#3321 William Tyler - Goes West

3.5/5
Pleasant enough virtuosity, but missing that epic patience and ambient buzzes that made Modern Country sound so gloriously infinite. These songs are penned and domesticated and lesser for it

#3320 Sidney Gish - No Dogs Allowed

3/5
Bird Tutorial is a wonderful bit of sampling, a brilliant little intro. For the rest, that flash of snippet-lifting works, winding thought Gish's tendency for throwoff lines, making for a loose, catchy-enough album for a while, before it kinda runs thin and forgettable

#3319 Alex Gopher and Demon - Wuz

4.5/5
Shades of Avalanches, Gopher's impossibly smooth grooves spiked with Demon's sense of atmosphere and mystery. A deeply hypnotic, textured, ingraspable album worth obsessing over

#3318 Cut Worms - Hollow Ground

3/5
Inoffensive, pretty, Byrdsey psych/country revival. Shrug. Can put it on while I play games with the wife, I say half-backhandedly

#3317 The Dictators - Go Girl Crazy!

2.5/5
What a dumb record. Greatest strength, greatest weakness. The jokeyness hasn't held up well enough to make this better than embarrassing in 2019

#3316 Jackie Cohen - Tacoma Night Terror Part 1: I've Got the Blues

3.5/5
fleetwood mac comparisons are unavoidable and I do not apologize. But now, and beautiful, shimmered with production, but swooping you past caring on the wings of sentiment and sound. There's spark here worth watching

#3315 The Disco Biscuits - Rocket 3

3.5/5
The halfhour Magellan version's everything you want from a jam band -- effortless virtuosity, with enough hooky structure to make it make your head bob, to lead you through. Spacy, transportive. I hate this shit but I'm won over. It comes together. The rest is boring, with goofy content (frog legs?

#3314 The Replacements - Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash!

4.5/5
as smart as dumbfuck punk comes. Shitty blasts of slackjawwed noise, relentlessly spiked with sharp observations, clever swerves, melodic brilliance. The kind of frisson you can only get from violently opposed impulses crashing together with abandon

#3313 Husker Du - Candy Apple Grey

3.5/5
Crystal's a not-sellin-out-fake-out shoutabout opener -- DWtKiYL is a legit great powerpop song. In between is underwhelming, especially those mopey sentimentals. A watered down shadow, but it's still Husker Du, let's not let precedent undermine present

#3312 Husker Du - Flip Your Wig

3.5/5
Sounds more like a major label concession than their actual major label debut. Enjoyable enough, but too smoothed out, too repetitive, too safe to make an impression

#3311 Mike Krol - Trust Fund

4/5
Doesn't live up to I Hate Jazz's ripcord energy, but man this dude has a fucking gift for writing great lines laced with deadly feedback. A fuzzy, effortlessly headbobbing 18 minutes (an epic!)

#3310 Mike Krol - I Hate Jazz

4.5/5
Not since Jay Reatard have I heard songs this fucking _tight, just catchy brash pop-punk forge-welded into impossible sharpness, streaked with the noise and melody of its enemies.

#3309 Skegss - My Own Mess

4/5
Hooky, sunny Wavves/Pup stoner pop-punk with more wit and sincerity than most. This's as fun as they come.

#3308 Shame - Songs of Praise

2/5
Effortful, strained, fussy pastiche without sincerity. The Lick's as unsuccessful an attempt to stand archly outside of the hype cycle as I can remember. It made my face hurt from the face it made me make.

#3307 Fujiya and Miyagi - Transparent Things

4/5
Endless krauty clipaclops keep the dancepunk platitudes palatable. There's a lot of words on this album, but the tracklist doubles as a lyrics sheet. Pretty catchy though, finding freshness by digging back farther and harder. And goddamn everything about Cassettesingle's perfect.

#3306 Dead Ghosts - Love and Death and all the Rest

3/5
Those fat surf/western guitars are killer, but this is opening act stuff, twelve lazy, garagey stomps blurred together.

#3305 Sun Kin / Miserable Chillers - Adoration Room

3/5
Itchy, offkilter micropop, peppered with little mutations that don't quite compensate for the underwhelming songwriting

#3304a Chris Farren - Can't Die

4/5
As hooky and fun as songs about anxiety can be, tipping gently into mania. As unshocking a partner for Jeff Rosenstock as you can imagine.

#3304 Faux Ferocious - Faux Ferocious

The raw materials that would be refined into the excellent Cloning the Rubicon. The self-titled debut's a good album that would seem greater if not for its followup, lacking the tight pacing and ending punch that helped make Rubicon an instant classic 3.5/5

#3303 Max Pain and the Groovies - Sounds from the Hole

Psych rock revivals been played out a half dozen times, but throw in some surfy barrelridery and I'm right back in. Great, rolling energy all the way through this tight little EP 3.5/5

#3302 Nate Wood - Another Time

Immaculately-produced pop-rock, full of jazzy flourishes and a surprising number of inventive electronic flourishes, balancing cleverness against breezy listenability. Wood's vocals the weak link, the reedy sameyness making even the knottier songs sound like the others - the curse of the one man band 3/5

#3301 Hampshire and Foat - Galaxies Like Grains of Sand

Atmospheric and evocative, all the production inventiveness of post-rock, with the musicianship and (relative) focus of jazz. An album with enough space to breathe and get lost in, but that never gets lost, finding throughlines and landmarks better than most music this cosmic. Quietly exciting stuff 4/5

#3300 Marbled Eye - Leisure

Exciting at first, but this kind of chugging, deadpanned post-punk's been done before, and Leisure keeps passing up chances to take it anywhere new. By track 4 you give up hoping 3/5

#3299 Squirrel Flower - Contact Sports

Strummy, low-key rock that lulls you into complacency, so Williams' declarations of hurt and strength can hit all that much harder. I'm pretty jaded but this got me more than once. It's hard not to compare her (favorably!) to Mitski, but I'm trying 3.5/5
(whew

#3298 The Real Kids - The Real Kids

As scrappy punk goes, The Real Kids are more charming than most, trying carelessly to make the best racket they can 3.5/5

#3297 Psychic Temple w/ Mike Watt - Plays Music for Airports

A doomed premise meets its inevitable conclusion. The only way to cover a song committed to peace and stillness is with utter restraint, to quash the instinct to put your stamp on it, but this has a dozen people kicking up ripples on the stillness. A tense, meandering, jazzy exercise that happens to have a few notes in the same order as the Eno classic. The Music for Bus Stops is at least allowed to be itself, even if it's nothing especially interesting 2.5/5

#3296 Faux Ferocious - Cloning the Rubicon

Texture, momentum, pacing - everything good about this last gasping generation of rock. These guys get tension and release, sounding live and unpredictable and electric, hypnotizing in 1-4 minute bursts, menacing cool dripping from everything. And then, the [chef's kiss], that last guitar solo, one of the prettiest album ends around. The most exciting new rock band I've heard in a while, not that that's saying much in 2019 4.5/5

#3295 Shadowgraphs - Another Time

Shimmering, blankly pretty 60's re-re-revival, with more satisfying organ sounds than most, zero hooks worth remembering 3/5

#3294 Ovlov - Tru

Flashes of energy that disappointingly simmering down into generic chiming indie. The best part is that guitar sound, spiked with bristly texture and crackling fuzz - keep that hot and you'd really be onto something 3.5/5

#3293 Josh Ritter - Gathering

Ritter's latest is peppered with shuffling, lively folk rock, as good for long drives as ever. But there's too many long meanderers, most notably Dreams. The album's staggering centerpiece has some of the album's best lyrics, but feels out of place, a bomb in the middle of an album that relies on atmosphere 3/5

#3292 Fred Falke - Part IV

Perfectly-paced, thrilling, endless house//disco, right up there with the best Norwegian stuff. Delicious synths and sliding beats with space for your own memories and dreams 4/5

#3291 Fred Falke - Alpha

Lively space disco mired in cloying vocals and too much nostalgia. And paced all wrong. There's good stuff here, but don't put a yammering 3-minute intro on a 17-minute EP 3/5

#3290 808 State - Outpost Transmission

The kind of confident electronic epic you can only make when you've mastered the tools. None of these songs are especially emotionally devestating, irresistibly bodyrocking, or intellectually thrilling, but these guys know their way around a synthesizer and every minute's as satisfying as a well-made meal. Well-paced, rock-solid 4/5

#3289 Siriusmo - Zeit

A plodding EP that never surprises once, lacking the inventive squirreliness his stuff usually has 2.5/5

#3288 Notaker - Genesis EP

Maximalist raveout meets 80's revival meets dubsteppy blompf - a pretty tight 22 minute listen with better flow than that genre-salad description suggests 3.5/5

#3287 Erasmo Carlos - Carlos, Erasmo

Not the most adventurous tropicalia album around, but one of the most roundly pleasant listens on the scene, overflowing with texture and melody, packed with pretty snippets delivered on the wind 4/5

#3286 Chastity Belt - I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone

Nowhere near as hooky and not half as exciting as Time to Go Home, but the commitment to unease, to trying to be alright, to a certain stoned evenness, gripped like a lifeline, is brilliant in its way. A minorly-miserable masterpiece, even missing the melodies. A deeply 2018 record 3.5/5

#3285 Fujiya & Miyagi - Different Blades From The Same Pair Of Scissors

Hooky, flowing dancepunk with just the right nonsequitors to mutter again and again to loose you from reason. Dig the way the record leads with the gapless one-track, emphasizing the full dj experience where this kind of thing thrives. The individual track versions even fade out clumsily, as if to remind you you're doing it wrong. It's a weird thing to get turned on by but 3.5/5

#3284 Wire - Silver / Lead

2016's Nocturnal Koreans defied all expectations: lively and propulsive and exciting beyond what you'd expect from a late-late era album from a once-iconic band. Then Silver / Lead hit every trap NK dodged: it's logy, overslick, and oversimple, the spark used up 2.5/5

#3283 Clinic - Internal Wrangler

A sinister, muscular manifestation of surf//country twang, menacing and strange and exciting, overblown energy overflowing 4/5

#3282 Pink Reason - Cleaning the Mirror

Spacious and patient, an artifact out of time. Simple and empty and perfect. Loose and earnest and ugly and alive, the way only an album uncaring of your interest can be 4/5

#3281 Mutual Benefit - Thunder Follows the Light

Teeters just on the edge of too much, all that indie crooning, layers and layers, that Bon Iver sheen, that Arcade Fire swoon, all that Sufjan crooning, all that soundtracky plucking about, with just a hint of Microphone grasping. But it's the whole-album listen that elevates - this is more than songs to someone. Those hints, relentless, of weather and light and sound and enduring, culminating in that hammerdrop last track. Any album that starts with Written in Lighting and ends with Thunder Follows ---- that's worth something 4/5

#3280 Scott Hirsch - Lost Time Behind the Moon

Hirsch's smooth with a tune, with just that spike of honkytonk. A little too smooth here. Pretty, but everything pedaled and flanged and reverbed past itself, till its got that solo artist sheen, a little Delicate Steve. I miss that Blue Rider clean 3.5/5