#3279 Deafhaven - Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

Pitchfork's Sam Sadomsky already crushed it out of the park, pointing out this is the best Smashing Pumpkins album in years. Those guitars're so noisy, and then so sweet. And the goblin shrieking's annoying, but is it any worse than the nasal king of gloom? It's brutal to think that in an alternate world, Billy could have kept pushing into the noisy corners Mellon Collie peeked under, instead of retreating into Green Album mediocrity.

A noisy, ambitious, tuneful mess of an album that I'd rather listen to than a hundred gutless alt-McCartneys 4/5

#3278 Booker Stardrum - Temporary Etc.

The live//not beats are clever and woolly, too bad they're slathered in atonal, unlistenable tones. A dissonant, sloppy mess 2.5/5

#3277 Cotton Jones - Paranoid Cocoon

Too-clean psychedelia and obvious production sap some of the magic from The River Strumming's sound. Pretty, but sounding crassly custom-designed for what's left of the rock festival scene 3/5

#3276 Cotton Jones - The River Strumming

Spacy, slowmotion honkytonky psycadelia, Americana clouds from far far away. That delicious drift away from obvious sources of creation, layers and reverb and performance in weird rooms making this more than the notes on the page 4/5

#3275 Locomotiv GT - Mindig Magasabbra

Competently cops a half-dozen American music styles. Listenable enough, but tough to dig into the individuality absent understanding Hungarian 3.5/5

#3274 Robyn - Honey

Generic pleading over generic beats, icy sub-Madonna whatever. The production's got an appealing crispness, and Robyns' got a great voice, but I'm not sure what that even means anymore. Adds up to ____poof__ 2.5/5

#3273 Mitski - Be the Cowboy

Mysterious, vulnerable, lush, sparse. Mitski has a touch. She breathes the word "husband" and knocks you over with how seldom you hear that word in popular music, committing to the idea that they're _doing _better and _sticking _together. It's as subtly stunning as any moment around, and a standin for half-dozen lesser triumphs.

Production blossoms, artificial and close. Bjork with warmth.

A beautiful, subtly difficult album, barbs hidden in velvet strokes 4.5/5

#3272 King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Eyes Like the Sky

Listen / buy here!

Holy shit. This is how you wed narrative and music. As thunderously powerful as a twangy riff's ever been. Every song's tone works in lockstep with its dusty storytelling, a plot that swerves and elides just as needed. Evocative, riveting, adventurous, must-hear for any fan of interesting music 4.5/5

#3271 The Murlocs - Young Blindness

All the Murlocs albums mostly sound the same, but this one's really struggling to stand out. A real sophomore slump, surfier than Loopholes, totally agreeable. Good! But stuck pretty firmly in its forebears footsteps 3.5/5

#3270 Czarface - First Weapon Drawn

There's some catchy, soulsome loops back there, but man it's all fully and totally derailed by all its clumsy attempts at storytelling. The ratio's all wrong, you can't get in the groove at all before some clunky announcer narrates the plot or some cringey radioplay acting forwards a pro-wrestling plot to nowhere. I can't figure out how you listen to this, everything good about it's undercut doubletime by some amateur nonsense 2.5/5

#3269 The Murlocs - Loopholes

All the Murlocs albums mostly sound the same, and this one sounds more the same than most, a nascent, lazy seed. That garage crunch's mostwelcome, swinging and harmonica-propelled into the sun, soaring and slouching into nothing 3.5/5

#3268 The Murlocs - Old Locomotive

All the Murlocs albums mostly sound the same, but this is their best so far, spikier, trippier, more thrilling. All that Australian garagey joy crystallizing into something special 4/5

#3267 Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska

Not a lyrics guy, but alright. More than the sum of their parts, these 10 songs gather us up, we coast dwellers, and tell what desperation looks like. Occasionally cartoonish, but mostly these tales of nothing-left-to-lose land, the spare production stretching out like the sky, stunning in flat endlessness 4/5

#3266 Masayoshi Fujita - Schaum

Mysterious and wonderful and alien, except when it's slapdash and lazy. A hundred noises drift in and out, just sometimes a curtain drops on the concrete dystopian wonderscape and you go -- oh, it's just some guy fuckin around dropping whatever he's got 3/5

#3265a Terry Riley - You're No Good

Beyond the obvious hyperbole about how ahead of its time it was, the proto-sampler opus mostly holds up. Its sprawling length gives time for the endless repetitions to sink in and hypnotize, even if some of the overlaid synth lines are clunkers 3.5/5

#3265 Sam Gendel - 4444

Jazzy, nuanced guitar brushes and bristles, minimal and close. It'd read like arty post-rock if not for its staggering awkwardness. The cringey vocals are hushed and overdone. Mentioning oxford commas during an acoustic rap is unrecoverable 2.5/5

#3264 Darondo - Let My People Go

Green-high crooning with textured backing. The funky first couple tracks are good fun, and Didn't I brings that rolling organ, but after that Darondo's cracking yelp gets grating and the songwriting's out of ideas 3/5

#3263 Fishmans - Night Cruising 2018

Meandering, smoky dub, spiked with Japanese mystery. I don't think I like it, but it's so deliriously, slitheringly strange I can't resist, bass rolling up in slow motion across short syllables reverbed into infinity; all I want to do is eat fish and smoke opium and never wake up 3.5/5

#3262 Swamp Dogg - Total Destruction to Your Mind

A sneakily strange album, kicking off with a few slowed-down, Staxy soul numbers, which, sure, hooksome enough - before dipping into Seussical/Silversteinian fantasy, songs reading more as parables and jokes than anything you'd like, listen to. Once you've heard the punchline of The World Beyond, do you ever need to hear it ever again? 3/5

#3261 Swamp Dogg - Love, Loss and Auto-Tune

There's something about the way autotune fractures that lends vulnerability, that reads as paradoxically human. Goddamn, does it work here, against all odds does it somehow sound perfectly natural alongside analog soul rumble and swirly electronic nonsense, blistering and splitting the pain in Swamp Dogg's delivery. This smells, on paper, by all accounts, like a cheap, desperate grasp at relevance, but dammit they pull it off, trashing the boundaries between legitimate and pop, ending up with one of the most unexpectedly great albums of the year 4.5/5

#3260 Kelley Stoltz - Double Exposure

Completely enjoyable pop-rock, effortlessly rattled off like an ex-Beatle or prolific producer-type might do. There's that solo-artist overcrispness, and a general unwillingness to go for the throat, but its all solid as shit. Unassailably good. Killer cover art's a bonus 4/5

#3259 Arvo Party - Arvo Party

Stark, dystopian ambiance, laced with drones, every beat and melody flecked with analog rust. But it's got a soul, bringing some hope or heartache to every song - landscapey music that keeps sight of its protagonist, and wants to see a happy ending against all odds 3.5/5

#3258 Arvo Party - II

The brutalist cityscape of Arvo Party's debut still pulses, but from farther away now. Hiss and static cake everything, as if we've slipped from the present tense into digital artifacts, piecing together what's left. When 37 Degrees cracks open into its euphoric midway point, the beats and synths surge to meet the heart, but they're skipping when they should be looping, some fraction of their frequencies worn away. It's a subtly enchanting effect. A mysterious, textured album with a lot to dig through 3.5/5

#3257 Al Lover - Interference Patterns

Half an hour of artless, dissonant drones without emotion or invention 2/5

#3256 Ty Segall - Fudge Sandwich

As usual, Ty puts his stamp on every last cover on this covers album: some're fuzzed to death, some chilled out, some melted into nothingness, none treated all that reverently. And man, I love the song choices: getting some deep cut weird prog/kraut shit in there.

But it feels like that's the best part: like showing off the breadth of references almost came before making an album for listening to. The fuzzed out songs are the best, but feel a little by the numbers 20 or so albums into his career. Is it too glib to pin this to its title/art? I like fudge and I love sandwiches, but the whole record feels slapdash, like less than the sum of its parts 3.5/5

#3255 Pere Ubu - Carnival of Souls

Mostly unlistenable beyond the bracing opener, a dissonant, rambling, yelping mess. Carnival of Soul does have one great trick: its breadcrumb trail of allusions. Little riffs and half-quotes from a dozen classic songs dot the album, nurturing an uncanniness worthy of its name 3/5

#3254 Great Northern - Remind Me Where the Light Is

Pretty, soaring indie rock that's married to its 4/4s for 4 minutes, with no production detail or decision sticking out in the least. But it's a nice enough little escape, like smoothed-out Arcade Fire 3.5/5

#3253 Keith Keniff - Branches

Shimmering, twinkling soundtrackery, pianos and bells and strings all plinking and popping endlessly, the glitchy Booksian hestitations bringing the most interesting moments. Uncertain of whether to be peaceful or ominous, never finding a structure that supports both 3/5

#3252 Cameron McGill and What Army - Is a Beast

Like U2* covering Josh Ritter - soaring, sky-grasping anthems, streaked with sunburns and the dust of the road. Pleasant enough, but pretty firmly locked into its 4-minute 3-chorus cadences 3/5

* or less charitably, Coldplay

#3251 VA - Colours of Funk

Platonic library music funk, as hot as background music's allowed to be. More exciting than most - at least half these songs would be totally excellent opening themes for retro cop shows 3.5/5

#3250 Yo La Tengo - There's a Riot Going On

Yo La Tengo is finally out of fire, making their most uniformly mellow, uniformly pretty record yet. Boring, cooing early songs like Shade of Blue and She May, She Might play almost as self-parody, but by the midway point everything opens into moonlit ambiance, and a creeping uncertainty fills the air. It's almost freeing. The title subverting Sly's, where we're not in the fight, we're watching it happen helpless in slow motion with a deepening numbness 4/5

#3249 Tapes 'n Tapes - Tapes 'n Tapes

A re-release of the band's little-known debut shows they had that spiky, manic energy from the jump, overflowing with jagged, joyous, strained exclamations 4/5