#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