#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.