#3825 VA - Focus On: Metroline Limited Volume 3

2.5/5 wow this is two hours of very samey music, even as house goes. may you connoisseurs out there derive some subtle note that I cannot

#3814 Floating Points - Late Night Tales

4/5 a lovely little ambient opener is a fakeout into a long sidechannel of obscure soul, before drifting back for some extended meandering electronic jams. There's a swoop to the flow, it gets smoothly from one mood to the next, by the end leaving you feeling like, well, like you've made a night of it

#3587 VA - World Spirituality Classics 2: The Time for Peace is Now: Gospel Music About Us

4/5 power and pain, all the fire of funk and soul, grasping at the biggest questions. An exciting, sprawling, smooth-flowing collection

#3482 The Men - Hated: 2008-2011

4/5 The Men are one of the best rock bands of the decade, and here they stretch their claim back. A rhythm section capable of motorik perfection paired with a werewolf nightmare willingness to go for the throat -- we get more of the latter here, with flashes of the Jekyll poet that gave us Oscillation. Raw power driven past intellect, thrilling history

#3465 Mouse on Mars - 21 Again Collaborations Volume 1

3.5/5 mainline MoM is a little abrassive for sensitive ears, but these collaborators weave enjoyable throughlines into the sound. Some of the spoken bits are momentum crushers, doubly so with whatever pretentious dissonant slop A Hawk and A Handsaw (jesus!) put together; otherwise a loose fun romp (hi Siriusmo!

#3416 Lindstrom / VA - Late Night Tales

4/5 this is how late night tales is done. a commitment to the buzzy disco throughline that Lindstrom's known for, paired seamlessly with reaches way outside his own powercenters into full-on prog, a badass Vangelis cover, and an endless wave of great of female vocalists. all the flow spiked with just the right amount of mystery and surprise

#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

#3401 Steve Reich - Reich: Drumming; Six Pianos; Music for Mallet Instruments

3.5/5 The first drumming track's what I want the rest to be: pure drums without any overt melodic contribution, letting the music come out of all those reverberations and overlaps. The others bring in pianos and vibes and chimes and sure, conjure all these extra harmonics etc, and it was all very groundbreaking at the time, but in retrospect that first track's the most adventurous and most interesting, making for a weirdly-paced listen

#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

#3396 VA - Schneeweiss 9: Presented by Oliver Koletzki

3.5/5 -- 3 hours 20 and never boring, an ever-shifting, moodful house meander, good for work, chillout, or rainy weekends

#3347 Kankyo Ongaku - Japanese Ambient, Environmental and New Age Music 1980-1900

2.5
a broad description of broadly boring music. Novel but nowhere near transcendent. Blink's micromelody's pleasant, and See the Light's the best of the lot, but its also the one that most blatantly cops Eno, so

#2950 Scritti Politti - Early

Skittering, minimal post-punk, bass set loose under strain and howl, spiked with fiberglass funk guitars. An ancestor, maybe, of Double-Nickles era Minutemen, with bristly energy to spare 3.5/5

#2927 Ty Segall - Singles 2

Plenty of old school Ty Segall scuzz and fuzz. Nothing quite as instantly catchy as his best stuff, but a rocksolid listen for 3rd wave garage fans 4/5

#2842 All Against Logic - 2012-2017

Darkside's Nicolas Jaar is a goddamn genius, an absolute master of pacing and rewiring the human mind. A maddeningly listenable collection packed with perfect samples - this is Endtroducing // Play (less gross ed.)-level stuff. Live feel pours out of this record, that drunken sense that you can let go of the wheel - dude's got this. You're in good hands. Buzzes, repetition, slow turns against the grain, and all those perfect vocal snippets - an effortlessly great front to back listen, possible best album of 2018 so far 4.5/5

#2832 Kashmere Stage Band - Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974

As tight a big funk big band as you'll come across, high school (!) or otherwise. Rhythm section is on point, grooves are tight, solos are on fire -- the whole fuckin vibe is electric conflagration. Lit-up instrumental rockist jazz gone beautifully wrong. The studio disc's incredible, the live disc's exhilarating, these dudes did not fuck around 4.5/5

#2823 Laraaji - Vision Songs, Vol 1

works pretty good, at first. New age icon Laraaji serenades you lo-fi-style, all close and vulnerable, home-mic breathy lines repeated over casiotone beats, soothing you right on down, thin vibes laying down warm baselines.

But it's like that eccentric stranger at the bar. Everything seems charming and quirky and hunky dory and the next thing you know you've been listening to this dude talk for half and hour and everythings's gone blurry andJESUSChrist shut the fuck up shut the fuck up.

'This album's fucking annoying!' I said out loud some time around track 14. The platitudes pile up and up; what was charmingly unpolished becomes lazy and wasteful of your time. There's even a Neu 2 same-track speedup cheat to close it out. A bloated, frontloaded collection of castoffs that didn't need to see the light of day 2.5/5

#2686 Larry Williams - Here's Larry Williams

It's easy to forget how rock and roll ran its entire course around 55'-57' and disappeared for at least as long.  In retrospect, rock and roll is here to stay / will never die / is only just now dying in 2017. Hah! Hah hah!

By 1957 Larry Williams put out his biggest hit, Short Fat Fanny. It's good fun, but already as played out and derivative as imaginable. Nicking longtime friend Little Richard's delivery, the big dumb sax of a dozen songs, and altogether rolling around in rememberthat. Doubt it? It's right on the sleeve, the lyrics dropping references to Blueberry Hill, Long Tall Sally, Heartbeak Hotel, Tutti Frutti, Hound Dog, Blue Suede Shoes, Jim Dandy, and a little bit of gettin' Fever. It's as overtly postmodern a song as the era's got to offer...57! It's kinda brilliant that roundabout way.

But Williams is riding the last wave in, singing about a brand new dance, and great balls of fire, flogging the innuendo that lead us to rock with only the barest concession the the second entendre. Hell, the serpent eats itself mid-collection: he even calls back to his own Bony Moronie on another song.

It's all good rockin stuff, but man, no wonder people thought rock was over and done as the 50's came to a close - this's a feast of freshly rotten nostalgia 3/5

#2657 VA - Cold Waves of Color Vol. 2 (1982 - 1985)

Volume 2 opens with synthy surges, the same icy precision of the first Color Tapes comp. But then come the tones: rich, textured, and then come the proper guitars. And we see the split with volume 1, detachment is no longer a strategy, rock immediacy is smoldering: guitar buzz, bass grumbles --- this is the cavalry.

Vol 1 had bedroom closeness. And this still feels small, but the ambition's growing. The nerds are making a pass, defcons are ticking. A thrilling little evolution of this splinter scene 4/5

#2633 The Weirdos - Weird World Volume 1

The kinda ramble that makes me wanna fuckin rock and roll, all too-fast hillbilly propulsion, all armswinging romp, drums whipping grunts and sneers into a frenzy, waves of harsh guitars dropping in on every punchline, straddling Pixies-brilliant and Ramones-dumb. Good shit, way ahead of curves 4/5

#2630 VA - Cold Waves of Color (1981-85)

Me, marching band nerd circa 1995: I have these memories of listening to bootleg Pumpkins rarities tapes on buses back from high school field shows, these plaintive, stripped-down covers of Thin Lizzy and Depeche Mode and Fleetwood Mac outlining an intimate kind of sound I wouldn't back into for decades.

There's something about this compilation that reminds me of listening to those tapes. Something about the way the glacial, detached pulse also sounds...warm, as close as bedroom indie mutterings.

Wanderingly experimental, all krauty minimalism and fuzzy analog pulses, the flashes of guitar bent into strange angles. Almost everything here's made by machines, but you can tell that those machines were guided by people, each with the passion to make something beautiful and strange 4/5