#1518 Holy Wave - Relax

A sleepy, churning piece of modern psychadelia. At times maddeningly busy and detuned and sloppy (shades of Deerhunter and Wavves at their worst), but at others finding a beautiful clear thread, more reminiscent of Olivia Tremor Control and recent fav Kurt Vile.

I'd never call it catchy exactly, but it winds agreeable around the right kind of night 3.5/5

#1517 Al Green - Let's Stay Together

Man, I just want Al Green to have a good day. Actual song titles on this actual album:
 - Let's Stay Together
 - So You're Leaving
 - I've Never Found a Girl
 - How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
 - It Ain't No Fun to Me

He's just got that voice, made for cryin, so let's sing about pain. It's a beautiful pain, awash in horns and croons and that stairstep of guitars down on into the darkness of night. The mix is lush but thin, beautiful like a cloud over a three quarters moon.

You poor, poor, lovestruck motherfucker Al Green 3.5/5

#1516 Perfume Genius - Too Bright

An album that's deeply personal first and foremost, deeply queer only as a side effect of that intimacy and the artist's identity. It's intense, that intimacy. That feeling of a casual acquaintance oversharing, but sensing that in the sharing is a need to share that you can't duck.

And yet, the stories are told in mystery, a smoke obscuring crucial subtitles. And then these moments of breakdown where the film just burns, as Kid A / Runaway distortions obliterate the details of I'm a Mother, fray the edges of My Body, and the music speaks the volumes - there's pride here, but also frailty, even terror, all in the windblown, surging, piano/electronic/vox washes.

It seems like an album you could delve into details, reconstruct a story if not a psyche. It's a bracing worthwhile listen, but I don't know if I can take the energy, the tension, to say nothing of Mike Hadreas's essential but borderline unlistenable crying croon. Don't know if I'll find my way back, but I'm glad to have heard 3.5/5

#1515 Mobb Deep - The Infamous

Quintessential 90's East Coast rap: gritty stories, dark production, epic scope. Or, translated for the haters: toughguy bullshit, boring beats, waytoolong runtime. I fall on either side of that opinion; the rapping's a balance of intricate and straightforward, but it all gets daunting by the end, without any particular attempts at hooks or brightness to pull in the casual rapfan whiteguy 3/5

#1514 Motor City Drum Ensemble - Send a Prayer EP

Every song on this starts off like its going somewhere, and it kinda starts to, but then you get hypnotized by the slow buildup and the next thing you know you've been listening to the same basic boring ass loops for 5 minutes and you're retroactively annoyed. This doesn't do much of anything that Gassyo and that Mothership track don't do better 2/5

#1513 VA - Brontosaurus 2014 EP

Little 3 track sampler from a larger Bronosaurus VA comp?

First track shows its hand in the first minute and then never really goes anywhere remotely unexpected with it for the next 7 or so. Moves too subtle to care. Second track's got a little more swerve and swagger in it -

but it's closing track Mothership that's the draw here. A tiny, housey little thumper with this microtap beat and then this warm little organ and then this thin little guitar then this twangy little croon crawling with electronic squiggles. It's such a soft, spindly little thing, blank white and sexy and crisp, with heart. Never heard anything quite like it - that endless beat over these unassuming acoustic little bristles, great song 3.5/5

#1512 Kurt Vile - Square Shells

I'd put this right alongside It's a Big World Out there as Kurt Vile albums go: hypnotic buzzy//clean production tucked into fuzzy sheets, everything winding down into tonal cyclers and back into hushed, warm songs proper. A quiet, intimate, curious little album that will cushion you in quiet strangeness 3.5/5

#1511 Gassyoh - Jumbo EP

Serious space rock in electronic electron beam form. This is a huge record that gets bigger the closer you listen to it, packed with hypnotic stereo moves and interdimensional lane changes, Japanese chanting gets chopped into pieces and melts away to raveups, then bleeps bleed in like from other songs, never settling on a style, like a seamless mashup of songs that never existed. Seriously good headphone music, might even be an assshaker for the right kinda night 4/5

#1510 Parkgolf - Cat Walk

For every kickin synth and skitterey beat line there's three doses of overrepetition, slurring and detunerey. It's a shame, because this does drop a lot of kickin synth lines and skitterey beats. Again and again, the guys on this Maltine label are really at their best when they're doing their own thing and dodging rotted trends 2.5/5

#1509 Girl Talk and Freeway - Broken Ankles EP

Never did check out Gillis's its-about-time foray into rap production.

He's got great restraint here, lets the samples ride; production knows its role. He makes his presence known, but it's subtle, adding emotional backbone and unexpected structure to the tracks, with shades of the best tracks on Ratatat's Remixes Vol. 2. Freeway's rapping hits hard in classic bang-bang East coast style, but its that quietly snaky production that grabs and holds attention 4/5

#1508 Guchon - Megamix: The Hugest Party on the Internet

A dance record / mashup record that lands somewhere between DJ mix / Girl Talk album, a populist version of Since I Left You. You're getting dance music, not party music: there's no Weezer singalongs, no Since You've Been Gone suckerpunches. But it with 400 songs in 120 minutes, this isn't just a song-then-the-next-song flow-showoff, and it's not afraid to truck in a lot of the same "you know you love THIS riff" samples that Greg Gillis leans on.

With all that laid down it seems like I should like this, but it didn't really work for me: it all slurred together and got tiresome by the end, lacking that contrast that made the best Avalanches and Girl Talk and E60 stuff work. Might be a great soundtrack for juuuust the right kind of party 2.5/5

#1507 Iserobin - hemogTAPEtrax

I just listened to this while playing some virtual pinball. That felt about right. The start-stop energy, the drum and bass propulsion over Prefuse skitching that so big in Japan, plus little pinches of IDM glitchery. Frantic synth lines dart around like on fire, while big bad Brother wobbbbbs lay the stage - its a frantic, exciting little EP 4/5

#1506 The Smashing Pumpkins - Monuments to an Elegy

Behold! The Smashing Pumpkins commemorative coin: a flat shiny bauble you can keep in your pocket to remind you of the real thing*. It's very definitely a lesser Pumpkins album, and yet! I actually rather like it - a svelte 32 minutes that's actually pretty hook-packed. It's the first time Billy's sounded loose, like he's having any fun at all, in decades; maybe expectations are finally so low he's not overreaching.

The lyrics are embarrassingly false-innocent coming out of a 47 year old's mouth, and some of the songs have nowhere to go, but dammit if Drum and Fife isn't a hook and a half, and Tiberius and One and All are like shitty Zeitgeist songs that have been training for a half-marathon. Imagine if this had come out right after Adore - a slim little rocker instead of an endless skyward deathspiral 3.5/5

* not that you asked, but:
Gish is the indie comic book
Siamese Dream is the movie
Mellon Collie is the theme park
Adore's the arty off-broadway theater production
Machina's the cashgrab 2nd movie
Zeitgeist is the straight-to-video 3rd movie
Oceania is the straight-to-video 4th movie where they like, go to space
Maybe a coin's a step in the right direction

#1505 Glassyoh - Jazz EP

Loopin, loopin, sample loopin disco music packed with frazzled vocals, throbbing horns, and the occasional pulse-pounding synth burner. AI-NO-EKI is the standout, a full powered, strangely original smashemup that works an endless shrieking horn riff right into the grain of a Justice-ready buzzsaw chug.

Exciting shit, it even flows real good! Just wish it was an hour - how often do I actually complain that something's too short around here? 4/5

#1504 Mirrorball Inferno - Super Sale Out

These Japanese electronic dudes (or at least the ones on the Maltine kick I'm on) really do not like to settle into a particular style. What starts out hard-driving video game music goes all Orbital space-house for a while, before it gets all glitchy skippy and stumbles slowly down the rabbithole. It's damned hard to review these musical Katamari, though I think the first three tracks make for a solid enough listen to spur mild recommendation 3.5/5

#1503 Rabbitbass - Rabbitbass EP

There's so much to like here, it's a shame its ruined by leaning on some of the worst recent trends in electronic music. The triple-title-track has a freaky breakdown and some bursty synth lines, but they're stitched together with a grabbag of dubstep cliches and airhorns. AIRHORNS.

Things get delightfully choppy, downright Prefuse, but at every turn pointless wobbles and slurs shit in the salad. Closing track Relation nearly escapes intact, weaving the kind of childlike glitch-and-skip you could see a more innocent Aphex Twin ginning up, but airdropped Squarepusher squiggles wither out of place. Plenty of potential if this guy (?) ever finds his own voice 2.5/5

#1502 80Kidz - Face

Packed with fakeouts: this opens hard and then strings together 3 tracks of poppy, beatdriven, happy club music, somewhere between Cut Copy and like, I don't know, Katy Perry? Bubblegum stuck up in its loops with just a touch of 80's mystique.

And then comes that angry Justice buzzsaw on Venge // Sting and the whole thing decides it came to rock after all. Bait and switch for the kids? And then it's sentimental, kinda trip hop, kinda breaky, sleepy, bouncy - consistent within tracks but all over the place in the transitions, on and on and on. It's fascinating, if uneven, you almost never get this kind of Mellon Collie eclecticism in electronic music 3.5/5

#1501 Lullatone - While Winter Whispers EP

Well goddamn with the well named band.

Somewhere between xylophone, vibraphone, and pure sine tone is the sound underneath this lulling little lullaby, the best of Music for Airports where all the flights were to sleepytown. The warmth of those tones is what elevates this, they glow with ambiance.

This is totally niche music: peaceful, childish, utterly pure rounded notes of melody that rock cradles not boats 3.5/5

#1500 Terry Malts - Killing Time

Wonderfully shambly shaggy little punk record, with all that scratchy energy and tripoveryourself chug. The weird thing, and the reason it has that "indie" tag down there, is the singing - more Surfer Blood soaring than punk barking // shouting -- heck, Pinkerton got nastier than this ever does. It's actually pretty damn melodic, offseting all that undertuned bristle in the backdrop.

Electric, noisy buzz that goes down damned easy 3.5/5

#1499 Beyonce - Beyonce

I liked this more than I expected to: it's clearly taken a page from the Dark Twisted Fantasy playbook, wielding arty structures, electronic fuckery, and personal soulbaring to keep you off-guard. Haunted in particular is a wonderfully strange midnight wanderer that dares to jettison verses and hooks to get under your skin.

But it doesn't have enough ideas to keep it rolling: once it blows its load around track 3 you get the Blow/No Angel/Partition run that's just treads water on icy minimalism, banking on Beyonce's vocal acrobatics to prop up underfed songs. I admire the strongest moves, but the whole thing's uneven at best 3/5

#1498 Blut Aus Nord - What Once Was... Liber III, Pt. 1

I felt physically ill, soul-sucked listening to this, its invasive, subliminally wrong black metal that surges and crawls with guitars and drums and groaning voices chugging and chittering until they're a distant machine digging inexorably towards your heart. A brilliantly unpleasant oilslick, just exciting and riffy enough to keep you hooked into its atmospheric deathspiral 4/5

#1497 Five Finger Death Punch - American Capitalist

Chugging, soaring, furious metal, a sarcastic bald eagle F16 paintjob, burning through a Michael Bay backdrop of layered guitar parts, panning drum fills, and production tricks.

It's actually kinda exciting; I can get past the overproduction. But I can't get past the attitude. I just can't. It's protest-rock lite, mock-intimidating, about a third as radical! as it wants to be. Every time I dive into the overload there's a guy going "yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaah!!! this is radical!!!" 2.5/5

#1496 Yo La Tengo - Extra Painful

The original album itself: all time 5 outta 5, #13 album of the 90's.

So what about the bonus tracks that make this reissue extra?

The alternate versions bring color to an album that, let's remember already had 2 versions of Big Day Coming, coming from a band that's built on repetition and droning and allowing-to-sink-in. They add a little bit of depth to the era and no small measure of small thrills. YLT proves the song's just a starting point.

The new songs fare even better, especially the shitkicking Shaker and Smart Windows' sloppy groove - each could have brought a nice jolt to the original album's nighttame shades.

--

Oh how to rate a reissue?

Despite the good songs, I don't think the new stuff altogether works as a listen, and this is a band //all about// the big listen. Split the original's score with a generous 4 and end up around 4.5/5

#1495 Deathtrip - Deep Drone Master

Double 2nd-degree acquaintance Brad Fickeisen* called this his favorite album of the year, so let's check that.

You know what this does that all the best doom should do? It transcends human creation - it's alien and strange and wraps its tentacles. It insinuates depths, moves while seeming static; chords shift out from under, themes wind back from songs ago tapping into lost past.

The mix is strangely flat, the songs strangely inert, but within all that gravelly growling, all that shimmering dissonant guitarwork, all that muddy galloping drumwork, those moments of breath and beauty, there's a landscape that beckons with dark distance that goes on forever 4/5

* He's a friend of a friend who I've seen play a couple times (he's a killer drummer!). Also his girlfriend is the only person in Boston who can cut my hair worth a shit.

#1494 Pantera - Vulgar Display of Power

Dundadunda-dunda-dunda-dunda-dundaaaadaaadaaa!

Somewhere between Sabbath's endless drones and Slayer's serrated thrash - all energy, all power, strained, searing vocals, slugged into pure headbobbing elipticals. This shit rocks, pure and hard, with primal too-fast // too-slow it slides in through your armor 4/5

Month in Review: November '14

A life-busy, music-thin month that was mostly fueled by the discovery of the great Shake Appeal column, packed with "garage and garage adjacent" coverage.

Not a lot blew me away this month, but here's a couple of gems for ya:

Album of the Month
Lindstrom - Where You Go I Go Too - strangely emotional, quietly eternal. A space disco epic meant for straight-through listens.

Also Recommended!
OBN III's - Live in San Fransisco - Great, garagey fuckoff energy, this is what live rock and roll is meant to be.

Adhesive Wombat - Marsupial Madness - Proof 8-bit doesn't have to be a gimmick, this is muscular headbobbing, bodymoving stuff.

Hawkwind - Space Ritual - Enormously, insanely, indulgently proggy. If you're going to do space rock, do it all the way.

#1493 Warm Soda - Young Reckless Hearts

They just don't make gliding little rock groups like this any more, banging out catchy little ditties with just a dusting of grit. With the innocence of 80's underground, Young Reckless Hearts is about the perfect album title, sounding like a band just doing their thing in a single breath -- this's breezily enjoyable Replacements-style rock and roll 3.5/5

#1492 Davilla 666 - Davilla 666

These Puerto Rican dudes came to party, packed with gargey grit sung Spanishwise, but also wolf howls, yup-da-da-da-da!s, uh-uaaaaaa!s, and woo-hoo!s. There's noise and rage, but also moments of beauty -- the joy of being alive. The thin mix and undermuscled sheetmetal guitars makes this more grating than noise has gotta be, but the spirit of an ancient, impossible demo tape burns bright 3.5/5

#1491 King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizards - Oddments

In the weird valley these guys have a place on the corner of Zappa St. and True Star-Era Rungren Blvd, somewhere between The Frogs on floor 4 and Ariel Pink in the penthouse on the Structure Structure.

Boys keep it delightfully fuzzy, freaky, lo-fi, but the pacing's inconsistent and slapdash. There's a left turn on a song-by-song basis, but individual songs reveal themselves and then just churn for the duration - you're set up to expect surprises, but few come.

But! Man, that Nick Drake twinkling on the 2nd-to-last track works wonders, a sensitive moment that gives humanity to everything that came before. That alone ups this a solid half point to a solid 3/5

#1490 Yo La Tengo - Fade

Fade's a perfectly competent album, and I hate to nail a band for doing what they do, but how many mostly interchangeable Yo La Tengo albums can we possibly praise? I think even their biggest fans would admit they sound a bit on autopilot here.

Crux of the matter: Well You Better. Possibly the hookiest song on the album, but that brushy beat, that meandering organ, that microfunk guitar -- it sounds like an all-Tengo Girl Talk track. It's cute! Even great! But even as it wins you over, in comes that little Frampton guitar talktalk like a starburst labeled "New!" and it tips into contrived. Pop's a razor's edge baby. Elsewhere extra little horns and strings wander in, but it just feels like frosting.

Most damingly, the heart and soul of the YLT experience, the endless droning wanderer, doesn't quite make itself known, the opening and closing tracks trying gamely but hewing just too carefully to ever make it to forbidden places. Frustratingly decent stuff 3.5/5

#1489 Machinedrum - Vapor City

Landing somewhere between subpar Prefuse tracks and pure glitch on the barely-there-o-meter, each track on Vapor City stitches an itchy beat to a warped sample or two and kind of throws washes and dub moves at them while they toddle around. There's the occasional burble of emotional resonance, but this mostly sounds like lazy looperism.

Thankfully, I'm pretty sure this whole slurry/samply/sub-IDM-revival movement died out in 2013 -- it reeked of shallow newness for its own sake from the moment it skittered under the door 2/5

#1488 Bjork - Homogenic

Let's get this out of the way: Bjork's voice is fucking annoying, and it's prevented me from getting through her albums for years.

But! I like what she does with it: the melodies are bonkers, the subject matter seen from alien angles, the backing beating Radiohead to a half-dozen punches by a decade or two. The album's unique. That's not nothing.

But! It's also icy, distant, unrelatable. It's showy in its strangeness, with none of Radiohead's engagement with our times, none of Sigur Ros's born-from-space effortlessness. It's unwillingness to entice me, to appeal to me, to speak a single uninflected, undecorated word, keeps me from treating it as more than a curiosity 3/5

#1487 Wet Nuns - Wet Nuns

Hard rock grind and groan that never really finds anywhere to go, shouting and lurking, building a riff but never really finding anything to do with it -- all threat, no action. It could work for a song or two, but that same ragged shouting and monolithic levels paper over even the interesting bits until it all sounds gunmetal grey. This lands in that forbidden valley of riffage: not interesting enough // not basic enough 2.5/5

#1486 Lindstrom - Where You Go I Go Too

The halfhour title track's the centerpiece, a slowgrower that's part Kraftwerk, part Pink Floyd, all classic roadtrip ambient - the kind of roadtrip that melts roads into blackness and passing reflectors into distant stars and on into the astral motherfucking plane. Heady shit.

The remaining halfhour works better as the delirious outflow of that initial trip - there's far more of Lindstrom's usual endless arpeggios and space disco mastery but by the time you get to em you'll be good and primed 4/5

#1485 The Staple Singers - Uncloudy Day

Pure gospel singing that tips over just ever so gracefully into blues thanks to some guitar rumble and shimmer. Deep full of soul, bursting with desperation and hope, songs mull in place, smoldering, cleansing - beautiful stuff 4/5

#1484 Suede - Suede

These guys were saddled with being the next Smiths, the next big English thing, by an English press desperate for a flagbearer for an English rock resurgence, a forgotten isle in the sea between Madchester and Britpop.

This isn't just my periodic stab at actual writing, it's really the easiest way to understand what this album sounds like: like a post-Smiths band with all the moaning and mellodrama, with a pre-Oasis dollop of swirling guitars and 60's-70's-please-help-us-old-rock-gods revivalism. It's an English rock band that knows they need to bring something more to the table, but they still can't quite split from the church of Morrisey, arriving at something that's a little too self-serious, a little too self-conscious, running on a little too long, having fun occasionally in spite of itself 2.5/5

#1483 Okkervil River - The Silver Gymnasium

These guys just don't sound desperate anymore, they're just making music. Tuneful tunes, with little kinks here and there that will pique your eyebrow at just the right moment, but it sounds so under control, so designed, with none of that haunted euphoria that marked earlier stuff, the unmatched Black Sheep Boy in particular 3/5

#1482 OBN IIIs - Live in San Francisco

Here's the OBN III's teased on Third Time to Harm, that wall to wall shitkicking, that couldntgiveafuck // aggressive nastiness weaponized in some of the best stage banter I've ever heard. Orville Bateman Neeley III (mystery solved!) gives the band real swagger, check his shouting match with a fan at the end of New Innocence, where he manages to be a total dick, a pretty nice guy, and not really give a shit, all at once. That's rock and roll, and the thundering, enormous, Thor's garage sound backs it up.

In and gone in 26 minutes, wish I'd been there 4.5/5

#1481 Hawkwind - Space Ritual

"He's in a Floyd hole!" Dr Venture yelps circa season 3, finding Hank passed out, limbs hung slack over a sea of classic prog sleeves.

Fuck Pink Floyd though, you want to talk about music that you can overdose on, this is it. Bass brings the metal backbone, guitar washes, swirling solos, and sax squalls make for a cosmic soup with looping sharks; tracking one lets the others in the back door and you're gone. It borders on ridiculous with its operatic exhalations of cosmic insignificance and the perils of sonic attack, but if you're looking to really prog out, to really go hard with both hands behind your back, this is the shit 4/5

#1480 Kid Kongo and the Pink Monkey Birds - Haunted Head

Haunted doom-wop sung with a tittering deathbed smile, Kid Kongo's a swaying, swaggering, staggering weirdo in no rush to get where he's doing. There's plenty of zappaesque retro slop and pyschobilly schlock; with glints of swampy, stoned fun it's a bouncy carriage ride to nowhere 3.5/5

#1479 Cheap Time - Cheap Time

Trashy, all-treble garagey shredding and smashing. On paper, this sounds like something legends like fallen Jay Reatard and Exploding Hearts might have put out, but it doesn't *quite* work, isn't quite exciting or personal enough to really hook you. Maybe being doomed is the secret ingredient. Sorry kids. 3/5

#1478 Oblivians - Desperation

Pure stomp. No frills shouting over endless chug and perfect steady beats, go go garage with the ghost of Jay Reatard. Tales of everyday trouble, shreddy guitars, caked with grit you can believe in 3.5/5

#1477 Useless Eaters - Bleeding Moon

It's not that this album does anything much better than that OBN IIIs album below -- its attitude's less purely nasty, its riffs don't hit as hard, it lacks Third Time to Harm's sloppy charm. But it's got the pacing down,  bristling with brisk little grinders that keep you engaged, there's urgency and peril here that keeps the heartrate up, and it makes for an altogether more fun, scuzzy garage // punk listen 4/5

#1476 OBN IIIs - Third Time to Harm

Opening track No Time for the Blues comes on in such a furious charge that you really buckle in for a ride. And there's Stoogey rollick and hard-Stones sneer to spare, but it's all a bit monochrome, with pacing that can't keep the party rolling, straddling hungover fuckoff and invincible rush without settling into either. A fun, nasty, strangely disappointing album 3/5

#1475 Lindstrom & Christabelle - Real Life is No Cool

Lindstrom's still on top of his game as space disco overlord, and I like that he's branching out, getting a dedicated vocalist to lead his toothsome synth spirals. I just don't know if Christabelle's a good choice, she's too typically icy, too cloyingly exotic, never building any real rapport. That arch little title says it all, the album creates a space populated by pretentious twits - it's nowhere I want to hang out 2.5/5

#1474 The Juan Maclean - In a Dream

Classic DFA double-disco, full of synthy arpeggios, big bass and one-stop-two-stop beats. Nancy Whang lends keening vocals to most of the tracks: whether you like this hinges on whether you like her.


If you ask me, she's ok. Melodic, with a touch of mystery, but she doesn't exactly set the place on fire. And she sets up a situation where MacLean himself seems pretty bloodless by comparison, riffing on // ripping off James Murphy and late-era Bowie, the songs them selves sounding an awful lot like Grimes (The Sun Will Never Set on our Love) and, well, LCD (Love Stops Here). It's all too familiar, effortless cool tipping over into a lack of effort 2.5/5

#1473 Clark - Clark

Unknowable, unmakable glitchy house, full of scratchy textures and ever-echoing atmospherics, wearing skyscrapers down to dust over centuries. Beats battle sounds, sides sway, a soundtrack to a strange dark film that's over before you know it. Quietly fascinating stuff 3.5/5

#1472 Adhesive Wombat - Marsupial Madness

8-bit's pretty played out, often gimmick, usually showoff, seldom better than something you could do with better tools.

But AW's using 8-bit as a starting point, swinging video game motivation and propulsion with a giant metal arm made of buzzy waymorethan8bit synths, churning guitars, and real ass beats. And yeah, the occaisional bleepy bloopy, but as intro, as accompaniment, appetizer and sauce - dude knows we gotta eat meat and dude brings some meaty motherfuckers, competing with Justice and Vitalic on the rockist techno front. Hooky, stern, clever, banging stuff 4/5

#1471 FaltyDL - In the Wild

Skipping the 2's and 4's, going all skitterey glitch, all 90's IDM, all prefuse samplelooper -- it's like Falty had to go out there and prove he can checklist styles. He almost pulls it off! But despite some mysterious moments, some clever tricks, the sense of song is missing. Everything loops longer than it should, never building onward or inward, like an instrumental version of a hip hop album, but without that lyrical negative space to justify its persistence 2.5/5

#1470 DJ Koze - Reincarnations, Pt. 2 The Remix Chapter 2009-2014

Less remixing than very diligent sampling, Koze grabs some core snippet from a song, puts it on a giant dumbwaiter, gives it a halfhearted push, and lets it circle back into view, again and again, while his housey beats and synthy washes pulse and drip.

Highly hypnotic, deeply patient // a little formless, a little overlong. But if you're looking to space out for damn near an hour and a half you could do a lot worse 3.5/5

#1469 Wand - Ganglion Reef

MORE TY SEGALL COLLABS.

Tremendous fuzz, interstellar solos, moments of riffage and fragile grace, wrapped up in waifish, reverbey vocals that give the whole thing a slimy translucent pink sheen. It's slippery stuff, hooks buried under squish - I liked it, wanted to love it, but it just kept slipping out of my grasp 4/5

#1468 Trentemoller - The Last Resort

Minimal-approaching-ambient electronics full of creeping atmospher // tension, interrupted with melody and texture only insidiously. Packed as full of Atticus Ross insect rhythms and Lychian menace as it is, it's surprisingly listenable, slitherey and fitted with rounded hooks on soft springs, a trip through an arcane world with a charming arcane guide that you mostly trustnand you kinda want to get with 3.5/5

Month in Review: October '14

A frantic month of work left me with too little energy to get super adventurous with new stuff or embark on any epic research projects. Instead I ended up hitting mostly-underwhelming albums by known quantities (!!!, Cibo Matto, Basement Jaxx, Legowelt, Tobacco, Sjukstugan) and trawled the blogs for newer stuff to round out my 2014 lists. Still gems to be had! Especially from the seemingly-endless expanses of Ty Segall collaborators, a connection that seldom disappoints. For example:

Album of the Month
Mikal Cronin - MCII - I've cooled on this a bit, it's a little too pop to last as your favorite thing ever forever, but I listened to this a boatload this month. Catchy, intricate, undemanding, never boring, a small masterpiece of big-guitar power-pop.

Also Recommended!
Meatbodies - Meatbodies - On the other side of the Segall spectrum, these guys make heavy, hooky garage-psychadelic-metal that hits like a ton of bricks and still manages to be a ton of fun.

Kurt Vile - It's a Big World Out There (And I Am Scared) - Just when you thought Vile's drawnout, hypnotic, epic guitar sound and craggy groan couldn't get any better, he trims the fat, adds some synths, and ends up with something familiar, different, and quietly magical.

Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels 2 - A hip hop album packed with intricate rhymes and impossible production moves, all while sounding completely effortless, the record in the block of vinyl just waiting to be found.

Courtney Barnett - The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas - Not so much a full recommendation as a special prize for being something I liked a bit when I expected to //hate// it, and for getting Avant Gardener solidly stuck in my head something fierce for a solid week.

#1467 Kurt Vile - It's a Big World Out There (And I Am Scared)

Word is Kurt sez "It's more of like a psychedelic journey that's a companion piece to the style of [Wakin on a a Pretty Daze], than an EP that just stands on it's own", and that sounds about right.

The drawn out guitars and languid vocals from Pretty Daze are still here, but this is it's own small, mysterious voyage, synthier, more instrumental, more unexpected in its structure, a sound where time gets lost, full of strange buzzes from beyond that steal moments. And in that timebending vein, its short length just //works//. There's something about the pacing that makes the listening experience perfect.

I've always had a soft spot for strange little EPs (Young Liars, Airbag come to mind), so take it with a grain of salt, but I might like this better than the proper album (which I liked!) 4/5

#1466 The Guess Who - Canned Wheat

Bog standard 1969 rock album, right on that cusp where psychadelia was mellowing into pretty shapes, plenty of harmonies, guitar solos, folky flourishes, all utterly Crosby, Birds, Small Faces, etc. There's jazzy, brushy drums, spacious spaces, flutey flights, totally agreeable, quite good in places, but strangely completely forgettable, meandering in familiar tempos and keys that do nothing to challenge, that set you gently on your pillow and might have never been 3/5

#1465 Deap Vally - Sistrionix

The production can actually trick you into liking this in small doses. Those guitars are huge, those drums do hit hard, but there's no soul here, it's all just too trite, too garage revival pounded with the Karen O hammer into salable shapes. There's something gnawing at you at the back of your brain while you listen, some too-perfect-twerking-mishap that makes this no fun.

The White Stripes, to pick one band these girls sound a lot a lot like, pulled their own mythological slight of hand, sure, but they pulled it off, sounding Detroit-raised, gritty and ready to hit the road. These girls met in a crocheting class in Los Angeles and it shows.

When you make rock and roll this stripped down all that matter is soul, and I don't think these girls got it 2.5/5

#1464 Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels 2

Goddamn these dudes hit hard. This is the most visceral, percussive rap album I've heard in a damned long time. There is no fat on this motherfucker, a hooking fist of rhymes, slicing through the air like a ball off a 3 wood and exploding on impact.

There's this moment on El-P's verse on the first track where the whole production trapdoors into a pit of bass, the beat coming in doublehard while saxophone desperation writhes in the background and it is *staggering*. It's the best production moment on the whole thing, but there's a lot on that level, artsy synth pulses, classic basslines, rockist basslines, classic beats, fucked up beats, building atmosphere, shifting slowly and then turning itself inside out, sideways, a sinking ship that blasts into space.

The best hip hop is effortless, and this pulls that off while being knotty as hell, unshowy complexity that feels like the only way to get it all into a million miniscule attention spans, a well designed machine that seems to exist by order of natural law, glancing off issues social, modern and personal all. Bracing, fascinating, essential stuff 4.5/5

#1463 Lightning Bolt - Oblivion Hunter

It's a Lightning Bolt album all right! Spastic, impossible high-low bass moves, spastic drums, overblown vocal yelps, played breakneck at 10000000 decibels. This is a collection of random jams and castoffs and it has that feel - things are looser, more organic, packed with more grooves than hooks.

If you haven't heard these guys you need to, but start with Wonderful Rainbow or Ride the Skies.

If you've heard them before: do you need more Lightning Bolt? This is that and nothing more - I've mostly had my fill by now 3/5

#1462 The Bots - Pink Palms

Robin and I got our faces melted off by these guys at Bonnaroo, where they shredded and writhed and rocked so fucking hard they put acts on stages 20 times as big to shame. I don't know how you stay that tight while committing every part of your body and soul to the performance - a rare gift.

There's glimpses of that energy here, especially on the first couple of sweat-drenched tracks, but later everything gets synthy and overproduced and damned underguitared. It's...fine. Actually pretty good in its small way, never quite letting you pin it down, but never quite shocking you, a night in silk sheets.

But it's a disappointment, these guys have a singular power to shred, it's a shame they wield it so sparingly here 3/5

#1461 Dead Ghosts - S/T

This is the Dead Ghosts before they'd sunk quite so far into the deep, dark reverb of Can't Get No - this pops with crisp energy, sounding dusty and sunny and a lot more fun. Shit's still heavy, the guitars still overblown, the core sound still nicked from the past, but now it's a much funkier, cleaner garage rock sound, flecked with feelgood rockability country gold, fresher, looser, better - even if it's all a bit of a sunblasted haze by the end 3.5/5

#1460 Dead Ghosts - Can't Get No

I'm tryna cut back on my band namedrops. I'll quit tomorrow I swear. But a band that names its album Can't Get No while sounding like Stones is the stray pack in the back of a drawer, a song called Roky Said, clove on a lover's breath. Tea Swamp Rumble? Well, it's classic Link Wray rumble. Dead Ghosts have zero point zero shame in their revivalism, slopping around in booming 60's scuzz reverb, crackling guitar crunch, stomping and shouting and falling over again and again, blasting and guileless, rollicking across everything between rock's birth and its middleage descent into self-importance. It's an old time good time, clipped and underproduced and probably a hoot live, slapping a fresh coat of slime on the old times and getting away with it with sheer bravado 3/5

#1459 Lower Dens - Nootropics

One great track here: Brains is brilliant. That swooning structure, that enchanting motorik, like a lost, great gossamer Interpol track, surges dropping in and out, all over that beat, that beat, perfect crafted moments stretched over that beat.

That magic's never captured again though, the rest of the album's lifeless, a Dyson sphere of vocals with the scale of Muse and the emptiness of Coldplay, all go-nowhere ambiance, too-slow beats with washes of nothing, a hungover version of itself looking itself in the mirror, wondering if this is all it's amounted to 2.5/5

#1458 Kurt Vile - Wakin On a Pretty Daze

A great, crusty, atmospheric album of soulful rock and roll. Despite a solid handful of 7+ minute songs, this never drags - it just lays the pace and you fall into it. Vile's voice, dark and smooth with that hint of grit, carries you through the deep night and too-bright day, all atop that pluck-slide guitar duo that gives you a lane to slip into while traffic falls back or flies by as you choose. Quietly masterful stuff 4/5

#1457 Sore Eros and Kurt Vile - Jamaica Plain

Neither artist's from Boston that I know of, but the title track's named after / was recorded in my hood! LocalMusicBoston is go.

That title track. It's a beautiful little piece of something, packed with atmosphere and tiny details, winding around through little samples and snippets and drones and buzzes and clatters, all adrift in that big slide guitar, that wistful plucking backdrop. I listen to it when I walk home in the dark of the growing fall and I am crushed to dust by the pinpricks of beauty in what I'm hearing and seeing and feeling, cold starlight on distant skin. It it nature and the world, with no regard for structures that will help you understand.

Serum, track 2, is too drenched in those moaning, cracking vocals and breaks up the single's flow, but Calling Out of Work provides the right 6 minutes to end on. Too ambient and meandering to capture the magic of the opener, it still melts time, still opens doors to fall backward through.

A great little collaboration, though that resonance through my current time and place may give it the inside track 4/5

#1456 Courtney Barnett - The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas

A female folk/country/indie singer-songwriter with a mouthy, inflected voice that spins webs of personal details and poetic observations? Not my cup of Starbucks locally-sourced organic Chamomotherfucking tea.

And yet! Despite the rap, this is not that.

On the first, folkier side, Barnett herself shows through clear as day, coming across as one of those girls that bookish boys might be fascinated by, an alternative to all the superficiality, such thought and feeling, they mutter. But one of those girls that, once the boy musters up the nerve try to date, reveals herself to be complex actual person, with problems that don't exist just to charm you - only the best bookish boy survives! There's an element of Wes Anderson; dark currents under overclever trappings.

The songs are pretty, the backing rich and full, and even the poetry lands harder than it tends to on this jaded shard of heart. Stages get set, atmosphere gets built, right angles hitch into place with a satisfying *click*.

On the second side the drones work their way in, the pace stretches, everything gets a lot more Yo La Tengo, and it saps a lot of the energy. That girl we came to know lost in a haze of weedsmoke.

The two halves don't work together, there's too many things going on here to take it as a whole, but I grudgingly admire it and grudgingly admit that's the kind of independence that got our attention in the first place 3.5/5

#1455 Jawbreaker - 24 Hour Revenge Therapy

This cult album's packed with completely familiar, grunge-punk in the vein of Bad Religion, Green Day and Nirvana. I assume the lyrics are what spawned the cult, laying out lives in gritty details. But lazing about in that 90's workmanship-lite hasn't aged well, tough to be too excited about this in 2014 if you weren't there 20 (god!) years ago 3/5

#1454 Gerry Rafferty - City to City

Pretty ripping sax riff on Baker St, it's true it's true it's true.

Otherwise this is bog standard pop rock, some grey soup of Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, Steely Dan and the Boss.

Actually the most interesting thing it does is be totally unsurprising for such long stretches: it's mostly made up of bare bones songs that go on for a solid 50% longer than you'd expect, growing strangely hypnotic at the 4 minute, 5 minute, 6 minute marks, not really changing in any way you can perceive, but not //quite// getting boring either. A strange little pop bauble that shifts lovecraftian when you aren't looking at it 3/5

#1453 PyPy - Pagan Day

For about half a song this is downright refreshing, with Annie-Claude Deschênes yowling promising a girl-driven take on the deeply dude-centric scuzzrock revival thing. But then the vocals descend into yelping Deerhoofism, and the riffs lose their teeth, and the whole thing settles into something of a grey muck right around the 6th-best song about cocaine I've heard this year (Too Much Cocaine. Yep). There's too many other people doing this kind of thing with more hooks and heart to really give this a strong recommendation 2.5/5

#1452 Eat Skull - III

This rock (pop? soul?) is occasionally enjoyable, even pretty, but it's mostly so tuneless, so half-warped, so willfully // accidentally offkilter that it's almost impossible to enjoy. There might be some underlying method to the madness, but no particular purpose to the moaning, detuned tunes presents itself, until you're left to conclude it's been dragged through the reels backwards as a substitute for having enough good song ideas 2.5/5

#1451 Mikal Cronin - MC2

Further dispatches from the Segallspehere! This time from longtime collaborator, one time Reverse Shark Attacker, Mikal Cronin himself.

Ah!

But holyshit how far has Mikal come, how much of his own voice does he have. This is as good a pure power pop record as you'll hear all decade, with a Weezerready summer shitkicker sensibility that will make your calf lurch and set your face a'grinnin'. Alongside, whynot, a magical sense of musicianship, spraying down the everpresent towers of acoustic shimmer with those crystaline solos, those crinkling piano lines, the occasional castrophony of overblown strings, all in the service of those feelings too big to live.

And then there's this heart, these songs that will make you think of good times and say out loud "god that makes me sad". It's packed with this impossibly sincere vulnerability that was only hinted at on his debut, moving on from grasping existentialism to something sunnier but still shimmering and shuddering.

"Should I shout it out?" // "Am I wrong?" Cronin asks on back-to-back tracks. Have you ever heard so many first person questions in an album that didn't come across as totally bullshit? And the full line is actually "Am I wrong? . . . [halfagain uncertain beat] . . . I don't think so" delivered with all the confidence of not thinking so and all the wavering of not knowing for sure, your own face in an autumn puddle.

And it all packs together, all that skyrocketing, all that wondering at the world from above, all that drifting to earth slowly and too soon, in a perfectly paced, sprawling, straightthroughlisten once kind of album that we get so few of.

Brilliant, classic stuff that will outlast the ages as a cult classic if there's any justice in the world

5/5

#1450 Meatbodies - Meatbodies

Fuck yes. All good music is 1 degree from Ty Segall, this from Chad Ubovich, his former bass player (with Ty himself returning the favor on drums). Long live the Segallsphere!

This is pure riffage for the fun of it, trippy and heavy and dense as the fist of god, that signature Hawkwind stripped to the bone sound, but a lot more fun -- there's that freshness of a guy with everything to prove and nothing to lose and its an exhilarating ride.

As Chad says right before kicking into the bassline of the year //and it feels like fucking gold//

4.5/5

#1449 Fatima Al Qadiri - Asiatisch

Pretentious fap in any language, these are aimless little experimental loafers, weird for their own sake to no purpose that translates. Maybe the lyrics scaffold this to greatness, but musically it's detuned Brian Eno // Laurie Anderson detritus and nothing that will get your attention or lodge itself in your memory 2/5

#1448 !!! - Thr!!!ler

Hey, !!! decided to drop the cool and actually just like, be a band, and sing and have backing vocals and hooks! It's their most enjoyable album, the brighter side of dancepunk - other than Me and Juliani they never really quite pulled off the detached thing off anyway 3.5/5

#1447 Ex Hex - Rips

This is perfectly good hooky, 70's lite punk, but haven't we heard this all before? It's the Strokes with a girl, the Exploding Hearts without the passion, Pretenders/Buzzcocks through and through. It kinda fun, but I've been on this ride too many times before and by now it seems kinda cheap 3/5

#1446 Cibo Matto - Hotel Valentine

Cibo Matto's got so much everywhichway energy that it makes a lot of sense for them to tie it to a concept album. This ones got a guitars, horns, electronic bonks and skitters, brushy accoustic beats, and as always those cooing, keening, rapping, inflected vocals, all wrapped in a hotel ghost story.

What might've seemed wildly scattershot and borderline obnoxious hangs together somehow, with all those callbacks to mysterious women, that rhythm of endless hallways, rooms, and guests, that spooky atmosphere offsetting overinguldent pop flailing. Fun stuff 4/5

#1445 Afghan Whigs - Do to the Beast

In theory I like the theory behind these guys, their soul side, their comeback story - but this all sounds a so //strained//, the vocals not quite pulling off powerful or vulnerable, the climaxes coming up short. I keep wanting to like this, but it's so slight 3/5

#1444 Fujika & Miyagi - Artificial Sweeteners

"you are the acid to my alkaline" mutters a man over busy sqsqsqueequenced beats, and that unwillingness to just say "bass" is this album's whole problem, as it self-consciously avoids being too obvious, tries to dodge being Yet Another Dancepunk Album. These guys could take a learn from the  Basement Jaxx school of doitdoitanddontgiveafuck.

The best moments are the wordless ones like Rayleigh Scattering and Tetrahydrofolic Acid, which just let the music be what it is, where FnM just let the melodies speak for themselves, without breathy, pointless lines like "i was right and you were wrong" again and again.

Believe in yourself! 3/5

#1443 Biosphere - Substrata

Thanks for validating me Biosphere - this is how ambient is done. Ambient shouldn't be difficult, it shouldn't be boring, it shouldn't be fucking art music. If you're doing it right it hypnotizes and transports and does the work for you via undoing work.

This does all that: it's breezily intricate, quietly beautiful, and never boring. It's not making a statement about the futility of notes or the honour of silence, its using notes and not-notes and everything in between to crack you open and pour itself into your grateful ex-mind 4/5

#1442 Stars of the Lid - And Their Refinement of the Decline

Roger Ebert used to argue that wall to wall action is boring. Explosions are what you came to an action movie to see, but you have to use discipline and curation to create contrast or you've got white noise.

The argument works in the opposite direction: you want your ambient album to be ambient, but you can take it too far and leave the entire thing totally blank, moving you into art music territory. Art music sucks.

So call me a philistine, but I think ambient should evoke emotion, or place, or time, or create sensation somehow. This is the summer blockbuster of ambient, trying to out-nothing itself so hard that it ends up losing sight of what all that restraint and silence and endless reverb was supposed to achieve 2.5/5

#1441 Basement Jaxx - Junto

You know what I like about this album? Its unabashed confidence. These guys are way outside the height of their popularity and decidedly behind the curve. Dubstep's come and gone (?), a thousand slurred, dubbed, variations, the world's moved on without the Basement Jaxx and these guys don't give a fuck. They just keep making right agreeable electronica from a house foundation, doused in plenty of these-guys-are-white-? soul and hip hop touchstones, swerves into dnb and techno and whatever else, to say nothing of the gorgeous shimmering closer.

With all the scenesterism and trendchasing that seems all the more common in the hyperoconnected 2014, its nice to see some dudes just going out there and doing what they to best 4/5

#1440 Pissed Jeans - Shallow

An ugly little punk album, raging and collapsing, full of feedback squeals, ranting yowls, and undisciplined, writhing rhythms. Gotta admire the commitment to bile - refreshingly sincere! But this can't decide if its about start-stop virtuosity or fist-dumb bludgeoning, and doesn't quite do pull off "both".

I'll bet if I'd seen these guys live and bought this album at the show I'd be going nuts for it. It almost pulls off the bottling-of-a-ripping-show trick, but without the memory of the real thing to fill in the blanks you're left wishing it was tighter, hookier, better 3/5

#1439 Caribou - Our Love

Good! I'm not dead inside! Thanks Caribou!

Here's how you do it, those big growing, growling synths, surging like hearts, those snippets that say more in repetition than a paragraph of prose ever could. An emotional, resonating, strange little electronic album that will soundtrack your loneliness and your gratitude for your love, full of secret passages, and dead ends and cloudy courtyards when the sun breaks through 4/5

#1438 Lone - Reality Testing

I'm spending a lot of words lately undercutting albums by electronic guys I used to like. Have you changed or have I changed?

I liked Galaxy Garden, but like Legowelt's latest, this suffers from sounding repetitive and lazy. There's not much motion, not much emotion, just a loop with a state-mandated number of flourishes over it to justify its existence 2.5/5

#1437 Sjukstugan - PsykoAkustik

This is more like it - the man who got me into the Swedish hip hop scene brings it back in 2014. This is some of the most inventive underground hip hop production I've heard since Temporary Forever. Jazzy licks, Waitsian grit, unexpected subsections and quirky choruses lay the foundation, while mouthy vocalizations offset those hard edges on the lyrical front. It works as pure, strange headbobbing, and also as abstract, inventive music to sink your teeth into.

The non-Swedish speaker is missing out on some solid lyrics I bet, but the upside is that you can soak the album up as unadulterated intricate, hooky sound - highly recommended for hip hop fans of all kinds 4/5

#1436 Grillat and Grändy - Gendish & Gäris

Swedish hip hop shocked me awake with its inventive production and the cadences of its clipped little consonant-bombs. But this doesn't live up to that standard: it's much more derivative of American hip hop, full of languid, bass-heavy loops that loop and loop and loop like a Doom track's shadow. The rapping's tight, but when I can't understand the words the universal message of music's gotta have more to say to get my attention 2.5/5

#1435 The Octopus Project - One Ten Hundred Thousand Million

Somewhere between the arty indulgences of their debut (a grower, I'm finding) and the hyperdense pre-DanDeaconisms of Fever Forms -- came this. Transitional. It reads so "instrumental rock", packed with virtuoso forms, sounding very well thought out in this Menomena-mechanical way. Not quite alien enough, not quite human enough // not quite sparse enough, not quite packed enough -- they're still finding their feet.

And I still have mixed feelings about this deeply muso band that I like despite myself - but when it gets down to it I like either end of their spectrum better than this particular stabatit 3/5

#1434 Aim - Cold Water Music

I wanna love this - it's got all these parts lying around, these banging beats, these sick Binary Star / Organized Konfusion -era raps, this atmosphere, but it's all at odds with itself - the mellow bits break up the hype, the hype fucks up the atmosphere, the whole thing reads demo or mixtape more than album. Maybe I can get my head around its lack of consistency, its indirect route to the heart of the matter, but this is all promise for now 3/5

#1433 Garcon Taupe / Legowelt - Narrominded Split LP Series #4

It's amazing how much the GT side of this split illustrates what I'm missing from the latest Legowelt. Even if it's mining some pretty well-worn 80's revivalism, the first half of this disc has surprises and voice and texture and, like, life, man.

The Legowelt side reminds me that I like that guy a lot more in theory than I do in practice - there's just something static about his tracks, just stuck in place 3/5

#1432 Legowelt - Crystal Cult 2080

Perfectly solid plodding, progressive house, but there's no real emotion behind this, no real arc, just pure geek craftsmanship, reverb reloops and analog subtleties. Not ambient, not quite there, not useful to me in any way I can piece together, frustratingly inert, possibly secretly super fucking lazy 2.5/5

#1431 The Cleaners From Venus - Living With Victoria Grey

Eh.

Jangly guitar, the kind of herkyjerky Frogs-y madness that makes this make "cult" album lists, but it's not really all that catchy or effective, some halfassed songs propped up by weirdness, by lame little skits. There's not really much here that's really all that worth hearing and even the best bits are crushed by its forced eccentricity, a charming guy at a party undermined by his neverending selfconscious chuckling 2/5

#1430 Gap Dream - Shine Your Light

It seems like I'm giving everything a 3.5, a B+, lately, amiright.

I think its that I've hit a wall of jadedness, desperate for something new.

Simultaneously, I'm stressed as fuck trying to make this startup thing work, so I want something that's reasonably pleasant to hear. I don't find mindspace to stretch real hard.

So some pleasant and familiar thing comes along and I like it and it's nothing special and I can't really raise it to the heavens, but dammit if I don't like it, so three point hedge five.

This is that to a T. Enjoyable synth buzz, drawing heavily from the likes of M83, Cut Copy, The Drums, and a thousand perfectly pleasant synth-drenched indie (rock) touchstones.

And I like it.

It has a certain glinting glow. It makes me feel warm. It does not cause me stress.

God fucking dammit.

3.5/5

#1429 Andrew W.K - I Get Wet

Imposingly critique-proof, this is a maximalist godzilla.
What can I slander this with that it isn't doing on purpose? The dumbest fist pumping record I've ever heard, taking metal and populist techno's letsdothis to the bigness - appropriately you can't tell where the synth crunch ends and the power chords begin, it's just that wall of sound going BUNGHE BUNGHE BUNGHE BUNGHE on songs called Party Hard // Party Till You Puke // Fun Night // It's Time to Party.

I know I'm 13 years late on this one - we're as baffled to explain this as ever. We try so so so hard to hate it and still end up grudgingly doing something like 3.5/5

#1428 Tobacco - Ultima II Massage

Still maniacal, noisy, strange. Still packed with alien loops, wobbles, moans. Still strangely catchy despite it all, this is pop sent to an alien dimension, mirrored back, and dilligently packed back into pop forms, with that drip and sag and dredge of the unknown baked into the deepest seams.

This is perhaps the man's most fascinating, complex record - less astral bubblegum, more Cthulu lap-pop.

Maybe I've just been reading too much Southern Reach

3.5/5

Month in Review: September '14

September hinged on the discovery of the Noise in France compilation (see below), which sent us off and digging up the best of a surprisingly vibrant French garage rock scene. Anticipated releases by Aphex Twin and Death from Above 1979 were solid, but didn't quite move me in my old jaded age.

Album of the Month
VA - Noise in France - A thrilling who's who in recent French garage / noise /experimental rock, banging out a strikingly potent cocktail of adventurousness and listenability.

Also Recommended!
Lorde - Pure Heroine - I was surprised how much I liked this little pop gem, it's hooky, intricate, spooky stuff.

The Dying Falls - Pheromones - Finally got around to listening to this album by some local favorites: extremely catchy, synth-wielding NY-style postpunk that demands a dancing-to.

The Octopus Project - Fever Forms - Packed to the gills with overbusy, superfuzzy, damned hooky electronic jams.

Purling Hiss - Lounge Lizards - Simple, strutting, nasty rock and roll doing what it do and doing it good.

#1427 The Octopus Project - Identification Parade

Here on Identification Parade you can see skeleton, the barest blueprint of the band that would make Fever Forms some 10 years later. But where that album is hyperbusy and exuberant, this is spare, generous with silences and tones, loping in slitherey stop motion, organ drones and theremin wobbles and experimental buds gestating patiently.

Slightly clumsy quietly intriguing stuff 3.5/5

#1426 Javelin - Canyon Candy

A far, lonesome cry from the pop eccentricities of Hi Beams - here's a dusty, atmospheric DJ record, with shades of The KLF's Chill Out; Endtroducing from beyond the sunset. The flow's brilliant, the tone deep as night.

The only shame is that Javelin doesn't have the chops to really let this thing ride. The approach they've laid out doesn't sound like it'd stretch beyond these little 2-minute loopers without getting boring, and an album like this begs to go on for about triple its 24 minute runtime - it's a sound you want to get lost in, but you wake up just as things are getting gone 3.5/5

#1425 Javelin - Hi Beams

This kind of synthy, autotuned, micro-anthemic, semi-dancable indie was the kind of thing I burned out on circa 2012, but maybe it's just been long enough for this to catch my attention. Maybe there's just enough variety here, just enough interesting tones and angles, just the right balance of Max Tundra heartstring nudges and Mint Chicks mindfucks to keep me hooked into what's next.

Quietly intriguing, slippery, understated electronic pop that's certainly worth hearing 3.5/5

#1424 The Octopus Project - Fever Forms

This had me from those first overblown synth notes - that place where the texture becomes wooly and gets a life of its own, this album strutting like a malignant cyborg, all giant tone, all instrumental hookiness, escaping that feeling of instrumental jazzy-esque muso knobbery by just being so buzzy and feral and perfectly designed, robot cheetah on a stack overflow. This is future-terror Fang Island, digitized Danananakroyd, Dan Deacon in a silver suit, the Go Team's bizarro future-fucked funbuddies, Menomena rendered human and ready to party.

It loses some momentum after the climax of mmkit, but this is just busy enough, just frilled and flared enough with fun angles to have totally won me over 4.5/5

#1423 Os Haxixins - Os Haxixins

I've been slamming a lot of bands lately for slapdash 60's revivalism, but these guys get the right idea - there's that actual flaming desperation here, those surly organs, a smoldering version of Os Mutantes' og Brazilian take on hard psychadelia. Here there's danger, here there's stakes. Just wish the songs, blissfully short though they may be, didn't all run together as they do 3/5

#1422 Mujeres - Soft Gems

A little bit of everything 60's from these Spanish rockers: lazy surf roll, velvets dissonance, general swirling walls of guitar noise. Zero memorable moments though, lost in its own reverb-drenched navel 2.5/5

#1421 Daikaiju - Daikaiju

Alabama dudes take on Japanese personas and create kickass, rollicking surf rock - good times result. With plenty of Link Wray rumble, rockabilly rollalong, and punk rock rollick this has dauntless energy. It's a small box they've painted themselves into, and it gets a little exhausting and samey by the end, but these guy are doing up the classic sound with more muscle and motion than most 3.5/5

#1420 Molice - Resonance Love

Super solid, hooky, downright dancable indie rock that just happens to be mostly in Japanese.  I'd probably dismiss this as derivative if it was in English, but dammit if it's not catchy, those unintelligible little coos and croons from the ladysingers drawing focus to the pure perfect energy of the underlying pop-flecked rock and roll. Nothing altogether groundbreaking here but goddamn if it doesn't tap into some perfect aughts-rock vein and send your body moving 4/5

#1419 Goat - Commune

The most middling of the 60's masquerading as artful, this is aimless, swirly, squaky psychedelia, wavering and shimmering without going anywhere, excusing itself with mythology, largely ruined by the shrill female vocals that crack any atmosphere with a poor stab at primal cred. The same galloping drums, the same rolling basslines, the same guitar washes, the same go-nowhere solos, it's a worse than a bad trip, its a boring one 2/5

#1418 Boom Bip - Sacchrilege

None of the atmospherics and subtly I associate with Boom Bip - this is pure propulsive, maximalist techno, throbbing with post-80's pulse, musclebound synth lines, and motion to spare. Great background music for a drive, fight, or other intense experience - even the tidy 5-song structure keeps this EP from wearing out its welcome 3.5/5

#1417 Streight Angular - After and Before

Listen / buy here!

While I still long for a Streight Angular record that captures their early, shitkicking live shows, After and Before is a ton of fun: brilliantly sunny, packed with pure pop touchstones, girl group taptaps, call-and-response-ready chantalongs, and 90's-swirled on-and-on-and-on raveups via REM via Swervedriver. It feels like a band overflowing GBV-style with ideas, letting them pour out on tap, with a looseness that suggests they've got plenty more to draw on. Even the angsty sneering rings conspiratorial, a love letter to people in their 30's in the 2010's, looking for that feeling, swinging for it again and again and again 3.5/5

#1416 Gramatik - Beatz & Pieces, Vol. 1

The beats are hot, the samples hot, the combinations solid, but Gramatic doesn't seem to have any notion of how to turn a loop into a song, let alone songs into an album. Everything on here goes on longer than it justifies, there's no motion, no flow, no way to come out of this without being bored somewhere pretty far from the end. Put some rappers over this and maybe you got something, but as it lays 2.5/5

#1415 Aphex Twin - Syro

10-something years on, when the man, the myth rises from his slumber, he's not reinvented himself, though he's not quite the same either. He's a man returned from war, honey left out to crystalize, a beach at uncharacteristic tide. Gone are the days of reckless reinvention, even the modified piano excursion of drukqs are gone (closing track aside), this is Aphex Twin in stride, master of his craft, making a plainold new Aphex Twin record, packed with disconnected stutters, ambient washes, bleaaaping skitters - the same tricks from new angles, in new combinations, with a couple new edges. There's something sad about that.

It almost distracts from the fact that from a pure listenability standpoint, from a pure consistency and craft standpoint, this is his best album ever. There's a contagious atmosphere that nothing of his ever had; this is by far the most cohesive album he's ever created.

And he does branch out - borrowing influence on beats, mixing new approaches with precocious abandon. But this is Richard James all grown up, out of his long teen age.

So it's pretty fucking great. And if you like his stuff you'll like this. But in deference to the core of this blog, fuck, I am too old or too stressed or too lame for this shit anymore. Even though I think its fairly brilliant I can't listen to it, and I can't reasonably go much higher than 3.5/5

#1414 Purling Hiss - Lounge Lizards

Somewhere in that shoegaze buzz, that jagged dissonance, that Jagger swagger, there's a heart that does not give a fuck. There's a heart that beats with confidence as it casually observes the garbage all around, and that steady beat's enough to make you feel safe in the wasteland, to make it a trip with a glint of fun through a hail of noise 4/5

#1413 La Terre Tremble !!! - Salvage Blues

Y'all know I like noise and all, but it should either be banged into hooks, or make some artistic slash, or be some pure expression of feeling and energy. This is carefully crafted to be detuned and herkyjerky for its own sake, grating and dissonant and unpleasant without giving you any real compelling reason to stick around.

Every once in a while it gels into some riff, some resolution, some moment of production, but mostly its an awful lot of work to get nowhere 2.5/5

#1412 Driver Drive Faster - Open House

This 2011 album feels exactly like the last gasp of a long 00's - it's full of all the touchstones of slightly arty, slightly slipperey, slightly angular, clever, lush, climaxing indie rock. It's meant to sweep you up, but it goes in the back door, sounding icy and detached before a simmer of power sneaks in. There's not a real sense of a band, just an emergent, subtly dense sound with just enough hooks to actually make it really appealing. Could grow on me if I find enough time for an album like this in my life 3.5/5

#1411 Daphni - Jiaolong

I read some review that, curtly, said the first three tracks on this album were good, but then it lost its way. I concede it was not wrong.

The key is that those first three tracks weave in a vocal sample.

That backbone, plus some excellent other-wise mixing tricks, on this uncharacteristic-from-ex-Caribou-nee-Manitoba solo album, makes for the real highlights. It gives those loops some body, something to groove to. Without that backbone the remaining tracks (with a remaining grace concession to the 4th track) just don't have enough substance.

Dude's got talent. This is his first-ish go in this direction. Seeds of promise here, but a meager early harvest yield

3/5

#1410 Jack of Heart - Only Seven Inches for Your Girlfriend?

That title's a tipoff - this is nasty all right, but without any particular muscle, just out of a brash, battered disdain. All the sneer feels applied by brushstroke, the mix blasted out seemingly on purpose. A fake bloodstain drying in on summer sidewalk. I just don't buy it. When your clattering, gasping climax pulls a fancy pan maneuver how do you maintain best-we-can credibility?

In this vein of rock and roll credibility of purpose, of striving, of desperation, it's the only currency that matters and this doesn't bend to the bite 2.5/5

#1409 Electric Discharge Machine - Electric Discharge Machine

A quick little EP from another of these noisy French fuckers.

You know what I like about this? I've heard it three or four times now and I still can't pin it down. It's of a sound, but its a hall of mirrors, glinting hard glam, surf rock, rockabilly slop, and pulsing shoegaze - it's unpigeonholable, despite being clearly made of pigeons.

I like the way it slips through my fingers. I'm intrigued. I hope in vain that these guys put out something else I can get ahold of 3.5/5

#1408 Harlem - Hippies

Insanely loose, jangly punk rock, you get that great joyous sense of dudes making noise and loving it, spraying off whatever feeling finds them with maximum speed. You'd think it was all improvised if not for the insidiously sharp start-stops, the sneaky clever little vocal hooks. Sloppy, unfocused, overlong, underedited, good with the bad - the spirit of The Frogs, The Exploding Hearts, and a touch of the sainted Jay Reatard ghosts through every trebly note. Fun shit 4/5

#1407 Death from Above 1979 - The Physical World

A smoothed-out version of that drum-and-scorching-bass, muscular sound we first (and last!) heard on album 10 years ago. What this looses in visceral, creepy aggression it gains in pure hookiness - this is undeniably a more listenable, wall to wall with headbobbing, undeniable lines, reading much more as roughed-up dancepunk than catchy noise rock. Pure riffage, punchy, if ephemeral 3.5/5

#1406 Yellabird - Mountainosaurus

Listen/buy here!

My biziepartner recommended these guys and the first thing I blurted out was "these guys sound like what I wanted the Black Keys to sound like".

I stand by that - circa Thickfreakness, this's got that filthy, heavy energy, blues gone bad, blues gone to heaven, walking to Satan's rhythms now, with that stomp that pounds your head to the ground. They set them up and they knock them down, there's a real sense of visceral songwriting here, of knocking you off your expectations with maximum downward force. Shit if Dixie ain't a shitkicker -- I gotta punch a motherfucker just to slough off that overloadedddddddfffffffffuckingenergy.

Rock and fuckin' roll.

A crushing, brilliant opening EP, making a wondrous spectacle out of small parts, shattered and thrown faceward 4/5

#1405 The Dying Falls - Pheromones

Listen/buy here!

Double disclosure, I've probably seen these guys live a dozen times and hung out with them a handful.

Acquaintances.

Look, what this album hinges on is: can you deal with the fact that these guys sound wicked like the Strokes? If not, you're gonna prob have a probem.

But. But! If you can get pastit, this is a seriously fucking hooky piece of post-punk. If I can double down on the Strokes comparison, if this ended up being the Strokes second album instead of Room on Fire, I think that band woulda been better off.

No small praise.

Alls I'm saying is, if you're gonna sound like a band, at least outdo them. Or at least outdo their 2nd best album.

This is insanely hooky shit, full of places where the song breaks open - opened Finger Paint alone has two altogether different moment where new layers bloom and explode. Frontman Matt's little coughs, huh-s, asides -- all give it a loose Stonesian edge. good way.

And! Unlike 90% of Boston bands I see first live, this does a damned fine job of capturing what makes their hitchy, hooky show so damned worth seeing. Looseness abounds, and goddamn if that aint at the bloody beating heart of rock and roll.

Those opening little buzzes and oaahahoos of Distress, that opening rush of Sunday Night, and then, god, that synth kickin. One of the finest pop moments of the year. To say nothing of that sly Smiths nod. Goddamn. Killer track.

They're a terribly fun band if you let them be. Please do 4/5

#1404 Clara Clara - Comfortable Problems

Listen / buy here!

I got a soft spot for guitarless bands, and Clara Clara's endless clatter of drums / rumble of angular bass / pulse of synthy organs makes for a writhing mess of a background, banged into angular angles, pounced on by shouty vocals. Angry, busy, fun, stressy, its a slash of noise that never quite falls into a workable shape, but it's fun to watch it thrash against your grip 3.5/5

#1403 Rustie - Green Language

Some era-spanning shit if you'll pardon the namedrops forthcoming --- there's that recordgroove soul of 90's DJ Shadow, that 00's Avalanches danceparty deconstruction, that 10's stoned slurcore haze. Rustie blurs the lines but he knows which borders to park on and what angle to smudge them at.

Never quite fun but thrumming with blanketsmothered cool, this is a sample-laden, fingerprint-drenched piece of hypermodern electronica, wobbling to the waves of instrumental hip hop's past. Recommended for long night drives, long nights high, and any other time dark and borderless 3.5/5

#1402 Yeti Lane - The Echo Show

A break from the usual hammering noise rock on this modern France kick, Yeti Lane carve off slabs of big lush synths, pile them on slices of guitar, sprinkle it all with electronic baubling, and layer on strained, whimpy vocals, making a big Grandaddy/early-M83/mid-Flaming Lips/Grasscut style sandwich of meandering, buzzing, atmospheric electo-emo-indie rock.

It mostly just pulses as washed out backdrop. Every now and again it hits a really tight little melody (Warning Senations is a highlight), but mostly it all hovers about in a fuzzy swarm, daring you to remember it as it washes your setting in gossamer 3/5

#1401 Pneu - Highway to Health

Keeping this France thing right on a'rollin!

As hyperpropulsive bass-heavy instrumental swerve-hook-hook-swerve cockkickers these guys land about halfway between the dayglo fun of Fang Island and the furious immolation of Lightning Bolt. Fans of the latter are probably more likely fans - this is nasty, stressy, stuff that will keep you on your toes and tip you over tapping 'em at all arthritic angles, packed to the gills with starts, stops, and virtuoso bursts of nitro speed, putting a smile on your face before melting the entire motherfucker right off 3/5

#1400 VA - Noise in France

In my quest to find the next hotbed of good scuzzy rock I found a cache in France of all places. It makes a strange kind of sense: if I was stuck in France I'd want to make riotous racket against banality too.

This - this is a spectacular compilation, 24 bands, plenty of guitars, a spattering of damaged synths, it's regularly nasty, occasionally pretty, relentlessly inventive. No one sound emerges exactly, just a bursting sense of newness, a pipebomb of arty angles that put fun and fuckingshitup ahead of pretension - Dananananaykroyd came to mind more than once.

Very highly recommended to noisy rock fans interested in something new 4.5/5

#1399 Catholic Spray - Amazon Hunt

Mega-scuzzy garage rock out of France, sounding a fair bit like Ty Segall, so you know I'm down.

This lacks the best stuff's directness though, buried in overblown bass and tinny guitar distortion, sounding badly mixed and played from down a tunnel. Which is thrilling in its own small way, but eventually it sound more like affect than workin-with-what-we-got scrappiness.

Still, do love me a good racket and these guys have some legitimate shitkicking energy, wafting up haunted from those Parisian sewers 3.5/5

#1398 Lorde - Pure Heroine

If Rock's dead and there's no way left to shock the heart, to mark the moment, at least there's still the faint flicker of Pop out there to soothe our thoughts away, to stroke our hair when we collapse in resignation.

Shameful anti-Pitchfork post-snobbery kept me away from this one until now. In fact, it took the happy coincidence of New Zealand week and a Metro article mentioning Lorde's likewise origins to nudge me to give this a grudging chance.

There is a tinge of the twangy, mouthy, inflected ladyvocal that I'm so tired of here, and plenty of electronic flourishes, but this has less to do with Dirty Projectors and Grimes than you might think. Instead, Pure Heroine beats with the heart of the likes of mid-00's superstars Why?, The Unicorns, and Broken Social Scene*, that fine tradition of those who fiddled specks of beauty in the small while the big disappoint yawned apart, that fine tradition of young mortals leaning moments against eachother, bulwarking against the never.

Every song has its perfectly observed little line, its filigree production hearttapper. Lorde pulls off the who-needs-the-stars, you-and-me-and-we-against the-world schtick that she debuted on Royals 9 times out of 10 (Team's a bit on the nose), and the effect is a guide into darkness, a skin-prickling electricity of flickering hope.

If rock had to die, at least we shiver to its ghosts 4.5/5

* Ribs' sly nod to BBS meltdown Lover's Spit is about as perfect a meta-pop moment as I've ever heard, nestled into a tune that evokes both that song and sister song Anthems for a 17 Year Old Girl until you hear every great moment of You Forgot it in People as a secret, subconscious backing track. Incredible.

#1397 Night Beats - Sonic Bloom

Can't win around here. Garage rock revival's the only thing left of rock these days, but that's not a recipe, no guarantee. These guys have the simple structures, the big fuzzy riffs, the swirling psyche, but there's no rock and roll here.

I'm gonna name this blog the search for rock and roll one of these days.

This has none of current omega-rocker Ty Segall's urgency, just retreads of the Creation and the Faces at their meatiest, an album packed with Black Keys and Raconteurs B-sides, songs without enough hookiness to bother putting on the album. Disappointingly uninspiring 2.5/5

#1396 Cymbals Eat Guitars - Lose

Is rock dead? I said it was out loud this weekend at the Jamaica Plain music festival where perfectly competent bands played perfectly competent rock music that simply didn't rock. Around that time, paragon of relevance Gene Simmons apparently was saying the same thing. Must be true. More on that shithead and what he's right and wrong about in possible upcoming post.

Spoiler alert, rock is in a coma, the per-decade beeps of garage rock revivals are its pulse.

This comes up because hearing this album is what got that notion pecking at its shell. This is perfectly good indie rock, perfectly enjoyable to listen to, inventive in its small ways, completely beyond reproach and completely unexciting. With no hint of danger, no real sense of newness, no spark that will defibrillate a heart. Hooks spin elliptical, reedy vocals soar, guitars chime, sands through the hourglass. The solos occasionally shred, the climaxes are climaxey - if this was 1999 this would rule, but why can't it make me feel alive in 2014?

Is this all that's left? Sitting by a bedside? 3/5

#1395 In Flagranti - Worse For Wear

Good album title! This sounds like its slowly wearing itself out, spinning in place at best - and its certainly worse for it.

Worse for Wear is post-disco in the DFA vein but there's no motion here at all, no energy, just like a DJ trying to Mrs. Doubtfire two simultaneous sets, leaving a loop rolling for 6 minutes and hoping no one'll notice. The fact that the actual loops are thin and uninspiring doesn't help. Stillborn stuff 2/5

#1394 Half Japanese - Half Gentlemen / Not Beasts

The two things you need to know about this album:
 - guitar player Jad Fair does not know how to play the guitar ("the only chord I know is the one that connects the guitar to the amp". good line.)
 - the album is 3 discs, 38 songs, and nearly 2 hours long

That's probably enough to send the most of you whipping the scroll wheel.

It is as bad as it sounds: it is a marathon of unpleasant sounds, of ragged noise, of go-nowhere meandering, of utter lack of self-editing. But you do have to admire the raw omega-punk energy of it.

I've heard this compared to the Shaggs but that's horseshit. They didn't want to be there. They were, at absolute best, art _about_ rock and roll. At absolute best. If you're generous.

Half Japanese couldn't want this more, couldn't *be* more rock and roll, nails scratching // at // the // coffin // walls. You have to admire that animal energy, even if listening to this feels like being in the coffin with them 2.5/5

Month in Review: August '14

This was the month I finally lost patience with trawling the classic rock best-of lists, weary of the diminishing returns on listening to the 18th best album of 1972, the 3rd best Grateful Dead album.

So now what? Desperation leads to following Spotify accidents, like looking up an old DOOM album and finding a similarly-titled track by some kickass Sweedish hip hop dudes, which got me thinking international, which lead to New Zealand week, capping with a happy also-named-The-Gordons bluegrass accident. The future is now motherfuckers.

Album of the Month
Ty Segall - Manipulator - Still love this dude. Kicks his shitkicking garage rock mastery to the curb, brews up a sprawling, hypnotic glam-rock masterpiece instead. Still rules.

Also Recommended!
Lonnie Mack - The Wham of that Memphis Man! - Can't get enough rollicking rockabilly, this was a great surprise find.

Sjukstugan - Rap pa Svenska - Who knew? Them Swedes can sure bang a bangin consonant-heavy syllable together.

The Gordons - The Gordons - Major highlight of New Zealand week, these guys make rock and roll with that kind of couldntgiveafuck energy I love.

Wire - Chairs Missing - Still some value in the old lists! Thrilling, knotty, hitchy postpunk.

#1393 The Gordons (US) - Southern Illinois Bluegrass

A debut very similar to the Gordons' just-reviewed second album - plenty of wickedfast plucking, agreeable singing, a bouncing bluegrass backing. The main difference is the lack of a fiddle player - making for a thinner, more dust-and-sticks sound. I probably like it a bit better in isolation, though it does suffer, in this moment, from being the one I heard second 4/5

#1392 The Gordons (US) - Covered Bridge

We're past the era of radio, past the era of putting on a record/tape/cd. Now we listen to things on our streeminservices and little weird things happen like you're listening to New Zealand standout shitkickers The Gordons and your Spotify rolls right on into 70's midwest bluegrass geniuses The Gordons.

This is their second album, reviewed by me.

Goddamn do they get that banjo a-plucked as fuck, this is frantic incredible stuff, driven by two voices so perfect and pure in their legitimate passion for music and the things their music is about, so fraught with grit and twang and sincerity that you don't even know how to resist it.

Your head will bob, and goddammit your hands will slap and your toes will tap. I mean this sincerely - when I first heard this, and again now as I hear this again it happens again, my hands did feel compelled by unholy fury to slap the nearest knee/table/anyfuckinthing withing reach. If you make it through the first five minutes of this and don't feel the same you need to check on your soul and see if it's still roundabouts your corporeal frame, still having any kind of ability to incur the body to do the things that a body outta do.

Which is a long way of saying, this is frantic, gorgeous, bluegrass that makes me feel right alright about the oncoming Boston winter, about the winter of all our lives, about every thing that one might worry about that might be washed away by the shimmering splash of cold clear plucking and strumming and fiddlin and hootin and doing every goddamned thing god damned us all to do 4/5

#1391 The Gordons (NZ) - The Gordons

It's not rock and roll if you know what's going to happen next. That goes for yall listeners and that goes for the band itself. It's the energy of moment and if you designed it you fucked it up. Plan, practice, then show up and let it happen.

That energy's on display on The Gordons' debut LP - here's guys who heard postpunk and decided that they were going to take it up a notch, past where they where ready - that goes for the listener too.

Alister's frantic yelp, those bipiditbibitibtybipt bass skitters, that shammering, shttering guitar wash, full of hooks with barbs, full of couldntgiveafuck that it'd take us 5-10 years to catch up to stateside.

You get that perfect power here, of people making music without bothering to wonder if they're making it wrong. Nothing better than that - even if the debut EP was better for its raw freshness - it's part part of a downward slide into propriety for these lads, grab this last gasp at greatness as it flies on by 4/5

#1390 Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gilespie - Bird and Diz

bwopaboppabweedaleeda-bwaaah!

fastslooowfastynastyfastslooooooow. fast! fa! fas! slooowididity - idity - fast!

I'm sure what these guys are doing is brilliant. And if you dig in, these little horn lines they do fly. But before long it sounds like people circling eachother in an argument where nobody's making any particular headway and the same points get rephrased from slightly different angles. Gimme some atmosphere, some structure, some tang of effort - this feels like guys coasting on talent and I demand a little more sweat in my tunes 2.5/5

#1389 The Gordons (NZ) - Future Shock EP

Before there was Bailter Space there was The Gordons, and The Gordons were hardhitting, garagey, couldn't giveafuck shitkickers and they fucking ruled. This was the height of what these guys could do, sparks flying, flywheels coming detached, some relentless robotic incarnation of the Iggy Pop Memorial Hall of Stooges gone broken on a singleminded accidental bydesign bludgeoning rampage.

This is the kinda shit that makes you say "well fucking duh albini wanted on board this shit" because they were totally out-big-blacking him and telegraphing some of the Pixies best 7yearshence tricks while they were at it. That guitar sound, that tendon-throb bass, it's enough to make you want a proper album of this shit, even while you recognize that this little 3-songer was the best possible package for this payload 4.5/5

#1388 Ace Frehley - Space Invader

Look, word got around our tiny office that Ace had an album out that had lurched its way up some billboard chart's dinosaur ass. So, fuckit.

Look, if my buddy said "my dad made this album in his home studio" I'd politely (but sincerely!) say "hey, this sounds really good!" But there'd be this unspoken "...for an album that some random dude slapped together".

And that's is where this album lands: the guitar chops are solid, the songwriting AC/DC-simple but good enough for what it is. But the mix is thin, with almost nothing to surprise you at any point. The phoned-in cover of SMB's The Joker just about sums it up. Hey! you made classic rocking! That's great champ 2.5/5

#1387 The Human Instinct - Stoned Guitar

Sub-Grateful Dead, sub-Hendrix guitar jam blueism. The guitar solos sound like they're a thousand miles away from the rest of the band, doing their own sloppy noodly-noodly-waaaah with almost no regard for the beat, so even when they're good they've got no connection to the overslow backing. Messy stuff that lives up to the album title 2/5

#1386 Rustie - Glass Swords

Rustie's 2011 debut falls somewhere between bigdrop bros-on-molly dubstep and wobblefuck artshit dubsteb and manages to be better than either. It's good, swooping fun and packed with ideas about how to fill the spaces between notes, whether with overblown bass, prefuse vocal snickersnaps, or hall-of-mirrors synth scintillations.

Hamfisted in places, up its own arse in others, its a net win - worth hearing for fans trying to keep the latest wave at arm's reach while keeping a finger on its pulse 3.5/5

#1385 Boom Bip - Zig Zaj

A scattershot rotation of seamripping bass, Manitoba breakbeats, synth surges, guest vocalists, and overblown production. This is 10 ideas in search of an album - none of the songs have much of anywhere to go once they've revealed their intention, nor do they add up to much stacked alongside 9 brothers. Tumtum alone stands out as a song whose centerpiece sound is enough to carry it - the rest sound like demos that could have used a little more time in the oven 2.5/5

#1384 Split Enz - Mental Notes

A pretty, hooky, quietly strange album, labyrinthine with changes in tone and tempo. This is somewhere between art rock and prog, but it's so damned easy to listen to it's hard to peg it as either. It sounds like some lost Genesis album that should have followed Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, a blueprint for how that band could have transitioned towards pop with grace.

Full of baroque detail and forward-leaning production touches, this free associates and leaps through its own wormholes in an effortless dream. Most importantly, all of the strangenesses it conjures are in service of that phantasmal atmosphere - nothing feels done for its own showy sake.

I've still got some untangling to do on this one, but it's got my attention - it'll surprise you near-constantly, give it a listen if you're into that kind of thing 4/5

#1383 Bailter Space - Thermos

I've been knocking a lot of these New Zealand bands for sounding too much like their influences, but here's one where the Kiwis just might be ahead of the curve. Thermos is a hard slash of dissonant post-punk, jagged-as-shit guitars, blownout yelped disinterest/desperation, heedless drums - all before the 80's really got hold of this stuff in earnest. It's tense, complex, uncompromising stuff.

Too much setup for the payoff a lot of the time, but if you're in the mood for a simmering nightmare in a ringy metal cube - who isn't from time to time? - here's yer fix 3/5

#1382 Goldenhorse - Riverhead

A slow-growing smash in New Zealand, hitting #1 a couple years after its release - this is far too pop, far too blankly pretty for my tastes. The real problem is Kirsten Morrell's inflected little voice, full of twangy angst worthy of Lisa Loeb, keening over very songwritterey little songs. Funky the way Dave Mathews Band is funky. There's highlights here and there, the title track has a great chorus swell and rolling menace in its analog organs, but getting there's a journey though Candyland 2.5/5

#1381 Opossom - Electric Hawaii

Another ex-Mint Chick project, this time from singer Kody Nielson, whose auto-tuned, doubled-up shimmersingin from Chicks circa Screens is on full display.

Other than that distinctive vocal tick though, this has the same problem as the just-covered Ruby Suns album: too much reliance on 60's and 00's influences (highlight Blue Meanies is a dead ringer for late-era Beck, Why Why is as similar to George's Wah-Wah in sound as it is in name). It fares better at the end when things get noisier and weirder (Cola Elixer's orrery swirls), but it's mostly very indistinct, with few real memorable moves. Too much NZ pretty and too little NZ punch 3/5

#1380 The Ruby Suns - The Ruby Suns

New Zealand week continues!

A band deeply influenced by all things dense and pretty. The album is sometimes very Beach Boys and Beatles, and sometime *very* Beach Boys (Function of the Sun) and Beatles (that She's So Heavy riff on Birthday on Mars), with plenty of Flaming Lips shimmer and whimper for good measure (Trepidation Part 2) and a bonus dusting of late-era Beck all about. The Shins too. Oh No Oh My. I could go on.

And it *is* pretty! Dense with prettiness! But none of it really sticks, washing into your memories of its comebefores. A perfectly agreeable, disposable piece of breezily arty, poppy indie 3/5

#1379 Die! Die Die! - Die! Die! Die!

New Zealand week! I'm a huge Mint Chicks fan (RIP) for one, and always found the garagey/pretty sounds coming out of the country agreeable. Let's take a quick tour.

First up, a ragged slab of post-hardcore shouting, sounding exactly as Steve Albini-produced as it, in fact, is. All them thin drums and jagged guitars. The fact that they toured, at various points, with Franz Ferdinand and Blood Brothers also makes a lot of sense: they land about halfway in between those bands on the hooky/screamy polished/falling-to-shit scales without being quite as boring/unlistenable as either.

Vaguely dancable, with a cheeky bit of wit (dig those song titles), this is good, if unremarkable fun - it mostly makes me miss Single Frame who struck the balance better.

Now I'm just listening to Wetheads Come Running. That albums rules.

3.5/5

#1378 Bear in Heaven - Time is Over One Day Old

One part cyclical Beta Band hypnosis, one part nauseating surging synths and sounds, this is hooky, disorienting stuff that seems very 2014. Fundamentally trippy, fleetingly inventive - I can't decide if I like it or not, it slips through my fingers like a suggestion, like a drug it alters and dilates and slightly sickens. That's a good trick if nothing else 3/5

#1377 Slow Magic - Triangle

There's warning signs here that this is going to be another of those slurred-for-doing-something-new's-sake messes. And Corvette Cassette, from its 80's-wanking title to its slowdubbed synths to its garbled chants is all things wrong with music in the early 10's.

But if you hang with, Slow Magic finds little moments of, well, magic. Little tinklings of piano, that woooOOOB-TCH gutwrencher on Feel Flows, that heartbeat-burble that out-DCRS&LG-era-M83's M83 on Circle - actual little flashes of innovation among the well-worn gimmicks. Quietly intriguing, even if that wobble-wobble-slur sets my teeth on edge 3/5

#1376 Alpis - Med Öppna Ögon EP

This guy's no Sjukstugan, making more of that huge-beat, hands-in-the-air live rap thing, full of overblown angles - this feels more inspired by American hip hop and less like its own magical thing. But it still kind of works. My love for Swedish as a language to hear banged into rhythmic shapes only grows; head-bobbing shit yet again 3/5

#1375 Sjukstugan - Rap pa Svenska

Swedish is a good fucking language for hip hop. Who knew? Those clipped syllables, those round vowels, those inflected consonants. I don't know a word of this, but as vocal sound, as pure verbal rhythm - it's a pretty sick beat.

The fact that the beats themselves are kicking is the other half of the equation. Full of fat bass, electronic squiggles, and surprise angles, this shit is guaranteed get your head bobbing and make you feel like a cool motherfucker. Hip hop outta have a message, sure, and I don't know what these guys' is, but as pure music this is a killer surprise find 4/5

#1374 Sigur Ros - Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust

Sigur Ros work best when they're slippin outward to the stars and inward to the soul, never better embodied than by that Aegis Byrjun astral alien baby. Their debut's otherworldly timbres, ( )'s terrifying inversions - all that mystery made their cooing worth enduring.

Here's an album of Sigur Ros exposed to the light - on the first couple tracks it soars, sounding like the Polyphonic Spree keening from across the abyss of a good trip. But afterwards, we're just left with their music as it is. It challenges you to accept it for itself without its intrigue. 'Do you love me for who I really am?' it asks.

Not really. I mean, you're fine, but I don't know if this is really going anywhere between us 3/5

#1373 Pet Shop Boys - Please

Pet Shop Boys can't decide if they want to take a critical Pulp-style sneer at the hollow nightclubbers or make music *for* them, so you get something a little incisive, a little dancable, and almost entirely miserable. It's a club scene hatefuck.

West End Girls is a tease, that drunken mellotron, that fat synth throb, thick with nightlife neon flicker and humid haze. The boys never find that high again though. Love Comes Quickly conjures a little bit of atmosphere, but everything else just sounds like the post-disco 80's: utterly disposable, grasping at a night that will surely end 2/5

#1372 James Burton - The Guitar Sounds of James Burton

Dude's a legend, and he does get in some tricks on that guitar, working in all the between-note nuance you could want, soaring with acute shining edge, leaping on the runs, riding the decay. Mystery Train has that rollick rollin.

But instrumental cover albums (two originals notwithstanding) are the lowest form of music. There's not much soul here, sounding too muso and too pop all at once. The record's an ipod - sleek and expensive and cheap 2.5/5

#1371 Ty Segall - Manipulator

A lush, hypnotic, timeless album, this is pure glam rock into chugging proto-metal. Every song finds its core riff and spins it in place while swooning sentiment and a clatter of inventive guitar solos hold court. There's palpable glitter and shine with real rock energy, a cascade through a history of Queen, T-Rex, and the Stooges at their slinkiest. Brilliant is the word.

The variety, the 17-song generosity, the whole-album flow - I can't be help but be reminded of all time personal favorite Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

It's a departure from Segall's pure shitkicking garage energy, and it truly catches fire only occasionally, but it's a glorious triumph in its own way. Dude's a fucking genius, this is a serious contender for my album of the year 4.5/5

#1370 Magic People - You are the Magic People

Listen / buy here!
 
Slightly tuneless, slow-paced, angular post-punk drenched in offkilter synth washes, evoking the mellower side of early Enon, Single Frame, and not to sound like a super hipster overobscure shithead - Built to Spill bassist Brett Nelson's side project The Suffocation Keep. And maybe even Ween, 'cause these guys just sound like they don't give a fuck, droning their way through quiet nightmares and can-barely-be-bothered-to-hate half-joking disdain for the world and everything in it.

It's clumsy, frustrating, and just strange enough, just charming enough, stuffed with just enough surprising angles to recommend pretty strongly to fans of strange, dissonant, fuck-you stuff 3/5

(disclosure: drum programmer / lead laugher Jesse Hubble's a buddy of mine)