#1790 Van Dyke Parks - Song Cycle

That I could turn off my mind, let this hot mess flow all over me - someday I might come to love it.

But Jesus Joseph and Mary and all the goddamn saints, what a mess. Parks's cloying crooning manhandling syllables like a sitcom-bad kisser making his big move - too much mouth, too much motion, too much..trying. Strings, horns, incidental noise, everything else slathered over top like thick, cheap gravy, all atumble, like nobody talked to eachother beforehand and nobody who gave a shit put it all together afterward.

Was the near-complete lack of drums a stylistic choice, do you think? They probably would have helped keep some of this shit on the same beat // page.

Maybe this is all part of its charm, some prescient notion of twee. Maybe it's all artful genius, a reckless disregard for convention while paying tribute to the song styles the past! Whadda paradox! And I guess I dig it's sense of LA place when I can dig it out of the tarpits.

But mostly it just seems sloppy as shit, like lower-tier Zappa or Rundgren. It makes my face make a face, like I just watched a bad kisser making his big move 2.5/5

#1789 Young Knives - Something Awful

Pulsing, moody post-punk that screeches and broods, a Single Frame song after a bad breakup and too much to drink. The pacing's murky, the vocals meandering, the whole thing off by a few degrees, but I dig it - at least it's doing its committing to its own thing, putting some swagger in all that staggering about 3.5/5

#1788 Everything Everything - Arc

Herkyjerk rock, packed with offbeat emphasis, angular guitars, streaking falsettos - a throwback to early aughts second-wave dancepunk. At its best it's got enough surprises to sound like Menomena's best computer-augmented instrumentations*, but by the end it droops into Franz Ferdinand / Hot Hot Heat territory, sounding watered down and understuffed, leaning too hard on those keening vocals while the band keeps time. There's real potential here if they could keep their edge on 3/5

* first track here is Cough Cough ~ IATFBM's Cough Coughing: Coincidence?

#1787 The Moody Blues - In Search of the Lost Chord

The world's got it all wrong, holding up the Moodies' Days of Future Past and totally ignoring the masterpiece that followed it. Is this pretentious? Sure. But it drops almost all of the synphonic horseshit that made Days a mushy, prissy mess; a little bit of the ridiculous spoken word poetry sticks around - but not much!

In that negative space is something even more majestic and strange, an album bursting with inventive moments, trippy atmosphere, and some fucking spectacular production that pivots guitars, vocals, mellotrons into and out of the fore with abandon, socking you with vertigo. Wildly listenable and enjoyable and strange 4.5/5

#1786 Thundercat - The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam

The whole Brainnfeeder clan is into some pretty incredible stuff lately, conjuring one dark rainbow of soul and motion after another. This short EP plays more like a single 16 minute track, and it's got some of that magic, keeping you guessing while it twists and simmers and pulses, Thundercat's bonkers bass twisting everything at odd angles.

Wildly original.

The main knock are the vocals, that samey falsetto blurring the more interesting backing - just look at how engaging it is in its instrumental 3nd act. Absolutely worth hearing, but marred by putting its least interesting element front and center 3.5/5

#1785 Sam Cooke - Night Beat

Cooke's voice, it really is something, full, round, bold, expressive, even mustering a bit of grit when the song demands. It's a good fit to the loose feel of these late-night sessions, a bunch of musicians rattling through all the rock and soul they love.

Cooke's deliberateness, his insistence on making it good (god forbid) undermines some of the rock tracks - rock needs a little more fuckit. As soul its just right - deep and true and blue like a moonlit lake 3.5/5

#1784 Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch!

1964. Jazz's chords had been all mined out; modal territory was pretty well mapped, jazz shark's manifest destiny says "keep swimming" - there's still some notes never played out there!

But the diminishing returns are kicking in, like the discovery of a new atomic element that only exists if you point a bunch of magnets justso - this is lurching, atonal, erratic, hopscotching along a negative space Goofus world of a beat and scale.

I'm not that desperate yet, the good stuff still gives me enough of a thrill 2.5/5