#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