#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