#3666 King Tuff - Black Moon Spell

4/5 as shamelessly, brattily catchy as power pop comes - Headbanger into Beautiful Thing is pure joy rock. Good clean fun, even if the singleminded songwriting wears a bit thin by track 14

#3665 Mikal Cronin - Seeker

3.5/5 heartfelt, desperate, resigned energy, the kind of thing you make when you want to be positive and write hooks but its been years of this shit, and it may not ever turn around. It's no time for MCII - tunes that glorious may never be written again, but there's something warm and true here to huddle around

#3664 The Beach Boys - Sunflower

3.5/5 The Beach Boys, some flashes of Pet Sounds aside, a little cloying, obvious, very nearly annoying. A lot of these songs are one-note concepts smeared out to multi-note harmonies without a whole lot of inspiration beyond the multiplication. And hoo boy is Add Some Music To Your Day a near-self-parodic piece of shit.

But there are those flashes where the magic strikes and how; the first and last tracks, in particular, are that kind of magic song that flits and slips through your fingers. That's how you make a song about music, by making good music. Jesus what a weirdly religious piece of shit that song is.

#3663 Ayeon - Sketches of Home

3/5 a little logo in the corner of the cover aligns this album with internet-via-LA-based label Jazz Hop Cafe, which in turn unironically aligns itself with sipping coffee. And that's fine. That's nice. And so is this music, which is pretty and pleasant, as whimsical as the pink and spaceship of the rest of the cover. And I didn't fail to enjoy a second of it but it dared zero times to make a move that might distract me from my coffee

#3662 Beach House - 7

3.5/5 awkward cause I'm real light and late on the Beach House train. There's moments, hoo boy, some of those synth slices and production flourishes are staggering, and its all pretty, but a bit washy, indistinct, unmemorable

#3661 Kyanos - Lost in Blue

3.5/5 chill, slomo surf grooves, with the soft grit of soft garage and a shamelessly psychedelic streak.

just, like, real fuckin good to listen to

#3660 Crack the Sky - Animal Notes

3/5 yeesh, what happened? There's an invigorating stomp through a lot of this, ghosts of that fun rockist progism. But man, the first side is miserable, and the second side is goofy as hell, especially that cloying Invaders From Mars bowieism. Freerunning band gets a job.

#3659 FM - Black Noise

3.5/5 those synth lines are the equalizer here, cutting right through all the bombast like a laser sword, a throughline into the foliage. Mostly utterly goofy, just look at those scifi songtitles, but those synth hooks're so bright, so cleanly, boldly realized, they'll make you grin in spite of yourself

#3658 Earl Sweatshirt - Feet of Clay

4/5 tight points punch through. fifteen minutes, but not one bar wasted, loose and precise, instantly memorable lines. madlib-sleepy//hooksome, finally stretching at the end then snapping off. a brilliant slash of bold pacing

#3657 Strawbs - Hero and Heroine

4/5 been hitting the prog _pre_ty hard lately, and this taps into the mother vein of my love of Genesis and rides it into the night. Those bellowing mellotrons, those romantic, sweeping climaxes, those flagrantly Gabrielesque vocals, all woven with perfect flow.

Sweeping pacing, and two gorgeous moments perfectly placed, like a movie might be paced, at the end of the opening salvo and as we achieve sweet denouement.

In the best prog rock you don't even notice that something complex is happening; the means not the ends. As in film, that's the line between the understated masterpiece and the arty wank; the best straddle it. Semicolons for everyone!

Profoundly sensitive, deeply uncool, but really quite a nice little swoon

#3656 The Regrettes - How Do You Love?

3.5/5 (maybe inevitably) lacks the manic, effortless energy of their debut, with nothing as frantically, positively toe-tapping as Hey Now or Lacy Loo. What you do get is more complex, a more bittersweet take on loving, loosing, longing. Girl-group pathos and slower-burning feelings paint a romantic, bitter, wondering worldview. Still miss those killer hooks though - little near-nicks of Close to Me and Last Nite are distracting too

#3655 Justice - Woman Worldwide

4/5 self-remixing, flow-conscious, show-length: by all accounts an electronic live album in the spirit of Alive X7, but not actually done live: studio-clean and clear of crowd noise. Clever. And it works. It's not Alive-tier, and its a real slow burn for stretches, but it's always overwhelmingly listenable, and the highlights land with earned expectation when they come. And yes, excellent work music

#3654 Digitalism - Idealism

3.5/5 the best moments are hooky as hell, there's a few certified bangers. But the tacky rockist moves haven't aged well -- Justice without the cool

#3653 Julian Lynch - Rat's Spit

3/5 shimmer and croon going nowhere in particular

#3652 Kevin Morby - Oh My God

4/5 searing, earnest folk//rock, pointed upward through gospel. Oh My God sounds eternal, inevitable, like George Harrison, Songs Ohia. Difficult, in its way - that patience and directness, a slow motion shot in the head

#3651 Spendtime Palace - Playdate

3.5/5 stompy, slack surf grooves, sounding not unlike local boys Vundabar. One-dimensional, but the bones are good, let's see where this's headed

#3650 Circuit des Yeux - Reaching for Indigo

3/5 complex, original, the kind of thing I ought to like. But the execution just doesn't land, sounding fussy, busy, thin, cold, lacking throughlines and soul, more collaged than performed

#3649 Rozi Plain - What a Boost

3.5/5 Plain's voice is full of promise and wistful mystery, the music is patient, lupine, elliptical, strange. a view as wide as the horizon

#3648 Bonny Doon - Longwave

4/5 wonderfully straightforward and chill. strums and mutters about how things actually are, for you to float in. and the songs aren't flashy, but you feel people playing them. fuckin solid.

#3647 Premiata Forneria Marconi - Per Un Amico

4/5 part of the appeal of prog is the sheer ambition, that building of a rocket meant for the moon, and while so many crash and burn or recede into theater, sometimes a band really gets there. Here's a rare case where all that complexity and pomposity achieves something like transcendence, overwhelms your intellect and sweeps what left to another place

#3646 Marillion - Clutching at Straws

3/5 you've got to admire the commitment, the withering story at its core, prog complexity deployed to illustrate disorientation and loss of control. But it's just so indulgent and ornate, playing like Collinsey emo, never landing actual empathy

#3645 Dommengang - No Keys

3/5 those riffs so heavy, muscular structures striding through the bullshit of 2019 - but that effortless, hooky irresistiblity of Love Jail was lost somewhere along the way

#3644 Happy the Man - Happy the Man

3.5/5 fun, but in that kind of studied classical sense of playfulness, a dalliance from the norms of form and don't you get it? not anything that's actual fun in any way that your body would understand. Fun like good whiskey, not like the cheap stuff -- enjoyable sure but not fun exactly at all

#3643 Crack the Sky - Crack the Sky

4.5/5 there were a handful of prog bands you could call playful, in a classical bullshit sense (see, say, Happy the Man) but this might the only prog album where you felt like the band was having any actual fucking _fun; was interested in you having some too, in an actual rock and roll sense. There's all those start-stops and strange Scary structures, but it's in the service of humor, headbobbing, maybe even dancing. Goddamn delightful, Thin Lizzy / Cheap Trick listenable, with all that arty archness just there to put a hitch in your hipmoves. Killer fucking album flow (Robots for Ronnie aside) too

#3642 Can - Future Days

4/5 as loose, organic, inevitable as krautrock can be. Unperformed, more likely discovered, buried in ash and rubble, a earthen lesson to '73, today, later. Brilliant, patient jams unspooling

#3641 Magma - Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh

3.5/5 ain't nothing like it, credit for that. A yelping, churning blood ritual, building to a fever pitch, keening vocals falling all over themselves as the master arrives

#3640 Ami Dang - Parted Plains

3/5 all the production is lush, inventive, enveloping. But the Sitar, theoretically the star of the show, is out of place, scattered, distracting. Frustrating.