#3563 Norma Tenega - Walkin' My Cat Named Dog

3/5 Tenega's got great ragged edges and galloping energy, the rock songs are thrilling, sounding full and close. The folk songs are folk songs.

#3562 Kevin Ayers - Bananamour

4.5/5 by the time I got off the bus it was torrential. 5 steps out and I was as soaked as I was going to get, may as well walk it. Blinding at first, a chest full of bracing cold, and then like a perfect Northeast squall, the sky started to clear, the hand of god sifting its fingers through the clouds, yellow and grey and flashes of blue, just as the soaring horns of When Your Parents Go to Sleep hit their stride, and I was in no hurry at all.

Assured, soulful, patient, cascading with exalted backing chorus and endless washes and wavering ruts of the blues. Unexpected, humbly thrilling.

#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

#3560 100 Gecs - 1000 Gecs

3.5/5 as I said to Aaron

i listened to this album and i hated it at first but some time around stupid horse I kinda started to like it, and then the rest actually has a kind of mad sentimentality to it that's pretty nice. once you kind of get tuned into its bonkers wavelength its a lot of fun. good find, thanks!

add a reiteration that it's really quite unpleasant to listen to, but in the vein of the best of Baltimore, there's undeniably thrilling adventurousness here. The possibility of next-album iteration is exciting, whether it goes swings for more listenable or less I'd wager it's gonna be worth hearing

#3539 Thee Oh Sees - Face Stabber

4/5 This is the natural path of Thee Oh Sees sound, a single 80 minute track (cowardly they hide behind 14 song titles). Those endless loping baselines, those simple driving beats  As a single track it becomes unassailable, a stoner metal masterpiece with flecks of punk'ed yelp, rolling and growling, hesitating tactically, but never stopping, time-melting pitstops spiked with near-death swerves - be not fooled

#3538 Kishi Bashi - Omoiyari

3.5/5 Ishibashi continues to make the prettiest indie this side of Bon Iver making soft love to the Shins. Everything here is hooksome, gentle. Why does it make me feel so deeply sad? It's a wonderful, tragic trick, a flower unfolding to die. Like those cover birds, free and fake, reminders of things soon lost

#3537 Jeremy Jay - Airwalker

4/5 the space in these songs, echoing off light-polluted starscapes, wandering, with the whole night ahead of them and no place to go, but for the hope of a date with Zevon's ghost; watching, enchanted by the time spent in their aura