#3732 Zack Mexico - Run Out of Money and Die

4.5/5 mellow, hypnotic, rich and rocking, with dips into weirdness. Beta Band meets Je Suis France, all spun out across a cosmic hour, some grooves stretching time, some just passing through

#3731 Pup - Morbid Stuff

4/5 pup weaves death and depression and anger into a damn near concept album - a bit slower, a bit older, but still raging, still hooky as shit, sounding pretty sunny for all the doomy themes. That cover says it all, the pastel thrill of something bad about to happen

#3730 Elvis Depressedly - Holo Pleasures / California Dreamin'

4/5 I almost blew right past this. It sounded at first like a halfbaked mess, or maybe a studied affectation of lo-fi. And it might be one or both, and now I'm not sure it's a bad thing - but it sounds goddamn _good, subtly lightyears better than a the hundred similar records. The overblown guitars, the tiny beats, the tapedeck friction, it's so warm, so close, as bedroom as they come, indie pop perfection.

Either Cothran got lucky or he's a damn skilled producer; these songs don't sound accidentally flawed, they sounds worn, bloomed, molted and mulched; dying, but alive

#3729 Jeff Parker - Suite for Max Brown

4.5/5 endlessly unpredictable, never less than enthralling. A gorgeous, mysterious blend of styles. Jazz from some forgotten future, structures, drifting down as loose jams, snippets, loops, but never straying from the idea that music is for listening to. Kamasi meets McCraven. Puzzle pieces that surely work together, laid our in strange formations. Some mysterious kind of magic.

#3728 Squid - Lino

3.5/5 a simmering, mini-masterpiece of patient rock texture. There's no sign here of the blistering, brilliant EP they'd put out two years later, but there's still some nascent unknowable magic. The longer two songs here don't sound slowed down... they just unfold this way, as naturally and inevitably as glaciers. Even Squid's career's a slow burn, as they dribble out a song or four at a time; every snapshot of their evolution's worth hearing. A first-round-pick Band To Watch.

#3727 The Snails - Songs from the Shoebox

3.5/5 Samuel Herring's searching howl never really matched Future Islands' synthpop detach. But with The Snails everything makes sense, his earnest strain matching the ragged, half-goofy sincerity of these shambling, sax-streaked rock songs, summoning pathos and bathos and crackling frisson

#3726 Bryan Scary - Birds

4/5 Scary's a criminally overlooked songwriter; a wizard, a true star. Birds is another suite of effortless pop, full of baroque and proggy flourishes, as graceful and fluttering as its subject matter

#3725 Bonnie Doon - Dooner Nooner

3/5 (not to be confused with Bonny Doon!) clumsy Sonic Youthy punk racket, lofi in every way possible - unremarkable, but charming in an indie pop kinda way

#3724 Sofia Bolt - Waves

3.5/5 Pretty, personal, true to Bolt's LA-via-Paris provenance, folky sunshine lightly marbled with rock frisson, breezy with a whisper of doubt

#3723 Klaus Johann Grobe - Du Bist So Symmetrisch

2.5/5 retro-synth-packed Swiss dancepunk with German lyrics, half-familiar and difficult to remember

#3722 Zack Mexico - Get Rich and Live Forever

3.5/5 agreeable, slack grooves and surfy rumbles, effortless hooks given time to breathe, with a resonant, welcoming voice at the center. A little too slack though, lacking some of the punch of its sister album

#3721 Grant Hart - Hot Wax

3.5/5 that opener's a kick, a perfect 60s nugget that never was. None of the rest reaches those highs, but there's enough organ licks, garagey guitars and earnest yelps from Hart to have a good time with

#3720 The Vacant Lots - Endless Night

3.5/5 you know you're gonna get good texture with covers like that. Neo-motorik in no rush, cutting lazy lines down the blue slopes

#3719 Flamingosis - Pleasure Palette

3.5/5 samply grooves, hazed and wobbled, halfway between vaporwave and instrumental hip hop. cool warm chill

#3718 Operators - Radiant Dawn

3/5 Daniel Boeckner brings that Wolf Parade feel, and the synths are all swirly and agreeable, but it's all a bit hollow. Tempos middling and locked in, no big moves or moments, as just-there as the cover's big black pyramid, as songs named Terminal Beach, Days, Low Life, and I Feel Emotion. Heck, maybe that's the point, but it's not much of a thrill to listen to

#3717 Dougie Poole - Wideass Highway

2.5/5 old school country ballad feel with a modern streak sounds relevant to my interest. But there's a detuned haze on the whole thing, like the record player sluffed a few rpm, that sets my goddamn teeth on edge

#3716 Olivia Tremor Control - John Peel Session

4.5/5 a thrilling, swirling mess, the spirit of eight songs captured perfectly and spun together, improbably reinventing all those squalls and fancies and flourishes from OTC albums. Just loose enough to thrill, as pleasantly, bewilderingly psychedelic a seventeen minutes as you're likely to find

#3715 Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross - Watchmen: Volume 1

3.5/5 all the tracks are simple on paper, and some of their tricks are familiar by now, but man these guys can put just the right sheen on those synths and textures. Clip the attack here, filter in some fuzz, some magic happens. Shame about all those spoken interludes - they set the stage the first time and fuck the flow all the way up every time after

#3714 Hot Flash Heat Wave - Neapolitan

3/5 plays like a cut-rate Surfer Blood, which ain't so bad, just with less memorably hooks and a misleadingly vaporwavey album cover

#3713 Johnnie Frierson - Have You Been Good to Yourself

3/5 utterly guileless, plainspoken soul songs about god, roughly recorded, backed by little more than an electric guitar and a foot on the floor. As scruffily folky as can be, but none to thrilling beyond that simple charm

#3712 Night Shop - In the Break

4/5 some of the slow songs drag, but man Justin Sullivan is a wonderful songsmith, spinning out open-road slow-burning energy, overflowing with skin-prickling detail. There's no unnecessary note in the backing, just an endless scrolling backdrop of endless sky, shades of Josh Ritter and bandmate Kevin Morby

#3711 Wallows - Nothing Happens

4/5 hooky indie clipin along agreeably, dancing through styles. Shows vulnerability that risks tipping into self-pity, but I'll take it for those last two songs, swooping the best Neutral Milk impression since Hidden Driver right into a Carseat-worthy climax

#3710 Flume - Hi This is Flume

3.5/5 scattering and fragmented, each song skittering in a different direction, some knob turned past its intended purpose; a cobble of artifacts. A bit of a bad trip to listen to, but the pacing keeps the new ideas coming fast. Fun to watch it all fall apart once or twice

#3709 Dance with the Dead - Near Dark

3/5 hard-driving video game music real, with proper guitars and synths, a now-familiar fusion of electronic headbobbing and metal headbanging. Heads will move. All nostalgic and exciting enough, but nothing stands out or sticks

#3708 Radical Face - Ghost

3/5 a hushed night creeping through your parent's old house, a sky full of stars; the awe you experience when you're truly alone with the world. Fuel for bored souls looking to soar, but I'm too jaded now

#3707 Ultiimate Painting - Ultiimate Painting

4/5 slack, hooky, noodling, with that sweet surfy haze, Pavement meets Courtney Barnett on a long left. The kind of casually pretty indie we don't get so much of anymore

#3706 DaBaby - Kirk

2.5/5 this doesn't speak to me. And that's nobody's fault, I'm pushing 40. this is just how things are now

#3705 The Darkness - Easter is Cancelled

3.5/5 such thorough, unwinking commitment to the huge awesome riff and the shriek of sweetest anguish from the heart. Hooky, glammy, shameless joy, even if it starts to lose its punch on the second half

#3704 Gauche - A People's History of Gauche

3.5/5 wafts of B52s hooky art-trash, with a slathering of that '19 sax, bratty angular, angry, lasers focused on the rotten core, melting down like a deerhoof, as annoying as the truth

#3703 Lizzo - Cuz I Love You

3.5/5 blasting pure-pop production, Lizzo can belt, and has a lot to say. Good swaggering, strutting, staggering fun - though the self-love message feels a little pushed sometimes

#3702 Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes

4.5/5 file these guys along Garbage as a band that has, when you really count it out, a surprising number of songs you know. That drawling yelp, those slapped brushes, but mostly that, impossibly huge , open , twangy a c o u s t i c guitar . a million microchallenges, every note on the edge or a tangibly staked respite against it.

bratty, annoying, but goddamn - it is alive as shit, and there's simply nothing else like this out there full stop. a weird tortured essential mess

#3701 Tipper - Forward Escape

3/5 you know Centipede, the fleas? the way you're fighting the titular crawlie and these other assholes drop in, straight down, at speed? there's a lot of that here. clever gestures, minor mindblow moves, but it's all a scatter of crosscutting tricks

#3700 Tipper - Jettison Mind Hatch

3.5/5 an absolute master of the audio space, that opener is a sphere of experience, and the rest is a trip. A perfectly named album, music that can give you an extra dimension to escape the otherwise encircling. Tipper's been at this a long time -- he has his snakes of sound welltrained, they rear at his command, warp and bend and close in for an embrace

#3699 Twin Peaks - Lookout Low

4.5/5 man Twin Peaks wants to be the Rolling Stones and I mean that in the best possible way. They want to be the best part of best era rolling Stones, Americana rolled out with the casual expanse that only exile can bring. There's horns, ladies, honk and tonk, dust and twang and spliff and spike and everything you could hope for. And goddamn is there ever still time for them to become, with all due respect to White Reaper, the world's best American band. Guitars that exhale, drums that follow slowing hearts, and a sentiment to hitch yourself to just before the shutdown

#3698 Monster Rally - Adventures on the Floating Island

4/5 Feighan finally got there. He had an idea for tropical grooves, but they were always a bit detuned, a little clunky, never actually relaxing, mired in some uncanny valley. But he's got there - this is what Dr. Jacoby got down with, the kind of thing that make you want to pin up your own tropical paradise and rock to a tape in a coconut

#3697 Black Coffee - Music if King 2019 Appreciation Mix

3.5/5 sure is house. Flow is rocksolid, feels good in the ears. Makes you wanna groove. Count it.

#3696 The Rain Parade - Emergency Third Rail Power Trip

4/5 file this under the few paisley underground albums that got there. all that crunch and swirl works, crystallizes, gels. Melts era, finds its space, occupies it, invites you in

#3695 The Three O'Clock - Sixteen Tambourines

2.5/5 hey remember that kinda backhanded praise of Baroque Hoedown? whatever magic that was that kept the Three O'Clock from being annoying evaporated and now it all seems kinda twee and no thank you

#3694 The Three O'Clock - Baroque Hoedown

3.5/5 some breeze rides under all this jangle, all this 60's dredging, the nasal vocals, it just finds that updraft and sails. simple songs in just the right shape to bring you up