#3247 Documenta - Drone Pop #2

Documenta's previously watery YoLatengoism gets a spike of krauty propulsiveness, making for an albums that's slightly more exciting, but still mostly forgettable 3/5

#3246 Signal Hill - Self-Titled

One chiming guitar in each ear, dueling studious arpeggiations in some mathy dilution of post-rock soundtracking zzz 2.5/5

#3245 Documenta - Drone Pop #1

Totally fine, utterly featureless shoegaze. That fat surfy guitar sound's gorgeous, but this is otherwise a drop in a sea of chiming arpeggios and endless washes 3/5

#3244 Documenta - Lady with the Ring

A celebration of the EP form, full of gorgeous guitars, evocative soundscapes, and Booksian storytelling snippets, tightly tied together with no note out of place. A folktale of death, dread, rebirth and death told so clearly and concisely for maximum punch -- miles ahead of Documenta's previously unspectacular shoegazery 4/5

#3243 Queensryche - Operation: Mindcrime

A hair metal concept album about mind control and dystopian revolution that has aged _real badly. Indulgent skits, shrieking vocals, and a general air of self-importance make for a record that's impossible to take seriously and impossible to enjoy frivolously 2/5

#3242 ANMLPLNT - Fall Asleep

A gorgeous, haunted, slitheringly sad record, finding beauty in a dying world. Birds falling from the sky and burning butterflies populate a surreal Mangumesque dreamscape, punctuated by staggering roars of obsidian guitars, landing all the gut punch of a great art film 4/5

#3241 The Blaze - Dancehall

What seemed fresh at EP scale seems uninspired by track 10: the Blaze's haunted, downtuned, searching sound remains unchanged and unexpanded on their full length debut. The thrill of strange emotion is there at first, but dulls 3/5

#3240 Binary Star - Lighty

Talk about groups you assumed you'd never hear from again - what a fun surprise. Rhymes complex as ever, packed with rhymes knots and lyrical micropuzzles. The production's hooky, headbobbing shit, reminiscent of the latest Tribe. But man those lines are dense, every bar tetrissed up, every space packed syllables and meanings. It's a little exhausting. A good problem to have but... 4/5

#3239 Binary Star - Ears Apart

...the companion disc show what a Binary Star reunion really should look like. The jitters out, the production and the rhyming find a looser flow on Ears Apart, the samples given room to roam, some soul seeping in. Still packed to bursting with rhymes, a rush of years of lines pouring out like this is their last chance, half-hidden meanings laced in the gaps, a nervous, intellectual punch to the skull 4.5/5

#3238 The Smashing Pumpkins - Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP : No Past. No Future oh come the fuck on

Look, I recently willingly spent 3 hours listening to Mellon Collie demos and outtakes, but I've got my limits. If your album's got more letters in its name than minutes of music, maybe you've gone too far. Even by 2010s-Pumpkins standards, SaOSBV1/LPNPNFNS is impossibly empty, without a single memorable line or hook in its entire 31 minutes. Even Monuments had Drum and Fife! And why squander one of the 90s' most understatedly great drummers on dreary, sub-Adore 1-and-2-ands? The Rick Rubin production's pretty and feels good in the ear, but it's gallingly synthetic, like he took every song apart and hand-washed each frequency before weaving them all back together.

Weird thing is, gun to my head, if I could only listen to one post-Adore Pumpkins album ever again it might be this one. At least they committed! If Billy really can't write a song for shit anymore, might as well make the cleanest, glossiest sound imaginable, with nary a Heavy Metal Machine of Ghost Child in sight, just shiny shiny shiny all the way down. For all my intellectual gnashing of teeth, when this was over I put it on again because it was just so easy to listen to, which makes it better than average by any reasonable metric 3/5

#3237 Slift - La Planete Inexploree

Rolling bass and jammy psych-rock guitars falling down the stairs forever. This's by all reckoning indistinguishable from a heavy-era King Gizzard album, right down to the busy beats, the growl-and-yelp vocals, the guitar tone, and the everything else. I want to love this, but the path's pretty well trod 3.5/5

#3236 The Beths - Future Me Hates Me

Pop-punk as sunny and toe tapping as a summer drive through trees. Packed with reassuring backing vocals and dozens of sweet guitar moves, never once unpleasant, in fact awfully joyful for an album mostly about self-loathing 4/5

#3235 The Surfing Magazines - The Surfing Magazines

A tense, buzzing little record masquerading as a laid-back one. Rhythm sections shy about the groove, chirping guitar lines skittering around the songs like trapped animals. Admirably arty but not that good for listening to 3/5

#3234 The Midnight - Nocturnal

Less heavy-handed than Kids' rotten nostalgia, but still awfully one-dimensional in its neon-drenched nightscaping. Saxes are a nice touch 3/5

#3233 The Midnight - Kids

There's a lot of 80's-tinged, nostalgia-driven synth music out there, but none as brazen as Kids.

Kids, which you'll note is called "Kids", is cloyingly, cartoonishly nostalgic.

Kids (featuring songs called Kids, Youth, Saturday Mornings, Arcade Dreams), has teal and pink cover art, set in a mall, complete with neon signs, arcade games, a soda machine and a timestamp in the corner, putting this in the era of VHS. And yes, as a bonus, in case you didn't get it, in case it was too subtle, procedes to WRITE OUT IN TEXT ON THE COVER OF THE ALBUM that the year is 1985, and fuckit, let's put the time right as you're probably getting out of school you doe-eyed escapee of your miserable present.

I'd call it parody if I didn't know better.

The actual music is as ham-fisted, with only the reprise of the title track actually touching any part of this black, deeply-bored-with-this-shit heart of mine 2.5/5

#3232 The Glands - The Glands

Scrappy, angular rock from the school of Built to Spill. Platonic indie rock: pleasant and clever and slight 3.5/5

#3231 Party Walsh - Not the Same as it Used to Be

Listen / buy here!

The EP undersells their live energy, with the vocals too high in the mix, but it's an agreeable swish of mod-y Americana - not too many folks making music quite like this anymore (School for Robots excepted!) 3/5

#3230 Perturbator - I Am the Night

Another menacing soundtrack from Perturbator. Atmospheric as ever, but brooding, samey, and inessential compared to his later, more exiting (Dangerous Days), more interesting (New Model) albums 3/5

#3229 Homeboy Sandman and Edan - Humble Pi

Edan's back! As knotty as percussive as ever, with Homeboy Sandman a perfect complement, with wooly, hard-hitting production underneath. Packed with great swerves, intricate and blunt - exciting shit. Hope for a proper followup to Beauty and the Beat 4/5

#3228 E-40 - In a Major Way

E-40's tenspeed flow's a thrill to follow; he does keep you on your toes. His easy charisma's easy to like, but the sub-barebones production and bloated pacing drag it down 3.5/5

#3227 Kelpe - Ex-Aquarium

Bristling with ideas, but never pushy about it. An electronic, sampled, moving, shifting matrix of soft spines, blurring lines between glitchy and jazzy, soft and hard. Kelpe never quite tip their hand into any particular approach, slinking through house and techno and instrumental hip hop and plunderphonics and rockist leanings and ambient corruptions, some elegant median of Aphex Twin, The Books, and Chemical Brothers circa Surrender. It's all awfully good listening, never ever boring or unpleasant, changing out from under you with transparent grace 4.5/5

#3226 DOA - Something Better Change

Scrappy, toetapping punk that's not afraid of a pretty moment, a searing guitar line or otherwise having a sneering good time 3.5/5

#3225 The Bats - Daddy's Highway

Classic Flying Nun jangle and coo, with lopey bass and boy-girl vocals to swoon to. Pretty, wistful and sweet, if a bit samey by the end 3.5/5

#3224 Fat Mattress - Fat Mattress

Solid, agreeable, clever psychedelia with flecks of country, like some lost Byrds transition album. No one song will blow you away, but it's album so roundly enjoyable it's tough not to recommend 4/5

#3223 Doug Hream Blunt - My Name is Doug Hream Blunt

As repetitive and outsider as pseudo-labelmate William Onyeabor, but without any soul or hooks. Thin and uncharmingly clumsy. Sometimes obscure, out-out-phase music didn't catch on for a reason 2/5

#3222 Sun Araw - The Saddle of the Increate

Starts off fun. Weird noises with plenty of space to breathe. Booksy playfulness. Chill Out having a seizure. Cowboy emphemera: a slide guitar snippet, a jangle of spurs, bottles and cans, dozens of half-phrases about horses and plains and men and cactuses. As if drawn from a hat. Jerky rhythms.

After about 10 minutes it gets a little old, though.

And after 20 its real old.

This dude is still just saying the weirdest shit.

Is this all this record does?

At the 40 minute mark everything goes a bit soft and you're awakening from VR sickness after a month on the range and there's a giddy, disoriented glee.

After 76 minutes, though.

An hour and sixteen minutes!

76 minutes and zero hooks later.

Man.

It's pretty annoying again 3/5

#3221 Ashra - Blackouts

A gorgeous, understated mesh of chiming guitar lines and electronic washes, plinking synth arpeggios weaving through waves of reverb, steeped with endless krautrock patience 4/5

#3220 Occam's Laser - Occult 88

Not as epic as, say, Carpenter Brut, but as consistently bangin as any other 80's-synth-horror act out there. Occult 88 nails that growling synth-guitar crunch, with just the right ratio of wistful washes and just a pinch of spooky sample nonsense 3.5/5

#3219 Occam's Laser - The Grid

An understated tribute to the first Tron movie, committed to vintage synths, icy washes, and brittle arpeggios, nailing the past-future moment. Works best in the space between background and foreground, a trippy little technology time machine 3.5/5

#3218 Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Blood Lust

Chugging, fuzzed-out stoner rock drenched in falsetto. Solid headbobbery, nothing special 3/5

#3217 Aceyalone - A Book of Human Language

Textbook Project Blowed backpack knottiness: torrents of rhymes, sounding improvised, loose, crosscut with veins of meticulous double-meaning. The lines are interesting for as long as you can keep your attention on them, but the album's overlong and pretentious, the conceptual framing never adding up to anything. The jazzy, upright-drenched production's laid back and deep-grooved, but too one-dimensional to carry you to the 68 minute mark 3/5

#3216 Ochre - Lemodie

Skittery, spacey eletronic fussery that can't decide if it's trying to be Aphex Twin or Orbital and ends up less interesting and less enjoyable than either. I can't come up with a situation where I'd want to listen to something this hazily nervous 2.5/5

#3215 Bomb the Music Industry! - Album Minus Band

Angry, frantic, engaged, everything you want from punk. But something more, something in the hairy, unpredictable, thrashing, swerving energy that reminds you bittersweetly of life itself. Those nuts song titles, those little pretty asides, those synthy touches, the hitches from battering hyperspeed 4/4s to ska ch-chug, endless whiplash changes. As _fucking _alive as any album you'll find. Jeff Rosenstock is the best bandleader in 21st century rock and its not close 4.5/5

#3214 Makaya McCraven - In the Moment

McCraven knows magic comes from moments, none more so than that gorgous bassline that opens and closes the record. Instrumental hip hop takes on jazz noodling come through clear, with groove and dust and a sampler's sense of repetition and cratedigging hope. Crowd snippets reinforce that what you're hearing is created and curated, in that order.

Even though it's chopped after the fact, despite all the scraping explanations of improvisation, this knows the experience of live music better than most. You listen in involuntary anticipation of what's going to happen, and feel others hoping and feeling it around you, and trustfall into waves and waves 4/5

#3213 The Internet - Hive Mind

Sexy, groovesome on paper, but none of it really chills me out or riles me up. Everything at arm's length. No tingle at the head/heart/hips. My bad maybe but 2.5/5