#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.

#3335 Savak - Beg Your Pardon

3/5
Hooky, crunchy, but a bit toothless. Songs about intense things sung without much intensity, guitars afraid to offend. A QotSA record left out in the rain, a martial arts demonstration.

Feels like a band that might have been more exciting a couple albums ago...

#3334 Butthole Surfers - Hairway to Steven

3/5
Wildly original, flagrantly unpleasant, if less so than Locust. Power through once and put in the basement, away from your other albums

#3333 The Del Fuegos - Boston, Mass.

2.5/5
Midtempo middling rock, one step from soft, Tom Petty without the melodies

#3332 Mike Krol - Turkey

3.5/5
Sludgier than his breakneck early albums, but that effortless, bratty hookiness still shows through

#3331 Demon - Midnight Funk

3.5/5
proof that Jeremie Mondon was the better half of Wuz, Midnight Funk's got all the mystery and restraint that Alex Gopher's album of the same year lacked. Songs are all slowburners, rightly so, full of dark housey texture and French sheen

#3330 Alex Gopher - You My Baby and I

2.5/5
All the bass and texture and patience hold up pretty good, but the vocals consign this to the bargain bin of the 90s. From the goofy robots on Ralph and Kathy to the exaltations of the on-the-nose Party People, almost every song sounds like a wonky Basement Jaxx b-side. Absent any context you'd hear this and know for a _fact was sold on a CD

#3329 Rainbow - Rising

3.5/5
up there with Steely Dan and Freebird as a good-or-shit high/low litmus test - I'm completely down with this album's hokey guitar god-grasping and prog-metal excess. Those back-half epics shred

#3328 Buffalo Killers - Alive and Well in Ohio

3/5
agreeable, laid-back jammy crunch, frothy with go-nowhere ooos and swoons. As pleasant and forgettable as a wasted afternoon

#3327 Je Suis France - One-Eyed Sun

2/5
I'm just glad these guys are still kicking, but mainlining the experimental throwaway drones they usually pepper their albums is no fun. Gemini Rose is actually rather nice though i wish the actually wasn't necessary

#3326 Herzog - Me Vs. You

4.5/5

Preorder here!

For one bar you think this is a new stripped-down Herzog, a Separation Sunday declaration of nostalgic stakes barrelling you over. For one song this sounds like Boys 2, propulsive music aware of the importance of music. But then the band shimmers off into Winter, and never quite comes back, drifting through something gauzier, more lost and more hopeful. And off we go, a followup one of the best, cleanest fistpumpingest albums in years is more of a headphone album, one that rocks plenty, but that shares more with Radiohead and the War on Drugs than you might expect.

It's the song structures short tracks unspooling like mini-epics, with subtle swerves and proggy diversions, shifting the formula just enough to keep you on your toes but never whacking expectation for its own sake. The closer's something special, a wordless build to a shoutalong climax to a fadeout as long as a day in the life.

It's also the lush, sensitive production. Me vs. You has moments of pure shoegaze, overflowing with generosity. From the soft second verse of Amps II Eleven, to the crashing climax of No Place is Safe Forever, the record's packed with harmonics, echoes, fizzy frictions and synthy flourishes. Other songs have a nuanced closeness: fingers on bass frets, the frames of the drums. It's all very pretty, all bringing intimacy to a pretty personal album.

One of Herzog's strengths has always been the honesty and directness of their songwriting. Boys addressed the indie rockers on line one, and followed up with songs about rock, touring, and the biz. Making music about making music's as demonstrably earnest as musicmaking can be, but the theme was made univeral, just songs about having a job, grinding frustration, sluffing profits to the man - its just that Herzog's job is being in a band. And then there's songs about getting old in a young folks' scene, an easy subject that's hard to handle well, but they find an effortless combination of personal and relatable that gives every song a punch.

And they keep it going here, still getting older, still settling down, still angry from time to time, trying to keep it all in balance. I've got a kid of my own, we're reminded. No once cares if you're depressed. Living Wrong, which undercuts everything about this being their more understaded album, is fire.

The one problem is the weird sequencing. The flow never quite comes together, maybe owing to some recording stumbles there were rumbles of. On an album as well-suited for a 3-peak structure, why not put Winter 3rd and either let it be a break from a big one-two or at least give yourself a chance to come down off the opener? Freedom's Goblin did the same thing. It's frustrating; it feels like a good film undercut by bad editing.

That aside.

Me vs. You's a great record for anyone who came up on loud-quiet bands in the 90's, who's grappling with the realities of unyoungness, full of big riffs and little shimmers. These guys are up there with Je Suis France as a chronically underappreciated band. This is the kind of album that makes you actively put energy into hoping a band stays together, just so you can get music more like this in your life.

#3325 Rainbow - Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow

3/5
if you want some big dumb hard rock, this is that. Riffs galore and an aesthetic that's aged even worse than prog proper's

#3324 Twist - Distancing

4/5
a quietly adventurous, assured little gem, somewhere between Fleetwood Mac and Blondie at their gauziest. Pockets of synthy brilliance everywhere, especially that whole Waves raveup spiking what this band's capable of

#3323 Clairo - Diary 001

3/5
Uninspired singing about nothing does not thrill me, the production's clean and clever enough to make for a pleasant headbob

#3322 Bacao Rhythm and Steel Band - 55

3.5/5
Quirky, groovy stuff, as funky as steel drums come, ripe for sampling