#3693 Jason and the Scorchers - Lost and Found

3/5 _barely raucous enough to escape the orbit of its honky-schlock gimmick. All the songs are deadfocused on a single riff on a single subject, and the production's just rough enough to make it sound live. but like, really, to be clear, just ___barely

#3692 The Long Ryders - Native Sons

3.5/5 indie-country frivolity that finds its legs on its rougher, looser, second half

#3691 The Dream Syndicate - The Days of Wine and Roses

4/5 possibly the best Paisley Underground album, barely-contained dissonance rumbling along to rock and roll rhythms, pressurized into something exciting and listenable, lashing out with a mind of its own

#3690 The Dream Syndicate - These Times

3.5/5 grown-up twitchy rockers stretch their legs, put on some pretty production and some miles, spin out a pleasant low-stakes trip

#3689 Sigur Ros - Liminial Sleep

2.5/5 pretty in a barely-there kind of way, but mostly dead boring, without the commitment of Route 1. Too dissonant to even sleep to

#3688 L-Epee - Diabolique

3/5 once they lock into a groove, that's the one for the song, drones building from a 6 to a 7, detached vocals drifting. You kind of admire the commitment. What a boring band to play bass in.

#3687 Rocketship - Thanks to You

3.5/5 lush shoegaze packed, overflowing with little moments, synths and breakdowns and buildups and clearouts. Very pretty and very clever, though all that complex, planful structuring undercuts the passion and excitement

#3686 Parquet Courts - Wide Awake!

3/5 all angular bristle at the order of things that mostly just doesn't land. A messy melee of mostly-agreeable minutemen and gang of four moments that don't come off as sincere and don't commit to anger, neither dance_ nor _punk, and not finding much outside the spectrum, undercut by thin, flat vocals. Freebird II's pretty as heck tho

#3685 Swervedriver - Future Ruins

3/5 pure 90s swirly shoegaze timecapsule, all those guitars blurring into the vocals, textured, chunky, without a single jagged edge; delivers you to space without a single chance taken  -- not such a bad thing when it comes to going to space

#3684 Kaytranada - Bubba

2.5/5 this is the year I really truly feel out of touch with what's it. pretty good beats, and then a slurry of gasoline production rainbow, and guest after guest and I'm just not attuned to it, goes right through me

#3683 Pearl Jam - Vault 9: Live in Seattle 12/8/93

3.5/5 a set from the Ten/Vs era that delivered exactly what a Pearl Jam fan of the era probably wanted: precisely-delivered wall-to-wall riffs, endless growls and howls, with few breaks and few surprises. Too raw to be dismissed as "too clean", but the band doesn't take a lot of chances, doesn't mess with the songs, keeping the energy turned up to 8 the whole set long. Probably great to attend, but a bit of a playlist listen. One exception: a right ripping I've Got a Feeling

#3682 Lucy in Disguise - Sunset Radio

3/5 this sure is synthwave, a style I have no ability to rate because every song fades into a hazily pleasant background as well as any other. nice crunchy bass sounds though

#3681 Kali Malone - The Sacrificial Code

3/5 endlessly, glacially patient organ notes, 10 tracks averaging 10 minutes each, with minuteslong themes reoccurring an hour apart. The conceptual commitment's admirable, and there's a certain meditation to the listen, but when it ends, without achieving any particular motion or lateral transcendence, you haven't been given anything you can take with you into your day, intellectually, emotionally, or otherwise. The exercise is hollow

#3680 Mikal Cronin - Arsonist / Tsinosra

4.5/5 a gorgeous, adventurous EP, unfolding and folding slowly. Both epic-length tracks work as perfect compliments. I'm a sucker for a truly patient long song, this is as brilliant as they come

#3679 DJ Shadow - Our Pathetic Age

3.5/5 the first disc of instrumentals is ok. no Endtroducing ghosts, not even Mountain visceralia. The main draw's the 2nd disc of hip hop production, tracks that are very of the Pathetic now, of crippling internet attachment, surveillance, oppression, and all the webs in between. Not a fun listen, but the exactly the one 2019 deserves

#3678 Je Suis France - Back to the Basics of Love

3.5/5 still love these guys, the most overlooked band of the 21st century. I'm so glad they're still kicking.

Their latest falls short of their best stuff, sounding like a tired version of Coleslaw III Drymouth -- but that's still good! its fucking 2019, that's the best you can hope for. full of easy hooks and stoned diversions, short songs and long songs and endless texture and that unflagging belief that making music is fun

#3677 The Mattson 2 - Paradise

2.5/5 what the fuck happened to these guys? all that jazzy frisson gone, left with soft, noodling rock, somewhere between Tycho without the texture and Steely Dan without the hooks

#3676 The Mattson 2 - Agar

4/5 hard-driving bass and explosively busy soft drums make for a jazzy, thrilling listen, washed in ambient touches. You can feel the focused energy of two well-aligned voices, hammer and anvil making sparks

#3675 Jeff Rosenstock and Laura Stevenson - Still Young

3/5 4 Neil Young covers that don't take too many chances, without much Rosenstock energy, if that's what you were looking for. Just a pleasant curio of a jam, earnest and nice

#3674 King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Infest the Rat's Nest

3.5/5 I'll never kick a king gizzard album out of bed, and this is rippled with pleasures as always, but the lack of editing continues to show. They pull off "stripped down metal", and I'd welcome this does of heavy live, but there's no real reason to listen to this over something by someone more specialized

#3673 Flowers Must Die - Kompost

3/5 just 6 more months till I can quit this project. none of this made an impression on me, all its swirling and yowling and warbles and surges and rages just mix to grey, or maybe I've gone colorblind

#3672 Anthony Phillips - The Geese and The Ghost

3/5 pleasant enough for the prog fan. But hemmed in, riding classical coattails without enough of a voice to carry things to the next level. A departure from the soon-expanding Genesis feels inevitable in retrospect

#3671 Beck - Hyperspace

2.5/5 I still don't know what the fuck is going on with Beck. I can't fathom that someone would make this because it was their vision, but I can't figure out who the fuck it's selling out to. Saw Lightning's kinda fun, but the rest is limp, barely there, empty of intention

#3670 Kurt Vile - Bottle It In

3.5/5 even by Kurt Vile standards, this's a slow one. As committed to letting the songs unfold as anyone -- is laziness the weakness or the point? Not much of it lands but maybe its not supposed to, you gotta admire a coast this long

#3669 Jacco Gardner - Somnium

3/5 pretty, catchy even, but with a squeaky-clean, voiceless lack of stakes that lands somewhere between exotica and library music

#3668 Gaz Coombes - World's Strongest Man

4/5 slow to start, with that kind of solo artist overstudied stiltedness, at first. Indebted to Albarn and Yorke in increasingly good ways. Invested in making an album that smolders, starts to burn on the second side, climaxes just before the end. Committed to making an album that plays as an album and isn't that refreshing

#3667 The Midnight Hour - The Midnight Hour

3/5 a way with a groove, but the vocals don't slot in, transplanted from another session.  vtfdrds4 b=gASD KLKGVZXK
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#3666 King Tuff - Black Moon Spell

4/5 as shamelessly, brattily catchy as power pop comes - Headbanger into Beautiful Thing is pure joy rock. Good clean fun, even if the singleminded songwriting wears a bit thin by track 14

#3665 Mikal Cronin - Seeker

3.5/5 heartfelt, desperate, resigned energy, the kind of thing you make when you want to be positive and write hooks but its been years of this shit, and it may not ever turn around. It's no time for MCII - tunes that glorious may never be written again, but there's something warm and true here to huddle around

#3664 The Beach Boys - Sunflower

3.5/5 The Beach Boys, some flashes of Pet Sounds aside, a little cloying, obvious, very nearly annoying. A lot of these songs are one-note concepts smeared out to multi-note harmonies without a whole lot of inspiration beyond the multiplication. And hoo boy is Add Some Music To Your Day a near-self-parodic piece of shit.

But there are those flashes where the magic strikes and how; the first and last tracks, in particular, are that kind of magic song that flits and slips through your fingers. That's how you make a song about music, by making good music. Jesus what a weirdly religious piece of shit that song is.

#3663 Ayeon - Sketches of Home

3/5 a little logo in the corner of the cover aligns this album with internet-via-LA-based label Jazz Hop Cafe, which in turn unironically aligns itself with sipping coffee. And that's fine. That's nice. And so is this music, which is pretty and pleasant, as whimsical as the pink and spaceship of the rest of the cover. And I didn't fail to enjoy a second of it but it dared zero times to make a move that might distract me from my coffee

#3662 Beach House - 7

3.5/5 awkward cause I'm real light and late on the Beach House train. There's moments, hoo boy, some of those synth slices and production flourishes are staggering, and its all pretty, but a bit washy, indistinct, unmemorable

#3661 Kyanos - Lost in Blue

3.5/5 chill, slomo surf grooves, with the soft grit of soft garage and a shamelessly psychedelic streak.

just, like, real fuckin good to listen to

#3660 Crack the Sky - Animal Notes

3/5 yeesh, what happened? There's an invigorating stomp through a lot of this, ghosts of that fun rockist progism. But man, the first side is miserable, and the second side is goofy as hell, especially that cloying Invaders From Mars bowieism. Freerunning band gets a job.

#3659 FM - Black Noise

3.5/5 those synth lines are the equalizer here, cutting right through all the bombast like a laser sword, a throughline into the foliage. Mostly utterly goofy, just look at those scifi songtitles, but those synth hooks're so bright, so cleanly, boldly realized, they'll make you grin in spite of yourself

#3658 Earl Sweatshirt - Feet of Clay

4/5 tight points punch through. fifteen minutes, but not one bar wasted, loose and precise, instantly memorable lines. madlib-sleepy//hooksome, finally stretching at the end then snapping off. a brilliant slash of bold pacing

#3657 Strawbs - Hero and Heroine

4/5 been hitting the prog _pre_ty hard lately, and this taps into the mother vein of my love of Genesis and rides it into the night. Those bellowing mellotrons, those romantic, sweeping climaxes, those flagrantly Gabrielesque vocals, all woven with perfect flow.

Sweeping pacing, and two gorgeous moments perfectly placed, like a movie might be paced, at the end of the opening salvo and as we achieve sweet denouement.

In the best prog rock you don't even notice that something complex is happening; the means not the ends. As in film, that's the line between the understated masterpiece and the arty wank; the best straddle it. Semicolons for everyone!

Profoundly sensitive, deeply uncool, but really quite a nice little swoon

#3656 The Regrettes - How Do You Love?

3.5/5 (maybe inevitably) lacks the manic, effortless energy of their debut, with nothing as frantically, positively toe-tapping as Hey Now or Lacy Loo. What you do get is more complex, a more bittersweet take on loving, loosing, longing. Girl-group pathos and slower-burning feelings paint a romantic, bitter, wondering worldview. Still miss those killer hooks though - little near-nicks of Close to Me and Last Nite are distracting too

#3655 Justice - Woman Worldwide

4/5 self-remixing, flow-conscious, show-length: by all accounts an electronic live album in the spirit of Alive X7, but not actually done live: studio-clean and clear of crowd noise. Clever. And it works. It's not Alive-tier, and its a real slow burn for stretches, but it's always overwhelmingly listenable, and the highlights land with earned expectation when they come. And yes, excellent work music

#3654 Digitalism - Idealism

3.5/5 the best moments are hooky as hell, there's a few certified bangers. But the tacky rockist moves haven't aged well -- Justice without the cool

#3653 Julian Lynch - Rat's Spit

3/5 shimmer and croon going nowhere in particular

#3652 Kevin Morby - Oh My God

4/5 searing, earnest folk//rock, pointed upward through gospel. Oh My God sounds eternal, inevitable, like George Harrison, Songs Ohia. Difficult, in its way - that patience and directness, a slow motion shot in the head

#3651 Spendtime Palace - Playdate

3.5/5 stompy, slack surf grooves, sounding not unlike local boys Vundabar. One-dimensional, but the bones are good, let's see where this's headed

#3650 Circuit des Yeux - Reaching for Indigo

3/5 complex, original, the kind of thing I ought to like. But the execution just doesn't land, sounding fussy, busy, thin, cold, lacking throughlines and soul, more collaged than performed

#3649 Rozi Plain - What a Boost

3.5/5 Plain's voice is full of promise and wistful mystery, the music is patient, lupine, elliptical, strange. a view as wide as the horizon

#3648 Bonny Doon - Longwave

4/5 wonderfully straightforward and chill. strums and mutters about how things actually are, for you to float in. and the songs aren't flashy, but you feel people playing them. fuckin solid.

#3647 Premiata Forneria Marconi - Per Un Amico

4/5 part of the appeal of prog is the sheer ambition, that building of a rocket meant for the moon, and while so many crash and burn or recede into theater, sometimes a band really gets there. Here's a rare case where all that complexity and pomposity achieves something like transcendence, overwhelms your intellect and sweeps what left to another place

#3646 Marillion - Clutching at Straws

3/5 you've got to admire the commitment, the withering story at its core, prog complexity deployed to illustrate disorientation and loss of control. But it's just so indulgent and ornate, playing like Collinsey emo, never landing actual empathy

#3645 Dommengang - No Keys

3/5 those riffs so heavy, muscular structures striding through the bullshit of 2019 - but that effortless, hooky irresistiblity of Love Jail was lost somewhere along the way

#3644 Happy the Man - Happy the Man

3.5/5 fun, but in that kind of studied classical sense of playfulness, a dalliance from the norms of form and don't you get it? not anything that's actual fun in any way that your body would understand. Fun like good whiskey, not like the cheap stuff -- enjoyable sure but not fun exactly at all

#3643 Crack the Sky - Crack the Sky

4.5/5 there were a handful of prog bands you could call playful, in a classical bullshit sense (see, say, Happy the Man) but this might the only prog album where you felt like the band was having any actual fucking _fun; was interested in you having some too, in an actual rock and roll sense. There's all those start-stops and strange Scary structures, but it's in the service of humor, headbobbing, maybe even dancing. Goddamn delightful, Thin Lizzy / Cheap Trick listenable, with all that arty archness just there to put a hitch in your hipmoves. Killer fucking album flow (Robots for Ronnie aside) too

#3642 Can - Future Days

4/5 as loose, organic, inevitable as krautrock can be. Unperformed, more likely discovered, buried in ash and rubble, a earthen lesson to '73, today, later. Brilliant, patient jams unspooling

#3641 Magma - Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh

3.5/5 ain't nothing like it, credit for that. A yelping, churning blood ritual, building to a fever pitch, keening vocals falling all over themselves as the master arrives

#3640 Ami Dang - Parted Plains

3/5 all the production is lush, inventive, enveloping. But the Sitar, theoretically the star of the show, is out of place, scattered, distracting. Frustrating.

#3639 Caravan - In the Land of Grey and Pink

3/5 this's what happens when the bass player is the singer - the basslines are so high in the mix, they pull focus and reduce the rest of the countless instruments to texture and its a damn shame. That balance works on the funkier, catchier tracks like the opener and title track -- which are fucking great! But man. That last epic should be catnip. But it unspools as meandering jazz noodling, the bass overwhelming the solos, an ugly, indulgent sidelong slog

#3638 UV-TV - Glass

3.5/5 all the clash and clatter blurs together, for better or worse, a frantically busy wall of sound like punkrock shoegaze. The hurricane's got a kind eye or two, but it all starts and ends in howling

#3637 Kansas - Leftoverture

2.5/5 oversmooth pop and big dumb hard rock tarted up with an affectation of prog's complexity and a legitimate portion of its pretentiousness. The worst of both worlds

#3636 Deerhunter - Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?

3.5/5 Deerhunter's long been cloaked in a resigned, approachable misery, shading the darkest sentiments with sunnier sounds, only descending into the depths under cover of darkness.

But here's their first post-2016 album, when the banal inevitability of the end of everything has truly become clear, and their tack suddenly feels natural. On second track No One's Sleeping, a classic Deerhunter chug sweetens the medicine, muttered references to the Village Green and Golden Pond, to things gone, and soon to be gone. 

#3635 Madmadmad - Proper Music

3/5 when these guys play live the drums/bass/guitar bring a little unpredictable funk edge, the electronics get bent and flayed with rough edges; there's a negotiation between press-play motorik and knob-twiddling jamminess. That conflict's lost here though. It's all catchy, building up slowly, but nothing feels spontaneous - there's no life, no danger, song after song ending after a polite three and a half minutes

#3634 Bob Seger - Live Bullet

4/5 draws heavily from Beautiful Loser, but finds the spark in its songs that the studio couldn't capture. A rollicking ramble of classic covers puts the whole thing over the top. The Silver Bullet band is electric, Seger is relentless - these guys know how to rock and roll and this cracking performance proves it

#3633 Bob Seger - Beautiful Loser

3/5 Seger's got some classics, but these aren't they. The country-flecked stuff's a good time, but there's too many sappy ballads and B- swings at 50s rollick

#3632 Nils Frahm - All Encores

3/5 love Nils Frahm, he's got a wonderful touch, but this 80 minute set of keyboard wanderings is a little too slight, a little too patient, ends up a little boring.

Exception for Harmonium in the Well, which needs every one of its 694 seconds to weave its spell of resigned isolation

#3631 Zip-Tie Handcuffs - Warm Shadows

3.5/5 rock solid rock with busy beats and silky-smooth gear changes from high to low and back again. I like it; 90s me would've loved it

#3630 Harenemuri - Harutosyura

3.5/5 packed with frantic energy: frayed post-punk guitars vs. laptop electronics vs. tacky pop-metal vs. pure idol choruses, shot through with endless clipped rap-singing. More annoying // more pleasant than it sounds; disorienting - anxious - joyful

#3629 Camel - Mirage

4/5 my kind of prog, knotted and swervy, but engaged with the human experience, interested in taking you on an adventure, aware of your limits, alternating tests and rests. With a damn fine eye for melody too. A good trip

#3628 Gentle Giant - Octopus

2.5/5 baroque, obtuse, purple nonsense, and I say that as someone who _likes _prog. Why just have a melody when you could hocket it hither and tither till it falls apart? Why pace your music in confirmation or thoughtful defiance of human expectation when you could scatter starts and stops as if mastered by some unknowable math equation? "Why not when you could" asked endlessly until unlistenable, then a little more

#3627 Blackwater Holylight - Veils of Winter

2.5/5 all those guitar tones and layered vocals blur together into a pleasant shoegazey haze. But the sound's just not heavy enough, not committed enough to pure stoner sludge, not otherwise bold enough to justify such a willfully plodding, hookless stance

#3626 Pottery - No. 1

4.5/5 seven little adventures. You know how Sonic spins in place in a little ball before launching through some swooping labyrinth - turn down the colors and put that in slow motion and that's the Pottery experience. Cool patience. Neo-motorik putting the groove on a treadmill before letting it loose to run, slack grooves that curl all the way around and crack. Effortlessly exciting, some brash child of Pavement and the Strokes

#3625 Sacred Paws - Run Around The Sun

4/5 a delight! Sunny, dancable, with double-hot indie arpegiations and beats leaning ever forward in African ellipses. Confident, bright, bristling with easy talent - one to watch

#3624 Natalia Lafourcade - Musas

3.5/5 pristine production, an effortlessly evocative voice, endless sprightly latin flourishes: it's an utterly pleasant listen. But truly, be warned, it is _squeaky clean, and look out for a clam of a That's Amore cover right in the middle

#3623 MGMT - Little Dark Age

3/5 quirky, warped. A more evocative take on purple 80s nostalgia than most. But outside the hazy atmosphere (and that great first song) its hook-light and unmemorable

#3622a Mother Hips - Live at Fernwood Resort 05-19-18

Listen (watch?) here!

4/5 a gorgeous night captured clearly. The Mother Hips strike the balance of jammy meandering, country-rock warmth, and soulful shimmer. And goddamn those transcendent Neil Young guitar tones put it over the top

#3622 Mid-Air Thief - Gongjoong Doduk

3.5 Crumbling is his masterpiece (so far!), but Mid-Air Thief's debut is a worthwhile peek at the genesis of the method: melodic and rhythmic snippets used as raw materials, stretched, blended, ripped and woven into sonic mixed-media. Disorienting, clever, occasionally a lot of fun, flashes of Cornelius and The Books

#3621 Mid-Air Theif - Crumbling

5/5 gorgeous.

so many soft layers, like chiffon, like a silk croissant.

the feel rises like transoceanic waves, subtle, unexpected, inevitable

flow. a universe deeply crafted yet seeming to emerge in real time

one hundred instruments, restrained, gesturing into your headspace as you pass through in turn

--

I've listened to this straight through a dozen times, and i don't find that kind of time very often these days. Effortlessly pleasant, sizzling with details and detours to dig into. Capturing that thrill of The Books, The Go Team, Prefuse, all those early aughts legends -- when maybe music was something unknowable and filled with possibility, that could spin a thread beyond your line of sight, tempting you to follow

#3620 Michael Christmas - Baggy Eyes

3.5/5 cheeky. hazy. easy weaving complex. clumsy now and then and not that worried about it. aspirational, that looseness. maybe what you should strive for is to chill the fuck out, Christmas throws out there, in this year of our lord twenty nineteen.

Smooth production, killer flow.

man they say tick tick a lot

#3619 Rik Ocasic - Beatitude

3.5/5 uninterested in you. plodding along with sunglasses on. boring for a while there, that strut to nowhere, but after a while you match stride and you're feeling kinda cool goddammit

#3618 Sergei Rachmaninoff / Berliner Philharmoniker / Lorin Maazel (1984) - Symphonic Dances, Op.45; Intermezzo "Aleko"; Vocalise, Op.34

3.5/5 the fuck do I know what to do with classical. It does move, gesture to motion. Lyrical, evocative, sprightly, alive, but only as alive a most excellent oil painting can be, in 2019. Goes decent with basketball, actually, though

#3617 Empath - Active Listening: Night on Earth

4/5 how do you even be this scuzzy and this pretty;; if empath was a girl I'd fall in love. all the clattering headless excitement of the moment, slathered in the gauze of memory;; the snap of a lolling head back into a moment of blistering awareness, the haze of drunken abandon and wist, may it never fade

#3616 Melody's Echo Chamber - Bon Voyage

3.5/5 starts off paralyzingly French, unfolds into something much stranger and more psychedelic and paralyzingly French. It's all so archly, willfully, baroque! And in a way I love its endless tricks and flourishes. But they mount and mount and bury any semblance of a throughline, until you're moaning stop faffing about and do the fucking thing already, like the science of sleep, but music

#3615 Saint Rich - Beyond the Drone

4/5 Delicate Steve spinoff that's at least as lush and hooksome and packed with juicy guitar tones as the best in the Steve-proper discography. The band-proper sound and rock-proper setups make the extended instrumental outros all the sweeter (Officer! You Ain't Worth the Night!). Thoroughly, simply enjoyable, a mirror image of the latest (electronic, disappointing) DS album

#3614 Penelope Isles - Until the Tide Creeps In

3/5 chiming, twinkling indie like they don't make much anymore. Pretty, but doesn't give you much to write about

#3613 Yak - Pursuit of Momentary Happiness

4/5 bewilderingly rockist, leading with a headfake towards King Gizzard, slathered in late Beatles references. Then comes waves of horns, thunderously scuzzy basslines, garagey rants, offkilter sneering, stomping, swirling, microproggy song structures - a reminder that psychedelia needs to look inward and outward, not backward (cc tame impala)

#3612 Delicate Steve - Till I Burn Up

3/5 sheds any pretense of a band, going full Ratatat with the clicks and swooshes and the so VEry perfect guitars. Lacks the soul of his earlier stuff, but you can't deny it's pretty

#3611 Red Belmont - Into My Own

3/5 big, full, borderline-shoegaze walls of guitars make for a pleasant washaway, but the bass is way too high in the mix, pulling focus, and the songs just sound muddy by the end

#3610 TVAM - Psychic Data

3/5 starts off strong, with just enough fuzz in the distorted sheen, moving along a menacing pace. But there's too many dalliances into puddly nonsense down the road to keep the momentum up

#3609 The Comet is Coming - Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery

4/5 more groovesome, less daring, and ultimately less exciting than companion album Afterlife, but still, a generous dose of heady synths, spiked with adventurous sax gestures, ready to move asses into another dimension

#3608 The Comet is Coming - The Afterlife

4.5/5 transcendental shit. holy shit those sax lines on the last two minutes of the opener. Beats that move forward without deigning to demarcate measures, the whole, rumbling, thrashing, flickering sound lurching forward inevitable and on fire.

All three members are at the top of their game: synths more otherworldly, drums more entrancing, sax closer to god than ever before. As fine a combination of experimental and enjoyable as you're liable to find this year

#3607 Session Victim - Listen to Your Heart

3.5/5 listenable, laid-back, largely unremarkable house, for a while there. But this finds its stride on the second half and swings for the dancefloor: Almost Midnight and Up to Rise are a dynamite one-two punch, and you wonder if it was the plan all along

#3606 Tony Molina - Confront the Truth

3.5/5 so short! so precious for it. little ditties, small sentiments, here and gone like a leaf in the wind, like the all of this damn autumn, like elliot smith. understatedly, warmly wonderful

#3605 French Vanilla - How Am I Not Myself?

4/5 its fuckin sax week. perfectly hooky underspeed new wave kicked up a full notch by some brash, brilliant sax riffs. Stabby guitars, yelpy vocals, and that damn sax ring helixical

#3604 Deeper - Deeper

2.5/5 chugging backing and samey arpeggios and vocal exclamations adding up to just nothing. Too slow, too consistent, too anonymous. Suburban postpunk

#3603 Meatraffle - Bastard Music

2.5/5 something about the production, or the tempo, or the kind of empty songwriting, but man is this __boring, like sub-b-side Damon Albarn "rarities"

#3602 Barker - Utility

3.5/5 a slippery devil, bending, warping, slipping, glitching little beats and tones, but never betraying the listener. Subtly inventive, if only for how Barker makes all his endless microexperiments consistently listenable

#3601 Fleetwood Mac - Tango in the Night

3/5 sure is a pop album, with a slow, persistent pulse that sounds like it's meant to inspire a kind of light, almost entirely vertical, bounce-dancing in time with its choruses. Better than most such silliness, but doesn't come close to escaping the gravity of the 80s

#3600 Viagra Boys - Consistency of Energy

3.5/5 all the unstoppable rollick of their later stuff, but they haven't quite honed their wit yet - this never gets past the most scuzzy foundations

#3599 Idles - Joy as an Act of Resistance

4/5 as perfect as cover art comes. context betrays a wedding punchup, but it's got all the visual energy of a joyfully rough moshpit, the exact kind Idles sounds ready to inspire.

Rollicking hard, with rolling physical energy and a sneering sense of humor, with arguments against James Bond as a hero, and advice like Never Fight a Man with a Perm, and an anti-nationalist screed in support of Danny Nedelko. Earnest, direct, firey, and yes, joyful.

Because that's the perfect title, too. Because punk can be fun. And punk must be angry. And joy can be an act of resistance, and this might be the perfect soundtrack.

#3598 Stay Down - Artless Wimper

3.5/5 about as hardcore as you can sound on a recording, streamed on the internet, into a workday. I don't know what more you could do. Screams pegged to 10, no speed spared, distortion squeals filling every empty space. Awful to listen to, but you gotta admire the commitment

#3597 Busdriver - Electricity is on Our Side

4.5/5 Busdriver's never sounded so effortless. His barely-sequitur rhymes just burble up, like heat from geothermal vents, like sunrise crossing clouds. And the production similarly wandering, understatedly strange. Nothing rushed. None of the overt zaniness of Temporary Forever, no forced pivots.

Was a double album the secret? It's such an obvious fit for this kind of eccentric and prolific.

You can feel Regan Farquhar in here for the first time maybe, if only in fragments. First person rhymes gone mirror ball.

A true rap odyssey, climaxing in a glorious Daedelus reuinion on Exploding Slowly, the euphoria of  Pull the Sky Closer. But even then, we end in subtle dissonance, and it all echoes.

It works as an album, a sprawling hip hop Mellon Collie, an opus decades in the making.

#3596 Vivian Girls - Memory

3/5 slick, dense, toothsome shoegaze shimmer. Good! Good at that. But so uniformly dense it doesn't leave space to let anything hook or stick

#3595 Gong Gong Gong - President Piano Co. Tape

3.5/5 a study in vibration! Patient, skeletal garage-surf riffs, fizzling with reverb and harmonics. Guitar and bass and the space makes three.

#3594 Daniel Rossen - Silent Hour / Golden Mile

3.5/5 horns and strums and strings and voices to fully fill the night that immediately surrounds you, a weighted blanket in your winter

#3593 Louis Cole - Album 2

3.5/5 enigmatic night-pop, pretty and miniature with a Pet Sounds intimacy

#3592 Brittany Howard - Jaime

3.5/5 soulful and smooth, with moments of raw directness to rival Nina and Gil. The sprawling, bewildering production's a trip. But first-take feel's a double edged sword. It's a fine line between raw and half-baked, and Howard wanders off and loses the audience more than once

#3591 M83 - Digital Shades Vol 1

3/5 a collection of Gonzales' synthy experiments. He does know how to write a song that crawls up into your heart and breaks it. Pretty, but scattered. It doesn't play too well as an album, you need some actual songs to break this kind of stuff up

#3590 M83 - DSVII

4/5 Anthony Gonzales has come a long way since the first Digital Shades volume. 2007's edition was a direct play to your emotions, a parasite. Volume 2 is pointed outward, a sprawling piece of instrumental worldbuilding that invites you to experience and explore, that gestures at nostalgia in the distance. It's peaceful, strange, evoking the best of the band's earlier stuff

#3589 Keith Jarrett - The Koln Concert

4.5/5 the context around this one makes the magic, forcing the improvisations out of their usual patterns, bringing a kind of rock and roll fury, demanding sounds that don't come easily. Jarrett's moan-singing, the endless rhythmic textures, the lurching structure, every section impossible to predict and inevitable. Endlessly compelling

#3588 Death and Vanilla - Are You a Dreamer?

3/5 shoegazey shimmer, with a triphoppy, languid rhythm section. Spacey, pretty, but not especially memorable

#3587 VA - World Spirituality Classics 2: The Time for Peace is Now: Gospel Music About Us

4/5 power and pain, all the fire of funk and soul, grasping at the biggest questions. An exciting, sprawling, smooth-flowing collection

#3586 Jenny Hval - The Practice of Love

3.5/5 clever synth puzzles that move, with Hval and her guest vocalists bringing an uncomfortable sense of intimacy. Someone fascinating, standing too close, sharing too much, mystery and directness sending conflicting signals, thrilling and exhausting

#3585 Blankenbirge - More

3.5/5 textbook very pretty shoegaze, with notes that go forever and notes made of a million tiny notes that, while short-lived individually, collectively, go on forever. Gets a bit samey but maybe that's just how the day goes by

#3584 Viagara Boys - Street Worms

4.5/5 as truly menacing as I've heard a band sound in years, as genuinely, hissingly scuzzy as the Stooges. Sebastian Murphy's a fucking force, and the band's inevitable. That sax is a knife. Didn't think they made em like this anymore.

#3583 Fews - Into Red

3/5 guitars and synths have a good rollick together, bringing plenty of 90's shimmer, but most of the songs are (and I say this as someone who _likes repetition!) dully repetitive. Too prickly to hypnotize, too indistinct to excite

#3582 Gum Takes Tooth - Arrow

3.5 a fetching helix of skitterey rock energy, ambient hums, and truly raw synths; sawtooth tigers ripping songs' spines out. It's a shame its all so doomy and serious though, this sound could make for a doozy of a raveup

#3581 Josefin Ohrn and The Liberation - Repetitions

3.5/5 much like Gnoomes (who do a remix here), this has that lovely textured clipalong energy and chiming beauty, but lacks the killer instinct for pacing and drags a bit. Lucid Sapphire's a jam though

#3580 Gnoomes - Tschak!

4.5/5 As gorgeously hypnotic as they come, a band that knows just how fast they can take the corners to thrill without jostling. Every turn is banked, the lights flick by in rhythm; roll your head back and enjoy the G's.

Straddles krauty rock and trancy electronics, and as with Mu bring the texture - sheen, shimmer, fizz, buzz -- whoosh. Never boring, always pretty, flowing so smoothly you lose track of time. What could be better?

#3579 Gnoomes - Mu!

4.5/5 These guys check every box imaginable for me, that soft motorik, urgency pitched against slowrolling repetition, all sizzling, overflowing with texture. All the fizzle and fray of shoegaze with some secret ingredients that send you off, rolling with a dog with a sweater on a spaceship fast and smooth. A rare combination of thrilling and relaxing, transmuting that hum of anxiety into forward momentum.

#3578 Iggy Pop - Apres

3/5 You gotta admire Pop's nerve to make an album this French and different. His voice's calcified into something endless over the years. But it's hard to say you'd bother listening if this wasn't Iggy Pop, and its hard to imagine his fans would care for it. Who's this for? James Newell Osterberg Jr. himself, I suppose. Bold move.

#3577 Iggy Pop - Free

3/5 at its best, and this is a weird compliment, reminds me of Shatner's Has Been. Pop's voice is deep and resonant, and his ruminations on the grand finite do resonate.

Love's Missing brings those horns and damn.

But James Bond and Dirty Sanchez are the names of two songs and, well, they don't have the same heft. We Are the People has pathos of the moment, undercut by the guileless Dylan that follows. Flashes of a Blackstar kind of reflection, but takes shortcuts to relevance, is less for it

#3576 Somei Satoh - Mandara Trilogy

3/5 drones as patient as time, the soundtrack to the ending all things, disinterested in being listened to

#3575 Lower Dens - The Competition

2.5/5 Lower Dens still fail to live up to their early promise, samey mid-tempos with no hooks to speak of. And wow do I hate that cover art.

#3574 Tredici Bacci - Amore Per Tutti

2.5/5 there's flashes of cowboy grace and euro cooing cool, but mostly this sounds like session musician-made library music, with community-theater vocals lent from friends

#3573 Big Bliss - At Middle Distance

3/5 the kind shimmering production and Interpol atmosphere that I'd normally be into, but it all blurs together, rotating unchanging in the dark

#3572 Sports Team - Keep Walking!

3.5/5 the second coming of Team Spirit, sunny power-pop like we don't much get anymore. Great deep vocals, pretty guitars for days, clipping along like light through trees

#3571 Squid - Town Centre

4.5/5 Squid's secret weapon is that horn, a force multiplier on a killer combination of ambient groove and spikey thrills. Or maybe it's that singer, that's a fucking deadly yelp. The first band I've ever heard that started with the Talking Heads and didn't just end there; these dudes are off and running

#3570 Damnation - The Damnation of Adam Blessing

3.5/5 A great lost gem of 60s rock, with an excellent garagey singer, a tight band, and just the right amount of stoned atmosphere

#3569 Chance the Rapper - 10 Day

4/5 Chance's first mixtape is effortlessly all over the place, casually running off endless rhymes over clever production moves. Not much of it stands out (Family aside), but it's a shockingly assured debut to make at 19. I'd be predicting big things if I didn't already know

#3568 Ryan Weitzel - Skies

3.5/5 Catchy, ragged indie rock, with delightfully weightless production, flittering drums running wild under the mix, silverey guitars over top, with an agreeable Clap Your Hands yelp to round it out. Weitzel's one to keep an eye on, could be the next Kelley Stoltz.

#3567 Tool - Fear Inoculum

3.5/5 slower, more hypnotic, more stoner than Tool's ever been. I'm down with all the long songs. It'll melt an hour and a half right good, but 7empest (: /) is the one time the band really perks up, and rest of the album sounds halfhearted in retrospect

#3566 The Woolen Men - Post

3/5 a brew of excellent influences, angular guitars, hopeful yelps, and one stunningly close swerve to All My Friends. But there's some center missing from those orbits, no real stakes, no real heart, few actual chances, all a bit composed; only Shadowline brings real urgency

#3565 Solid Space - Space Museum

3.5/5 Minimal, icy post-punk, catchier than most. Those fuzzy old synths don't mind if you smile, sway, maybe even dance a bit, as disassociated sci-fi mutterings and tincan beats clip by. Expertly crafted, surprisingly human

#3564 Snapped Ankles - Stunning Luxury

3.5/5 still love their relentless, textured, harrowing energy, hypnotic and strangely dancable. Stunning Luxury lacks the memorable, unexpected moments that highlighted Come Play the Trees, and plays as a more as a single, endless groove, for better or worse. They've nailed this sound, I'm cautiously optimistic they'll find something thrilling when it comes time for some 3rd-album chancetaking

#3563 Norma Tenega - Walkin' My Cat Named Dog

3/5 Tenega's got great ragged edges and galloping energy, the rock songs are thrilling, sounding full and close. The folk songs are folk songs.

#3562 Kevin Ayers - Bananamour

4.5/5 by the time I got off the bus it was torrential. 5 steps out and I was as soaked as I was going to get, may as well walk it. Blinding at first, a chest full of bracing cold, and then like a perfect Northeast squall, the sky started to clear, the hand of god sifting its fingers through the clouds, yellow and grey and flashes of blue, just as the soaring horns of When Your Parents Go to Sleep hit their stride, and I was in no hurry at all.

Assured, soulful, patient, cascading with exalted backing chorus and endless washes and wavering ruts of the blues. Unexpected, humbly thrilling.

#3561 Cloud Becomes Your Hand - Rest in Fleas

3.5/5 blisteringly inventive, only occasionally pleasant. See Menomena for this kind of man-machine confusion, the kind of composition that feels bracingly inorganic, but too strange to be generated, a willful alien revolt against structure. When it feels good its great, but man, man this's only casually interested in being listened to

#3560 100 Gecs - 1000 Gecs

3.5/5 as I said to Aaron

i listened to this album and i hated it at first but some time around stupid horse I kinda started to like it, and then the rest actually has a kind of mad sentimentality to it that's pretty nice. once you kind of get tuned into its bonkers wavelength its a lot of fun. good find, thanks!

add a reiteration that it's really quite unpleasant to listen to, but in the vein of the best of Baltimore, there's undeniably thrilling adventurousness here. The possibility of next-album iteration is exciting, whether it goes swings for more listenable or less I'd wager it's gonna be worth hearing

#3539 Thee Oh Sees - Face Stabber

4/5 This is the natural path of Thee Oh Sees sound, a single 80 minute track (cowardly they hide behind 14 song titles). Those endless loping baselines, those simple driving beats  As a single track it becomes unassailable, a stoner metal masterpiece with flecks of punk'ed yelp, rolling and growling, hesitating tactically, but never stopping, time-melting pitstops spiked with near-death swerves - be not fooled

#3538 Kishi Bashi - Omoiyari

3.5/5 Ishibashi continues to make the prettiest indie this side of Bon Iver making soft love to the Shins. Everything here is hooksome, gentle. Why does it make me feel so deeply sad? It's a wonderful, tragic trick, a flower unfolding to die. Like those cover birds, free and fake, reminders of things soon lost

#3537 Jeremy Jay - Airwalker

4/5 the space in these songs, echoing off light-polluted starscapes, wandering, with the whole night ahead of them and no place to go, but for the hope of a date with Zevon's ghost; watching, enchanted by the time spent in their aura

#3536 Kelley Stoltz - Que Aura

3/5 big fan of Stoltz, big fan of reinvention, but this is a move even further into bass leads, into electronic hum, and I don't think it runs with the grain of his songwriting. Songs are mostly aimless, repetitive, dusted with near-hooks and glancing off hypnosis but never striking home

#3535 Kelley Stoltz - The Scuzzy Inputs of Willie Weird

4/5 props to Stoltz, he commits to his weird persona and it works. Like -- the less you expect the better it works, and the album bakes in this lowered expectation, some mutation of Beck and Zappa, manipulating itself into your confidence. And to be clear, less great than each, but never heard anything quite like this dusty, mad little world.

Also, props to Goodbye Porcupine Hat, best-named jazz almost-cover around.

#3234 Particle - Live 9/7/14

3/5 Online here! So much pitch bend! So much bass groovery! It swings, in its way, perfectly good to bob to, and I dig the keyboard lead focus, but there's no real soul here. Even the Hornitz sound out of place.

#3533 Kwiaty - Kwiaty

3.5/5 solid record held back by being very familiar (the very 90's underground/shoegaze sound) and very unfamiliar (the to-me unintelligible Polish lyrics). Also, too many slow songs. But flashes of frission

#3532 Je Suis France - Pro Smell

2.5/5 Love these guys, love the nerve to barf out all these analog noise nonsense dalliances and call them an album, but its a meandering fuckabout mess and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone

#3531 Oso Oso - Basking in the Glow

3/5 I like what these guys got going, all those big grasping sentiments and shameless chords, pure pop-punk exaltation. But they stick to the same nasal vocals, the same middle tempos, they made the same song 10 times and frontloaded the best few versions - need to find another dimension

#3530 The Car is on Fire - Lake and Flames

3/5 TCioF veers off the dancepunk road to nowhere, sands down its spikes, adds a lot of atmosphere and production, and ends up with something much richer. A sprawling, 23-song indie romp, packed with ideas, none of which really grab me, but I admire the band's nerve to become something wildly more interesting than their blueprint

#3529 The Car is on Fire - The Car is on Fire

2.5/5 Brittle dancepunk, the yelp of the Dismemberment Plan prickled into Hot Hot Heat bristle. The nasal vocals are pretty rough, and the angular hopscotching gets exhausting

#3528 The Car is on Fire - Ombarrops!

3/5 TCioF continues to evolve on their last album, bouncing from idea to idea. Songs morph constantly, electronics and production tricks in every exposed seam.

It's all very clever, but the lack of personality and urgency hold the band back. If these songs are about anything (sleeping seems to be a theme??) it's more of a puzzle than I can solve, and tricks are no substitute for hooks

#3527 Kelley Stoltz - To Dreamers

4.5/5 Stoltz truly hits his stride here, confidently making propulsive, pretty songs, effortlessly packed with hooks, finding every possible permutation of tempo, pop, rock, jangle, and fuzz. And then there's that special thing we get so seldom these days: a gorgeous, showstopping closer, the kind of beauty that waits in the wings of every future listen, putting every song on a path to somewhere; Bottle Up's an indie rock gem worthy of the Shins and the Kingsbury Manx.

The kind of album I'd have been obsessed with in my younger days.

After 8 albums and 15 years, a breakthrough seems unlikely. Stoltz is probably destined to be cult hero at best. But with songwriting talent like his, never count him out - this is his masterpiece, so far.

#3526 Kelley Stoltz - Circular Sounds

3.5/5 maybe it's a trick of the title and the cover, but there's something _round about these songs, all soft sounds, elliptical loops, lulling and pleasant, with just enough Kinksy bristle to keep you stirring. Great background music, in the best way possible

#3525 Kelley Stoltz - Below the Branches

3.5/5 a transitional album for Stoltz, missing the warm, open feel of his debut, but lacking the consistent pop punch of this later stuff. Too many songs lack a plan, toddling along at midtempo before just ending. But there's a couple of great flashes, the goofy joy of Birdies Singing, lost Kinks masterpieces like Memory Collector and Prank Calls

#3524 Kelley Stoltz - Antique Glow

4/5 Spotify's image for this album is different than the actual album cover - I don't know where it came from, but its perfect. It's all there: Stoltz, his piano, and the apartment the album was recorded in, all high ceiling and extra space. It's that space that's the star here, lending an enchanting breadth and warmth to the sound, letting all those extra touches bloom. A minor Americana masterpiece

#3523 Kelley Stoltz - Natural Causes

3/5 pretty moments and Stoltz can't help but pepper hooks here and there, but his recent slower, duller turn continues to underwhelm

#3522 Eno Moebius Roedelius - After the Heat

3/5 Cluster and Eno, having shipped their practice tapes a couple times, figure out their electronic trickery and dickery enough to make some some songs. There's slow moments given time to breathe, landscapes, melodies, reflection; enough structure from which to appreciate the squonkery. It's still not _great, but at least they came with table stakes.

#3521 Cluster, Eno - Cluster & Eno

2.5/5 Cluster's previous album sounded like clumsy Eno experiments, and now we're official. Lots of "hey that's a weird noise, keep making it, here's another one", too little music that evokes mood or setting

#3520 Cluster - Sowiesoso

2.5/5 beatless and boring for krautrock, tuneless and ugly for ambient. Adventurous in invention but lazy as musicmaking execution

#3519 Bon Iver - i,i

3/5 I listened to this on a very long walk home, and again on a long bus ride, in spaces more befitting its charms than my usual work soundtracking, and it still left me cold. 22 A Million got by because it was so adventurous in its explosion of the Bon Iver sound, and this has touches of that, but mostly it's unsticky crooning and production ornamentation (Hey Ma the only exception, and even that's half the gutpunch of Over Soon or Creeks).

#3518 Justin Jay - Everything Will Come Together, pt. 1

3/5 pleasant enough, but halfhearted and slight. So midtempo and consistent and unadventurous compared to Home. Everything Will Come Together, pt 1, makes me want to remind Jay that no it won't, not on its own (or maybe it's outlining a plan to make pt 2 the good one?)

#3517 Sparks - Hello Young Lovers

3.5/5 for my money, I'll take this over Lil' Beethoven for my late-era Sparks repetition-fest. More quietly strange, without the sharp edges of cringey bitterness. From the unpredictably direct opener to the closing howl against obscurity, everything swoops in placing, seemingly content to amuse itself. 20 albums deep, this might just be Sparks finally out to pasture, humming to themselves about what might have been

#3516 Brian Witzig - The Iron Horse

3.5/5 funky enough, and gets the production dust and pop right, that bit of retro mythology elevates, everything a bit road-worn. pretty good poker music

#3515 The Sound Defects - Volume 2

3.5/5 organs and horns and beats and muttered sentiments - smooth with a dusty, drifting cool. Better than most DJ Shadow-and-descendant albums, but not especially inspired. Tough to see why you'd listen to this over even Deadringer

#3514 Duval Timothy - 2 Sim

4/5 lived experience of African-British diaspora seeping, pouring through atmosphere, bracing like a dam breaking again and again. So clearly expressed, floated under your nose by the softest clouds of piano until you can't help inhale and fall

#3513 Sparks - Lil' Beethoven

3/5 regarded as Sparks' big modern masterpiece, but nah.

Repetition's the name of the game, again, this time over lots of strings. It's an inventive stab at not-rock. The opener's brazenly minimal as they come, and there's some knotty little jokes woven into the repetition; Carnegie Hall shows what it tells, and Your Call's Very Important to Us is a fun Zooropian piece of lived microdystopia.

But Sparks' streak of bitterness crosses a line into embarrassing this time out, ranting about modern bands and suburban homeboys, whining endlessly about women who only care about money -- it's gross, and undercuts the detached cool the rest of the album worked so hard to build

#3512 Sparks - Balls

3/5 it's easy enough to assign intentions to Sparks' previous albums of the era, but this is a weird one. Leaning right into big dumb British electronica a half decade too late, it's not quite a pop grasp, but its hard to imagine anyone being especially proud of it. Not awful to listen to exactly, but hollow and forgettable

#3511 Sparks - Plagiarism

3/5

This is bullshit! you can hear the Maels shout, finally getting a critical crumb or two, after decades of intermittent brilliance

So sure make those great old songs again, with strings, electronics, and faith no more (?) The album kicks off with, what else, a remake of Pulling Rabbits Out of A Hat, their ode to empty excellence, now swarthed in every flourish a symphony can afford. This Town Ain't Big enough, in particular, benefits from all that excess, pumping an overblown song past bursting into delightfully ridiculous.

But nobody needs hard-driving dance remixes or tacky guitar-driven versions of the rest, sounding cheap, like copyright-dodging karaoke versions. Unnecessary, if strangely understandable

#3510 King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard - Fishing for Fishies

3.5/5 cosmic, goofy boogie all night long, the boys sound like they're having a right good time, loose as the Dead with a darker tinge and a staggering stomp. As good a combination of the band's heavy and light sides as you'll find

#3509 Ty Segall - Deforming Lobes

4/5 a couple bars of riffing in, Ty stops the song, clarifies how a drum fill goes, apologizes, and the band kicks back in on the one. 15 seconds later, the fill comes. Budda-budda-budda-buppppa. Duly teased, it hits like fucking lightning.

And its the critical moment of the whole record, this moment of vulnerability, recovery, and  _payoff. A testament to how tight the band it, and how loose the sound feels -- its a thrill.

Segall's not a born frontman. His songs aren't _about much other than an excuse to stomp and shred. But that band's in top form here, so loud, so dedicated, 35 minutes is right. This isn't a concert experience, because that's not the sound. It's moment to moment to moment and that 8 songs is all it takes to give you the idea so

#3508a Chance the Rapper - The Big Day

3/5 pretty enough, packed with little rhyme puzzles, with no hunger or stakes at all. Chance in a Life is Good shirt, rapping from his porch with some flow-killing skits stuffed in between. It's a bad sign that Randy Newman's the guest that fits in best. I'm glad he's made it, married his lady, is appreciating things, and is honest enough to speak from that place, it just doesn't make for an especially essential listen

#3508 Sparks - Gratuitous Sax and Senseless Violins

4.5/5 Sparks go away for 6 years and come back with a revelation. A wonderfully bizarre bent-pop record with songs riffing on Frank Sinatra, Charlie Parker, Gone with the Wind, Liberace, and Chinese filmmaker Tsui Hark. You know, 90's stuff.

From its Confidential magazine cover and blaring sensationalism, its an album out of time, a frantic thrashing against celebrity, peaking with the flayed I Thought I Told You to Wait in the Car. From ruminations on the ennui of owning the BBC, to trancy micro-experiments - it's a complete 180 from their pop-grasping lows.

But the signature song is The Ghost of Liberace, a pop fairy tale of what remains of fame, reflected in the story of a man once scourged by Confidential itself. It's hard not to see it as autobiographical. Elegiac and hopeful that one will be remembered fondly, it's Sparks accepting that it's better to burn out bright on your own terms. If this had been their last album, it would have been strangely perfect, but the story's got a couple twists yet

#3507 Sparks - Interior Design

2.5/5 the dying gasp of pop-desperate-era Sparks. Limp new-wave bopping and uncomfortably uncool ballads, it doesn't seem like their hearts were even into selling out anymore. The cover's all wrong too. An album made by nobody, mislabeled and misfiled

#3506 Ty Segall - First Taste

3.5/5 No guitars this time out? You wouldn't know it by the sound, we're spoiled by the breadth of Ty's fuzz arsenal, this all slots right in. Like many of Segall's many albums of the last few years, the gimmick is just a different route to the same place; this falls into the same blur as Fudge Sandwich, Joy, Emotional Mugger, and Ty Rex. It's no Ty Segall ('17) or Freedom's Goblin. A fine racket, but other than the refreshing Ice Plant, the clattering The Fall, and the screeching closer, nothing much sticks

#3505 Los Doltons - Siempre...Dos Doltons

3.5/5 scuzzy smooth perfection, rough-edged garage with a full-bodied Spanish croon. Some of the covers (Matrisuicidio!) out-energy the originals nicely, all a delight

#3504 Sparks - Music that You Can Dance To

2.5/5

Sparks goes all the way down the rabbithole, making music so pop it almost goes around the horn and is _about pop music. Almost!

Layered with the tackiest possible synths, these are just songs called Music You Can Dance To, Armies of the Night, and Let's Get Funky, which more or less do what they say on the tin. Fingertips sounds like a prescient dancepunk song without the cool:

Everybody say yeah! Everybody have a good time! Just one more time! Clap your hands just a little bit louder!

Again, it _almost works, you can _almost admire it, but it never escapes the orbit of its brazen intentions. Plus the songs just aren't very good to listen to

#3503 Sparks - Pulling Rabbits out of a Hat

2.5/5

if you want to understand the sixteen year, six-album fistfight with the world that this album kicked off, look no further than the title track.

You can almost picture the Maels having a beer with friends one night when, in a moment of wellmeaning drunken candor, someone drawls

"you guys are such talented songwriters! how come you've never had
you know
a hit?"

detached, one replies

"we could have, could have had dozens. If that was that's what we were going for"

And then Ron and Russel were challenged to prove it.

--

Of course, its not that Sparks were ever _aggressively disinterested in having a hit. But they'd never stooped to making something in the basest terms of what was popular. And in the mid-80's, stooping was a pretty all or nothing proposition.

And so with much swagger does this album kick off, announcing that, for my next trick, I will make pop music, and people will love it. And this is the easiest, most basic trick there is, the pulling a rabbit out of a hat of songwriting. And I have performed so much grander tricks: made a pauper a king, raised the titanic, made legitimately great music for a decade.

And even the choice of phrasing: I am pulling rabbits, one after another, out of this hat. Not one rabbit. Not out of multiple hats. I am _churning _these _hits _out until the room looks like the cover of fucking Hello Young Lovers.

But then the crux of the matter in the song's whelp of a chorus:

_pulling rabbits out of a hat
_pulling rabbits out of a hat

_all I get is polite applause!
_applause, applause, applause, applause, applause 

It is as fine a run of 11 words as you'll find in music, and 6 of them are the same one. A disdain for the payoff of this trick, that the applause is polite, that the appreciation is critical, but halfhearted, and certainly without commercial payoff. For all its confidence, the song betrays an anticipation that this all will fail. Polite applause, who needs it. But Russell continues!

Applause! he repeats again and again, desperate and ecstatic and failing, as if flogging one team of horses and being flogged by another.

is that all I get? god yes the applause! more, more you fallow fools!

it is cheap and hollow and its all that I want and there will never be enough.

a wracked, complicated song, sneering at the audience and desperate for its affection, wrenching itself ouroboran into operatic glam self-loathing. An overlooked art-pop gem.

--

Of course, Sparks was not successful. The album is packed cheap, bouncing pop songs, each packed with budget synths and endless repetition of the name of the song. There's flashes of wry humor, but nothing that matches the apparently-worthy-of-400-words opener, and certainly nothing unscathed by its brazen attempt to hit a single by scattershot.

It's like the Maels made this album on a bet, but they weren't really sure they wanted to win it.

--

Stick with us for Sparks Week 2 - The Repetition Era, where we'll see a descent into nothingness, a surprising resurgence, a swing at cosmic justice, and the most overrated ending since The Usual Suspects!

#3502 The Field - Infinite Moment

2.5/5 atmospheric and patient, which can go a long way. But not sparse enough to work as nothing, not focused enough to work as something. Did not cause thought or feeling.

#3501 Czar and Scott Allen - Soul Provider EP

3.5/5 the horn samples give a nice breezy contrast to the otherwise overdark drum and bass sound. got a good soulful feel, though some of the samples give me an uncomfortable case of the Mobys

#3500 Interpol - Marauder

3.5/5 That first song's a killer, that perfect rolling beat, that insistent energy - about as catchy as Interpol gets. The Rover's good fun too. When its at its best, this is Interpol's most straightforwardly enjoyable album. But they don't have an album's-worth of hooks in the clip, and without the dark magic of their early stuff it gets a bit lifeless by the end

#3498 Kuniyuki Takahashi - Feather World

4/5 an album united by patience, repetition, groove, and otherwise unbeholden. Interflows of space disco, jazz, ambient electronic, polyrhythmic getdown, accoustic folk

#3497 Corridor - Supermercado

3.5/5 brittle-to-breaking guitars chug and chime along to the lazy motorik and its all rather enjoyable to the post-post-punk lover, even if it never really goes for the throat (and plays all the more formless if you don't understand the French

#3496 Yasuaki Shimizu - IQ 179

4/5 see! This is why albums matter! There's songs on here so packed with enough crooning, saxes, and guitars that you'd call it as schlock. But the rest is so weird, alternately chopped to pieces, spare and breathful, repetitively nightmarish, endlessly neon, until it all melts into a pop-art experimental synthwave prophecy. I'm not sure I even like any of the weird songs on their own (title track in particular is a dud), but the combined effect is so hypnotic and strange that it's an enthralling listen.

#3495 Susumu Yokota - Symbol

4/5 we sample so many things, but not classical, not like this. girl talk for the erudite-adjacent, these little flickers of familiarity, looped and crossed across. overly intellectual and yet. right novel this, lush, pulling across time, soft and seductive

#3494 Daft Punk - BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix 1997

4/5

Listen here!

Never feel totally comfortable listing mixes etc here, but this is a gudn. That flow, and extra props to those old school turntable moves, making something more out of seconds of sounds, slamming those sliders. Praise to true scientists

#3493 Andy McKee - Art of Motion

3/5 dexterity incarnate, with all the feel and flow you can pull from one instrument with two hands, words where there are none. And god, whatever happens on that closer; devastating, unforgettable.

Though. Look. I get that this is the Andy show, and it's all about what he can do with just his guitar, and a certain crowd will appreciate the purity. But imagine what this could do if it would deign to spread from solo showiness, with a little bit of backing, say, with some William Tyler synths. This is a showcase, and sure, duly impressed, but solo jerkoffery can only go so far when it comes to actually reaching people (again, that last track aside, due respect

#3492 Chon - Grow

2.5/5 a coworker was so sure that I'd like this that I'm a little sad I mostly don't. Hitchy, unexpected, mathy - too planned, too screws-tight precise in a way that leaves too little room for feel or feeling, like music designed by a clever-but-soulless computer and put to midi, Dananananakroyd without the urgency and heart

#3491 Terumasa Hino - Kimiko

2.5/5 man i know nothing about jazz, and dudes can play, but it all feels a bit showy and solo-forward without any real chemistry or transcendence

#3490 Montero - The Loving Gaze

3/5 god, when it hits it hits, sweeping and overwhelmingly beautiful. but messy, uneven in general, crutchsomely experimental. And save yourself, because once you associate this with Ben Montero's beautiful/cloying/cute/nightmarish comics it all has a twee stink on it that undercuts any attempts at connection, an insidious one-third blindered irony that's hard to get past. And maybe that's on me, but this kind of weird pillowed awe just doesn't meet me halfway

#3489 Mariah - Utakata No Hibi

4/5 a slippery beastie. a part repeating, but that part might be rather strange. a hitched beat you're not too comfortable with, but that it worms its way in with repetition, and then a sea of horns and adornments and variations. sounding very live, with a backbone of machine intention. method of creation very unclear, intriguing. as intimate and detached and disorienting as its cover art. man, japan in the 80s.

#3488 Brian Eno and Kevin Shields - The Weight of History / Only Once Away My Son

3/5 a rich, fleetingly epic pile of moans and drones that never escapes the atmosphere, sounding like an enjoyable, larksome dalliance more than anything approaching the sum of the parts

#3487 Tycho - Weather

3/5 I admire that Tycho made the 3rd album turn. I'm not sure that whispy vocals were the right shift, and I'm not sure that Saint Sinner was the right choice, too affected and effortful for a sound that sounded otherwise chiseled from crystal. The ratio's not right, sounding like Saint Sinner album featuring Tycho, which, eh. Their core sound's still nice enough, and I dig the swing, but it's a miss

#3486 Susumu Yokota - Sakura

4/5
god that second track, predicting tycho's wanderous grace by a decade. Followed by endless experiments in texture, repetition, progression. a hard recommend for anyone interested in interesting ambient angles. I dont remember how I came across this list but its on point

#3485 Yasuaki Shimizu - Kakashi

4.5/5
The creativity is staggering. Pop ditties, Broken Social washes, repetitive experiments, melting sunrise proto-synthwave. A confabulation of traditional Japanese sounds and burgeoning electronics from '82 that we're just now catching up to. The best weird thing I've come across in years

#3484 Matt Martians - The Last Party

2.5/5 possible victim of being next to Al Green on the docket. so anonymous, sludgy, detuned, detached. how'm i supposed to care when you don't care?

#3483 Al Green - Gets Next to You

4.5/5 Green's unassailable, here still rough around the edges and all the more thrilling for it. Production's raw, those horns fighting for their love, organs pushing through. They don't make em like this anymore

#3482 The Men - Hated: 2008-2011

4/5 The Men are one of the best rock bands of the decade, and here they stretch their claim back. A rhythm section capable of motorik perfection paired with a werewolf nightmare willingness to go for the throat -- we get more of the latter here, with flashes of the Jekyll poet that gave us Oscillation. Raw power driven past intellect, thrilling history

#3481 Thorsten Quaeschning and Ulrich Schnauss - Synthwaves

3/5 busy, endless plinking on offset paces that obscure the lines between measures, fitting the water/rain theme. clever, dense - more intellectual than I'd like, but at least it delivers on that axis, plenty to tent your fingers to

#3480 Remember - The City is My Friend

2.5/5 the kind of generic arpegio loopchaining you get doodling around on your laptop once a week. with that evocative title and cover art I expected something more soulful, capturing some sense of disorientation or loneliness. oh well

#3479 Move D - Kuntststoff

2.5/5 by the numbers, old school, as workmanlike as that geometric chair on the cover, finely made, no heart or hooks

#3478 Nonkeen - The Gamble

3.5/5 Nils Frahm continues to blow me away, such a soft, emotional touch to his playing, here with some friends bringing lively, textured backing. Fragile, temporary music, with a live feel for better or worse: some songs just kind of wander off into the night

#3477 Folllakzoid - II

3.5/5 the kind of superdense krauty jams I'm always a sucker for

#3476 Eris Drew and Octo Octa - Devotion

3.5/5 the Octo Octa track versions leave me cold, too many clashy harmonics. But Eris Drew does this thing where she drops the loop and leaves this little half-beat of silence that I'm enchanted by. Brings the whole feel back to physical vinyl looping, leaves a little spot for your stomach to drop again and again. Is this her invention or a genre standard thing I'm just ignorant of? Great execution either way

#3475 Daphni - Sizzling EP

4/5 Daphne's still got it after all, the most dancy thing he's ever done, raucous, downright disco, with his signature fearlessness about when to clip the loop

#3474 Thom Yorke - Anima

2.5/5 clever, clattering, forgettable, sounding like king of limbs bsides, made me feel nothing

#3473 White Denim - Performance

3.5/5 white denim's always solid, rumbling, dancable, jam bandery tightened up and spiked

#3472 Black Midi - Schlagenheim

3.5/5 clattering, angular, hitched, as knotted as you can make rock music and keep it listenable. The Dismemberment plan with the uncertainty and heart drained out, replaced with sneering swagger

#3471 Daphni - Joli Mai

3/5 warm synths and clever eliptical beats, vocal snippets ruin a few songs though, and he's capable of doing them right (Yes I Know)

#3470 Pom Poko - Birthday

3.5/5 impossible to avoid the comparisons to deerhoof and ponytail and danananakroyd and the other angular, shrill, giveafuck weirdos. Hookier, more pleasant than most, but the lack of that unpleasant edge is doublesided - i miss it a bit - this never feels quite like the horses have taken over, steering to the cliff

#3469 Haruomi Hosono - Hosono House

4/5 weightless japanese Americana, with the creak of a chair just out of sight, wrapped in the pull of nylon. sweet and clear, with a spike of dr john swagger. doubly recommended for anyone looking for something unexpected

#3468 Woob - New Program

4/5 after work i wandered to the docks outside the aquarium and watched the planes land, boats in the foreground, and track 8 played and was the perfect slow motion soundtrack. and elsewhere it builts, slowly, with great earning, towards something a bit more beatsome, but this is the sound of patience, of the earth hardening, of planets drifting from orbits

#3467 Etienne de Crecy - Super Discount

3/5 hasn't aged overly well, groovesome, but a little stilted, especially those vocal samples

#3466 Wells Fargo - Watch Out!

3.5/5 rough edges all the way down, budget Hendrix and maybe more charming for it. tight enough to get by, loose enough to charm. kids had heart and chops, feel that cry from The Crowd and try to stay on the ground

#3465 Mouse on Mars - 21 Again Collaborations Volume 1

3.5/5 mainline MoM is a little abrassive for sensitive ears, but these collaborators weave enjoyable throughlines into the sound. Some of the spoken bits are momentum crushers, doubly so with whatever pretentious dissonant slop A Hawk and A Handsaw (jesus!) put together; otherwise a loose fun romp (hi Siriusmo!

#3464 Kenny Kirkland - Kenny Kirkland

3/5 know nothing about jazz. pleasant enough, but seems a bit overpolished in that kind of well-whatreya-gonna-do-at-this-point 90s jazz kinda way. Kirkland's playing does have a mouthsome kinda sway to it

#3463 Leif and Donna Lea - Dinas Oleu

2.5/5 it sure is minimal beats and washes and squiggles and goddamn if it will really improve your mood in the moment or leaving a lasting impression so what are we doing here

#3462 Kraus - Path

4/5 shoegaze jolted back to life by livewire drums and a subtle, endlessly-layered approach to vocals. Will Kraus has a magnificent knack for production, but I do I miss the overblown, jagged edges of End Tomorrow

#3461 Liily - I Can Fool Anybody In This Town

2.5/5 endless, identical spiky arpeggios with shouty conviction pushing endlessly forward. probably plays better live

#3460 Said the Whale - Hawaii

3.5/5 an undeniable knack for a hook in that unabashed 00's spirit, flecked with the Beach Boys, Radiohead, the Decemberists and a rogue's gallery of one hit wonders. All rather nice, a couple of weird forays into raps and drops notwithstanding

#3459 Bruce Springsteen - Western Stars

3/5 there's no illusion that the protagonists of any of these ballads is Bruce himself, or that the America he's describing exists anymore. The theme is restlessness, so tuck these stories away from here. Ballads that work best when they touch on the universal (Hitch Hikin', title track). His voice is still there, well suited to these low-key ramblers, stuck in place

#3458 Daedelus - Baker's Dozen

3.5/5 It's nice to see Daedelus just doing what he does best: rolling around in artisanal samples, making hooky, dusty little ditties, without the need to attach some grand conceit or get outside his wheelhouse for its own sake. Playful, pleasant, quietly classic

#3457 Karper Marott - Keflavik EP

3/5 title track's got a great urgency, weaving through its own reverb deftly, but Megatu goes nowhere and Microworld falls into that weird Selected Ambient vol-1 middle ground and can't commit to a stance

#3456 Karper Marott - Forever Mix EP

3/5 slowrolling techno with an ensemble cast of washes and flourishes that gesture at some gauzy paradise, somewhere way up outside the hole, mottled shadows swaying

#3455 Rodriguez - Cold Fact

2/5 folk music, how does it sound so halfassed and so overwrought at the same time? it's like backpack rap without the beats or the conviction. the scant scraps of guitar fuzz are the only consolation. Actual song title:

This is Not a Song, It's an Outburst: Or, the Establishment Blues

can't make this shit up

#3454 Dennis Coffey - Goin' For Myself

3/5 Never stops sounding like an album made by studio musicians, except when it starts to sound like library music, but pretty funky considering

#3453 Maethelvin - Continuum

3.5/5 Maerthelvin puts a lot of voice in his synths, gives a lot of sunny expression to the maths. Most of this EP is right pleasant, a welcome reprieve to all his night-stricken neon-obsessed peers. It's a shame about the two versions of Party All Night, which, man, name says it all

#3452 Blouse - Blouse

2.5/5 Reverbey postpostpunk that's smothered itself into nothingness, slow, muffled, familiar, numb

#3451 Zoos of Berlin - Instant Evening

3.5/5 Slight, easily dismissed, and yet pretty in its small way. The kind of thing you might find finding purchase in your heart if you can listen with patience, like its 2003 and there's still newness in the world, and a compact disc costs money. Production that turns every hard edge into feathers, even the angular leaps smoothed into curves. Could be a grower

#3450 Tengger - Spiritual 2

3/5 I've got a lot of tolerance for meandering krauty repetition, but this strains patience. Not pure enough to be ambient, too limp to propel, like a Neu! 2 song that didn't commit to really cranking the bpms

#3449 Cavern of Anti-Matter - Hormone Lemonade

4/5 There aren't many bands out there this committed to repetition, blurring electronic automatic loops with motorik man-precision. Just enough texture to grip onto, hypnotic and propulsive and full of energy, a machine with enough flaws to spark

#3448 The Pilgrim Jubilees - Homecoming

4/5 Gospel soul masters record a live show long after their prime, and they fake you into thinking they've lost their touch. The first nine tracks are introduced almost apologetically; they rock here and there, but the group's checking boxes. But then they go full raveup revival, and that last 35 minute is endless fire, stoking the crowd, flowing and cresting with effortless control, all the more exciting from the slow windup

#3447 Nico Yaryan - What a Tease

2/5 That first song was just interesting enough to trick me, with those huge swells and spaceship flybys. Every bit of adventurousness used up, ten too-smooth, utterly risk-free love songs follow

#3446 Pools - Prettiest Eyes

2.5/5 Garage crunch too tightly locked into middling tempos and the same blownout, muddy mix

#3445 Caterina Barbieri - Ecstatic Computation

2.5/5 Harsh arpeggios warp and fade. Music that sounds composed by one computer and performed by another, each gifted with an algorithmic notion of how to slowly surprise, but incapable of real interest in human listening. These hypothetical computers are very clever, and that might be enough to pique your interest, but it left me cold

#3444 Das Vag - Scenbuddism

3/5 A fascintatingly weird crosssection of styles, reggae-drenched postpunk dragged back around through Europe, a Modern Lovers breadcrumb marking the way. Not quite chill or thrilling, but a fun curio

#3443 Tall Boys - Homes in Boston

3.5/5 The first spikey little songs remind me of the best plucky 00's weirdo indie bands and I love em. But the slower songs drag, wall-to-wall Greater Boston easter eggs notwithstanding

#3442 Daedelus - Taut

2.5/5 Daedelus's missing his playfulness, hooks, and heart. Surges and and squiggles totter around in untrackable rhythms - a trip into new territory without breadcrumbs back to anything compelling

#3441 Feed Me - High Street Creeps

4/5 Never underestimate Jon Gooch. His early stuff got filed under dubstep, but Big Adventure was squiggly, jazzy, and alive beyond the scene.

If Spotify stream counts are anything to go by, his worst songs are his most popular: goofy bro-rave bangers about love, coke, and headshots. But you don't get the sense that's where Gooch's heart's at. Sure, the four most-played songs on his latest are the worst, most vocal-drenched ones, in between's where it gets interesting.

Ominous, tense, clever towers of synths, twisting out of shape, starting and stopping, never letting you get too comfortable. Take Satanic Panic, the closest thing we've gotten to that golden age sound in years: it builds and builds and builds, not to a drop but to a stuttering squonky switchup, crystallizing into a glorious lead that battles stuttering infection. A floorless midsection floats out to a proper trapdoor into malfunctioning synth solo, before that melody carries you home. There's no drop, no chorus, just helixical, mutating synth contrails in an endless duel.

There's not a good full-album listen to be had here, those vocals really are a drag, but the highlights are high enough to pull out and let run wild

#3440 The Volcanics - Forgotten Cove

4/5 finds enough rambling energy and little spikes of invention to pull ahead of the surf rock pack. Big Bossman's as exciting as they come

#3439 Celine Dion - Let's Talk About Love

2.5/5 it's not that it's that bad, though it is pretty bad. It's that it's so _much. So long, so produced, so about love. Sixteen songs, not one shorter than four minutes, a hundred pounds of pop in a ten pound bag. Grudging respect to My Heart Will Go On, but Treat Her Like a Lady made me physically uncomfortable, and everything in between is just endless numbing forgettable soaring

#3438 Julee Cruise - Floating into the Night

3.5/5 even pulled from their various screen contexts, each song is uncanny, aslip time and space, beautiful and doomed. Badalamenti's arrangements are masterpieces of uneasy sleep, perfectly matched to Cruise's lost crooning

#3437 The Pyronauts - Surf and Destroy

3.5/5 sticks pretty closely to the surf rock playbook, but this's as sparkling and sunny as it comes, Pie's a right pretty highlight

#3436 Trabants - Nel Cuore Di Una Terra Selvaggia

3/5 more twangy western soundtrack epics please, this is a trend I can get behind. Trabants don't really pull it off though. NCDUT never rises above library music, every song riding a looped trope or two, sounding too long at two minutes, Daddy's Got a Big Gun doubly so

#3435 Uranium Club - The Cosmo Cleaners

4/5 alright boys, you got me. All Them Naturals felt forced but this is so spackled with archness, so aware of framing, so zag-ziggingly built to fuck with the expectations of anyone who knew the last album, moving the endless mythmaking monologue to the middle, putting an 11 minute song at the end called Interview with the Cosmo Cleaners and making it the last thing you'd expect, an actual straight-up luxuriously patient post-punk epic. The playing's spikey, songwriting catchy and untrackable, Grease Monkey in particular as as fun as they come. As modern a rock record as you can make these days

#3434 Uranium Club - All them Naturals

3/5 twitchy, strained, the feelies meet gang of four and on up. that endless mythmaking intro piques, but then there's talk about pissing on a teddybear and it all collapses into a substance-light pisstake. never gets over the line to feeling not-forced and that's death

#3433 The Allman Brothers Band - Idlewild South

3/5 it sure is a sweet guitar sound smoothed all the way out, pretty as heck, but the second side's so basic blues it saps most of the momentum

#3432 Flying Lotus - Flamagra

3.5/5 flying lotus has always made dense nervous music  and damn if that aint  the music of  the time. so sure lean into the  theme of fire, centered on an unnerving monologue by  david lynch  why not. i love hate this mostly but  its truer than most

#3431 Frank Zappa - Weasles Ripped my Flesh

3.5/5 looser, less adventurous than weeny sandwich, tipping over into sloppy. there's flashes of manic delight, but the ratio's gone a bit sideways. and man I do not like that cover and maybe thats the point but still

#3430 Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention - Burnt Weeny Sandwich

4/5 lurching, swaying, deeply messy, but dredges up a lotta proper omelette for all those broken eggs. A very Mothers of Invention album, wandering all over the place in a manner too mad not too be improvised, coalescing into moments too hooksome not to be the will of something divine

#3429 Babatunde Olatunji - Drums of Passion

4/5 man those people and those drums do sing

#3428 Meat Puppets - Up on the Sun

3/5 mildly interesting muso postpunk, too loose and too tight. stuck in the same mode/mood for an hour. a grateful dead album for people who also want to feel stressed out

#3427 Dark Sky - Othona

2/5 tense, tichy, detuned synth loops. one among a million electronic records with a technically slightly new sound that aren't good for dancing to or focusing on or soundtracking your life with, so

#3426 The Durutti Column - The Return of the Durutti Column

2.5/5 meandering, noodly, beatless un-rock that hasn't aged well. a blind squirrel's record frontloaded with the only 3 of the 48 minutes that really came together

#3425 Matt Berry - Opium

3/5 where Berry is still mired in his ironic mode, glammy and vamping before collapsing into quasi-intentional bathos. catchy in snatches but samey and slight

#3424 Go Yama, Axion117 - Vintage Soul

2.5/5 whatever Axion117 brought to the table, it messed up Go Yama's groove, dragging it into detuned sludgy bad-synthwave territory, abandoning the tunesome backbone

#3423 Jeff Parker - The New Breed

4/5 I know nothing about jazz. Wandering, thoughtful, tuneful, with a touch of Makaya McCraven's sense of hookwise looped meddling. Mysterious, magical stuff

#3422 Tyler, The Creator - Igor

3.5/5 muddled, vulnerable, queer, strange, brilliant, uncomfortable. that place where you're high enough to be honest about your feelings // too wrecked too really feel them, so they come pouring out, bare, detached in slow motion

#3421 Go Yama - Glo Fish

3.5/5 Go Yama's sprightly Squarepusher stutter-squiggles elevated by bold swerves of guitar noodling, bringing unpredictable, narrative flow to loop lockdowns. Musical, clever, pleasant, inventive

#3420 Matt Berry - Witchazel

4/5 quietly offkilter, just this side of parody, rolling around in folk and prog and all of their uncanny excursions into melody. Arch at times, but throwing all off like a cloak

#3419 Matt Berry - Night Terrors

3.5/5 A brisk little kaleidoscope ride. Exotica wanderings and wildly divergent covers bookended by a library music funk jam and its unrecognizable electronic remix - good enough fun for a once-through

#3418 Makaya McCraven - Highly Rare

4/5 McCraven's catchiest time out. Keeps most of In the Moment's small-room immediacy without falling into Universal Beings' highminded stiffness. The interplay of looped and live's never been finer, every fill and riff and crowd exclamation's a candidate for aftermath hookcrafting

#3417 !!! - Megam!!!x Vol 1: Shake Shake Shake

4/5 every album should be like this! evolving as a single seamless mix, with that kind of looseness that comes from being able to focus on flow without having to work with a set set of parts. The boys claim that they have so much new stuff they could make a few more of these before they even started to run out of songs, and I believe them: you can't make something that chains tracks together this well unless you've got a lot to work with. Dancable, listenable, clever, understated, varied, cohesive, leaving you wanting more

#3416 Lindstrom / VA - Late Night Tales

4/5 this is how late night tales is done. a commitment to the buzzy disco throughline that Lindstrom's known for, paired seamlessly with reaches way outside his own powercenters into full-on prog, a badass Vangelis cover, and an endless wave of great of female vocalists. all the flow spiked with just the right amount of mystery and surprise

#3415 omniboi - Signals

4/5 Signals has the feel of something solo-created and loop'd, with a lively feel that graduates it from "jazzy" to jazz. There's a visual, inspired, animated cadence of city streets, trains, motion - quietly brilliant

#3414 fusq - Polarity

3.5/5 a delightful smear of buzzy synths and upended vocals, every possible knob turned 30 degrees from reality. Thoug h all that creativity's unde rcut by the big thump-thump-thump-thump crutch

#3413 Sunwatchers - Illegal Moves

3.5/5 There's probably no separating what makes Sunwatchers frustrating from what makes them great. More so than ever their songs are clashes of endless repetition and aimless noodling that sometimes wander off to nowhere and sometimes smash together and supernova (that guitar 2/3 through Beautiful Crystals!). This band is the universe, ebbing and flowing, uncaring of your observation, rewarding and pointless in measures, utterly admirable and sporadically enjoyable running helixical

#3412 Moris Blak - Exile Tapes

2/5 Nothing about this feels like a lot of heart was put into it. There's so many samples and presets and places to crib from, it's not hard to make thumpy, doomy dance//sway music in 2019. No personality or distinction, nobody stuck their neck out one inch making this, in the originals or the remixes

#3411 Olafur Arnalds / VA - Late Night Tales

2.5/5 A clunky take on the LNT thing. Stiff, not a lot of flow, some distracting 'clever' choices, the whole thing feeling arch and showy like a friend putting their spotify playlist on at a party. Even the closing monologue is cringier than most in the series, though maybe that's not Arnalds' fault

#3410 Olafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm - Trance Frendz

4.5/5 (truly beautiful, affected piano playing, giving way to ambient analog surges, which wash out like the tide until twinkling piano is left once again) all wrapped in a gauzy latenight haze.

The kind of pure music energy you can only get from improvisation, the lack of expectation that an after-hours session brings, the pure talent to ride true across ragged hills

#3409 The Orb - COW / Chill Out World!

2.5/5 What an incongruous, self-defeating name. Fitting: Orb doesn't really understand what ambient or chillout is supposed to sound like. COW/COW! (ok.) is packed with fussy intellectual ideas and no real ability to give over to any sense of flow

#3408 The Rolling Stones, Nicky Hopkins, and Ry Cooder - Jamming with Edward

3.5/5 the Stones called it a throwaway and they're not wrong There's nothing blindingly brilliant here. But it's a reminder that behind all the strut and sneer this was a pretty solid bunch of musicians, and it's fun watching them play off eachother. There's a real sense of being in the room, hearing something comes together and threaten to fall apart

#3407 Nicky Hopkins - The Tin Man Was A Dreamer

4/5 rightsolid romp, with Kinksian glimpses of sentimental beauty and all the rollick you'd expect from Hopkins' 70s-Stones pedigree. The kind of unpretentious, loose fun that you don't often get from piano rockers

#3406 Karen Dalton - In My Own Time

3.5/5 Dalton's voice is a difficult, special thing, cracked and ragged beyond reason and strangely enticing. Combine her effortless knack for phrasing and some lush country-tinged production for an album you'll remember like an uncanny dream

#3405 Bill Fay - Time of the Last Persecution

4/5 Mournful and beautiful and resigned, with enough honkytonk shuffle to keep things from getting dreary. Rich backing matches Fay's confident delivery perfectly. Soulful stuff

#3404 Steelism - ism

3/5 pleasant but unexciting, slathered in clever steel guitar. Exactly the kind of album you expect veteran studio musicans make: expertly done in every way, without any concept of how to have attitude, personality, or any of the things that make a band, a set, an album

#3403 The Crystals - He's a Rebel

3.5/5 For my money, the title track's the greatest girl group song of all time, full of glorious energy and ingenious rhythmic tricks. But the Crystals otherwise didn't stand out from the pack; the rest of the collection's bog standard and pleasant enough, dripping with all the harmonies, strings, and longing for boys you'd expect

#3402 Geowulf - Great Big Blue

3/5 The cloyingly sunny Sunkist vibe is pleasant when you don't think too much about it, and the production's full of pleasant shimmer. But none of the songs are about much more than summer and beaches and weekends, and some (Only High, Drink Too Much) sound like music for teenagers who want to pretend to have grown up problems and no thanks

#3401 Steve Reich - Reich: Drumming; Six Pianos; Music for Mallet Instruments

3.5/5 The first drumming track's what I want the rest to be: pure drums without any overt melodic contribution, letting the music come out of all those reverberations and overlaps. The others bring in pianos and vibes and chimes and sure, conjure all these extra harmonics etc, and it was all very groundbreaking at the time, but in retrospect that first track's the most adventurous and most interesting, making for a weirdly-paced listen

#3400 The Flamingos - Flamingo Serenade

3.5/5 not a lot of personality, but very easy to listen to, those so smooth harmonies all so so deeply in love. The blownout production's annoying, but lends a scruffy charm to the crooning crooning crooning

#3399 VA - re:works

3.5/5 Pleasant, flowing armchair electronic, spanning atmospheric, thumping, and bleepbloopy styles. Each artist takes things pretty far into their respective direction, leaving only the barest skeleton of the classical inspiration, but better that than another run at Switched on Bach

#3398 Gang Starr - Daily Operation

4/5 endless laid-back lines with clever knots and a message to deliver: everything you could want. Premier's production's thin and low in the mix by today's standards, but it leaves all this space to breathe: just enough guidance for Guru to trace rhymes through and nothing that gets in his way

#3397 Toshiyuki Terui - What I Think About the World

2.5/5 Wandering guitar lines that sound like instrumental versions of existing songs, or otherwise like something's missing. Could be handy if you're making a movie that needs background music for 11 different sunrise scenes

#3396 VA - Schneeweiss 9: Presented by Oliver Koletzki

3.5/5 -- 3 hours 20 and never boring, an ever-shifting, moodful house meander, good for work, chillout, or rainy weekends

#3395 Air - Love 2

3/5 a swing at being Moon Safari 2: same tricks without that magic. Air's debut had a subtle desperation, this feels like a hedonistic half-hearted grasp for more

#3394 Beak - L.A. Playback

3.5/5 A (quietly, truly) weird, reverby, clumsy band plodding through some offkilter psychedelia that lives up to the cloudy, ramshackle cover photo. In a world with less such stuff floating around it'd be a cult classic. Might still

#3393 Prefuse 73 - Sacrifices

3/5 Between Fudge and Every Color of Darkness, Prefuse seemed to be making a comeback, but Sacrifices is underwhelming. This isn't all the way back into the sludgy morass of the Only She Chapters, but so little of it actually connects. It all seems like its waiting for accompaniment to finish the job, all kinds of half-note sweeps into resolution without any real snap to it, the percussion brushed under the rug. All clever and empty and kinda good but does so little to uprock and invigorate

#3392 The Lemon Twigs - Do Hollywood

3.5/5 An unabashedly goofy, retro, rollickingly Kinksy romp that puts a smile on. Warbled and detuned and weird, but on this side of nice to listen to unlike so many Ariel Pinks

#3391 Sam Shure - Nandoo

3/5 totally fine, dedicated house, flecked with coffeeshop exotica

#3390 Con Funk Shun - Secrets

2.5/5
Syrupy, without enough funk. Too polished, drowning in strings and silky crooning

#3389 Jacques Dutronc - Il Est Cinq Heures (s/t '68)

3.5/5
French garage rock with bite, and some damned pretty Kinksian interludes too. Fiery and inventive, though the language makes it a lot harder for the unfrench to lock into. French just isn't a natural-sounding language for this kind of punchy rock, keeping the universal feel from finding its way through

#3388 Pierre Cavalli - Uma Vitamina Faz Favor

3.5/5
A bossa-nova drifter via Europe, wobbling between classy jazz and vacant (if catchy!) library music. Funky, sunny, and uncanny strange, its own kind of actually very cool

#3387 Max Cooper - One Hundred Billion Sparks

4/5
Slow-growing tones with ghosts in. There's something heartbreaking and insidious lurking in these songs, gaining strength in numbers. The notes feel fragile, reflective, a skittering anxiety onrushing at the end

#3386 Tom Demac - Serenade

2.5/5
The earnest sermon on the title track's just this side of charming the first time, but sounds more pretentious and pathetic the more you hear it. The rest is too minimal to bother with, never summoning any particular place or pathos

#3385 Sunflower Bean - Human Ceremony

3.5/5
Mostly too twee, too slathered in easy arpeggios, but there's just enough Strokesey motorik cool to get it over the hump. Julia Cumming's sweetspot vocals don't hurt either

#3384 Kikagaku Moyo - Mammatus Cloud

3/5
Pure Eastern psychedalics, all drones and tones and the barest tickle of guitar - too aimless for me, lacking their later visceralia. The main reason to stop by is the endless quasi-cover of Tomorrow Never Knows, distilled down to its barest ghost

#3383 Jacques Greene - Feel Infinite

3.5/5
A house backbone keeps it headbobbing, while a menagerie of shiny, swirling vocal distortions weave through. Just on the border of dissonant and hypnotic

#3382 Kiki Pau - Hiisi

3.5/5
Starts off so unambitiously you're liable to quit on it. But after 11 minutes of the sleepiest psychadelia imaginable, a half hour of jamming breaks out, working up a real hypnotic froth. Man we're in a golden age of interesting album structures.

#3381 Waylon Jennings - Lonesome, On'ry and Mean

3.5/5
A solid set of wryly-smiling self-pittiers, with flashes of hot Nashville twang and gospel grandiosity.

Jennings' voice sounds a little put on at times, like he's trying to do Elvis. Weird.

#3380 Thelonious Monk Quartet - Misterioso

3.5/5
I know nothing about jazz. Loose, lively, full of presence and humanity, with an endearing bustle of ambient cafe noise and plenty of little flubs and rough edges. Monk uses space like a wizard. The sax fits in rockily, the friction making its own little spark, Griffin's solos full of raw wit and surprise.

#3379 The End of Electronics - Union

3/5
Icy, metalic post-punk from Russia. It's a neat newness, and that brittle production's nearly perfect, but it starts to feel awfully samey, especially when the words are all endlessly deadpanned Russian

#3378 Prins Thomas - Ambitions

3/5
Thomas explores the acoustic-electronic boundary in subtly new ways here, and some of it works (XSB!) but mostly it just doesn't. Doesn't quite chill you out, doesn't quite get you excited, doesn't quite bob the head. Some soul missing

#3377 UFO - Obsession

3.5/5
Big dumb hard-rock proto-hair-metal that dammit I kinda like. Plenty of glam and Zep influences, with subject matter just one tick above AC/DC, but the melodies are right solid, and those guitar solos frickin' sing.

#3376 Black Beach - Play Loud, Die, Vol. 2

3/5
Black Beach has real potential. But here's three more fuzzed-out songs in the same sludgy space. The songs are decent, but man they're still playing it safe.

#3375 VA - Boogie Woogie Music Vol. 2

4/5
Listen here!

Our oldest album yet, shellac cominatcha from '35! A great little romp: an interesting bit of pre-rock-but-rockin historical perspective, and a lot of fun to listen to besides. All that crack and hiss is just sprinkles if you've got the right attitude.

#3374 Mien - Mien

2.5/5
Man, I don't know, I got lungs like Arthur Morgan over here, so I'll tell you what: I'm just going to drop MIEN's 3-sentence Spotify bio here, and I assure you that how you feel about it will indicate whether this is an album you're interested in:

Inhabiting a modern-day realm in which what is termed ‘psych’ is all-too-often a codified and predictable incarnation entirely at odds with the original free-flowing spirit of psychedelia, it can be a struggle to find a band who can marry the essence of its inception with an adventurous mindset - one with the ability to render their creations beyond clichéd genre trappings and studied thriftstore cool. Who knows whether through study or serendipity, but MIEN - a Transatlantic four-way collision of considerable force involving luminaries who have each forged a reputation for head-spinning audial magick in their own right - are just such a band. What’s more, their eponymous Rocket recordings debut is no less than a rich tapestry of third-eye visions and nocturnal serenades both vivid and vital.

#3374 The Telescopes - Exploding Head Syndrome

3.5/5
Maybe I'm just high _ _but: is this a concept album about having a concussion? The muffled mix puts the music in a little ball in the center of your awareness, in contrast with the sparkies, stray, high buzzes that arc in place like ripped synapses, who're given massive tracts of sonic space to themselves. Everything loops, everything slips, the words are barely audible. It's not that they're far away away from you, you're far away from them. And it doesn't relent. All the round tones stay contained, the sharp ones roam lazily, the pace never quickens, the haze never clears. Glimpses of love lost, song titles told as little sentence snippets, mention of Nothing, End, Why, Never, Don't, "Everything is in the Moment" in French. And then on the last song, a lone buzz and no backup, a sparkie frozen in a moment of waking. And in that quiet the music slinks in, the words clearer and closer than they've been. And halfway through the music rises and the buzz is gone, before coming back deeper, steadier, and integrated into an ascendant full-band sound, still dark and plodding and strange, but out of its frequency oubliette and at full strength.

I don't know if I like it for listening to exactly, but I've never heard production much like it, and no album feels much like it, and heck that's tough to come by these days.

#3373 Lorelle Meets The Obsolete - De Facto

3.5/5
Post-punk weight, pressing down on a sizzling, expanding cloud of shoegaze. There's frisson in this sound that never quite resolves, a feeling of claustrophobic hope

#3372 Chet Atkins - Hometown Guitar

4/5
Atkins is shamelessly showy, but somehow slots cleanly into a dozen tracks across the country gamut. Those instrumentals: Blue Angel -> Get on With It is fuckin fire. And then there's songs with soft cooing vocals as texture; that last one'll take you away.

#3371 Fennesz - Agora

4/5
Perfectly patient, anxious and wondering, long days passed idle. You can feel yourself step outside when you get to the title track and I don't know how he does it. Building spaces out of sound takes time, and Fennesz takes it.

#3370 Death Pesos - Moon Violence

4/5
How many other bands could make songs about Las Vegas, Saturday night and slow drivers in 2019, and make em pretty fuckin fiery? Death Pesos believe in rock, and bang it out loose and trashy with wit to spare. Fun shit.

#3369 Black Beach - Shallow Creatures

3.5/5
Blasted, fuzzy, sludgy garage rock that doesn't do much to differentiate itself from the pack.

Exception: The Youth is Out There shows us Black Beach with the pedal down and their hands off the wheel, ending the album on a thrilling, chaotic 6 minute jam. Need more of _that.

#3368 Buddy Emmons - Steel Guitar Jazz

3/5
Emmons' pedal steel solos are a showcase of expressiveness. He did it. He showed it can be done. But the instrument just doesn't slot in well with the horns: of academic / novelty interest only.

#3367 Chai - Punk

4/5
What sounds at first like candycoated gimmickry reveals plenty of complexity. Subtly dense, insidiously hooky, lyrics laced with pretty poison, every maximalist blast backed by a salvo of fizzy cluster missiles

#3366 Wand - Perfume

4/5
Perfume continues Plum's adventurous spirit, steering back into heaviness, getting arty, angular, lightly proggy, even a little jazzy. A clever, unpredictable set of songs. The pacing's all wrong, but even that feels like part of Wand's campaign against expectations

#3365 Wand - Plum

4.5/5
Wand's a full-band creative force now, and Plum's a refreshing is-this-the-same-band detour. Sweeping and twinkling and swooping, and occasionally ripping off a guitar killshot, sure. But Wand's left most of the Ty Segall baggage behind, outgrown their garage rock housing, and bloomed into something prettier and harder to pin down. Shades of the early 90's when Radiohead, STP and the Pumpkins were overrunning their hard-rock confines.

Even the post-halftime lull kinda works, when it leads into the two longest songs on the album, each enchanting enough to jostle your sense of how long you've been listening.

#3364 Wand - 1000 Days

4/5
Lacks Golem's transcendent pacing and claustrophobic reverberation, but Wand's still the best heavy // psychedelic band out there. 1000 Days never goes too long without a texture swerve or gorgeous guitar straightaway

#3363 Dino Oliveri - Singularity

3.5/5
Deeply old-school electronics with a streak of concept album, like the soundtrack to some lost sci-fi cult classic. Steers clear of 80's revival cliches and keeps that air of mystery and surprise

#3362 Sinoia Caves - The Enchanter Persuaded

3/5
Patient, alien, inexplicably unsettling, sounds shifting like long, colored clouds. Adventurous, artful drones with a whiff of madness

#3361 Disco Biscuits - Live at 9:30 Club 04-20-09

3.5/5
Listen here! This music is mostly the same and comes in 3 hour chunks. All I'm really qualified to say is this's modestly less entrancing than their 10-05-02 set, but still very...Disco Biscuits.

#3360 Disco Biscuits - Live at Haymaker Festival 10-05-02

4/5
Listen here! Jamtronica is a very uncool kind of music, but this is so easy to listen to and it goes on forever and feels rather good. Excellent work music that will tickle just the parts of the brain you're not using

#3359 Wimps - Repeat

3.5/5
Feisty, dumb-smart punk//post-punk - arty and poppy and packed with delightful surprises

#3358 Kikagaku Moyo - House in the Tall Grass

3.5/5
these KM albums kind of blend together, but this is the most successful of their spacier albums. There's slow burn little crests, but the emphasis is on atmosphere and space and motion and pattern. A sneaky good one

#3357 Kacey Musgraves - Slow Burn

3/5
Pleasant, sweet pure-pop without a lot of personality. The subtle electronic flourishes are the highlights. But most of the album's bog standard verse-chorus-verse over a kitchen sink's worth of instruments and production tricks, with nothing that lands half as well as say, Lorde, Grimes or Mitski.

Exercise for the reader: does this have a higher rate of country instrumentation and themes than Old Town Road? And if not, hm.

#3356a Fela Kuti - Unknown Soldier

3.5/5
A smoldering, hypnotic jam that gets your head bobbing good and slow before it snaps the trap closed with its harrowing message. Powerful, complicated stuff

#3356 Kikagaku Moyo - Masana Temples

3/5
these KM albums kind of blend together, but this one in particular tips too far into their spacy side. All that chiming repetition fails to quite excite or hypnotize, a band rejecting power and wandering in the woods

#3355 Kikagaku Moyo - Forest of Lost Children

4/5
these KM albums kind of blend together, but this is their best outside of Stone Garden, with real power rising from all the repetition and angles. A stronger current than most, soothing and thrilling and full of gentle swerves

#3354 Grand Soliel - See You Space Cowboy...

3/5
breezy, lazy little synthwave experiments, bloop and wash without a bother

#3353 Powercyan - Plutocracy EP

4/5
all the texture and complicated attacks you could want from this kind of bangfactory bullshit. Every tone given some extra filter, stutter, or fault. Aggressive, without going bro-y, light on the 80s worship, this's as good as this regrettably-often-awful kind of thing gets, he says unintentionally backhandedly. It's a good album! Sorry!

#3352 LA Takedown - II

4.5/5
transcends synthwave, clawing its way clear of the nostalgia hole, weaving guitars, space disco, soulful touches, and a real sense of pacing to make a wordless concept album as sprawling and desolate as LA. Hell, there's shades of Air and the Microphones in there. Captures something of the wonder and despair of a city that goes nowhere forever

#3351 Laurence Guy - Saw You For the First Time

3.5/5
enough live bass and Shadowy flourishes to elevate this, putting a cozy city spin on the thump x 4

#3350 Horse Lords - Hidden Cities

3.5
imaginative, repetitive, coalescing often enough to imply order. A machine sufficiently complex to approximate life

#3349 Dusty Springfield - Dusty in Memphis

3.5/5
Undeniably pretty, utterly sumptuous, if a little superficial by now (a couple unassailable highlights aside)

#3348 Savak - Best of Luck in Future Endeavors

3/5
The latest Savak album seemed like a smoothed out version of a younger, livelier band, but upon looking back, no this earlier one's just as underambitious. There's cleverness, a sense for offcenter hooks, but the band never fucking goes for it

#3347 Kankyo Ongaku - Japanese Ambient, Environmental and New Age Music 1980-1900

2.5
a broad description of broadly boring music. Novel but nowhere near transcendent. Blink's micromelody's pleasant, and See the Light's the best of the lot, but its also the one that most blatantly cops Eno, so

#3346 Total Control - Typical System

3/5
sleek, textured post-punk that doesn't make you feel good and doesn't scare you and can't much commit

#3345 Karl Hund - Karl Hund

3.5/5
The opener's on the nose and the She Said cover's a bit superfluous, but Hund's debut is a pleasant, quietly experimental little EP. Patient, shimmery textures keep you moving downstream

#3344 Makthaverskan - III

2.5/5
The shimmery, leanforward backing's nice enough, but every song's _dominated by Milner's vocals. The production seems to think she's really something special, but its too much: too showy, too loud in the mix, riding the same melodramatic up and down melodies over and over and over again until you're utterly numb with half of an album left to endure

#3343 The Nude Party - The Nude Party

2.5/5
Unremarkable 60's revivalism. The country-flecked songs never catch fire, the garage songs are dime-a-dozen, and a rough Dylan impression doesn't move me

#3342 King Tuff - The Other

3.5/5
All the King's garagey grit is gone, leaving a Band of Horses / Blitzen Trapper kind of skyward seeking. The Other teeters right on the edge of cloying and sincere -- the title track's beautiful, Circuits in the Sand's hokey, and how you take everything in between's likely to hinge on how cynical you're feeling

#3343 Khruangbin - Con Todo El Mundo

2.5/5
All the worldly influences are polished to death, all the friction and voice and passion buffed off. Gifts from the National Geographic catalog. Music for people who want "listening to interesting music" as part of their persona but don't want to actually challenge themselves

#3341 Mike Krol - Power Chords

3.5/5
Sounds like a Mike Krol album where each song is played 3 times in a row before moving onto the next one. Which is a little ungenerous, and a Mike Krol song's still a good one, but Krol's knack for bratty, catchy little one minute songs just doesn't scale up that well

#3340 Illuminati Hotties - Kiss Yr Frenemies

4/5
Sweeter, faster, straightup better than most any softhearted punk band you can find these days. Sarah Tudzin overflows with indie pop sincerity and licks that stick. A plucky, punchy listen with gokart acceleration and brickwall brakes

#3339 The Dictators - DFFD

3.5/5
As shockingly solid an album as you'll hear from a punk band 30 years into their career. Wryly stupid, utterly unpretentious, and laser-focused on playing you some rock and roll

#3338 Greyboy - Freestylin'

3.5/5
Live horns over some well-dj'd hip hop beats sounds like it wouldn't age well, but it holds up better than you'd expect. The feels very, very 90's, but joke's on you its from '89. Apostrophe exhibition!

#3336a Sunwatchers - II

4/5
A bad jam starts with a groove and goes nowhere, but a Sunwatchers jam does the opposite. An explosion reversed and in slow motion, a damaged barnraising timelapse filmstrip, that scene where the t1000 gets blown up but then the chunks all melt and come back together and turn back into a dude and Arnold's like "run!", and then the groove, ridden right to the point of climax and no further, like an arrival at the big bang, nowhere emphatically the only place left to go.

Patient, smoldering chaos or fractured angry noise, either one building into something you can bang your head to. One of the most insidiously exciting albums I've heard in a while

#3337 Black Sabbath - Sabotage

3/5
Some of the proggy intricacy on the longer songs is actually pretty fun, but the band's utterly lost its bite by now, and the Sabbath sound doesn't weather sounding completely unthreatening very well

#3336 Mathilde Bataille - Le Soleil Dans L'oeil

4/5
Best experienced as one deeply pretty 12-minute micro-epic, drenched in endless reverb and patience, like some lost Broken Social Scene highlight. The 5 minute centerpiece is enchanting enough on its own, but the little driftaway intros and outros seal it. Perfect cover art too.