#689 Clifford Brown & Max Roach - Study In Brown

A jazz album built on runs and tone. The tones are rich and exotic (especially on Cherokee and George's Dilemma) and runs are catchy and melodically satisfying, but here's the problem: they're often doubled, which is a real pet peeve of mine.

It's not that I expect that the main motifs to be improvised, but when two guys play in unison it shatters the atmosphere of spontaneity and energy. It's analogous to the "we like to emphasize the end of the LINE! so we all shout it at the same TIME!" move in rap: I know you're not freestyling, but I don't need to be reminded that you guys are on-script every other bar.

I think if I was a jazz musician, or if I saw more live jazz, I'd appreciate this move more: I'd see what a beautiful thing it is to have two musicians pull of a twirling piece of airshow spectacle in perfect unison. But as abstract music, divorced from the process of performance, it just sounds crowded and overbusy and overbuzzy. Which is maybe a failing of mine. Appreciation takes patience. In the meantime, let's underrate some more motherfuckin' jazz! 3/5

#688 Telefon Tel Aviv - Fahrenheit Fair Enough

Electronic glitcherey that we would have called IDM in the 90's, evoking the usual suspects like Autechre and Four Tet, though with a bit of that fuzzy nostalgia we associate with The Books. The songs are structured interestingly, but never really manage to connect for more than a moment or two at a time, neither in terms of headbobbing grooves nor heartwarming buzz. The fact that the album flirts with both of those pleasure centers makes it frustrating, but this ends up being little more tahn another clicks-n-blips collection for armchair chinscratcherrey 2.5/5

#687 Flume - Flume

This album set up its base camp in some of the ugliest territory in modern music, pitching a tent right between dupstep mountain and a river of sludgy, clumsy tuneless instrumental hiphop plumbed by the likes of Onehtrix and Samiyam. This is a piece of land that can't be wiped off the map fast enough, a stripped wasteland, a feral breeding ground for amateurs eager to use tweaks on others' new tricks as a substitute for creativity.

From these blighted beginnings, to his credit, Flume tries to forge a new path: adding guest vocals, flashes of beauty, and a slinky sensuality to rise from the ashes. And for the most part, it succeeds, finding fresh flesh under the dubstep apple's rotten skin, shaking off the languid tendrils of overslow beats, creating atmosphere with pockets of fresh air. On Top in particular inspires confidence that there's diamonds still down there somewhere.

On the other hand, you can take the music out of the dubstep, but you can't take the dubstep out of the music. There's some fancy new clothes on this album, but they hang from a skeleton of newness for its own sake, and when well-worn tricks poke out from behind the seams the illusion is broken.

I long for a return to tunefulness and craft and melody. Electronic music keeps digging deeper and deeper into the same ground, with legions of 12'ers swarming to any newly discovered pocket of sound and scrabbling over eachothers' corpses to extract a paycheck. Time to move on. Stop digging. Find a new land. Please, move along, doing things wrong for its own sake is done. Bending notes over backwards just to hear them groan is done. Keep it moving. Nothing to hear here 3/5

#686 Lee Morgan - Sidewinder

Usual disclaimer: know fuckall about jazz.

This, though, I like: briskly-paced, brimming with style and intrigue, melodic and beautiful, bristling with energy, full of insistence on movement. Simply one of the most listenable jazz albums I can remember hearing that still sounds complex and mysterious - accessible but unknowable. The runs are punchy, punctuated by good hard little bops, wrapped in agreeable whorls of ostinato. This is what I look for in jazz, whether I know it or not 4.5/5

#685 The Rolling Stones - The Rolling Stones No. 2

Another mostly-covers album, establishing The Rolling Stones as rock-solid R&B revivalists with a rock and roll streak. The band's picked up some swagger since their debut, coming with a bit more energy and menace.

By all accounts, if you played this alongside the Diddleys and Vincents and Waters and blues shouters of the previous decade, it would fit right in. Sure, it's a bit dirtier, a bit less fun, but the same basic pleasure centers get hit. The main real difference? This isn't for girls, at least not in any overt sense. Elvis, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis, all those scuffed-edged white rockers did at least the occasional crooning, wisping sentimental ditties for the ladies to swoon over. None of that here*, and that lends the band a certain credibility - the rock hasn't changed all that much, but its attitude and presence and image has, for better or worse 4/5

* except maybe the wildly out-of-place cover of Under the Boardwalk, but its performance so thoroughly fails to achieve any romantic atmosphere, arriving at lewd at best, that I'm just going to hope that wasn't what they were going for

#684 Bob Dylan - Another Side of Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan sucks. Can we just get that out there? I've now choked down every Dylan album of note and feel I have have some modest prerogative to get that off my chest. As I just got done saying, he's a lousy singer and a meandering songwriter and a passable guitar player. Lyricswise, he's a good version of the dude with a guitar at your undergrad beach bonfire, which is to say, still pretty bad. And if some dude at your undergrad beach bonfire got out his guitar and started singing and he sounded like this, you mean to tell me you wouldn't roll your eyes or boo or throw a half-full can of Coors Light at him?

Highway 61 Revisited has its moments, Blood on the Tracks is personal and affecting, and I was willing to give him a pass on his debut where a certain earnestness pushed me over, but here its back to the same insufferable moaning and rambling that I can't take it any more.

Are there clever turns of phrase? Sure. Was I suddenly, inexplicably made melloncholly by Ballad in Plain D? I was! And that's not nothing. But it's not enough 2/5

#683 Hyper Crush - Night Wave

It's a fine line between exciting and annoying. a girl's laugh in the night. breakdancing dude in a neon hat. really spicy thai food. nipple clamps. It's a line toed by the likes of Spank Rock, Girl Talk, and Dan Deacon, trying to break you out of convention with a kick in the dick that spikes your grin with cringe.

With its overfat synths, banal choruses, relentless repetition, and dead-simple 4/4's, I can't tell if Night Wave is winking, or if this is just the new sound of pop music. If this had come out 5 years ago it might have been brilliant, but right now its either not a joke, or a joke that hits a bit too close to home.

Werk Me is straightforward and abstract enough to work, and work well actually. And some of the hip hop elements are goddamn explosive. But then...

Take Cheap Thrills which puts hard-edged hip hop over vulnerable synths and you get your head bobbing and then "BWEEEEEEEEEooooww", it takes a huge dubstep shit. It's like when you're watching an 80's movie, and you're really feeling like its actually pretty timeless, and then the synth soundtrack kicks in, and you roll your eyes and the moment is over. It's like watching a good comedian, a really good, surprisingly good commedian for a night like this, can you believe this guy, wow this is why I go to open mic night, hah, wow. And then he takes a litteral shit on stage.

The moment is over.

I really liked moments of this album. And then I realized it was really fucking terrible* 2/5

* I still kinda like it though