#2897 Carpenter Brut - Leather Teeth

in which Carpenter Brut trade the blunt muscle of Trilogy for something creepier, more operatic, more eerily memorable. The poppy vocal tracks . . .

Aside: CB's live show's a slasher phantasmagoria that ends, perfectly, with a cover of She's a Maniac.

the vocal tracks work that same way here, worming into the space between the disposability of the 80's and the decade's insidious, exploitative violence.

this might be a brilliant album. Moving beyond hey-remember halcyon nostalgia-nicking to point out how fucked the era was, and how maybe we're all still fucked the same way now, but fuckit, let's dance. Live drums, hellacious synths, swaths of guitars, it's a bewildering phantom soundtrack to a movie you hope doesn't become reality 4/5

#2896 Wata Igarashi - Counter Pulse Series, Vol. 8

Ominous, alien precision drives an unstoppable cube of analog vibration. The tech's basic, but the atmosphere nails the details, hissing noise backing mathy pulses. Relentless pacing lends a Terminator / slow zombie Carpenter menace. Insidiously creepy shit 3/5

#2895 JJ Doom - Key to the Kuffs

A failure to communicate. Doom still can barf a million knotted lines, and the buzzy production's hot enough. But they don't line up. Doom's off the beat repeatedly, and the punchlines need punch-ins. No album flow. Rhymin Slang aside, a clumsy waste of talent 2.5/5

#2894 Mildlife - Phase

Lightly funky meandering, with shades of disco, yacht rock, and euro exotica. The kids seem talented, and it's perfectly listenable, but it sounds like a show you'd go to and think about leaving a bunch of times, but your stoned friend wants to stay and fine fuckit, I mean, its fine 3/5

#2893 Gost - Possesor

takes the latent horror of propulsive 80's revivalists like Carpenter Brut and pushes it right on through to ham-fisted Satanism. The stuttering squiggles (The Prowler) are great textured fun, but too much of the rest is just bog-standard fat-as-fuck synths layered with tacky samples and goblin shrieks. Gost doesn't seem like he's in on the joke 3/5

#2892 Antarctigo Vespucci - Leavin' La Vida Loca

I'm losing my perspicacity! Fuck if I know what to say about music anymore. This has a great band name and a great album name and Jeff Rosenstock and still manages to be pretty forgettable. Maybe it's Chris's weak vocals or Jeff's magnanimous desire to stay out of the way or maybe I just have no soul 2.5/5

#2891 Prince Daddy & The Hyena - I Thought You Didn't Even Like Leaving

Emo punk that's more fun than most, with that Fidlar/Pup/Wavves wasted crunch, just...shriekier. If you're, say 37 and well past feeling feelings out loud, you'll feel a little old and embarrassed to be listening to all that yelp and whine, but the kids have a real knack for a hook 3.5/5

#2890 Traams - Modern Dancing

There's some combination of texture and momentum that gets right to me. That post-motoric clip, that buzzy insistence, those frayed vocals - The Men, Cloud Nothings, Surfer Blood. God this hits it, just high-lows the body and mind, from tappingest toe to highest raised hair. This is my favorite album I've heard in months, can't stop listening - just know that recommendation comes from a real personal sweetspot. This is everything I want 10's rock to be, a slo-mo butane rocket sluffing frustration 4.5/5

#2889 Les Fleur De Lys - Reflections

A compilation of totally solid, utterly undistinguished garagey psych rock songs. A few ripping solos, a few pretty melodies, but this strictly by the book, and 24 tracks of it is numbingly plenty 3/5

#2888 The Rozwell Kid - The Rozwell Kid LP

Even more so than Weezer, Rozwell Kid nail that sweetspot, that overlap between pop-punk and hair metal. Speed any of these songs up 25% you get punk proper, slow em down and they turn into stoner rock - as is it's just nodalong anthemic bliss. Add a little bit of slacker wit and it's no wonder My Saturn and Ace Ventura Pt 3 have been in my head for days. This's heavier than the more-fun Too Shabby or Good Graphics, but not as leaden as Precious Art. Sweet spot.

25 years ago these guys coulda been stars, but be glad they're here in the post-rock 2010's when we need them most 4/5

#2887 The Idle Race - The Birthday Party

on which Jeff Lynn shows he had a knack for jaunty, otherworldly catchiness from the jump. The highlights (The Birthday, Morning Sunshine) are swirling, gorgeous mini-masterpieces, with production punch that 50 years in obscurity couldn't blunt. Gorgeous guitars abound throughout.

But. And look: it's no crime to be influenced by the Beatles, but Obla Di Obla Da wasn't the height of their output. Too many songs on The Birthday Party are childish, bouncy little singsong numbers (I Like My Toys, Sitting in My Tree) that, even at 2 minutes, overstay their welcome. An inspiring glimpse into what Lynn was capable of, but too uneven to make for much of a listen 3.5/5

#2886 Tages - Studio

Very British psychedelia from Sweden - this's as swirling and beautiful as anything the Zombies, Faces, and Kinks were doing. The production inventiveness earned Studio the nickname of The Sgt. Pepper's of Sweden. Well earned. At the vanguard of that fast-moving psych-rock wave with its '67 release, this is packed with the best sweet melodies and trippy tape tricks you could hope for. Criminally overlooked, highly recommended to anyone with any interest in rock in the 60's 4.5/5

#2885 Black Cat Bones - Barbed Wire Sandwich

That rare blues rock album that finds the sweet spot between slavish 12-bar lockdown and halfhearted deference. Most of the songs put down solid, standard turns at building tension and ripping off mournful solos, before veering into some exciting twist of tempo, tenor or form.

And then there's the tentpole Nina Simone-related tracks in the 3 and 7 slots: a solid take on Feelin' Good, and an inevitably underwhelming take on Four Women. Which is to say, it's less that the covers are such great ones, but that going there represents a refreshingly broad take on what classic sources rock music should be drawing from. These guys got it better than most 3.5/5

#2884 The Comet is Coming - Death to the Planet

A prog apocalypse with no guitars, a dark house raveup with a blaring horn backbone, an experimental jazz album built on electronics and repetition. Kinda, each. Mostly a promise for the live show, where Comet's undeniable dancability and bewildering slashes of saxes can go high//low on you, where you walk out sweaty going what the fuck was that? 3.5/5

#2883 Maiole - Music for Europe

Light, lush, listenable house, peppered with little buzzes and flecks of guitar -- listenable lemonade for a breezy spring day. The vocal snippets are loose and distant like memories, everything in its lane on its way somewhere sunflecked 4/5

#2882 Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas

Guitars looped and echoed until they're more shimmer than sound, Guthrie's vocals helixing through like a flying fish. As pretty as the gauziest shoegaze -- but tense.

It's that tension that makes Heaven or Las Vegas more than just a pile of production tricks, but makes it a strangely difficult listen, a trip on the cusp of turning bad. If you were down with this when it was the only game in town it's probably a time machine and a half to drift away to, but 3.5/5

#2881 Superpitcher - So Far So Super

Pretty, but inert: all the songs shuffle in place without generating any particular atmosphere. And somebody misunderstood the causality between detached deadpan singing and coolness.

fun Baby's On Fire cover though 2.5/5

#2880 The Jam - This is the Modern World

A rushed second album and it shows. London Traffic: was less time put into coming up with the idea or recording it? The two part message is that London has traffic and it's cause of the cars. They could've rattled off a hundred more like it in an afternoon (and might've). None of the urgency of their debut, none of polish of their later stuff - the 4th best Jam album at best - which is still pretty good cause the Jam're still pretty good 3/5

#2879 Die! Die! Die! - Charm. Offensive

Energetic, absurd, and plenty hooky. Every song's a setup for the next one's shifts - suddenly all the parts are at odd distances, washed with different palettes and filters and films, Die! Die! Die! throwing out their guitars and buying arpeggiators and back. And it all sounds like the same band somehow, some band making weird, catchy fuckit rock from a dozen angle 4/5

#2878 Makeness - Loud Patterns

Kyle Molleson made this in his dad's studio, and that sounds about right. There's something Pollock playful about the layers of guitar squiggles, wandering synths, and washes of ambient buzz. The first four poppy songs are fine, but the best bit's the mostly-instrumental second side, sizzling with the freedom of the kid who got the _big crayon box 3.5/5

#2877 Mind Over Mirrors - Bellowing Sun

Bellowing Sun's perfectly named, sounding ancient and powerful and huge, unwinding at its own galactic pace. Laurie Anderson's future funk and Dan Deacon's hyperlayers and Microphones' grasps at the infinite conspire to veer off well-worn experimental electronic // space rock paths 4/5

#2876 The Third Power - Believe

The vocals are strained and the lyrics are clunky, but The Third Power's only album's otherwise a perfectly solid bit of Whosian hard rock, with a couple nice psychedelic threads running through it. Lost in a Daydream's a highlight, sounding weirdly ahead of its time like some lost Flying Nun single 3.5/5

#2874 Duds - Of a Nature or Degree

Taut, angular start-stop post-punk. Gang of Four->Minutemen->Duds. A boiler bolted down hard, rattling and hissing under pressure. Lockstep drums at war with sheetmetal guitars. A frustrating, almost-danceable slice of pure tension 3.5/5

#2873 Bosnian Rainbows - Bosnian Rainbows

A Mars Volta spinoff that tamps down the ambition, taking scraps of the band's sound and covering them with embarrassing lyrics sung embarrassingly, no syllable left unoverembellished. Arty music for people who don't like arty music 2/5

#2872 Lindstrom - It's a Feedelity Affair

Possibly Lindstrom's best album, possibly the best Nordic space disco album of all time, but I say that about a lot of them. Definitely a good a place to start if you're new to the sound: all those rolling basslines, those textured synths, those flecks of guitar. Everything's perfectly paced, hypnotic and exciting and cool. Great background music, for working or hanging out or driving - hell, it even rewards the armchair listen if you wanna roll around in tones and the shapes they're in 4.5/5

#2871 Moaning - Moaning

Shoegaze guitars punched up with post-punk insistence, each song finding some proportion of crisp beats, buzzy electronics, and crushing guitars, pieces of Interpol, Built to Spill, Dismemberment Plan, and The Men slathered in extra extra layers. It's a good sound, but muddy. It doesn't help that every song lays out a verse-chorus throughline and _stick _right _to _it.  It's numbing. That may be a plus or a minus for you.

There's something here, it just needs to be a little more confident, more adventurous - keep an eye out for their next one 3.5/5

#2870 Gui Boratto - Abaporu

Cool, low-bouncing house that boxes you in. It evolves too slowly, shifts too subtly, makes spaces a bit too small, connects them with passages that loop back, and puts the whole blocky habitrail in your head till you feel like you got way too stoned watching Dave Made a Maze 3/5

#2869 Michael Mayer - &

A sampler of Europe's finest, not just curated into shape, but collaborated-with into a listen that's cooler than the sum of its parts. & flows and swerves, full of asides and throughlines, buzzy synths and loping bass and clipping beats and nightdrive atmosphere 4.5/5

#2868 Surfbort - Bort to Death

Scuzzy punk proper, all overblown guitars and unlistenable yelps, with just a flash of uncommon truth. 2017 best band name of the year 3.5/5