#3212 Makaya McCraven - Universal Beings

McCraven's after-composed improvised jazz masterstroke angle is past its humble excuses, ready to be Serious Jazz, full of knotty half-hooks and tense, arty constructs. In the Moment was stumbling into a backroom and finding magic. Universal Beings is still secret, but well pre-whispered about by droogs, full of knowing cool. Admirable, in a Kubrickian kinda way, but lacking connection 3/5

#3211 Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - King of Cowards

All those big fucker riffs, so scuffed up so right, banged into songs with tempo changes and sections and shit this time. Is it wrong I miss the singleminded churn of Feed the Rats? 8 minutes feels like a pop sellout by comparison 3/5

#3210 Cloud Nothings - Last Building Burning

Cloud Nothings've had some great songs, but no especially solid albums - this included. An electric, roaring opener gets followed by weaker vocals, slower tempos, limp songwriting aimed squarely at talking girls out of getting with mediocre guys, a subject the Hold Steady already owns. The pacing's weird and hollow, even the long song seeming lost 2.5/5

#3209 Junior Senior - Say Hello Wave Goodbye

A limp shadow of the Danish duo's brilliant career. Repetitive songs that nick details and skip all the live playfulness that made their best stuff work. Cheek, puck, surprise, gall: all gone. Just a bunch of too-late dancepunk grasps 2.5/5

#3208 Sleep - The Sciences

The downside of Dopesmoker is everything's going to sound watered down by comparison; that curse's still hanging on. The vocals're dopey, but Sleep's latest is riffier than most stoner stuff, bringing in little drops and interplays lightly. Don't want to _harsh anyone's buzz_. Highlight's Marijuanaut's Theme, that shit _moves 3.5/5

#3207 Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - Feed the Rats

Hell yeah heads say again and again and again. Hard rock revival gone to full stoner length, QotSA stretched to krautrock forever, Sleep with showmanship. What sounds like a hook sounds like a meditation on its 100th repetition, over endless guitar gyres, eruption in looped slow motion 4/5

#3206 Liars - Titles with the Word Fountain

Extra stuff from last year's (surprisingly great!) TFCF that starts off strong. Angus's still inventive as hell for a few songs there, diving into the wildest textures and coming back with improbably melody. But it's a frontloaded, bloated collection: mostly sub-b-side half-ideas by the 1/3rd mark 3/5

#3205 Electrelane - The Power Out

A pretty, alien little indie rock album with intimate production that borders on uncomfortable. The vocals are so _ goddamn _ close _, just right all the way up in your ears. Guitars that aren't afraid to put a finger in your forehead out of nowhere.

And then there's the staggering tempos, mismatched instrumentation, all these structures and dynamics all just 30 degrees askew from expectation. Pretty, maybe brilliant, difficult... and upsetting somehow, like some suppressed memory being vibrated. Deeply fascinating, mysteriously unbearable 3.5/5

#3204 Omnium Gatherum - The Burning Cold

Hyper-technical nerd-metal that's completely comfortable with melody. Right pretty in places, and generally pleasantly overbusy. But the combination of squeaky-clean production and grunty metal-guy growling feels oily in the ear 3.5/5

#3203 The KVB - Only Now Forever

Gothy shoegaze electropop, locking into a beat and swishing it around in endless tones and cavernous croonscapes. I mean it as a half-backhanded compliment when I say: I've never heard a 4-minute song that  felt   like   it    went    on    so     long      3/5

#3202 The Exorcist GBG - The Exorcist GBG

Spooky as fuck but tied to rockist analog humanism. This is what dance music should sound like. Death to fake wobblers, these guys cut to the heart of the matter, and quick 4/5

#3201 Nicolas Godin - Au service de la France

I'm a sucker for the French, I admit it, so let's get it out of the way while I fellate them.

This is everything I love about exotica and lounge and tropicalia and bossa nova and it cool as fuck. Godin gets it, every theme's cooler than the last, a world tour though a spy's eyes, a trip through space and time to all the sexiest, most mysterious corners of the world. Composed or sampled or who knows -- swoon goddamn 4.5/5

#3200 Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

I'm not down with Tom Petty, the dude, which is maybe my problem. Lookit this smug fuck on the cover of this album. Such a fuckin' Willbury, all those overrated shitheels.

The Heartbreakers, they're fine. The songwriting, solid. But there's an empty swagger here I bristle at, some put on Police-sexiness, that -- no thanks.

Breakdown's got its thing, and I can't argue with American Girl's timeless hooks. But man, Petty seems like a shit to me, downhome but keeping us all at arm's length and downward, and that undercuts the whole thing. It's some Phil Collins pussy-reaching shit and I'm not with it 3/5

#3199 Daryll Hall - Sacred Songs

I hate when my thunder gets stolen. Allmusic commenter Nick Austin says:

What would a record sound like recorded by Daryl Hall and Robert Fripp? Like this.

And who's to argue with that. I mean, I love Babs and Bads, but it's as stark a division as you an imagine, an artrock stomp descending into full on Eno-style Frippery on a dime, no attempt to cover for the contrast at all. I kind of admire how harsh the transition is. Never heard anything quite like it.

You'd expect the marriage between Hall and collaborator to be smoother but its like -- my turn fucker -- and the knob turns into full nonsense. What a wildly harsh combination. A genuinely fascinating failure that goes all the way around the horn to brilliant somehow.

Undeserved bonus points around the surge of airplane noise and Tufts chatter that passed by my fall window, right in tune with this album's wiles, right as I closed this out 4/5

#3198 The Cowboys - Volume 4

I like these kids. Flayed, sunburned, in the way only a Texas wastrel and a surfer burnout can have in common. I grapple with what surf and country have in common -- that twang maybe. And I love anything that planks the bridge. These guys drive to the heart of the matter, roll with em into the sunset, westward as far as you dare 4/5

#3197 Goggs - Pre Strike Sweep

The riffs they are heavy and the riffs they are fast, but Goggs' latest as no sense of pacing or contrast or songwriting. A numbing samey shouting blast 3/5

#3196 The Sueves - RIP Clearance Event

As heavy and scuzzy a riffpile as I've heard in a while, the kids aren't fucking around and the production brings it home. Bonus points for the [waves] interludes that break up the racket. A rare gem in a sea of similar screamers 4/5

#3195 Je Suis France - Je Suis France

It's impossible that Je Suis France even had a debut: their countless albums slither in and out of the Jeremy Bearimy, with no throughline of quality or style. Their basic catchy crunch is there from the jump, frayed and manic and spiked with surprises, a friend on a too-fast night drive towards nothing and away from everything 4/5

#3194 Madlib - Shades of Blue: Madlib Invades Blue Note

Sounds like a Madlib beat collection, maybe a little bit cooler. It's not like pillaging jazz is a new gimmick for him. Funky and chill and worth hearing, but the billing's unnecessary 3.5/5

#3193 Je Suis France - Ice Age

Ignore this micro-EP's track breaks: this is as exciting a 9-minute song as you're gonna find. Angry, stupid, strange, packed with hooks, wheeling all over itself in waves of crunch and yelp 4/5

#3192 Je Suis France - Sephardic Negligee

An odds-and-ends record of mostly-throwaway noise experiments. They figured out how to turn these noises into songs on later albums, but skip this unless you really want to hear the sausage getting made 2.5/5

#3191 Je Suis France - By the Condo

One of the most enigmatic, inventive, and utterly underappreciated indie bands of the 21st century: here's yet another album packed with rough, hooky noiseballs, slathered in buzzy electronics and mad asides. I'm not saying JSF was ever going to sell out stadiums, but the fact they're not GBV // Pavement tier indie-famous is a failure of culture.

There's nothing on By the Condo that measures up to their most adventurous highs but its arguably their most straight-up enjoyable album yet, and the pop highs (Distance Makes it Further! Zealand!) are as manically delightful as ever 4/5

#3190 Feral Trash - Trashfiction

Sheets of guitars and shouted complaints like you've heard a thousand times. But Feral Trash finds some magic in wreckage, smashing classic teenage frustrations into 20something is-this-it Fight Club nihilism. Trashfiction stews a dozen ways to be angry and betrayed into a poison that reminds you of all your angstiest moments, all wrapped up in a candy pop-punk pill 4/5

#3189 The Riffs - Death of Glory

Utterly sincere, totally committed anachronistic punk revival with shades of the Exploding Hearts. Chuggy and nasty-lite, with enough sweet guitars to make you smile, but nothing that's going to stand out from the last 40 years of reinventions 3/5

#3188 Bardo Pond / Guru Guru / Acid Mothers Temple - Acid Guru Pond

Sounds exactly like what you'd expect when you put these 3 together. Waves of noise, bleats of sound, vaguely eastern structures. It's as numbing as they come, pouring all the cereals into one big bowl of super cereal and watching the milk turn rainbow sugar, feeling the chaotic pull of at least 2 cooks too many. Too formless for me, but manna for the hardcore I'm sure 3/5

#3187 William Tyler - Live at Third Man Records

Tyler's a heck of a guitar player, and its incredible watching him wring so much out of one instrument and two hands. But it's a more intellectual experience, better suited for close listening; you might miss all the subtle backing and reverb and production touches that gave his records their subliminal emotional force 3.5/5

#3186 Bardo Pond and Yo La Tengo - Parallelogram

The first sidelong track's a masterpiece, those glorious Tengo guitars, no stranger to endless jams, bring searing clarity to Bardo Pond's waves of noise. The spare breakdown in the middle is breathtaking: everything you want from an epic-length song.

The other side's the castoff sludge-twin, sounding like a mangled, postproduction Neu-fucked version of an already boring b-side. Is this really the second-best thing this collaboration came up with? 3.5/5

#3185 Fucked Up - Dose Your Dreams

Fucked Up completes their transformation into a heavy indie band that happens to have a howling lunatic frontman and I'm good with it. Their prettiest, most fun album, full of half-working experiments and clumsy combinations. That's always been my favorite thing about the band -- that and their peerless ability to be ferociously aggressive and deeply wounded and sensitive all at once.

Purists will moan, but if you're not stoked to get down when Talking Pictures hits its dancy breakdown you just don't like music. Obligatory: holy shit this album's and hour and 22 minutes long and does too little to get you to the end, but it works well enough portioned out in slices 4/5

#3184 Tepr - The Deadly Master of Rappers from Hell

This makes me weep for 2003, when Thought for Food (technically 2002), One Word Extinguisher, ( ), and Who Will Cut our Hair when We're Gone, made all seem possible. But then it all just kinda plateaued.

This French album from the same era carries some of that same energy: a bristly restlessness, wrangling minimal, unlistenable sounds in just the right combinations to make something beautiful and emotional and rich*. Melodies and skitters and skips conjure dread, loneliness, hope, awe, making for an instrumental album that's surprisingly thematic, borderline narrative, with glimpses of apartments, mountains, skylines, snow.

Bonus points for the most misleading album title I've seen in years 4/5

* but not taking it as far as Give Up, which, feh

#3183 Tepr - Hypnotease

After a 9 year break, Tepr's back, transformed again. But this time his weapon's poorly-paced dance music, big beats and repetitive samples stepping in place, waiting for the microdrop. Drag 2.5/5

#3182 Tepr - Cote Ouest

Tepr's as great a shapeshifter as I've encountered in a while. Here he jettisons sensitive glitch for big crunchy buzz and swings it in every direction, cranking out bangers, bent-rap throwdowns, sentimental M83 soundscapes, and chiptune stormers. A remarkable, rough-edged smorgasbord 4/5

#3181 J Dilla - Welcome to Detroit

Chilled out and groovesome, with tense, claustrophobic undertones: the act of finding space for good times in a dicey city. Dilla pulls it all off: he's as effortlessly hooky as ever, with an atmospheric throughline that elevates, punched with worthy verses 3.5/5

#3180 Hnry Flwr - Flowerama

Pretty, restless 00's-style indie ballads, each with some wash of synthy backing to blur the edges. Pleasant enough, not especially memorable 3/5

#3179 Marcy Playground - Shapeshifter

Distilled 90's. Nirvana if Nirvana was fun. All those same defanged punk chords sedated to metal tempos, perfect for blank grin bobalongs tipping into giddiness and I have zero problems with that 3.5/5

#3178 Maxwell - Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite

At some point I misnumbered by a 100's digit: we've been in the 3100's for months. WHOOPS. Will write a script to fix someday. Which will make this comment confusing.

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So smooth, so sex. Silky as silk, with bodies bumping under. Dark and rich and velvet shimmer all drunken night 3.5/5