#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