#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