#3823 Moon Diagrams - Lifetime of Love

4.5/5 about as deeply atmospheric as electronic albums come. Lifetime of Love is a blend of styles, but it's ambient at heart, with a transcendent sense of pacing, with vocals early so that their absence is felt for the next half hour, the importance of beats ever-evolving, ending on the only traditional song. Blue Ring // The Ghost and the Host are the centerpiece and the destination, an endless embrace that the whole album approaches and recedes from like breath in repeated listens

#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

#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

#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

#3773 Vundabar - Either Light

4.5/5 they don't make em like this any more, blooming with details, shimmering with easy momentum, vintage Shins meets vintage Strokes, some lost '01 classic.

Vundabar's early stuff was fucking brilliant, one angular, surfy hookstorm after another. They never quite recaptured that magic, but this is a clean break*. Synths lead the way like never before, backing vocals swoop in and flank, Hagen's vocals and guitar work showing subtle new depths. Less Dick Dale, more Brian Wilson, the kind of lushness that blurs the seams in its craftsmanship. The kicker's the way it all hangs together, a solid, well-paced front-to-back, put-it-on-again listen that you just don't get too often these days

* never gonna stop missing Antics' drums though

#3763 Ratboys - GN

4.5/5 luscious, crunchy guitar textures with a thousand tricks up their sleeves, alongside chiming vocals, effortless hooks, and _fucking _pedal _steel. A real special slice of perfect indie. Any album that puts a song on all three of my playlists for hanging out with Jo must have done _something right

#3754 Flat Worms - Flat Worms

4.5/5 it's not that Flat Worms don't come out the gate hard. their relentless post-motorik hits from beat zero, songs that so go go go with names like Motorbike, Goodbye Texas, Accelerated.

But that's all windup, something subtle happens that ignites all that laid powder, that shoves that momentum into a drift and pedal down, right around White Roses, into 11816, into Fault Line, and there's that sense of something that in increments grew out of your control, a speed wobble a third of the way down a hill of unimaginable steepness and abrasive potential. That texture roughens, the complexity ratchets, and you can't say that the album's changed exactly, but that you failed to appreciate the cumulative effect of psychic acceleration. One of the insidiously excellently paced albums, rivaling Faux Ferocious and The Men for irresistible forward tilt into breathlessness

#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

#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.

#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

#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

#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

#3680 Mikal Cronin - Arsonist / Tsinosra

4.5/5 a gorgeous, adventurous EP, unfolding and folding slowly. Both epic-length tracks work as perfect compliments. I'm a sucker for a truly patient long song, this is as brilliant as they come

#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

#3626 Pottery - No. 1

4.5/5 seven little adventures. You know how Sonic spins in place in a little ball before launching through some swooping labyrinth - turn down the colors and put that in slow motion and that's the Pottery experience. Cool patience. Neo-motorik putting the groove on a treadmill before letting it loose to run, slack grooves that curl all the way around and crack. Effortlessly exciting, some brash child of Pavement and the Strokes

#3621 Mid-Air Theif - Crumbling

5/5 gorgeous.

so many soft layers, like chiffon, like a silk croissant.

the feel rises like transoceanic waves, subtle, unexpected, inevitable

flow. a universe deeply crafted yet seeming to emerge in real time

one hundred instruments, restrained, gesturing into your headspace as you pass through in turn

--

I've listened to this straight through a dozen times, and i don't find that kind of time very often these days. Effortlessly pleasant, sizzling with details and detours to dig into. Capturing that thrill of The Books, The Go Team, Prefuse, all those early aughts legends -- when maybe music was something unknowable and filled with possibility, that could spin a thread beyond your line of sight, tempting you to follow

#3608 The Comet is Coming - The Afterlife

4.5/5 transcendental shit. holy shit those sax lines on the last two minutes of the opener. Beats that move forward without deigning to demarcate measures, the whole, rumbling, thrashing, flickering sound lurching forward inevitable and on fire.

All three members are at the top of their game: synths more otherworldly, drums more entrancing, sax closer to god than ever before. As fine a combination of experimental and enjoyable as you're liable to find this year

#3597 Busdriver - Electricity is on Our Side

4.5/5 Busdriver's never sounded so effortless. His barely-sequitur rhymes just burble up, like heat from geothermal vents, like sunrise crossing clouds. And the production similarly wandering, understatedly strange. Nothing rushed. None of the overt zaniness of Temporary Forever, no forced pivots.

Was a double album the secret? It's such an obvious fit for this kind of eccentric and prolific.

You can feel Regan Farquhar in here for the first time maybe, if only in fragments. First person rhymes gone mirror ball.

A true rap odyssey, climaxing in a glorious Daedelus reuinion on Exploding Slowly, the euphoria of  Pull the Sky Closer. But even then, we end in subtle dissonance, and it all echoes.

It works as an album, a sprawling hip hop Mellon Collie, an opus decades in the making.

#3589 Keith Jarrett - The Koln Concert

4.5/5 the context around this one makes the magic, forcing the improvisations out of their usual patterns, bringing a kind of rock and roll fury, demanding sounds that don't come easily. Jarrett's moan-singing, the endless rhythmic textures, the lurching structure, every section impossible to predict and inevitable. Endlessly compelling

#3584 Viagara Boys - Street Worms

4.5/5 as truly menacing as I've heard a band sound in years, as genuinely, hissingly scuzzy as the Stooges. Sebastian Murphy's a fucking force, and the band's inevitable. That sax is a knife. Didn't think they made em like this anymore.