#3809 Chris Forsyth - Peoples Motel Band

3.5/5 some pretty exciting instrumental guitar jamming, finding the balance between waving about and cutting right to the quick. Excellent pacing for the patient

#3808 Once and Future Band - Deleted Scenes

3/5 so so slick. Shamelessly pop prog, reviving the least cool era of the least cool good music around, whitewashed jazzy flourishes, jamband wanderings, and some admittedly pretty great organ runs, all in perfectly bite-sized units. Undeniably catchy, tough to listen to with a straight face

#3807 Peel Dream Magazine - Agitprop Alterna

3/5 maybe I'm just getting bored around the three thousand eight hundred mark, but as I listened to Agitprop Alterna I wondered, how many reviews of this album will compare Peel Dream Magazine to My Bloody Valentine? Will it be all of them?
Or more, somehow?

Let it not be said I'm not a data scientist! Of the 9 different reviews linked to on the first google page of "Agitprop Alterna Review", it's a clean sweep!

• Udara Madusanka Perera - bearing a distinct resemblance to My Bloody Valentine
• Dan Macintosh - remind one of My Bloody Valentine 
• Kaelen Bell - function much like My Bloody Valentine's "Touched"
• Sophie Kemp - bearing a distinct resemblance to My Bloody Valentine
• Andy Von Pip - similar woozy disorientating rush utilised by My Bloody Valentine
• Maxwell Cann - a continuation of the experimental production methods of My Bloody Valentine
• Justice (?) - recalling the likes of Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher of My Bloody Valentine
• Brian Polson - pays homage to the fuzzy, mod-flavored rock of acts like My Bloody Valentine
• Lizzie Manno  - undoubtedly an homage to shoegaze and drone-pop artists of yesteryear like My Bloody Valentine

There are a surprising number of ways to say that! Good job team! I'm not sure I have anything to add. Tychofied shoegaze: pretty, chill, out of ideas, taking no chances

#3806 Jeffrey Silverstein - You Become the Mountain

4.5/5 truly lovely, all the twinkling, sliding, swooning peace of a William Tyler landscape, with a streak of psychedelia and a dash of beats, making for some chill hybrid of Tycho and Delicate Steve at their best. That slide guitar, it surely is sweet. As mysterious and pleasant as anything I've heard in a long time, a patient journey through large spaces inside and out

#3805 DJ Python - Mas Amable

3/5 I love where this starts, because it's beautiful slow and evocative and all I listen to anymore is ambient. But then the offkilter beats come in and all these tacky noises, and there's still these touches of that original beauty but then oh wow ouch the vocals on that 11 minute centerpiece. Bummer fakeout

#3804 Have a Nice Life - Deathconsciousness

4/5 I don't know that I like this. Maybe it's because it fits the times just a little too well (more on that when we get to Dan Mangan). But it's so patient, so unique, with just enough atmosphere and gorgeous slow-motion hooks, and earnest despair, I can't help but really recommend it as something you hear once (maybe save it for wave 2 or  3 of quarantine?). The kind of thing I want to remind myself to come back to again once a year or so.

All the smallness and zero-stakes earnestness of bedroom rock, but at such epic scale, songs stretching to strange lengths, buried in ancient distortion. I can't help but call it really _brave. You hear two guys making songs that are just the fucking songs they want to make, and they're shamelessly huge, without sounding like they have any pretension or aspiration at all, like they just had something they had to get out, and heck if that's not exciting to hear

#3803 Eerie Gaits - Holopaw

4/5 a pleasant little piece of introspection during a walk in strange woods. Every time Ross goes too sentimental, too close to some post-rock climax, a steadying piece of ambiance breaks out, revolving through awefilled mania and a quiet rumination (The Lure Follows Line being the best, wow).

There's borderline embarrassing excitement, balanced against moments of unexpected wisdom and peace, and I guess I see some version of myself in that, a version that balances the things that make me cringe and that I most admire, and knows that some of those are the same things

Holopaw feels like the earnest expression of a guy I'd like to know

#3802 The Spirit of the Beehive - Hypnic Jerks

4/5 you can't make a truly psychedelic album without some real surprises, some true left turns - more Olivia Tremor Control, less Tame Impala. Here's all this haze and wash, but with real fuckin _hooks, late Fugazi lean muscle caught by ambient trapdoors, and some of the most perfect Booksian samples around. That time dilation, no way all this adventure took place over the course of just 38 minutes

didnt I just take you there about an hour ago?

yeah, I'm the same guy. can you take me back to where I was before?

yes sir, right away! where were you before?

just take me there

yes sir!

#3801 Eluvium - Virga I

3.5/5 I will never figure out why these 3 long songs are broken up at the exact points that they are, but then this guy made Shuffle Drones, so don't go to him for orthodoxy in tracklist architecture

I'm not positive the title track isn't just repetitions of a one minute segment, a Disintegration Loop without the disintegration. There's a similar uneasy hypnosis to that landmark, but House Taken Over is the only one that truly finds something beautiful in all the noise and haze

If you've got the patience, you can play this as one 40-minute song and find truly satisfying catharsis in that final aching variation

#3800 Flat Worms - Antarctica

3/5 an underwhelming followup to Flat Worms' blistering debut

s/t was hot and fast, songs about Texas, acceleration, hot sands, motorbikes

Antarctica is, well, about things cold and slow, and it's just a mismatch to their strengths

And there's not the same urgency - I find out only afterwards that Ty Segall (!) and (!) Steve Albini are on board and, I don't know maybe that's just too much effort in play, some spark got blanketed. There's hooks, crunchy production, but it's Dad's clothes

#3799 Dan Deacon - Mystic Familiar

4.5/5 Dan Deacon's transformation from batshit noisemaker to transcendental sherpa is finally complete. After a decade or so of making increasingly amazingly trippy videos for harsh-but-gorgeous songs he's finally dropped the harshbut and made a wonderfully soft, busy, colorful swirling armchair//headphone listen without a single ragged sawtooth in sight. A fractal rainbow sweater. Just look at those song titles! A lovely listen, weaving old tricks (those sweeping automated piano lines, those filtered drones) with the new (some lovely sparse saxes, some actual clean vocals!). Fitting that it ends on the names of ghost towns. Let's get the fuck out of here

#3798 Wamth - Life

3/5 at some point Mena lost that balance from Home, stopped going slow, stopped blurring the edges of his 4-speed skills, let overt harmonies come through, fell ass backwards into a Tycho album

#3797 The Stokes - The New Abnormal

3/5 with every passing year Is This It becomes better and its goodness becomes harder to understand. Years where a new Strokes album comes out doubly so. One thing science has settled on is that that album was very _cool, as in detached and effortless, and somehow perfect. The New Abnormal is not that. The band sounds tense and subtly sloppy, and Casablancas sounds like he's having trouble keeping up, tiny gasps and surges to push the words where they need to be, and no number of studio snippets and winking asides can cover for it. Even putting Basquiat on the cover broadcasts a doomed plan for engaging in looseness

#3796 Skatebard and Lauer - Volpe

2.5/5 three criminally boring and idea-light songs, not even especially dancable. feels phoned in

#3795 Bjorn Torske - Byen

4/5 almost every song on Byen has a backbone of deadsimple old-school synths, some foundation of tangible, visible, hard-edged waves. And on top of that familiar, elemental crunch comes disco, rumbling drums, sparkling synth lines, samples of birds, and a million ways to bob your head and move your ass. A wonderful hybrid. The Norwegian scene lives.

#3794 The Necks - Body

3/5 remember those big brick pocketknives with like, 50 tools, until it doesn't fit in your pocket? Arty, timemelting minimalism into a jammy raveup center into an ambient fadeaway. An advertisement for a show I'd go to, but a better ad than a tool. I can't think of any possible hour of my life where this wouldn't be all wrong for some 15 minutes of its runtime

#3793 Warmth - Home

4/5 the difference between good and bad ambient is necessarily subtle. Agustín Mena does one thing very well: moves voices into the mix slowly, evolves voices even more slowly, and builds in subtle rhythms, little ghosts of clicks and heartbeats moving at paces more readily expressible in bpms. And every once in a while there's an actual melody, played low and slow and repeatedly and far apart. And he does all these things well, adding the barest scent of some distant place and, there you have it, good ambient from just one stone

#3792 Christina Vantzou - No. 3

3/5 a giant, patient mix of soundtracky, classical-adjacent drones and readymade electronic reverb. There's flashes of something enormous and elemental, with constant instrumentation shifts to keep you off-balance. But I'm not sure more is more when it comes to this kind of music, and it never adds up to more than a numb sense of unease

#3791 Ed Schrader's Music Beat - Riddles

3.5/5 I can't help but give Dan Deacon a lot of credit for this one. All its best moments, those twinking piano backings, those huge buzzy basslines, the general manic spirit - are the producer's hallmarks. All the actual songwriting and vocals and melodies are good enough, but not especially memorable

#3790 Underworld and The Necks - Appleshine Continuum

4.5/5 I haven't gone hard on a song like this in a long time. Each blur of a workday lately's been marked by at least one Appleshine Continuum playthrough.

Straight 4s makes for a straight underworld song for the first five minutes or so, but then little by little the beat compounds, and a bassline sidles in, and long organ drones lurk. And then its just a jazz trio magma jam, with only the barest electronic flourishes, and that strange patient dance goes on and on until the half hour mark (!) where something really remarkable happens: we just take off the yoke and a full on, maximal/minimal Necks groove breaks out, a Reichian raveup, endless texture, all upright bass and rumbling piano, and then just the sweetest outro you can imagine.

Apparently done in one take and it flows so slowly without a seam on it. Every part works and it is not boring and it is goddamn great background music to anything, that insistent beat as everything shifts in such slow motion. Perfect quarantine music, a second heart when yours is tired

#3789 The Necks - Three

2.5/5 the desert cover, the 20 minute songs, everything about this should have been catnip to me, but its all so busy and dissonant and tense - I can't see focusing on it, and I can't think of any activities that would be improved by having it on in the background, so

#3788 Hailu Mergia - Yene Mircha

4/5 wonderfully jazzy jaunts through African forms and beyond. Half the songs are downright dancable, and the other half still do sway, all balancing artsy improvisation against irresistible throughlines

#3787 Lindstrom - On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever

4/5 you gotta hand these Norwegians one thing - after they found the peak space disco sound 8 or so years ago, none of the big names are stuck in it. Better to become Liars than the Rapture. Of these four long songs, two are beatless and near-ambient and are the best of the bunch. The title track's all interpretive dance, lurching from motion to motion without overarching structure or form, and its, kind of incredible, in its frustrating way. Swing Low Sweet LFO's the other highlight, endlessly paced, rippling arpeggiated patronuses bounding through negative space. Even the closer's a mysterious anticipation of a moment that never really comes. Each song bordering on boring in some interesting way.

#3786 Skatebard - Vill Stil

3/5 packed with clever little sound design gestures, this guy clears the presets when he gets a new synth. Skatebard gets a lot of mileage out of a small idea and minimal hardware, except when it's a long road to nowhere -- man those 11 minute tracks are slogs