#3639 Caravan - In the Land of Grey and Pink

3/5 this's what happens when the bass player is the singer - the basslines are so high in the mix, they pull focus and reduce the rest of the countless instruments to texture and its a damn shame. That balance works on the funkier, catchier tracks like the opener and title track -- which are fucking great! But man. That last epic should be catnip. But it unspools as meandering jazz noodling, the bass overwhelming the solos, an ugly, indulgent sidelong slog

#3638 UV-TV - Glass

3.5/5 all the clash and clatter blurs together, for better or worse, a frantically busy wall of sound like punkrock shoegaze. The hurricane's got a kind eye or two, but it all starts and ends in howling

#3637 Kansas - Leftoverture

2.5/5 oversmooth pop and big dumb hard rock tarted up with an affectation of prog's complexity and a legitimate portion of its pretentiousness. The worst of both worlds

#3636 Deerhunter - Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?

3.5/5 Deerhunter's long been cloaked in a resigned, approachable misery, shading the darkest sentiments with sunnier sounds, only descending into the depths under cover of darkness.

But here's their first post-2016 album, when the banal inevitability of the end of everything has truly become clear, and their tack suddenly feels natural. On second track No One's Sleeping, a classic Deerhunter chug sweetens the medicine, muttered references to the Village Green and Golden Pond, to things gone, and soon to be gone. 

#3635 Madmadmad - Proper Music

3/5 when these guys play live the drums/bass/guitar bring a little unpredictable funk edge, the electronics get bent and flayed with rough edges; there's a negotiation between press-play motorik and knob-twiddling jamminess. That conflict's lost here though. It's all catchy, building up slowly, but nothing feels spontaneous - there's no life, no danger, song after song ending after a polite three and a half minutes

#3634 Bob Seger - Live Bullet

4/5 draws heavily from Beautiful Loser, but finds the spark in its songs that the studio couldn't capture. A rollicking ramble of classic covers puts the whole thing over the top. The Silver Bullet band is electric, Seger is relentless - these guys know how to rock and roll and this cracking performance proves it

#3633 Bob Seger - Beautiful Loser

3/5 Seger's got some classics, but these aren't they. The country-flecked stuff's a good time, but there's too many sappy ballads and B- swings at 50s rollick

#3632 Nils Frahm - All Encores

3/5 love Nils Frahm, he's got a wonderful touch, but this 80 minute set of keyboard wanderings is a little too slight, a little too patient, ends up a little boring.

Exception for Harmonium in the Well, which needs every one of its 694 seconds to weave its spell of resigned isolation

#3631 Zip-Tie Handcuffs - Warm Shadows

3.5/5 rock solid rock with busy beats and silky-smooth gear changes from high to low and back again. I like it; 90s me would've loved it

#3630 Harenemuri - Harutosyura

3.5/5 packed with frantic energy: frayed post-punk guitars vs. laptop electronics vs. tacky pop-metal vs. pure idol choruses, shot through with endless clipped rap-singing. More annoying // more pleasant than it sounds; disorienting - anxious - joyful

#3629 Camel - Mirage

4/5 my kind of prog, knotted and swervy, but engaged with the human experience, interested in taking you on an adventure, aware of your limits, alternating tests and rests. With a damn fine eye for melody too. A good trip

#3628 Gentle Giant - Octopus

2.5/5 baroque, obtuse, purple nonsense, and I say that as someone who _likes _prog. Why just have a melody when you could hocket it hither and tither till it falls apart? Why pace your music in confirmation or thoughtful defiance of human expectation when you could scatter starts and stops as if mastered by some unknowable math equation? "Why not when you could" asked endlessly until unlistenable, then a little more

#3627 Blackwater Holylight - Veils of Winter

2.5/5 all those guitar tones and layered vocals blur together into a pleasant shoegazey haze. But the sound's just not heavy enough, not committed enough to pure stoner sludge, not otherwise bold enough to justify such a willfully plodding, hookless stance

#3626 Pottery - No. 1

4.5/5 seven little adventures. You know how Sonic spins in place in a little ball before launching through some swooping labyrinth - turn down the colors and put that in slow motion and that's the Pottery experience. Cool patience. Neo-motorik putting the groove on a treadmill before letting it loose to run, slack grooves that curl all the way around and crack. Effortlessly exciting, some brash child of Pavement and the Strokes

#3625 Sacred Paws - Run Around The Sun

4/5 a delight! Sunny, dancable, with double-hot indie arpegiations and beats leaning ever forward in African ellipses. Confident, bright, bristling with easy talent - one to watch

#3624 Natalia Lafourcade - Musas

3.5/5 pristine production, an effortlessly evocative voice, endless sprightly latin flourishes: it's an utterly pleasant listen. But truly, be warned, it is _squeaky clean, and look out for a clam of a That's Amore cover right in the middle

#3623 MGMT - Little Dark Age

3/5 quirky, warped. A more evocative take on purple 80s nostalgia than most. But outside the hazy atmosphere (and that great first song) its hook-light and unmemorable

#3622a Mother Hips - Live at Fernwood Resort 05-19-18

Listen (watch?) here!

4/5 a gorgeous night captured clearly. The Mother Hips strike the balance of jammy meandering, country-rock warmth, and soulful shimmer. And goddamn those transcendent Neil Young guitar tones put it over the top

#3622 Mid-Air Thief - Gongjoong Doduk

3.5 Crumbling is his masterpiece (so far!), but Mid-Air Thief's debut is a worthwhile peek at the genesis of the method: melodic and rhythmic snippets used as raw materials, stretched, blended, ripped and woven into sonic mixed-media. Disorienting, clever, occasionally a lot of fun, flashes of Cornelius and The Books

#3621 Mid-Air Theif - Crumbling

5/5 gorgeous.

so many soft layers, like chiffon, like a silk croissant.

the feel rises like transoceanic waves, subtle, unexpected, inevitable

flow. a universe deeply crafted yet seeming to emerge in real time

one hundred instruments, restrained, gesturing into your headspace as you pass through in turn

--

I've listened to this straight through a dozen times, and i don't find that kind of time very often these days. Effortlessly pleasant, sizzling with details and detours to dig into. Capturing that thrill of The Books, The Go Team, Prefuse, all those early aughts legends -- when maybe music was something unknowable and filled with possibility, that could spin a thread beyond your line of sight, tempting you to follow

#3620 Michael Christmas - Baggy Eyes

3.5/5 cheeky. hazy. easy weaving complex. clumsy now and then and not that worried about it. aspirational, that looseness. maybe what you should strive for is to chill the fuck out, Christmas throws out there, in this year of our lord twenty nineteen.

Smooth production, killer flow.

man they say tick tick a lot

#3619 Rik Ocasic - Beatitude

3.5/5 uninterested in you. plodding along with sunglasses on. boring for a while there, that strut to nowhere, but after a while you match stride and you're feeling kinda cool goddammit

#3618 Sergei Rachmaninoff / Berliner Philharmoniker / Lorin Maazel (1984) - Symphonic Dances, Op.45; Intermezzo "Aleko"; Vocalise, Op.34

3.5/5 the fuck do I know what to do with classical. It does move, gesture to motion. Lyrical, evocative, sprightly, alive, but only as alive a most excellent oil painting can be, in 2019. Goes decent with basketball, actually, though

#3617 Empath - Active Listening: Night on Earth

4/5 how do you even be this scuzzy and this pretty;; if empath was a girl I'd fall in love. all the clattering headless excitement of the moment, slathered in the gauze of memory;; the snap of a lolling head back into a moment of blistering awareness, the haze of drunken abandon and wist, may it never fade

#3616 Melody's Echo Chamber - Bon Voyage

3.5/5 starts off paralyzingly French, unfolds into something much stranger and more psychedelic and paralyzingly French. It's all so archly, willfully, baroque! And in a way I love its endless tricks and flourishes. But they mount and mount and bury any semblance of a throughline, until you're moaning stop faffing about and do the fucking thing already, like the science of sleep, but music

#3615 Saint Rich - Beyond the Drone

4/5 Delicate Steve spinoff that's at least as lush and hooksome and packed with juicy guitar tones as the best in the Steve-proper discography. The band-proper sound and rock-proper setups make the extended instrumental outros all the sweeter (Officer! You Ain't Worth the Night!). Thoroughly, simply enjoyable, a mirror image of the latest (electronic, disappointing) DS album

#3614 Penelope Isles - Until the Tide Creeps In

3/5 chiming, twinkling indie like they don't make much anymore. Pretty, but doesn't give you much to write about

#3613 Yak - Pursuit of Momentary Happiness

4/5 bewilderingly rockist, leading with a headfake towards King Gizzard, slathered in late Beatles references. Then comes waves of horns, thunderously scuzzy basslines, garagey rants, offkilter sneering, stomping, swirling, microproggy song structures - a reminder that psychedelia needs to look inward and outward, not backward (cc tame impala)

#3612 Delicate Steve - Till I Burn Up

3/5 sheds any pretense of a band, going full Ratatat with the clicks and swooshes and the so VEry perfect guitars. Lacks the soul of his earlier stuff, but you can't deny it's pretty

#3611 Red Belmont - Into My Own

3/5 big, full, borderline-shoegaze walls of guitars make for a pleasant washaway, but the bass is way too high in the mix, pulling focus, and the songs just sound muddy by the end

#3610 TVAM - Psychic Data

3/5 starts off strong, with just enough fuzz in the distorted sheen, moving along a menacing pace. But there's too many dalliances into puddly nonsense down the road to keep the momentum up

#3609 The Comet is Coming - Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery

4/5 more groovesome, less daring, and ultimately less exciting than companion album Afterlife, but still, a generous dose of heady synths, spiked with adventurous sax gestures, ready to move asses into another dimension

#3608 The Comet is Coming - The Afterlife

4.5/5 transcendental shit. holy shit those sax lines on the last two minutes of the opener. Beats that move forward without deigning to demarcate measures, the whole, rumbling, thrashing, flickering sound lurching forward inevitable and on fire.

All three members are at the top of their game: synths more otherworldly, drums more entrancing, sax closer to god than ever before. As fine a combination of experimental and enjoyable as you're liable to find this year

#3607 Session Victim - Listen to Your Heart

3.5/5 listenable, laid-back, largely unremarkable house, for a while there. But this finds its stride on the second half and swings for the dancefloor: Almost Midnight and Up to Rise are a dynamite one-two punch, and you wonder if it was the plan all along