#3747 Tokyo Police Club - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Radness, Pt 1 and 2

3/5 like a moth to the flame of that amazing album title. still got those hooks, too goddamn pop though, without even a touch of that old edge, just look at those song titles

#3733 Dogleg - Remember Alderaan?

3.5/5 a scrappy little fist of angular anger. a fun listen that sounds like it was even more fun to make

#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

#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

#3719 Flamingosis - Pleasure Palette

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

#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

#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

#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.

#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

#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

#3561 Cloud Becomes Your Hand - Rest in Fleas

3.5/5 blisteringly inventive, only occasionally pleasant. See Menomena for this kind of man-machine confusion, the kind of composition that feels bracingly inorganic, but too strange to be generated, a willful alien revolt against structure. When it feels good its great, but man, man this's only casually interested in being listened to

#3478 Nonkeen - The Gamble

3.5/5 Nils Frahm continues to blow me away, such a soft, emotional touch to his playing, here with some friends bringing lively, textured backing. Fragile, temporary music, with a live feel for better or worse: some songs just kind of wander off into the night

#3451 Zoos of Berlin - Instant Evening

3.5/5 Slight, easily dismissed, and yet pretty in its small way. The kind of thing you might find finding purchase in your heart if you can listen with patience, like its 2003 and there's still newness in the world, and a compact disc costs money. Production that turns every hard edge into feathers, even the angular leaps smoothed into curves. Could be a grower

#3447 Nico Yaryan - What a Tease

2/5 That first song was just interesting enough to trick me, with those huge swells and spaceship flybys. Every bit of adventurousness used up, ten too-smooth, utterly risk-free love songs follow

#3423 Jeff Parker - The New Breed

4/5 I know nothing about jazz. Wandering, thoughtful, tuneful, with a touch of Makaya McCraven's sense of hookwise looped meddling. Mysterious, magical stuff

#3411 Olafur Arnalds / VA - Late Night Tales

2.5/5 A clunky take on the LNT thing. Stiff, not a lot of flow, some distracting 'clever' choices, the whole thing feeling arch and showy like a friend putting their spotify playlist on at a party. Even the closing monologue is cringier than most in the series, though maybe that's not Arnalds' fault

#3410 Olafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm - Trance Frendz

4.5/5 (truly beautiful, affected piano playing, giving way to ambient analog surges, which wash out like the tide until twinkling piano is left once again) all wrapped in a gauzy latenight haze.

The kind of pure music energy you can only get from improvisation, the lack of expectation that an after-hours session brings, the pure talent to ride true across ragged hills

#3409 The Orb - COW / Chill Out World!

2.5/5 What an incongruous, self-defeating name. Fitting: Orb doesn't really understand what ambient or chillout is supposed to sound like. COW/COW! (ok.) is packed with fussy intellectual ideas and no real ability to give over to any sense of flow

#3399 VA - re:works

3.5/5 Pleasant, flowing armchair electronic, spanning atmospheric, thumping, and bleepbloopy styles. Each artist takes things pretty far into their respective direction, leaving only the barest skeleton of the classical inspiration, but better that than another run at Switched on Bach

#3392 The Lemon Twigs - Do Hollywood

3.5/5 An unabashedly goofy, retro, rollickingly Kinksy romp that puts a smile on. Warbled and detuned and weird, but on this side of nice to listen to unlike so many Ariel Pinks