple dozen failed attempts at Hollow Knight's final-final boss I put this on in the background and took it down lickety split 3.5/5

#3014 Oren Ambarchi - Hubris

Part 2's a shrugging Microphonesey microditty and part 3 descends into artless two-radio cacophany. The only reason to bother is Part 1, with its 20-minute pseudo-accoustic take on ambient progression, metallic twang melting material and time 3/5

#3013 Japan - Adolescent Sex

Skulking, slinky glam slathered in wall-to-wall funk guitars and feisty production flourishes. Wobbly synth leads rub against silky backing vocals - there's a very specific population of music fan you can piss off by pointing out Japan kinda sounds like Steely Dan.

A combination of relentless repetition and surprising divergences make for an insidiously interesting album that might take a few listens to get into 4/5

#3012 Sparks - Propaganda

Storming forward, full of power and retreat, at least as good as the much-acclaimed Kimono. That repetition. Finding some anthem and riding it, it's as bracing as any of Sparks' previous swerves. Utterly confident. From the martial stomp of Reinforcements, to the frantic searching of At Home/Work/Play, to the gallop of Achoo.

--

So confident our protagonist retreats from the public eye, now a reclusive magistrate, no worlds left to conquer, beholden to his own rules alone, and quite indulging, sashaying around his glass-walled home overlooking the ocean.

--

And we can't escape the sense of a concept, of a kidnapping, of control, of conflicting feelings, Stockholm and its inverse. What more perversely glamorous than capturing something glamorous and holding it in your hands?

--

And so nonsense spills anew. There's something in Sparks early output that reaches into your lizard brain and awakens your imagination, that brings you to spin tales, that reminds you that life can be imaginary and beautiful and perverse and what you make it, that your every thought spins a consequence. Inspiring, in all ways good and ill. Absolutely one of the lost bands in all of rock 4.5/5

#3011 Sparks - Kimono My House

This one took me a few. But jesus the swagger. What a lost gem. The pinnacle of mania. Russell's swinging from the chandeliers, and the rest of the band gallops alongside This Town.., Here In Heaven, Equator -- the euphoria. You get this marriage of reckless energy and tight melody startlingly seldom in life, hold on tight to it when you find it. Around now I'm ready to call Sparks the most underappreciated band of the 70s. Where are these songs on classic rock radio? Too strange I suppose. The first four songs make Bowie and Bolan look like stiffs. Worth noting also are the two cd bonus tracks (Barbecutie, Lost and Found), two of the albums biggest earworms, predicting Propaganda. Delights both.

--

Our cult comes up from the underground and their leader storms the staterooms and ballrooms. King of the world, bedding every woman imaginable. Maybe not just women ---- all lost in a hedonistic haze. Our hero hasn't changed, as idealistic as ever, the world rising up to meet his steady standard of euphoric bliss 4.5/5

#3010 Sparks - A Woofer in Tweeter's Clothing

A transitional spasm, as Sparks became a band proper, shaking off Rundgrens's minimalism, before they arrived at their fully formed world-conquering sound.

Uneven, but featuring some strutting, blinding glam highlights. The stomp of Beaver O'Lindy's irresistable, and the momentum of Underground/The Louvre's _fucking ____exciting. Jesus. Take that as a single 8 minute song and its one of the best of the 70s.

--

The image of this album is of our skulking dream from S/T, belting his last note from the empty stage, as the pale nobodys emerge from the shadows, drawn by the swaying confidence. France, catacombs, secrecy, redemption, a throwing off of the cloak - this is cult classic music, lurking music of the individual finding its foothold with the few. And you all know what happens after that. Stay tuned 4/5

#3009 DJ Shadow - Live in Manchester: The Mountain Has Fallen Tour

Shadow's got a great sense of pacing. This tour didn't feel especially live, but he still knows how to pull the ebbs and flows, how to wield earned familiarity. A bit too much banter, and not quite enough hitworthy grist to work with, but this is within a stretching reach of Alive XXX7, and that's a high water mark and a half 4/5

#3008 The League Unlimited Orchestra - Love and Dancing

Fuck yes. Strip it down. Dare was great, and this just pulls out the filet, chopping it up, saucing it down. A visionary bit of remixing that's a delight to listen to, fans of Daft Punk and LCD take notice. Gorgeously analog, composed with a DJ's effortless sense of pacing. One of the few important 80's records that you'd listen to in 2018 even if it wasn't homework 4.5/5

#3007 Tess Parks and Anton Newcombe - Right On

Parks' husky, forced-breathy vocals are unbearable. Points for Grunewald, where the guitars step up and pull that trip-hoppin horse into the briars but man Yo La Tengo where La is Exceso Jadeante 2.5/5

#3006 Gram Parsons - Grievous Angel

Absent the rest of the Burrito Brothers, Parsons holds no draw for me. His take on country feels polished and bloodless. Emmylou Harris's reedy voice does nothing for me, but at least this time it sounds like the two are in the same room. A session-musician-sounding whatever 2.5/5

#3005 Richard Betts - Highway Call

Steel guitar's my spirit animal, and nothing this smooth and sweet will ever fall far from my heart. A rambling, swooning piece of stumbledupon heaven, rolling high and low on sweet waves like slowmotion grain in the wind 4/5

#3004 Speedy West - Steel Guitar

An act of pure pedal steel artistry, bordering on showing off, rolling through every sound the beast can make, bending it in every direction there is. Spirited, playful, inventive, effortless; frantic and soothing in turn, consistently good clean fun 4/5

#3003 Buddy Emmons - Steel Guitar Jazz

Does what it says on the tin!

Hard bop going hard, shuffles like country triple time. And the horns and all get their due, democratically. But it's the pedal steel's debut, sounding like it doesn't belong at its own ball, but. . it's hanging. The marriage's never quite comfortable, but its fun to watch em try 3.5/5

#3002 Sneaky Pete Kleinow - Meet Sneaky Pete

This is not the showcase of Pete's (considerable!) talents you're looking for. The backing's pure plastic, the whole sound's breadclip cheap. Clipart country rock, until even the guitar sounds like a cleverly bent synthesizer 2.5/5

#3001 Julie Doiron - Julie Doiron Canta En Espanol, Vol 2

Canadian from France sings in Spanish - its the France that wins. A sultry dream, smoldering like memory and desire and regret, voice right against your cheek in the mix, crackling and overblown, spare guitars close and crisp behind, like a mysterious Microphones (connected by Eric's Trip). Sparse, clear, bracing, quietly gorgeous 3.5/5

#3000 Vive la Void - Vive la Void

Improvised-sounding electronic noodling, without the technical or melodic effort//talent necessary to make it work. Each song's got two parts set on loop, some breathy cooing, and some of the most tuneless, meandering synth leads you've ever heard. Occasionally atmospheric, mostly literally headache-inducing 1.5/5

#2999 Sparks - Sparks

Sparks rules, lots of ink on them incoming in the next couple weeks, I'm sure.

Despite the 5 toughs on the cover, Sparks' debut feels conjured from the imagination, a personal, private grasp at something beautiful. Their glammy, strutting sound's all there from the jump, Russell's manic vocals sliding all around the room. But Todd Rungren's production is so patient and airy; so big and yet so small. The whole album has music hall scope; broad, beautiful gestures echoing off faraway ceilings. But it's a dream of the stage, a rigger stealing a song after hours, an imagined audience held rapt by songs about the opera and the ballet 4/5

#2998 Mord Fustang - All Eyes on Mord Fustang

Wildly danceable near-dubstep, unafraid of big 4s and the occasional build. But with enough rough-edged buzz and textured frisson to keep it exciting, a sneaky retro edge lending cred -- better than most 3.5/5

#2997 Salvia Plath - The Bardo Story

Psychedelic layers and layers, each so thin, each barely there. There's so much space, in the mix, in the structure, between the beats. A spring day in bed under seven silk sheets, each hovering millimeters apart on an invisible breeze. Out of Baltimore, but somehow very Los Angeles, those endless numbered days smoothed out to infinity 3.5/5

#2996 White Fence - For the Recently Found Innocent

A wonderfully sincere slice of mod revival: Who wryness, Lou Reed muttering, endlessly, understatedly tuneful. Tim Preseley's a worthy partner to Ty Segall on their various collabs, the heady mindfuck complimenting Segall's full-body brute-force revival. A jangling, effortlessly retro feel pulls you back and time on the thinnest of threads. So silkily great it'd be easy to miss 4/5

#2995 Kaki King - Legs to Make Us Longer

King's absolutely successful in transforming the guitar into an instrument of pure texture, extracting some line parallel to The Books, Les Claypool and Strumming Music. The production's vital, putting your right in the body of that guitar, your house buffeting in the storm. A bit wearying by the end, but one of the most wonderfully, deeply acoustic sounds I've heard in ages 4/5

#2994 Gram Parsons - GP

Parsons drops his bands, drops the -rock from country-rock, leaving saccharine, paint by numbers country. Every move's been done a thousand times and the duets sound like strangers 2.5/5

#2993 The Flying Burrito Brothers - Burrito Deluxe

Totally solid, laid-back county rock with no particular highlights. An easy way to melt a hot summer half an hour 3.5/5

#2992 John Phillips - John the Wolfking of LA

For someone who hates LA I'm sure a sucker for its gauzy idealizations.

Phillips' lone solo album's a gorgeous, tuneful bit of wistfulness, Lou Reed gone west and smeared across time, memories bathed in honkytonk piano, dusty drums and sweet pedal steel. A beautiful, understatedly sad sunset of a record 4.5/5

#2291 Ssion - O

The pure pop works, surrender to those technicolor flashes. But then there's these weird flailing gestures at youth edginess, a parade of guests with toothless Miley snarls that makes me feel like I'm at a middle school talent show and I don't even have a kid that goes here 2/5

#2990 Martin Denny - Quiet Village

Less glaringly condescending than Hypnotique or Ritual of the Savage, this is one of the better exotica albums, blurring the gimmicky details to builds a sleepy mood. Sounds not unlike Since I Left You, in flashes 3.5/5

#2989 The Nice - Live at the Fillmore East December 1969

turns out keith emerson can play. The whole band's tight, dipping down as many wormholes as it takes to keep you tripping. Mastery on full display. But the limitations of the three-piece lineup show through - those millions of notes get numbing after the first half hour, and they don't elevate into any particular arc or revelation, just one showoff after another 3/5

#2988 No Age - An Object

I've got a knifeedge relationship with No Age, never sharper than now. They're so flinty, so distant, and sometimes that reads as thrilling frisson // boring twaddle. My accidental double-review of Everything In Between says it all.

This is as stripped down as they get, falling backwards into some postpunk negative space, shedding skin, still inventing sounds, but sulking them into the backdrop. Man that production's wafer crisp. So much noise in so little space, just giving up entire ranges, hemmed in by sonic gentrification. Probably their worst album, but right, hell I'm into it 3.5/5

#2987 No Small Children - What Do the Kids Say?

These ladies put on a fun, lite-metal show and are super good people besides. Go see em!

But their latest record scrubs a lot of that off - super clean, overproduced, unwilling to commit to its edges. The first couple songs are so fucking catchy they maybe benefit from the attention. Radio's tough to argue with. If that doesn't make you smile yer dead.

But the soft menace of the rest doesn't translate. This recording of I'm so Concerned doesn't _work. A promising band in desperate need of a bolder, truer approach to recording 3/5

#2986 Nektar - Journey to the Center of the Eye

I think I recently mildly offended an investor by dismissing Dream Theater as virtuoso prog. And having opinions about prog subgenres is next level pretentious bullshit. But man, I'll take guys who build themes and structure and atmosphere over faster meedlies anyday. And Nektar's the former.

Themes arise and return! Songs melt into ambiance! You get that delicious Lynchian discordance of uncanny familiarity, of the world sent slightly askew. And while I'm in deep coolness debt anyway, Astronaut's Nightmare is basically a mashup of While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Genesis's The Knife, those martial beats and endlessly descending basslines. Pet theory: the The Journey to the Center of the Eye takes place entirely within the dying final seconds of the soldier from The Knife's life.

Goodnight Boston! 4/5

#2985 Talk Show - Talk Show

Why wasn't this better? Let's agree that Purple and Tiny Music were great, with the DeLeo brothers taking significant songwriting credit on both. And Coutts isn't _that much less interesting than Weiland. But these songs just run in place, falling limp. Lacking production maybe? Or Weiland frisson? Cursed by a deeply uninteresting band name / album name / album art?

A minor showcase, at least, for how fine the interplay between Robert's rolling bass and Dean's soaring guitar really was. That sound's lean muscle 3/5

#2984 Nirvana - Incesticide

A messy datapoint on the Nirvana problem. They straddle the metal/punk thing as well as ever on the various thudding, desperate nonalbum tacks, ridding muscular riffs without the investment they suggest.

The 4-track Peel Session jammed in the middle's the secret highlight - they sound fresh, tight, fun even, like an actual fucking band for the only time in their official career.

Elsewhere, that guitar sound's undeniable though. So thick, so focused, easy to overlook in retrospect but essential. Kurt finding the reedy strain that fits right over top is proof that god wants us to be thrillingly sad 4/5

#2983 Juvenile - 400 Degreez

Hot and tense as the South in the 90s. Assured, clever, swinging little hooks and ideas left and right. Those stuttering beats just simmering. Drags sometimes but that's the era 3.5/5

#2982 Albert Hammond Jr. - Momentary Masters

Agreeable, but overproduced and tight and thin the way solo albums often are, when you don't have the interplay of a band to generate _feel_. A Strokesey shadow, grasping for Arctic Monkey bristle and coming up short, never really finding its own sound. Noteworthy mostly as a bridge to the excellent Francis Trouble 3/5

#2981 The Residents - The Commercial Album

A fun exercise in pisstaking, noteworthy for its self-aware badness and audacious marketing and nothing more. At least the Shaggs kept it to 31 minutes. And every other short-song album at least bothered with songs. hands off my piss 2/5

#2980 Ty Segall and White Fence - Joy

Ty's done it his way a half dozen different ways, and has nothing left to prove. Why not get back together with natural mate White Fence?

Joy isn't as thrillingly, disorientingly heavy as Hair - just two effortlessly talented dudes banging out a bunch of noise, the rock equivalent of The Weather, you can practically feel the couch under them, GBV-style, an album with pets on the cover and at least two songs about them. It's charmingly lazy, packed with fuzz and reedy, manic observations 4/5

#2979 Kadhja Bonet - Childqueen

Bonet's voice echoed again and again, swooping in reflected flocks over exotica landscapes of flutes, strings, and minimal funk bristle. Fleet, silky, spiritual, mysterious 3.5/5

#2978 Sandy's - Chime

A beautiful sense of space, that astral living room on the cover says it all. Steel guitars and swooning ambience run through endless reverb, with just enough pop structure to keep it from falling apart in your hands. William Tyler meets Tycho, a refreshing little 23 minute driftaway 4/5

#2977 Jo Passed - Their Prime

A kaleidoscopic look back through recent rock history. The Mercerian frontman coos and swoons, backed by indie plinks, ambient drift, shoegaze crush, postpunk stutter -- mapping every point on the [driving / halting] // [brittle / lush] axes. It all _works, the edges blurred just enough to pass as a unit, changes linked by dream logic 4/5

#2976 Rival Consoles - Persona

Maximalist, skittering, clausterphobic, human. I didn't like this, but I kept being drawn back in.

Just watch this demo with the title track playing:

https://youtu.be/r2fGCrekGj8?t=36

Desperate washes of order, people obliterated when they leave the field of view.

Vintage Shynola, gesturing to fragility, abstraction, inexplicable panic, nauseous thrill 4/5

#2975 Kamasi Washington - Heaven and Earth

Washington's still brilliant, building monolithic washes of sound to ground frantic improvisation. But the same motifs that risked wearing out their welcome on The Epic crop up again and again here. I've already got 3 hours (!) of blocky piano + giant fanfares + Star Trek operatics. It gives me a jetlagged, worn out feeling, like accidentally watching all of Armageddon on TBS on a hot Saturday afternoon. Have I been listening to this album for months? 3.5/5

#2974 Electrelane - Axes

Steve Albini + a live playthrough, sounds promising, and it works for a few songs. Bells could go on for 10 minutes more; that tight motorik and strummed piano make a brilliant pair. But the band can't keep the thread and aimless meanderers gut the momentum 3/5

#2973 A Certain Ratio - The Graveyard and the Ballroom

As proto-dancepunk as post-punk gets, bass restless, drums restless, guitars restless. Sounds good on paper, but it's samey and numbing, a dim impression of Ian Curtis stumbling through endless guitar stabs and bass pops 2.5/5

#2972 The Passage - Pindrop

As paranoid as they come, a slow-motion panic attack, every surroundins pregnant with menace. That muttered alarum. Primitive, growling tones closing in 3.5/5

#2971 No Age - Snares Like a Haircut

As clean and hooky as No Age's ever been. Fans of their sludgy reverb-void will be disappointed: that scaly skin's been shed, set neatly into token little asides where they check the box without breaking breakneck flow. Somehow their least interesting and possibly best album 4/5

#2970 Nils Frahm - All Melody

Frahm clearly knows his way around the making of sound. There's an organic crispness to his synths that I admire. But all the songs have the same lineage: rounded arpeggios, slow knob turns, ghostly washes, hints of shepard tone hyponsis, maybe some throughline, like Momentum's infinite shimmering buzz. Patience, risking tipping over into lack of focus, like on A Place's so-slow turns to the outer world.

But damn, My Friend the Forest gets special mention, one of the best songs of the year. The way that acoustic thump of keys gives ground to an already-gorgeous melody. Transcending the already-transcendent likes of The Books and Aphex Twin as an exercise in exquisitely present music. One of the most exciting, soothing, things I've heard in ages, the kind of song that makes you glad to be alive and afraid to die 3.5/5

#2969 Jon Hopkins - Singularity

Hopkins is peerless when he's on top of his game. He can pull emotion from the smallest fizzled perturbation, from the most subtle sweep of frequency. He operates at all scales at once like nobody else making music. He can work with knobbending loops and slowturning distortions, blending methods and level of focus seamlessly and at will. Singularity opens the album, seems to be his opus, and then Emerald Rush, goddamn. Pyramid Song meets Final Fantasy, Girl Talk gone ambient -- scale collapses, epoch catastrophe, washed away on a sea of microvocal waves.

Emerald Rush is the best electronic song of the last year, maybe the whole decade.

It makes me bob my head, and I feel every pinched nerve strike electricity in my should arm hand, and at least it feels like part of some grand design.

Neon Pattern Drum stutters itself out by its own bootstraps. Sexiness arising from the tar, Tasha Yar's death put to song in reverse.

--

The second side peters out, mostly lost to meandering ambiance. But man, this guy has the tools to make gold. Even when its a bit slow, every tone's homegrown, crafted, emphatically better than it has to be 4/5

#2968 Daniel Avery - Song for Alpha

A trip into the deepest undergrounds, sound dense as rock. Impossible echoes, deep pulses, tectonic hums, mechanical beetles in the capillaries. Or maybe into space. I'm still convinced The Core was originally about going into space. aka doesn't _not sound like selected ambient works 3/5

#2967 El Goodo - By Order of the Moose

So utterly agreeable! So full of Shinsey takes on 60s microharmony and clap-clap and sway, with this tiny, tidy dash of Latin flair. Such a pleasant album, so lush and fearless of Apples in Stereo cloying delivery on the promise of a better, cleaner, sweeter time that once was, that might again 4/5

#2966 Naked Giants - Sluff

I had to co-search these guys with local superkids Vundabar, so similar is their embrace of shambling pop-punk, loping surf, and cowboy twang. Even the cover art's a total Vundabar pose. But I can't fathom a connection, just an independent arrival at a bountiful crossroads, not far from the Astro Coast.

It's almost too perfect, too designed. Even the messy songs, the long songs, the things that throw me off the trail feel like designed trail-throwers. It's hard to shake it. When I do shake it it's damn near the perfect album, packed with wander and spike and absurdity and drift -- in a better world this'd be crushing the radio 4/5

#2965 Kyle Kraft - Full Circle Nightmare

Taut, wry Americana, with a nasal, emotive, drawl from somewhere near Lynne, Davies, and Rundgren. Floating here, galloping there, spiked with delightful Exile horns. Songwriting so solid you take it for granted, a rough gem standing totally outside time 4/5

#2964 Charles Lloyd & The Marvels - I Long to See You

The jazz itself is loose, messy even. But the feel is all dust and breath, touching on folk ballads, Willie Nelson wistfulness, Danel Acerado precision - a strange brew of wildly different sides of American tradition. Not as successful as the more ambitious colab with Lucinda Williams that came after, but an admirably adventurous stumble into the uncharted west 3.5/5

#2963 Crocodiles - Sleep Forever

Wonderfully buzzy, propulsive rock, with all the deamlike density of MBV, all the woolly woof of Je Suis France, all the crunchy motorik of peak The Men. A subway underneath everyday life taking you somewhere else with ethereal efficiency 4/5

#2962 Snapped Ankles - Come Play the Trees

It's maybe twice a year where I get exactly what I want from music. Here we are. A perfect combination of krauty insistence and arty dalliances, driven by a showman's sense of sequencing -- headbobbingly predictable and totally surprising. Magic.

What starts as a sluggish Animal Collective meander tighens itself right up and blows it all out, all momentum and bristle. Here's music designed to hypnotize and move to dance, in that order, earning every cry of "Let's Revel!". Insanely good pacing. Raveups for people who like to be taken out to dinner and get nice and conversed with as a prelude to the frolick 4.5/5

#2961 Charles Lloyd & The Marvels and Lucinda Williams - Vanished Gardens

I'm fascinated by country stretched out to road length, drained of all its bullshit backbeats, just the ring of that sweet steel, whether its the Kurt Vile, William Tyler, or the KLF. So here's country jazz proper, full-scale unfolding sax solos with all that drawn down lap and slide. And dang.

Williams does a right fine turn as a jazz singer, keeping enough dust in her drawl, and these two veterans bring the smoky dignity. But its the band that's the key, the interplay of that sunset portamento under frisky cayote runs. The opening mission statement's all you need to know, though the highlight's the twisting, disintegrating wretch that is Unsuffer Me. A gorgeous, natural pairing of traditions here to unwind space and time 4.5/5

#2960 John Frusciante - To Record Only Water for Ten Days

All the trappings of a totally amateur, self-recorded album. Those cheap beats, those clipped vocals, that stilted un-live flow. But coming from a real professional, with experience doing it right. It's an uncanny, icy, personal listen, befitting the zen//regimental commandment of its title. A conundrum not without its intrigue 3.5/5

#2959a Nine Inch Nails - Bad Witch

It's hard to point to anything new here, but it's so tight. Such a perfect combination of Atticus textures, noise against riff against drone against buried melody. Pacing's good, no fat on it, even the long songs at the end winding off just right, some lost filet of The Fragile. It might be getting some buzz if it wasn't the 50th nin album and the 20th in this vein 4/5

#2959 Gorillaz - The Now Now

When your one-man fake band pitches its new album as a solo album by one of its fake members maybe you just need to sit the fuck down. A lazy, lurching, utterly forgettable pile of budget beats and Albarn crooning 2.5/5

#2958 Low - Things We Lost in the Fire

A quiet little listen that rewards you for letting it seep into your bones, a slow sleep by radon or lead. Post-rock that remembers home fondly.

A blanket mix, woven loose and close, like on, say, Closer, where the strings and bass and voices all share a space, slip through eachother, defying the notion of parts, not from bad mixing or production tricks, but from a natural inclination to interleave sounds, to let their legs get locked together in flannel sheets on fall mornings. Every brushy snare as close as the vocals, no baseline too shy about draping its arm into your space.

And because I'm a huge album structure nerdburger, I love the way the spare emotional core comes right at track 7, between 6 songs on either side, and is called Embrace. Cmon. The leadin to the surreal, strangely uplifting Whore is just perfect, the whole second side like a slowly rising sun 4/5

#2957 Let's Eat Grandma - I'm All Ears

Sometimes I just wanna post a picture of the album cover and call it a day. 2 girls, all wisped apart, refracted into impossible colors: and so you get in sound, all smeared to pieces, nanoscale puff pastry a million layers deep. Vocals overinflected, overdesigned, Cut Copy for the touchscreen generation. All that work cooks up some swirly flashes of euphoria, but the kind you get numb to quickly 3.5/5

#2956 Public Image Ltd. - First Issue

GUESS WHO"S BEEN READING A BOOK ABOUT POST PUNK.\

As strong an argument you're going to get about how postpunk outflanked punk, how John Lydon > Johnny Rotten. Not the catchiest album out of the scene, not the most violently original, but man it splits the difference, sneering and toothsome, cutting to the quick. Bonus points Fodderstompf: the hookiest a meta-level fuckyou you'll find 4/5

#2955 Josef K - The Only Fun in Town

Spotify has a bad habit of labeling reissues with the year of their reissue, which is a real problem when a 1981 album sounds totally plausibly like it might be from 2014. Josef K's only album's as tight as post-punk gets, relentlessly fast, perfectly democratized, totally catchy, like some next-level evolution of Interpol+Strokes, instead of a long-lost ancestor. A wildly underappreciated gem with its fingerprints on a dozen of albums you love 4.5/5

#2954 Devo - Freedom of Choice

Puts truth to the name Duty Now For the Future: here's the payoff for that sophomore album's awkward synthy dalliances. Hooky and taut, Kraftwerk's fit cousin. Every song's stiff, predictable, but so purely committed, so perfectly executed you can't help but get on board 4/5

#2953 Devo - Duty Now for the Future

lands in an awkward space between the inspiration of their debut and the polish of Freedom of Choice. The songs are catchy, but stilted. Synths sticking out at odd angles. Solid enough, but the other two do everything here better (Blockhead excepted) 3.5/5

#2952 Scritti Politti - White Bread Black Beer

Green Gartside, still an enigma. After a 40-year career spanning the anti-pop//pro-pop spectrum, he steps outside it. His inexplicable latest is an intimate, hyper-layered lap-pop R&B mindmelter. So languid, so soaked in endless self-harmonies, a soft-focus hall of mirrors with a hip hop streak like some lost Spongebath LP 3.5/5

#2953 Throbbing Gristle - The Second Annual Report

As exciting as confrontational art-punk gets. Side one is seven songs with two names and not one note of commonality, all festering electronic noise and nightmare imagery, all strangely listenable, even the version of Maggot Death that's just a minute of screaming at the audience. This is secretly one of the great live albums of all time -- putting you viscerally in the scene in a tidy 19 minutes.

Side 2 is an endless sound collage, packed with synthesized inventions and atmospheric menace, a timelapse of the collapse, wildly ahead of its time.

There were some brilliant fuckers striking the set on the 70s, few records convey the destruction so viscerally 4/5

#2951 Scritti Politti - Cupid & Psyche 85

Bristly post-punker goes full 80s: saccharine vocals over gated snares and candy-coated synths. The synths're clever, but man is it tough to get past the packaging. Gartside almost goes around the horn to subversive in his perverse commitment to pure plastic pop -- but not quite. What a weird turn 2.5/5

#2950 Scritti Politti - Early

Skittering, minimal post-punk, bass set loose under strain and howl, spiked with fiberglass funk guitars. An ancestor, maybe, of Double-Nickles era Minutemen, with bristly energy to spare 3.5/5

#2949 The Nice Boys - The Nice Boys

A thoroughly delightful slice of power-pop, delivering all the sunny, glammy//moddy hooks that the cover art promises. Fans of Big Star, Thin Lizzy, and Buzzcocks will find a lot to like. That it represents a return to music for the last member of The Exploding Hearts is a bittersweet bonus 4/5

#2948 Tierra Whack - Whack World

Leave the visual component out of it - a few cool shots aside it mostly feels too-literal and lazily whimsical, like the worst Gondry. Plus the whole-album-video and super-short-song-album gimmicks kinda cancel eachother out.

On its own though, the super-short-song thing feels less like a gimmick. Underground excursions like the Punch Line and Bee Thousand were exercises in no-fat hookcrafting, but the commitment to one minute onthedot inspires some unique songwriting and sets up a hypnotic rhythm (with 100x the actual listenability of The Commercial Album).

Every song feels unrushed, and Whack still finds time for intros, bridges, choruses, repetition // change -- everything you expect from pop songs. There's demarcation between tracks, but flow across the album too;  mundane, soft-focus vignettes with magic in the corners, with the loose positivity that evokes Chicago more than Philadelphia. A curious, unique little record, as this wave of hip hop drifts, like rock before it, further into arty experimentation 4/5

#2947 Rusko - Songs

Dubstep from before it became mana for the axe body spray contingent, when there was some actual dub influence to give it atmosphere. Big warm synths and spatters of breakbeat keep you on your toes, a hazy, disorienting listen that doesn't lean on drops for excitement 3.5/5

#2946 Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever - Hope Downs

rock's last stand is the motirik beat. it keeps going cause it doesn't care. because your head will move because humans are built to anticipate and to love the of resolution of that anticipation. The motorik knows you're too old to dance, and it keeps your heart pumping. And RBCF wants you to keep going, wants to keep you stepping through this clean dystopia, chiming perfectly to that clip that you lean into, cause its better to fall forward than back, so here's your beat 4/5

#2945 Toby Tantrum - Community for Those That Can Afford It

Listen / buy here!

That first track's what it's all about. Toby gets it - cutting to a local problem with biting wit, with ruthless efficiency, dodging cliches left and right. Earn that LocalMusicBoston tag. Don't Turn Around keeps the streak with a Kinksian, regretful look back over the shoulder. There's only 2 songs worth of music here though. The last couple tracks sound like lazy studio fuckaround throwaways -- surely there's something better in the clip? 3.5/5

#2944 The King Khan and BBQ Show - The King Khan and BBQ Show

KK+BBQ got rock and roll from the beginning. Doo-wop's simplest longings loaded into garagey rockets and delivered to your Exploding Heart. A simple sentiment shredded and blasted into your chest by someone who knows how to sharpen a hook and aim 4/5

#2943 The King Khan and BBQ Show - Invisible Girl

Weren't things simpler, back then? Girl group beats, doowop swing, rockabilly slumming it all night long. KK+BBQ bring an insidiously filthy smirk and a heaping pile of effortless hooks into the 21st century. The uneasy thrill of what started off such good clean fun -- in a little over your head. Punk the long way around. Woozy boozy. Let's rock. An intoxicatingly good time, everything rock and roll should be, bound to be stuck in your head for days, like it or not 4.5/5

#2942 The Tandoori Knights - Curry Up It's The Tandoori Knights

A cartoonishly Indian rockabilly album, a goofy pisstake that's...actually a lot of fun. Unwestern tones and King Khan's general madness compliment Bloodshot Bill's rocksolid romp and surfy swerves.

Fuck Dick Clark! He won't let Tandoori play on the bandstand!

Is all you need to know. And there's a love song about a bed of nails and falling into your lover's many arms. And a song just called Brown Trash. Presumed dumbfuck stoner idea is actually pretty fresh 4/5

#2941 Bloodshot Bill - Guitar Boy

Not one detail reveals this as anything other than a long-lost rockabilly record. The production's as flayed as it comes, all rattling upright strings, tube amp buzz, yelped breath on the mic. Hard to say if its a sincere limitation or gimmick or just the depth of Bill's devotion to the era. He's a bud of the puckish King Khan (stay tuned) -- anything seems possible.

As rockabilly goes, it's not going to dethrone the greats, but its a proper unhinged rollick, more Gene Vincent than Elvis (that's good) 3.5/5

#2940 Shannon Shaw - Shannon in Nashville

Shaw's got a good voice, but Dan Auerbach's obsessed with it, and it kills the record. He puts her vocals up at the penthouse, propped on pillowey strings and borrowed Dangermouse beats, bathing in its own endless reverb. But there's hardly any songs to speak of - no instrument dares show any initiative, and none of the sentiment's worth writing home about. Just you and Shannon in a hall of mirrors 3/5

#2939 Ruler - Winning Star Champion

When this first spun up I thought: I'll bet there's gonna be at least one good road-trip-with-Jo song on here. I was right! (title track, Cars and Houses too)

Ruler's latest is emo-tinged power-pop, all hopeful yelps against the storm of onrushing adulthood. Hooky, with enough little surprises to keep you bopping for its half hour 3.5/5

#2938a Car Seat Headrest - Twin Fantasy (Mirror to Mirror)

Car Seat Headrest's long lost cult album recently got re-recorded - mostly note for note, with some rethinkings of the spoken word space-fillers. It's a messy record in either form, calling to mind, strangely specifically, It Was Hot We Stayed in the Water, in its particular rejection of sensible pacing in the name of deeply felt emotions beyond expression in standard forms.

Some of it's stunning. My Boys is a a soaring classic, Stop Smoking's a dagger of simplicity, and Cute Thing's a ripper you'd never be sorry to hear live. The 16-minute Famous Prophets is rewarding in the buildup and the payoff.

But man it's a long, weird meander (the other long song, Beach Life-In-Death is a mess, a disjointed pile of half-baked fragments). Face to Face (2018) cuts some of the most embarrassing spoken word bits, but those were arguably, in their own uncomfortable way, some of Mirror to Mirror's  (2011) highlights. The remake's production's undeniably a better listen, and I don't know that I'd make it through the original again -- but if I had to pick one to exist, I'd let Mirror to Mirror's bizarro boldness live forever. A strange project from a brilliant kid//adult, a stark illustration of how you can't have it both ways when it comes to sincerity 4/5

#2938 Alkaloid - Liquid Anatomy

Dense, overwhelming metal that's down with goblin voice AND proggy frippery. The combination's too goofy to take seriously and too numbing to enjoy frivolously 2.5/5

#2937 Ausli Hue - We're In Different Places

Wobbly house slathered in vocals that warp and contort, by methods natural and otherwise. A slippery, strange record that wants you to dance, but wants you to work at it 3.5/5

#2936 Andy Gabbard - Fluff

Perfectly named! So close to "Fuzz", but without the implication of bristle. An album of Tiny Music b-sides -- agreeable, but thinly mixed and slight 3/5

#2935 Nicolas - Las Lomas 2

Insistent, mysterious, menacing. Patient as a ghost. Tides of synths, Spanish muttered from the bottom of the well, building midnight desert atmosphere 3.5/5

#2934 Nicolas - Donut Girl EP

Wobbly, hazy, familiar synthwave sketches that barely round out 10 minutes 2.5/5

#2933 Men I Trust - Headroom

Très Québécois! As warm, sensual, and cool as Air // Daft Punk, with an icy electro clip. Hipster boat music in the best way 3.5/5

#2932 Yazz Ahmed - Le Saboteuse

Rolling, distance horn lines that move in unfamiliar contours. Hypnotic but dissonant, more pleasing intellectually than in the listening. Radiohead cover feels like a distraction 3/5

#2931 Sol Virani - No Pork in My Gumbo

There's a 25 great minute EP in here somewhere. Virani's got great flow (watch him dance around "wine" on the intro) and for a few tracks he perks up trap tropes with some soulful swoon. But there's nowhere near enough ideas on here to cover 24 songs and 72 minutes -- the whole last hour sounds like he's trying to hit the word count on a book report 3/5

#2930 Car Seat Headrest - Twin Fantasy (Face to Face)

Car Seat Headrest's long lost cult album recently got re-recorded - mostly note for note, with some rethinkings of the spoken word space-fillers. It's a messy record in either form, calling to mind, strangely specifically, It Was Hot We Stayed in the Water, in its particular rejection of sensible pacing in the name of deeply felt emotions beyond expression in standard forms.

Some of it's stunning. My Boys is a a soaring classic, Stop Smoking's a dagger of simplicity, and Cute Thing's a ripper you'd never be sorry to hear live. The 16-minute Famous Prophets is rewarding in the buildup and the payoff.

But man it's a long, weird meander (the other long song, Beach Life-In-Death is a mess, a disjointed pile of half-baked fragments). Face to Face (2018) cuts some of the most embarrassing spoken word bits, but those were arguably, in their own uncomfortable way, some of Mirror to Mirror's  (2011) highlights. The remake's production's undeniably a better listen, and I don't know that I'd make it through the original again -- but if I had to pick one to exist, I'd let Mirror to Mirror's bizarro boldness live forever. A strange project from a brilliant kid//adult, a stark illustration of how you can't have it both ways when it comes to sincerity 4/5

#2929 Christoph De Babalon - If You're Into It I'm Out Of It

The concrete, fluttering tape drones hold up better than the noisey, broken-breakbeat fuckery. But IYIIIOOI is a fun acronym and an analog for how the album's more than the some of its parts, how it works better in soft focus as a blearily remembered, haunting whole. This is menace incarnate, some ghost with intent beyond reckoning 3.5/5

#2928 Kali Uchis - Isolation

Relentlessly smooth, sneaky-adventurous, Kali winds her way through 15 slinky variations on her lush pop sound. The beats keep a half kilter off, Casio buzzes on In My Dreams are an unexpected twist, but no curtain falls. Midrange scotch that's surprisingly drinkable, with a little flourish on the finish 3.5/5

#2927 Ty Segall - Singles 2

Plenty of old school Ty Segall scuzz and fuzz. Nothing quite as instantly catchy as his best stuff, but a rocksolid listen for 3rd wave garage fans 4/5

#2926 Ty Segall - Ty Segall (2017)

Ty Segall distills his history. Never as raw as Lemons, never as ferocious as Slaughterhouse, but carrying some streamlined version of their spirit - this's a mellowing of his recent, desperate lunges away from his roots.

Here the hooks are effortless, the fuzz is natural. Where old Ty was a hundred-reverberation melee, new Ty is a flashing two-guitar cross-channel duel. And for once the pretty songs -- prettier than usual even -- feel at home. With the hindsight of the Freedom's Goblin's triumph, it's hard not to see this as a sweet last kiss to Segall's garage era sound 4/5

#2925 Bobby Caldwell - What You Won't Do For Love

Pure AOR with the barest exotic touches. Stevie Wonderbread. Tonic for those who find Steely Dan just a little too spicy. But damn smooth if you're in the market for this kind of thing. In an era of synthwave and disco revival, maybe this deserves a second look. That title track at least is undeniably sweet 3.5/5

#2924 Shamir - Revelations

I'll bet this is at least one person's all-time favorite album, and that's something. And it's admirable that Shamir wants to move past his day-glo pop beginnings. But we don't need any more lethargic bedroom indie pop; the endless falsetto wonderings aren't nearly interesting enough to make generic guitar grumble and lazy casiotone clipclops worth bothering with 2.5/5

#2923 Ty Segall - Freedom's Goblin

Freedom's Goblin's a sprawling, brilliant double album that takes Segall's dalliances with glam and squealing strangeness, marries them to his natural talents for hooksome fuzz, adds some killer rock horns, and blossoms into a bewildering opus.

After reaching the outer limits of what blasted guitar rock could accomplish, Ty Segall seemed lost. But last year's self-titled album was a centering ritual and the path opened up. Sweet 60's shimmer, Exile swagger, flashes of outright power pop (5 Ft Tall!) and more - none of the 19 songs sound the same. It harkens back to those adventurous albums from 90's bands trying to find space outside their sound: Tiny Music, Vitalogy, In It For the Money, Mellon Collie. Segall takes solo credit on this one, but there's a band on the cover and a band's worth of ideas on the record.

And then there's those sweet little callbacks. A hollowed-out third version of Talkin (may he keep making these forever) shows Segall hasn't lost his Diddy Wah Diddy. A 12 minute track closes things out, a pair of Cowgirl in the Sand guitars stretching Sleeper's title track into glitched out disintegration.

Ty's early stuff is legend, and he's finally showing us how much more he's capable of 4.5/5

#2922 Courtney Barnett - Tell Me How You Really Feel

If you handed someone this album and Sometimes I Sit and Think, you'd forgive them for mixing them up. Barnett's debut was inventive and restless and clever*, fully baked and cresting the way a great second album might be.

TMHYRF's the one that sounds like a wave-making debut. The songs are enjoyable, but simple, indebted to the past, obsessed with obscuring fuzz and distortion-driven slights of hand. It's Mellow Gold, Cowboys From Hell, Surfer Rosa, Subliminal Plastic Motives, Blue Album, Gish, Homework, Black Sabbath, Undertow, The Bends**, Kerplunk, Isn't Anything -- the perfectly solid prelude to the seminal sophomore -- but it came . . after . .?***

Maybe it's hanging out with Kurt Vile - Tell Me How shares his dry take on lyrics and love of slow-roasted guitar tone. Some of those drones are some Yo La Tengo caliber endless shit. Maybe it's just what Barnett wants to _do, shaking off any need to top herself, rattling out 10 perfectly good songs about thisish and thatish, wreathed in Americana and guitars.

That feedback on the opener, that wish-this-would-go-on-forver**** sweet sweet solo on City Looks Pretty. Damn near every song has some great guitar moment, some gorgeous congregation of electricity. And while we've lost a measure of perspicacity, instead we get supreme confidence from a voice that's in it for the long haul 3.5/5

* if __I__ noticed the lyrics she's gotta be doing something right

** shh

*** this is how you get famous in 2018: hit it big with the indie nerds, leverage that cache into broader appeal

**** surely she knew there was a moment worth stretching into an 8 minute song there, did she wuss out because this was her big breakout moment? or maybe its just a bit of the old leave em wanting more. do want more.