#2841 Hector Plimmer - Sunshine

Elliptical beats clatter over inventive, dizzying sound surges. The two parts feel akin but out of phase, headbobbing // headcocking, stranger the closer you listen, but perfectly happy to be half-ignored 3.5/5

#2840 Earthless - From the Ages

Stoner jam band riffage, wandering through endless sludgy repetition spiked with fiery bursts of fretwork -- Sabbath gone Freebird. Earthless lands in an awkward middle ground: too meandering to focus on, too frantic to space out to 2.5/5

#2839 Kikagaku Moyo - House in Tall Grass

Kikagaku Moyo lay down a beautiful piece of meandering psychadelia, floated on soft, close production worthy of Yo La Tengo. There's little of the thrashing variety of their later stuff, but it's a beautiful, transportive little slice of guitar meander 4/5

#2838 Bill Baird - Straight Time

There's nice texture here, an offhanded psychedelic deadpan drifting a half dimension askew the Beatles and the Stones. I Can't Turn Around's the highlight, a luxurious raga of guitar tones and unknowables. But there's not much song here, not enough message or melody or mechanical adventurousness to warrant a revisit 3/5

#2837 Here Lies Man - Here Lies Man

Afrobeat cycles do put a new headbob on those impossibly buzzy riffs. Here Lies Man stays a steady course - that giant bass tone doesn't change timbre one touch through the 31 minutes, and those vocals bleat from the same distant megaphone again and again. But damn that bass is thick, and there's just enough mixup rhythmically to keep the trip rolling 3.5/5

#2836 Vundabar - Smell Smoke

By the time Brandon Hagan turns 30 he's gonna be Neil goddamn Young, rasping and croaking like every breath's his last. Vundabar's always been accelerated, always shown pop prowess shockingly beyond their years. It's only taken a couple years (and no small personal strife) for Hagan steers them away from catchy surf-rock highs into world-weary resignation. The yelping exuberance is gone, replaced with 90's underground chime and chug, layers building, only rarely bursting into hooks. Even the most melodic moments (Acetone and [one of the best pop songs of the year] Tonight I'm Wearing Silk) are awash in alienation and self-annihilation.

Which is to say, Smell Smoke's not much fun, but it's personal and evocative and satisfying to get down into. And god it's well paced -- TIWS is a great track, made triply so by the way it bursts out of Tar Tongue's agonized outro, and that raging buildup of $$$, into a classic 90's last-sounding-sneaky-setup-penultimate track* into a classic offkilter closer. I would have been obsessed with this record in high school.

I call time travel again. Or something. There's something Twilight Zone about the specific way this band is good.

I worry a little bit about the path they're on. Worry a little bit about Brandon if I'm honest. Dude's got a worrying approach to stage presence. And you can feel that same frayed energy in this record, for better or worse, just under simmering reverb 4/5

* eg Sofa of My Lethargy, We're an American Band (YLT), Between Your Ear and Your Other Ear, Sweet Sweet, By Starlight, etc

#2835 Baby Dayliner - You Push I'll Go

Four pretty electronic-pop ditties, running in place, bright but sagging with little dalliances with downturned detunery. The title track's the highlight, pulling off that good old LCD // Hot Chip sentimentality that we're all nostalgic about being nostalgic to 3.5/5

#2834 Screaming Females - All at Once

A perfectly fine album that lacks the screaming highs of the Females' previous stuff (Castle Talk!), on the vocal and guitar fronts both. Nothing here particularly bites 3/5

#2833 40 Thieves - The Sky is Yours

Dance and doze on an interstellar lounge cruising at low warp, a two hour tour of the the zero dimension. Thrill to the live drums and bass, swoon to the buzzy nebulae and the endless clip of lightspeed. Lindstrom spiking the Darkside on a miles-wide autobahn to the stars 4.5/5

#2832 Kashmere Stage Band - Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974

As tight a big funk big band as you'll come across, high school (!) or otherwise. Rhythm section is on point, grooves are tight, solos are on fire -- the whole fuckin vibe is electric conflagration. Lit-up instrumental rockist jazz gone beautifully wrong. The studio disc's incredible, the live disc's exhilarating, these dudes did not fuck around 4.5/5

#2831 Kikagaku Moyo - Stone Garden

Kikagaku Moyo (Geometric Patterns) are masters of the whole spectrum of mindmelter settings, from relentless, punishing riffs to meandering ragas, and every click in between. This's a 29-minute trip, but it feels longer, in a good way, just five time-bending jams, guitars and momentum turning you upside down slowly 4.5/5

#2830 Diskjojokke - Staying In

Buzzy house with attitude, all that analog muscle working its way through the crowd with stoned swagger. Nothing especially memorable, but it'll put your head on a swivel 3.5/5

#2829 Prins Thomas - Prins Thomas 5

The first self-titled Prins Thomas album was so live, so analog, bristling with real bass and krauty electricity, and I've been chasing that dragon for 4 self-titleds plus. This is lazy, wandering, too undancable to even deserve the term space disco, no particular momentum, no sense of energy, just a bunch of disappointing knob-twiddling 2.5/5

#2828 Floating Points - Reflections: Mojave Desert

What a perfect album. a melting of boundaries.

two peaks, Silurian Blue and Kelso Dun, the long ones, the two that let all those guitars and bass and motorik breathe, that open up everything into a glorious sweep of pure prog/kraut/postrock expanse. Before/after/inbetween: little electronic meanders blur the lines of what kind of listen we're dealing with

A glorious sweep of sound, a majestic gesture of repetition and texture and evolution and simmering feeling 4.5/5

#2829 Art Feynman - Blast Off Through the Wicker

Krauty repetition finds indie slight prettiness, a slightly unpredictable, hooky, hypnotic album backed with side doors and other pulk//pulls. William Onyeabor's endless grooves, as spiked by second wavers like Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder, a swirl of interlocking cycles, peppered with jammy guitar asides. A mysterious, softly barbed little meander through savannas 3.5/5

#2827 All Them Witches - Sleeping Through The War

Another Queens of the Stone Age exercise in big hard rock riff revival, or so it seems at first. But there's something more here, some weary soul, some Southern frisson, some rumbling, growing, thrashing guitar beast that keeps you dodging. There's more variety, more surprise, more tasty hooks -- a totally goddamn listenable slash of gigantic fuzz and skittering drums and everything that makes your lip curl 4.5/5

#2826 Zack Mexico - Get Rich and Live Forever

Zack's got a real sense of patience (avg song length 6 min*) and a hand with a sweetly squealing guitar -- that's enough to get me on board. Each song just smolders, rolling around in some straightforward sentiment, climaxing in some choice piece of solo and onward. This's the kinda Swervedriver-via-Kurt-Vile slowmo swirl that would have backed many a fuckaround session in high school, that kneecaps my rushrushrush instincts even now 4/5

* outlier: Bless the Dead, a sub 2:30 riff on Highway Star that's not shy about rolling around in its influences. Great fun. This guy gets it.

#2825 Lescop - Echo

With its shuffly drums, whistled melody, and understated, blooming guitar, opening track David Palmer sounds like some sedated, euro-cool take on Young Folks, maybe Pumped Up Kicks. Echo never escapes that indie orbit, never quite reaches elegant detachment. The act of disconnection feels put on. It's a pleasant, chilled-out listen, but there's some air of pickupartistry around the affectations, too flatly pretty and crisply unknowable to be truly interesting.

Nowhere is this less true than on the title track, which is full on beautiful, riding Warm Jets of guitars, and buried back at track 8. It's a weirdly respectful move that makes me second guess myself. Stupid sexy french flanders, don't know if I'm under yer spell or what 3.5/5

#2824 Holy Fuck - Bird Brains

Holy Fuck started to hit a sweet spot on 2016's Congrats, shedding a lot of their noisiest baggage, concentrating energy into monsterous golden grooves, all lean muscle and bristling texture, with occasional sags into sleepy ambience. Now even those lulls are culled, the EP format affording deadly focus on lasersawing the dancefloor into carefully-measured chunks. These are unstoppable buzzing pulses, all the noise put to precise purpose, bringing the kind of energy that makes you stop and check if an act's on tour (they're not :( :( :( 4/5

#2823 Laraaji - Vision Songs, Vol 1

works pretty good, at first. New age icon Laraaji serenades you lo-fi-style, all close and vulnerable, home-mic breathy lines repeated over casiotone beats, soothing you right on down, thin vibes laying down warm baselines.

But it's like that eccentric stranger at the bar. Everything seems charming and quirky and hunky dory and the next thing you know you've been listening to this dude talk for half and hour and everythings's gone blurry andJESUSChrist shut the fuck up shut the fuck up.

'This album's fucking annoying!' I said out loud some time around track 14. The platitudes pile up and up; what was charmingly unpolished becomes lazy and wasteful of your time. There's even a Neu 2 same-track speedup cheat to close it out. A bloated, frontloaded collection of castoffs that didn't need to see the light of day 2.5/5

#2822 Washed Out - Mister Mellow

Washed Out's always been the Ernest Greene show, but in the past there were whiffs of rock tradition. All those consistent vocals, all those gated backbeats.

Not anymore. Mister Mellow's Greene's first album not to credit any musicians, and he's even pushed his own singing out of the spotlight. This's pure sampledelic instrumental hip hop, all hazy samples and conversation snippets and swirled sounds, with full on tips into sunny house. It's a big thick cloud of slowmo nothing, damn listenable even as it slips through your fingers, a fun little romp freed of restrictions and expectations 3.5/5

#2821 Jane Weaver - Moderm Kosmology

Etherial, buzzy synths lay out a blocky, soft-neon landscape, and Weaver takes you by the hand, riding casiotone clips and optimistic motoriks, crooning her way through life's tiny mysteries. At its best, Modern Kosmology recalls Holy Fuck and late-era Dan Deacon, hitting those thrilled, vulnerable emotional centers, charting mathy maps of the human heart 4/5

#2820 Phobophobes - Miniature World

Rumbling, muttering, clausterphobic post-punk, Interpol's cooler cousin strutting out of a Stooges oilslick. Insidiously catchy stuff, slathered in fuzz and screech, all slinking menace and charasmatic sneer 4/5

#2819 Lars Vaular - 666 Mening

Brief dips into English notwithstanding ("suck my ballsack!"), don't understand a word of it. But Vaular's got a tight, hard cadence that transcends words, with smooth, funky production that bobs the head real nice 3.5/5

#2818 Equiknoxx - Colón Man

Too much clattering, scattershot experimentation, too few concessions to flow, pattern, or meaning. Underneath all that fragmented rhythm and drooping loops there's a groove, peeking its head above the noise, beckoning you. But then its gone, and you're left adrift and seasick 3/5

#2817 Groundislava - Groundislava 2

Chiptune wandering meets big dumb 80's synth slurs to make mopey synthwave. Occasionally evocative, but too ugly and familiar to move your feet, touch your heart, or hold your attention 2.5/5

#2816 Lapalux - Ruinism

hits the sweetspot of listenable // experimental -- fraught with too-big bass, glitchy start-stops, busted-up samples, but strangely hypnotic once you get over the hump, pulling you into its claustrophobically comfortable worldview, finding resignation in desolation 4/5

#2815 Tyler, The Creator - Flower Boy

A slippery, elegant slice of weird, a sweetspot of feeling high, the kind of thing all the slurcore hiphop dreams of being. Autotune and detuned beats and raps and croons and halfhearted muttering, woven into something more than the same of its parts. Pretty interludes bleed into watercolor songs proper, funky and ethereal and brilliant 4/5

#2814 The Smith Street Band - More Scared of You than You are of Me

There's this little "woo" on the opening track that's at the crux of my consternation on this one. An aside, a "woo!" noise without the exclamation point. I've never heard anything like it, it felt squeezed into the half measure, a little out of breath. On one hand, a forced aside read off a cuecard. On the other: a more overproduced album would have found a better take -- maybe a poorly executed gesture of sincerity left on tape is its own kind of sincere.

I want to kiss you on the mouth, a little bit too hard, sings Wil Wagner, and that's the perfect example of the kind of overwrought bluntness that you've got to wrestle with. The boys feel what they're playing, they're just a little disconnected from punk rawness, infected by a kind of Mountain Goats reach for something more eloquent, a Los Campesinos grasp at infinite pathos -- indie pop gone big riff, some untold generation of emo.

The 45 minutes feels longer. When it was over I said "I'm glad that's over" out loud. It's a big dumb shouty mess. I don't think I liked listening to it very much. But fuck, it's sincere. It screams and reaches. It whiffed on my heart guts, but I love that it tried. This feels more pointed at winning fans than selling records, and in some tortured way I like it because I didn't like it. On the band's wikipedia page Wil has a Menzingers shirt on and that feels about right 3.5/5

#2813 Claptone - Charmer

Totally listenable, oversmooth, overrepetitive pop house. Riding the same vocal hooks too hard, but listenable. But some nice live-ish bass, slowmotion dancepunk, hints of indie (Clap Your Hands shows up (?)). I had a good listen, even if I felt a little hollow after 3.5/5

#2812 Gang of Youths - Go Further in Lightness

A deeply influenced album that weaves every strand of sky-grasping, affirming rock the western world has ever heard. U2's soaring desire, Springsteen's weariness, War on Drugs' twinkling desperation, Japandroids' spark-throwing howls to the universe, Explosions in the Sky's sense of skyward scope, Broken Social Scene's slow spotlight searching, Arcade Fire's stagey grandiosity.

And its not just style, little details crop up, with Keep Me in the Open very nearly nicking Avril 14's iconic piano, Le Reel build on a generally Arcade Firian mode, with a violin line that hews _awfully close to Rebellion (Lies), and countless Explosions near-misses.

As if trying to outdo the outdoers, it runs 77 minutes over 16 songs, 4 of them 6 minutes-plus, riding the same themes too long and too often.

And all those influences are good, and we can use more of this kind of grounded uplift right now. And in flashes (Do Not Let Your Spirit Wane) there's real pathos. It all feels sincere and large, like a swing at being the best album ever, at least to a cherished section of the masses, and it's hard to fault that. And it's even good in places. It uplifted my day and gave me cause to appreciate. Is that not enough?

It's something. And it's crass to knock rock for ripping off when that's rock's foundation. But at some point its distracting, and an accidental subtext of pop-art, postmodern pastiche runs counter to the intended themes. This is not an academic complaint - at these degrees, familiarity disrupts the actual listen, memory distracting from the immediate 3.5/5

#2811 Too Many Zooz - Subway Gawdz

Legendary subway buskers, a drums-and-two-horn salvo that builds EDM-like energy, using blossoming repetition and Skynerd-planned solos as a crowdmoving riff on jazz. What's undoubtedly thrilling live, especially when stumbled upon, doesn't quite work as an album. Subway Gawdz ends up ringing of gimmicky plundering of not-rock beats, sounding like Gogol Bordello or Beats Antique.

Horn-based rockist instrumental music is a narrow space. It relies on novelty and live energy to get there, and much like minor local legends The Hornitz*, Zooz don't find a way to translate that energy into an exciting home listen 3/5

*is there a rule somewhere about adding a "z" to your rockist horn band name?

#2810 Oliver - Full Circle

A festival-ready blast of EDM, 80's revival, and disco-via-Daft Punk, all gone a little pop, all very smoothed out, all very easy to grin emptily to in rave-lite bliss. Which is nice. But Full Circle takes zero chances and invents nothing and we deserve more 3/5

#2809 Booji Boys - Weekend Rocker LP

All the heedless shouting and shambling of the first wave punks and their best revivalists (Royal Headache!), I love their spirit. But a muddy mix and a lack of hooks or an intelligible message leaves this in the also ran heap 3/5

#2808 Karl Denson - Dance Lesson No. 2

All those little hip hop scritches seem pretty square by now, but you know what's timeless? Riding a fucking groove. And this gets it, look no further than Flute Down and man that shit gets __down. Denson can play. It's all a little too smooth, but not past enjoyable, a groovesome pre-Kamasi wash of post-jazz 4/5

#2807 Robert Walter's 20th Congress - Get Thy Bearings

A little too perfect, a little overproduced. I like my Metersy instrumental funk with a bit more of a ragged edge. Hooksome, enjoyable, but kinda -- and there's no other concise way to put this -- super fuckin _white? 3.5/5

#2806 Brother John Sellers - Baptist Shouts and Gospel Songs

Sellers has a great voice, but on this recording he's prone to too much tremulo and other put-on inflections. Add dips into hokey blues and general overproduction and this ends up feeling too commercial to connect too deeply 3/5

#2805 Juanita Johnson and the Gospel Tones - Climbing High Mountains

Second wave gospel music that's heard the likes of Little Richard and reclaimed all that swinging, rocking power, that's not afraid of a little electric guitar. But that's also still deeply rooted in Gospel Proper, a bridge of the sacred and the popular, a rich, joyful swirl of 1964 re-reimagining of rock roots 4/5

#2804 The Nudge - Dark Arts

The Nudge aren't shy about finding a groove and riding it. Dark Arts's a super-clean, super-tight set of fuzzed out lines that map out the shape of your face and melt it on down slow. The 25-minute closing tracks crosses over into jammy indulgence at times, and I say this as someone who deeply loves long songs. Still, a totally solid psychedelic that'll take the edge off your week right good, especially those first two tracks 3.5/5

#2803 Primal Rite - Dirge of Escapism

Muscular, knotted metal that balances raw//clean, complex//blunt, dreary//catchy in about the right ratios to appeal to the casual fan (me). As soft-focus fury goes, this'll punch up your day something nice 3.5/5

#2802 Batpiss - Rest in Piss

Roaring, dissonant post-punk that's never really noisy, hooky, propulsive, clever, or raw enough to catch. A muddled mix of greater influences 2.5/5

#2801 Sampa the Great - Birds and the BEE9

Warm tones, all breath and wind and sun, full of something more than your day to day. Sampa taps into it, in word and sound. Inflected phrasing dripping backstory and personality. A salve 4/5

#2800 Charlie XCX - Pop 2

I'm down with big autotune. Human voices are boring. Shave off their everyday aspect to get at the frail spine. Pack in the difference with fat artificial synths. In a world increasingly lies, obfuscation and bullshit, artifice is the new sincerity.

Pop 2 works best when it commits, hits hard on the synths and cranks the distortions to 11 -- those first and last tracks are fucking staggering. In between it's too often too safe, too repetitive, too smoothed out - but there's enough flashes of boldness, especially on that bonkers I Got It // Femmebot turn to make it worth a listen 3.5/5