#2799 Pity Party (Girls Club) - Girls Club

Rock's gone back underground, little threads of resistance keeping the cause alive. Surf rock's a beating artery, lo-fi too. This complicatedly-named gang of youth keeps it alive on both veins, bashing out another wave of noisy, hooksome wasting away, all reverb and small sentiment and rumbling threats of life. Keep beating kids, don't let it all die with us 4/5

#2798 Winston Surfshirt - Sponge Cake

Perfectly smooth white-guy soul//R&B//hiphop, sounding readymade for festival groovalongs. It's not bad to listen to, but a profoundly uncool record in a space that demands coolness, from the obvious beats, to the weird fried vocals. The fact that every song sounds exactly the same by the halfway mark's just the mayo on the wonder 2.5/5

#2797 Nadine - oh my

Plain lyrics with hidden edges. Simple electronic buzzes with hidden heart.

A quiet little record. Even when it goes big, there's space in the notes, a laserframe with no protection from the wind.

Worth sinking into, worth letting sink in 4/5

#2796 Dommengang - Love Jail

Supersolid fuzz, busy drums, fast-slow pacing that flows, lyrics that stay the fuck out the way - that is the map to my heart. I'm a simple man. I just want a texture that sinks into my mind folds and fills in all those fuzzy gaps, that keeps my boredom and anxiety at bay, that gestures at some atomic wave of sound. The Men are gods in this space, Boris circa Pink, all the way back to Sabbath, put these guys in the pantheon. Effortlessly heavy, occasionally pretty, take me away 4.5/5

#2795 The Garden - haha

Absurd lyrics over big fat riffs and outdated electronic flourishes make for a delightfully dumb piece of indie-punk nonsense. None of it's especially memorable, but these dudes sound like they're having a blast in the moment, entertaining in the short term, never telegraphing what's next, everything blunt and bouncing, shades of Single Frame, Vundabar, Enon, early Liars 3.5/5

#2794 Goons of Doom - Free Your Skeletons

Aggressively amateur Australian punks with enough natural hooksense and charisma to make this 24-pack of throwaway songs a scruffy good time. It's Guided By Voices readymade lo-fi goodness, with a Stooges-via-Frogs trolly deadpan - indie pop at its finest, all community and good-enough ramshackle joy, the kind of album you feel like you could make, so why don't you? You won't. But that spark of feeling like you might could, that's exciting right? 4/5

#2793 Sacha Robotti - Believe in Me

The title track's perfectly good big bwowmy slowrolling house, with enough glitches and bigass buzzes to keep you interested. But it's only barely good enough to justify the release, especially with such a no-nowhere B-side 3/5

#2792 Sacha Robotti - Melato Nina

The title track's a gem, something about the way those twinkling synths // big low square lead // clipped vocal loops swoop around eachother hits a pleasure center in my brain. The B-side's a little too minimal for its own good, but 8 minutes of simmering bliss's good enough for 4/5

#2791 Lee Foss - Alchemy

Old-school limited-resources techno that underwhelms. The vocals are hamfisted, the squonks uncharismatic. Pass 2/5

#2790 Justin Jay - Fantastic Voyage Pt 1 (Radio Edit)

Man Justin Jay fucking rules. Its all big dumb housey 4/4s but all that lively bass, all those searing guitars (on Can't Complain!) and wandering buzzes at just too nice not to love. Everything different than you're used to, but familiar and friendly and frail and ready for you to dance up alongside. Dream girl music, impossibly welcoming and pretty and cool 4/5

#2789 Quincy Jones - The Dude

At its best, The Dude's funky, cool in a kind of uncool-cool 80's kind of way. Those first couple tracks show promise. But it's a producer album, slick and overpolished to death, with soppy ballads and post-disco-still-disco pop schlock padding out most of the rest. And yet, weird little exotica flourishes and some choice keys make me hedge. I can't quite dismiss this record; it's just on the knife's edge of so square its hip, a noteworthy pop nugget from another age 3/5

#2788 Khalid - American Teen

On the face of it, this feels committee-designed for the youngs, with songs called Young, Dumb & Broke // American Teen // 8Teen, all full of autotune and generalized details, all ready for kids to sing along to at some 3rd-tier televised New Years Eve performance.

And yet, there's these flashes that Khalid's telling a story that's his: an actual story of being a teenager. I buy it, mostly. What seems tacky per-song kind of comes together in the back sections, a reminder that music as product and music as personal aren't mutually exclusive 3.5/5

#2787 Manic Focus - Minds Rising

Every song feels perfectly designed to make kids at festivals bend their knees and necks along with big heavy bwoooms. Nothing wrong with that, especially when you bring every sound you've got to get there. Seriously, 17 guests listed across 12 songs, and it's hard to say who's bringing what, but damn there's a lot of lively live-sounding instrumentation, bass, strings, horns, and so so many bwoooms 3.5/5

#2786 Justin Jay - Home

Proof you can make original electronic music in 2017 without resorting to detuned contrarianism. A heady unhitching with shades of house, vaporwave, Lemon Jelly, Avalanches, Jamie XX, and more.

Goddamn it's damned fun, totally unexpected, nauseatingly pretty, a swallowing whirlpool of synths and guitars and vocals autotuned past mattering, the kind of album Daft Punk would be proud to make, I say as the highest compliment.

In fact, let's pause on that. If this was the new Daft Punk album, people would be going NUTS for it. Maybe take that as a sign you better get the fuck on board. The lyrics are basic, sure, but let's remember the poetry that was Around the World and One More Time.

--

I've been frustrated as hell with music lately. We've been spinning out wheels, stuck as fuck.

This is the kind of shit I'm expecting. I have no idea what's happening, but it's thrilling and strange and danceable, a generous, hooksome, effortless kodacolor blast of utterly enjoyable tones and squiggles and squonks 4.5/5

#2785 The Six Parts Seven - Everywhere and Right Here

Vaguely formless instrumental post-rocky jamming, that at least feels like all the jammers are in the same room. Those vibes are a nice touch, with some hints at emotional swings here and there, but not especially memorable 3/5

#2784 Unwed Sailor - Little Wars

This is the same muso-arpeggio instrumental wank as the El Ten Eleven album I just got done being unimpressed with, so why's it so much better? There's real feel to the playing, a sense of pacing and liveliness, plus all those big sweeping tones that give backdrop to the patterns -- this's more like mellow Dananananakroyd or Fang Island, which is most welcome indeed 4/5

#2783 El Ten Eleven - El Ten Eleven

Music like this reminds me of inbflat, where you learn that as long as you're in the right key you can kinda do whatever, and it all sounds good. This is pretty, somewhere between Tycho's motorik and Explosions in the Sky's instrumental sweep, but it kinda feels like 4 guys with a basic grasp of music theory mixing and matching noodle patterns, without any real overarching sense of emotion or purpose 3/5

#2782 The Regrettes - Feel Your Feelings Fool!

They don't make em like this anymore. The Regrettes debut's in the running for best rock album of 2017, or, fuckit, best album of the year, period. My gut is its not even close.

On one hand, FYFF is this, like, fucking perfect blend of
 - 60's girl-group clap, clicks, coos, and innocence
 - 90's riot grrrl crunch and deadpan selfconfidence
 - 00's 3rd-wave pop-punk manic pogo mainlined joy
 - precisely 2017 I-shouldn't-even-have-to-say-this-shit-by-now feminism. Shit like "sometimes I'm girly and sometimes I'm not" and "if you ask me out I'm still allowed to say...no way". The full-on fully-righteous long-overdue war on creeps.

On the other, it's just the most frenetically personal, heedlessly fun, album of the year, not afraid to get weird, not afraid to shred, just generally full stop not afraid. Lydia Night's got the perfect voice for the sound, she's a legend day one.

And they don't make em like this anymore, in that: it's 15 songs, never the same, never boring, perfectly paced, with ebbs and flows of energy right down to a little secret song encore. The kind of thing that I would have listened to over and over and over in high school, and that's still radically now. I don't even want to spoil it, but jesuschrist that kickin from the delivery of the title line isffffff___uk

Thank god for rock, and albums, and rock albums. Packed with moments, all those start-stops, big operatic swings, blistering chugging breakdowns, a grand tour of all the great moments in pop history and a tip into the future. This is a lifeline, more more more like this, Regrettes and everyone 5/5

#2781 Khan Jamal - Thinking Of You

Lookit Khan, making jazz sexy again. Just look at that album cover, with those bedroom eyes, that wineglass perched improbably on the vibes. This's super-smooth jazz-lite - not especially inventive, not especially sharp, all overproduced, complete with synths. Jamal's playing is sprightly, but the whole feel's just too plastic, sounding too much like something white people put on the 80's to show their visitors how sophisticated they were 2.5/5

#2780 Shiba San / Green Velvet - Fearless EP

Claustrophobic house, haunted by paranoia, loping bass pushing forward relentlessly 3.5/5

#2779 Tash Sultana - Notion

Sultana's one-woman live-looping thing's a little lost on record, and her singing style's a bit much for me, but there's no denying she weaves some real atmosphere, every note she plays ringing off every other across micro-scale reverberations and macro-scale repetitions. And when its time to deliver a payoff on all that smoldering anticipation, she can rip a solo or two too - its an interesting straddling of jam-band and trancy-electronic traditions. Definitely on the list to see live, good stoney background music in the meantime 3.5/5

#2778 Psychic Temple - IV

Chris Schlarb's got a silky-strong voice, intimate and warm, and backed with cozy music, lushly produced. It's not hooky exactly, but deeply pleasant, quietly offcenter, and great to drift off to. Shades of Songs: Ohia, MMJ, and Morning Phase-era Beck 4/5

#2777 White Denim - Stiff

I saw White Denim at a festival and they were a great time, but strangely exhausting in their relentless persistence. Their latest album reminds me of that experience: they play medium-fast and medium-slow 4-minute songs, all vaguely danceable, with slightly demanding complexities -- but without any real message, or any sense of the experience they're creating. Together the songs are detached, numbing, like an otherwise good book where all the sentences are the same length 3/5

#2776 Shuggie Otis - Inspiration Information

Still awfully smooth, produced just this side of over, but I kinda like it. Impossibly listenable, quite utterly pleasant, with just enough jazzy/experimental edge that you don't feel like a total tool listening to it 4/5

#2775 Jason van Wyk - Opacity

feels a little by the book, right down to those ethereal one-word song titles. Gentle synth oohs, Mobymotional chords, a twinkle of piano, all pretty but a bit familiar. On the other hand, it did briefly make the squirrel on a roof outside my window seem like the humble center of the universe for a second. Might be worth another listen 3.5/5

#2774 Shuggie Otis - Freedom Flight

An album of guitar music that's real smooth and real pretty, for better or worse. Otis's blues stuff is fine - deft, but without a lot of character. All that smoothness and prettiness works better when he's swinging more pop (the sparkling Strawberry Letter 23) or experimental (the jazzy Freedom Flight). A totally enjoyable, professional, well-executed piece of muso rock that takes too few chances to be especially memorable 3.5/5

#2773 Betty Davis - Betty Davis

Davis is all attitude, as unabashedly sex-forward as you're gonna find in the 70's; it's thrilling to see that kinda swagger. But the playing's sterile, pure session musician check-cashing, and a thin mix leaves the vocals floating and isolated. The result's just not as exciting as it should be 3/5

#2772 The Missionary Quintet - Gospel Songs

A mysterious, underexplained field recording from the early 50's Bahamas. Five voices rolling along and past eachother, finding the sacred through repetition, overlap, transposition; so full and hypnotic that you can almost start to feel it. Soothing, soulful stuff 4/5

#2771 John Maus - Screen Memories

So 80's, so hazy, so repetitive, so deadpan, so uncanny - so much of each that it's more than the sum of its underwhelming parts. An evocative dream of childhood days that we 30something remember as a beige smear, flashed with feelings 3.5/5

#2770 Siriusmo - Comic

A disappointing record from Siriusmo after the positively electric Enthusiast. Comic has little of that album's adventurousness, energy, or wit. A fine pile of buzzes that's a victim of past successes, mostly hookless and generally overserious, reaching for another level of importance without quite reaching it 3/5

#2769 Fucko - Dealing with the Weird

Churning, chuggy 90'sy rock that never really goes anywhere, never really finds a hook, just kinda muddles around in its perfectly-ok crunch, like an opening band just barely good enough to keep you around for their set. Subtly good drums though 2.5/5

#2768 Harold and the Barrels - Omenaje a Genesis

These Spanish guys do no-frills English versions of some of the most-English Genesis songs. They're not super tight, but their garagey enthusiasm generates electricity. Prog rock's built on virtuoso perfection and pompous presentation, so there's something strangely thrilling about hearing it covered imperfectly.

Colony of Slippermen is unsalvageable; a strange pick, especially for an opening song, and some of the more mechanical songs just sound like pale imitations. But Juan Talavera's accent lends an uncanny urgency, and the rough edges make for versions of Battle of Epping Forest and The Lamia that I might actually prefer to the originals. Hardcore Genesis fans will have a fun listen, even if I can't imagine recommending this to anyone else 3.5/5

#2767 Weakened Friends - Crushed

Fuzzed-out, woman-fronted 90's revival is a creeping highlight of the 10's, and this's hookier than most. There's great lead/backing interplay on the guitars and vocals alike, screaming/crunching//yelping/cooing, all coming together into 6 songs you'll be singing along to by the second time you hear em 4/5

#2766 Pond - The Weather

A lot of the festival wonks are pretty high on Pond and I don't get it. Their latest is trippy, with buzzy synths that might be really good to get your chest rattled to live, but I've heard it twice through now I can't remember a note of it. File this under Tame Impala and My Morning Jacket, which is to say, in a pile on the floor with a hundred others 2.5/5

#2765 Post Animal - The Garden Series

The first two and a half tracks throws you off the scent with some kinda dopey, sludgy, extra-Tame Impala psychadelia, some kinda lilting Dr. Dog whatever. But then whatever you took kicks in, and the bottom drops out of Lonely Jones, and you're off on a heavy, goosebumpy trip proper. You don't often get album-level structure and straight-through-listen thoughtfulness from an EP, but this shit delivers 4/5

#2764 Virtual Self - Virtual Self

Sounds like music the kids are listening to. Big bright synths and blurty vocals, all the beats for dancing to, peppered with minidrops. It's lush, I kinda liked it, I could even see getting swept up in it once properly dulled, but its not for me 3/5

#2763 King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Gumboot Soup

The fifth and final salvo of King Gizzard's 2017 blitz weaves a thread through the rest: the Microtones ring on, Brunswick's smallness peeks through doomy Murder, and we get flashes of Polygonical crush in the middle. They're still a rock-solid band, the best psych-rock band going, but a lot of the same riffs and tones and tricks come up again and again. It's almost a positive, in this space, to bleed together, to build a universe of sprawling dimensions and distant mountains. But by now is just another lap around the head-loll, nothing to snap your neck up, especially since (unfortunately) this is mostly on the lowkey trippy side. Needs more riffs.

Take a breather guys, you made your point, we're duly impressed. Show us something truly mindblowing in 2019 3.5/5

#2762 Brockhampton - Saturation II

Tight raps, straigsincere htforward sentiment, crowdpleasing punchlines - nothing not to like. None of this rises to the technicolor Jubilee of III, but they're a charismatic crew, from their handbobbing bangers to their boyband soppers 3.5/5

#2761 Dirty Projectors - Dirty Projectors

An evershifting bent-pop album of soul-baring breakup deadpans, autotuned and wobbledbacked until it can justifiably be called music. Kevin Barnes gone 22, a Million. Dave Longstreth's first solo album (name notwithstanding, keep it) is fascinating, fussy, frantic, bracing in its unguardedness - not especially interesting, not especially enjoyable, but worth hearing just because it's more adventurous than 95% of the stuff out there 3.5/5

#2760 Manchester Orchestra - A Black Mile to the Surface

Twenty-story twang, open-sky reverb, buzzy, grasping harmonies; all good things. But its a fine line between Band of Horses and Mumford and Sons. And its hard to tell if this is sincere or manufactured, whether its universal, or just broad. The switch flips a dozen times, but I was left feeling manipulated, with the creeping feeling that this Manchester Orchestra's just folk-rock Coldplay in $100 flannels 3/5

#2759 Brockhampton - Saturation III

A swervy record that manages to be sprightly, colorful, lazy, and soulful all at once. Boogie blasts thing open with Basement Jaxx brashness and Das Racist stoned cleverness, and Hottie's a delightful, pretty, wistful clipper, 1979 gone hip hop. Clever, hot//cold -- Saturation's the right word, everything's cranked up and high contrast, moving so fast you barely put words on it 4.5/5

#2758 Jeff Rosenstock - Post-

Listen / buy here! 

As America inaugurated its first fascist, I wondered what music would come out of 2017. I hoped it would be furious, that "this would be great for the punk scene". But the dread was just too big. All the rock and roll was hopeless, defeated. Arcade Fire, LCD, and whatever was left of the 00's stalwarts put out rundown albums, and rock in general shriveled into a raisin in the fetal position.

WORRY was the best album of 2016, when America was just holding the gun to its head, and maybe it wasn't going to pull the trigger. It was angry and stressed, but had hope. Differencemaking seemed possible.

It feels intentional that POST came out on January 1st, 2018. It's a slow, cold dawning, just the barest break from black. Rosenstock talked about how he wanted to make an ambient album* and there's vestiges of that idea here; mullfull scenes wander through the album's epic-length bookends. USA uses its seven minutes to honor how long and hopeless every day feels, to give you time to muster a spark, and spends its last couple minutes fanning it for all its worth. Closing track Let Them Win sends you back into the world across 11:00, with a message that we can't give up, even as it twinkles off into wobbly surrender itself. It's a gorgeous, conflicted, exhausted call to arms.

In between, there's some good pop-punk fun, all frustration and regret, Pinkerton if it was about a country instead of a girl. There're songs called
 - Powerlessness
 - All this Useless Energy
 - And Beating My Head Against the Wall
and none of them are depressing, or uplifting, or angry, exactly, they're just Jeff shouting about how it is, tapping into a new kind of quasi-teenage (Jeff's my age (old)) frustration in plainspoken terms.

Where WORRY was blistering and breakneck, POST marshals its strength, and finds only small amounts. But what it finds it shares generously, showering it onto anyone who will listen. And it's still one of the best rock albums I've head in a year or so. Bad times make for worse music, and less appreciation. There're no answers here, Jeff doesn't know anything you don't. This is just the energy to get yourself out of bed. It's a start 4/5

* what i would pay to hear that