#1767 Visual Transitions - Maslin

Listen here!

I want to like this more. RJ Foley's a good dude, a talented dude. And I like the back to basics approach: once-through on a fancy synth, see what you can make it do.

But it sounds like what it is: fussing with a piece of technology, seeing what interesting noises it can make, and calling it an album. It never really elevates beyond the tech. The beats are hard-techno-rigid, there's not a great sense of pacing, and the evolutions all have the same basic shape: if you've played around with this kind of thing you can just see the knobs turning.

At its best it's delightfully hypnotic, the epic-length title track and bangin' Peseda are highlights, but it doesn't conjure the subtle, emotional magic that made Cape Cod a surprise favorite. The man let the machine lead and there's not enough space for that human heart 2.5/5

#1766 Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment - Surf

Free! Listen here.

A fucking ton of fun. And there's truly nothing else out there like it. How often can you say that?

Chance the Rapper's on here, and his role gets the headlines, and the fact he puts Nico//Donnie's name first out of, maybe, some grand sense of community, just seems about right.

This is community, this is art, this is joy. I dare you not to smile. And besides squintingly brilliant popslices like Slip Slide and Go, there's this //soul//. There's the pure yesyesyes of Wanna Be Cool, hiphop's answer to Weezer's in the garage. There's the pure uplift of Sunday Candy. There's the pure wiggy cool of Nothing Came to Me // Something Came to Me's squiggling trumpetwork.

'Baby got her jeans from goodwill / but I bet that ass look goooo---ood still!'

--

In the 90's there was murder rap, and some people said - is this all hip hop's gonna be? And we got positive hip hop, and it was...super fucking square. It couldn't find a way to square that circle of not giving a fuck while staying true to roots. It didn't have the nerve, didn't swing hard enough, just bunted to the 3rd base side and hoped.

Here's an album that says, look. If we're going to be positive we've got to unask the basic question of hip hop. We've got to drop the whole idea of what a hip hop records gotta be. We might even have to flirt with not *being* hip hop to find a real way to express goodwill. Being willing to trust that hip hop will still be there when you circle back around on your own terms.

This's dead daring, outside anything anybody wants to lay down, honestly not giving one single fuck, saying this is who I am and it's fucking spectacular and it all opens up in horns and rhythms and syncopations and rhymes and melodies and singing and songcraft. If you're square enough, earnestly enough, the world bends its angles to you.

This is glorious perfect pop - it makes you feel good as shit, even as it invents and challenges and makes a mark hard on your forehead. Rare, brilliant shit 5/5

#1765 Chico Buarque - Construção

A middle ground between funky band tropicalia // dudecrooner tropicalia: this has got the strong frontman presence, but a full set of fuckineverything writhes in the background, allied with walls of horns, lapped by waves of strings, giant piano chords in the wings.

Not built for love or joy, not outright - this trips along behind sheer fabrics, with spy-movie insinuations, with pop-rock // art-rock ambitions, a soundtrack to an overbusy place where intrigue and fun lurk with unknown intentions 4/5

#1764 Waylon Jennings - Honky Tonk Heroes

Simple songs, in structure / sentiment, Jennings is folks like [you] and [me].

Not actual me, don't think Waylon would much like the cut of my jib.

Can't please everyone.

Every song's got its core message that it comes back to again and again, over those shuffly one-two's and twiggly traggly guitars, and while I walked out unimpressed the first time, second listen around it did get on up into my head and toe 3.5/5

#1763 Novos Baianos - Acabou Chorare

Sprightly, exciting, ever-surprising Tropicalia. It stops short of bringing in a bunch of electric guitars, but this brings the hear with all manner of licks, riffs, and exhalations, keeping you on your toes throughout, never lolling into sleepy croonery. Sunlight reflected 4/5

#1762 Joao Gilberto - Chega de Saudade

As Tropicalia-adjacent styles go, the singer-songwriter / crooner bossa nova thing never appealed to me all that much - this is quite pleasant, coasting along with that golden voice as golden guide, but it's not altogether exciting and doesn't do much to differentiate itself to the non-Portugese speaker 3/5

#1761 Minor Threat - First Two Seven Inches

Blistering-fast hardcore at its best. Sentiments are sincere, biting, positive, desperate. Guitars are tight // messy, full of personality, lightning bolt immediacy. Songs in and out in a minute or so. Bracing, classic shit 4.5/5

#1760 Graham Coxon - Love Travels at Illegal Speeds

It's 1996 and fans are nervously awaiting Blur's followup to Parklife; rumours of an American underground rock-influenced album swirl. This is probably what they were expecting: all that alt-rock crunch, swished with britpop sensibilities and a early-Supergrass bratty romp.

Except this came out 10 years later. Such a strange step backwards.

I love Blur's self-titled, such a weird, messy beast. It's just the sweetspot of all the band's divergent impulses. Coxon's widely credited with its American angle, but if this is what he's got in his heart lets be glad that Damon et al were there to spike the punch.

Don't get me wrong, this album's perfectly solid. Sounds like a Blur album really, but it's pretty safe, totally lacking surprises, and miles away from the ramshackle masterpiece you won't be able to keep from comparing it to 3/5

#1759 Graham Coxon - The Sky is Too High

Blur guitarist's solo debut, that just, nearly, almost transcends its whiny sung // bedroom strum trappings. It rings sincere and blossoms with small imagination, and there's that strange orangeade-sky magical atmosphere from the s/t Blur days that makes it worthwhile in moments. But it has too many stretches of being too small, too dissonant, too aimless, to be an altogether enjoyable listen 3/5

#1758 Public Service Broadcasting - The Race for Space

An atmospheric, soundtracky, often-ambient electronic album that draws inspiration from all stages of the space race. Extended samples of speeches, news reports, control tower communications, and human silence tell the tale, backdropped by spare beats, ambient washes, and pure evocation of space and endeavor itself.

This was a Robin rec and he described it as "fun". I said, ah fuckit, this:

I don't know that fun is the word I would use (other than for go! which is a delight), I find it kind of strangely sad and scary. I mean kind of fun, in the way is uses the materials, but I find outer space so daunting, and I to me this drips with the awe and terror inherent to making these leaps into places we were, let's face it, from an evolutionary standpoint never meant to go.
...
Weirdly the only song I didn't really like was Gagarin, which I feel like is the most accessible - when you're going rock and roll all that precision and polish kinda works against you, I found it very made by human hands, while the rest feels recorded by alien anthropologists, smeared with the colour of space itself.

I think that sums it up about right. Compelling, truly evocative stuff that I'm appreciating even more throughout the day as it sinks in and swirls around 4/5

#1757 Unknown Mortal Orchestra - Multi-Love

Ruban Nielson's Mint Chicks stuff was pure gold, nothing else like it - so eratic, so ugly, so wonderfully, perfectly New Zealand garage rock.

His UMO stuff hasn't got that same spark, too many layers, too much studio fuckery. That's all still true on their latest, but this is the first time that sound's remotely /worked/, where it attacks at angles that compliment all those excessive smears and doubleups, coming in insidious, packed with slithery funk and Of Montreal self-doubting sleaze.

It's not much fun, not altogether exciting, but it's at least compelling, drawing you in closer to peer at some mottled thing to puzzle out its uncanny nature 3/5

#1756 The Buggles - The Age of Plastic

This album's more than you might expect: it's not just 80's pop, it's not just new wave racket, and it's definitely not just Video Killed the Radio Star.

This is art rock proper: chiming technology, squirrely song structures, and dystopian atmosphere all working together to make something catchy, strange and affecting. All that operatic sweep and skitters of mania, Gang of Four post-punk modern anxiety meets the computer age at Queen scale, taking that perfect last ride out with Johnny on the Monorail, squinting into the future 4/5

#1755 Jamie XX - Far Nearer / Beat For

My distaste for slurcore post (?) - dubstep (?) knows no limit. Somebody redeem this detuned garbage pile of a substyle!


Good start: Far Nearer's off the beat, off the note, winding and chiming all around and it's actually pretty exciting, frail, beautiful even.

Then Beat For strikes back, aimless, indulgent, a teethgritter front to back.

Dude's still not the savior - got hope for his June 1st full-length though 2.5/5

#1754 Low Motion Disco - Keep it Slow

Overproduced, downbeat samply funk-flavored groove-scooting that just drifts along and along like The Avalances' ghost. It's actually perfectly agreeable, I actually kind of like it. But it's so goddamn /uncool/, especially when it works in those vocal snippets.

Coolness. Its crucial when it comes to this kind of laid back atmospherics, it's all about the world it weaves for you, and this is kind of . . . Starbucks cool, at best 3/5

#1753 Toomy Disco - Bedroom Tricks

Solid slow-growing, fat-synth, big-beat stuff that loops and smolders and rolls on and on. Probably about right for endless dance parties, but it's a numbing, generally unmemorable sit-n-listen 3/5

#1752 Hot Chip - Why Make Sense?

New Hot Chip! It brings harder disco angles, quieter interludes, noisier noises, heck, even a rapper or two. New! Right?

How come it feels so familiar, so tired?

It's all still the same kind of energy, that same middling pacing, those same falsettos, the same basic bleepbloops all tarted up. And even all that new newness is on the frontend. Then the album figures it's checked the newness box and just coaaaaaaaaaaassssssts, an old dude with no moves in a Lorde shirt 2.5/5

#1751 Rammellzee - This Is What You Made Me

Rant.

No getting away from that word.

Rammellzee and the production itself, both:

brash, start-stop, rambling, halting, caustic, impassioned, sloppy.

Chaos magma, loosely linked, messy and free, exciting and frustrating.

Brilliant, ultimately boring, worth a peek 3/5

#1750 Hieroglyphic Being - The Seer Of Cosmic Visions

That I could get into this, my tenuous grasp on hipster cred slipping away one cringe at a time.

This bristles, ignoring rules, crackling with bent-circuit energy and overblown knob positions, sure. Inventive, even, sure. But it just sounds so fucking lazy, throwing strange feedbacks and filter coincidences at the wall, seeing what sticks, then using the pile on the ground when nothing does. This is the kind of stuff I'd make if I had more patient friends, but even my most adventurous folks expect some...effort, some scant concession to songwriting 2.5/5

#1749 Ray Mang - Mangled

MORE SPACE DISCO.

Shouting party.

This is rightcool compared to the Azari skeeze. Songs in no hurry at all, that unfold on and out, 4 4 4 4 and more, full of angular energy, some pre-posthumous reflection of Jason Forrest's shambling chopwork masterpiece. Praia Do Londres closes out side A with a bit of an overstay, but Not So Fantastic 3 and Aphreako kick it right on back up with them funk // latin guitars, pure transportation, hints of late-era (;)) Avalanches in the rustling crowd sounds.

(great song titles)

Great pacing, powerful listenable, ahead of its time circa 2002 4.5/5

#1748 Azari & III - Azari & III

GIANT H

MY CAPS LOCK KEY ACCIDENTALLY WAS ON WHEN I STARTED TYPING THIS.

Seems like a sign.

True story.

Giant housey beats swirling along space disco, slinky soul stylings. This is for real for the dance party, great album pacing. What exactly its trying to do to you keeps slipping out from under you. You're pretty sure it's sleazy, but you just let it happen happen 3.5/5

#1747 Hugo Montenegro - Montenegro in Italy

Latin-tinged orchestral trifle, romantic and sprightly in broad strokes. It's fine. I don't know why I'm listening to this kind of stuff lately 2.5/5

#1746 Terry Snyder - Persuasive Percussion Volume 2

The original Steely Dan, pure production of the '59-novel stereo tricks! Impressive (?) with the tools at hand, but it rings hokey, downright midi by now 2.5/5

#1745 Les Baxter - Hell's Belles

A little too smooth, a little too right, a little too Tarantino, a little too Les Baxter - sure, but this '69 soundtrack's still got nasty, cratedigger loops to spare. Soul, rumble, outlaw swagger, all dust and grease and lookin good in suits.

Bernard Purdie? Is that you? No, but maybe yer worn out ghost 3.5/5

#1744 Les Baxter - Space Escapade

As as we tip from exotica into straight up lounge. This is goddamn delightful. It's oversmooth, but hey so's skimming outerspace on the swankest ship this side of the Andromeda. Lush strings, popping reeds, little bitty bells, and what the hell, even more strings: its enough to make this sound like self-parody, but dammit it pulls it off 4/5

#1743 Yma Sumac - Mambo!

The usual exotica stuff, those bubbling beats and extra flourishes, plus:
 - searing blasts of horns, coming in bright enough to make you squint
 - Yma's bonkers operatic howling, piping voice. I mean full on range, swinging from Louis Armstrong growls to some beep boop Fifth Element opera shit on a dime

That voice is a thing to behold, and an interesting curiosity, but pretty goddamn unpleasant to listen to. Same goes for the album  2.5/5

#1742 Actual Water - Call 4 Fun

May there always be bands that ride this kind of rollicking bullshit, that make no particular concessions, that make screaming Exploding Hearts noises and thrash about all night. This isn't especially hooky, isn't especially good even, but it's got so much streaking, striving effort and sincerity that it still makes me happy as hell 3/5

#1741 Dexter Gordon - Our Man in Paris

Not my kinda jazz. Too much "look how good I can jazz", not enough engagement with actual human feelings and interest, more classical guitar than electric guitar. I still don't know dick about jazz, but I know that it can be more than this 2.5/5

#1740 Cloudeater - Purge

The electronic bits bristle with ideas, but all the clever Atticus Rossy electronic crackles and knob sweeps in the world can't cover up this album's shortcomings. Repetitive structures, halfhearted lyrics, samey vocals, and overstuffed production add up to static - there's a lot going on, but its always the exact same amount of a lot, with no fuckin goinforit moments until the whole thing just blurs 2.5/5

#1739 The London Souls - Here Come the Girls

Ok, no, this one's not on me.

This is empirically way too goddamn smooth for how gritty and rootys and blues-flecked this is trying to be. Everything happens at just the right spot with just the right vocals, it's cloying and obvious - even the place where it cracks into actual energy feel like carefully scheduled recess 2/5

#1738 Surfer Blood - 1000 Palms

Has the world changed or have I changed?

All these indie albums seem a step too slow, a bit too studied, a bit too practiced. Astro Coast was my favorite album of 2010 and this leaves me a bit cold and I can't tell you what the difference is. I feel like I'm living inside a series of shells of worry and focus that music can't penetrate.

This's got pretty moments, but I need a much higher dosage than this in this 2015 3/5

#1737 Kamasi Washington - The Epic

Coming in epic-sized at 3 hours: 3 discs packed with 15 minute jazz tunes. Yikes.

Rock
The way Washington tears open his sax on the more frantic tracks is pure Hendrix, total rock and roll distortion. Hear that freakout at the heart of Final Thought and hear guitars that aren't even there, feel the way the songs stretch until they look like Zappa jams and prog rock opuses.

Classical
Or to even skip the prog step, feel that reach for import and scope and masterpiece, even more so than the big Davis/Coltrane epics.

Exotica
And those operatic space-voyage backing vocals, those little odd-instument flourishes, those big cushions of strings, it all has that transportive quality of the 50's exotica I've been up into.

Jazz
And yes, jazz, all kinds of jazz, most obviously the hourlong genre-expanders of the 60's.

Everything
The worst thing about this album is that it tries to do too much. Those backing strings in particular seem like a new-for-its-own-sake shortcut to spicing up the tonal palette - they intrude, feeling ornamental and heavyhanded. And the vocal tracks like The Rhythm Changes are out of place, seemingly there just to check the box.

And that grasp is also the best thing about this album. I mentioned the 60's and it has that feel, of trying to see how far we can take this thing, of drawing on everything insight to find a cranny of new, and that kind of adventurousness and grasping is refreshing right about now.

And for a style-spanning, massive-length, truly epic album, in a genre not exactly known for its accessibility, it's actually not a particularly difficult listen. It's a journey, but you've got guides and snacks and you can kind of just let the alien landscape roil onto itself in the distance 3.5/5

#1736 Temples - Sun Structures

Don't you have how modern Tame Impala sounds?

Temples make zero concessions to not actually being from the 60's. Those backing shouts at the one minute mark are a hint and a half: these guys don't even limit themselves to especially popular // cool 60's music, pouring guitars, sitars, reverb, and feedback down their chests in dark rainbow bucketfuls.

It's trippy, agreeable, murky, losing any hope for hooks in all those layers, and look, there's nothing more I can say here: if you know what this sounds like by now this is probably for you, if not probably not 3.5/5

#1735 DMA's - DMA's

This is a propulsive little slab of bouncy rock, but it cribs so goddamn aggressively from 90's British rock, especially (especially!) Oasis - it's distracting. These guys want to be Oasis as bad as Oasis wanted to be the Beatles*

If you're into that kind of thing and can get past it, this is fine, maybe even good. They lay it on thick, but at least you're getting the best Oasis songs I've heard in a decade or two 3/5

* an impression only deepened by their frontman's spot-on Liam impression at Bonnaroo

#1734 Team Spirit - Killing Time

Team Spirit's debut EP was an indie-rock 8-ball - would an LP of that kind of manic energy just be an overdose?


Probably, though I wish they'd gone for it. The band comes out at full speed for the first 3 tracks, but then they downshift into chuggier tempos and you can just feel the sound choking itself on its leash. Beast wants to RUN. But instead its 2 minutes worth of ideas stretched to 4 minute, again and again and it's frustrating as hell. Just go full Punch Line if you have to, dammit 3/5

#1733 Cannonball Adderley - Somethin' Else

Gliding and swooning, so full of motion - it's all so strangely perfect, it just slides into my brain and makes it into sensible shapes. You can grab on and marvel at the showmanship, but if you lay on back it's one of the best jazz albums around at just making you feel good 4/5

#1732 Screaming Females - Rose Mountain

Defying the bandname, Marissa Paternoster's got one of the richest, most pleasing ladyvocals on the rockscene, weaving in perfectly alongside those gliding guitars. The Females' latest isn't as razoredged as 2010's Castle Talk, but it's super agreeable, blazing out one effortless, aerodynamic fuzz rock groove after another 3.5/5

#1731 Mikal Cronin - MCIII

MCII was my favorite album of last year, so I come into this with high hopes that can't be met.

Shame! If it wasn't for those nuts expectations I might have loved this: it's slathered in extra strings and intrumentation, swinging Shinsward and halcyon - it's got it all: hooks, good-to-great solos, soulstoking little lines, etc. But it doesn't seem to have that grab-you-by-the-heartguts hopeful existentialism, that *this*fucking*song* awestriking. It just doesn't have that magic - Cronin seems used up. This is a record, he's not *in* it.

You can't pour your whole self into an album every year. Here's hoping this is a breather that sets him up for his next big thing 4/5

#1730 Martin Denny - Hypnotique

Every bullet that Ritual of the Savage dodged must have flown past and lodged itself in Hypnotique instead. Ritual used its south // east touches to make something cool, this just doubles down and makes something kinda hokey and gross, it's the difference between wearing pendant from China and using your fingers to make your eyes slanty.

Maybe I'm overreacting, maybe I'm blaming the originator for associations I make to things that came 50+ years later, but I found none of the loungy grace of Ritual here, this is an album that literally uses that CHINGA, CHINGA, CHING-CHING: CHING! CHING! CHING! CHING! Chinese cliche.

You know the one I'm talking about.

Maybe he invented it, but it sounds fucking ridiculous in 2015. And then he does the blues with a flute and eastern malletwork. No, fuck that, benefit of the doubt lost. Hacky bullshit 2/5

#1729 Metz - II

I've been reading too much Pitchfork lately. Just laziness I guess, it's a quick way to feel like you've got your finger somewhere within arm's reach of the pulse when you're 34 and gettin older.

I mention it because I totally screwed myself this time, can't escape from Paul Thomson's dead-on review of this album, specifically the line about how it feels like "falling down the same set of stairs ten times in a row". Fuck, that's perfect: this is an exciting, harrowing, numbing listen 3.5/5

#1728 Girl Band - The Early Years

That bristling guitar.
Those undying drums.
That seething patience, boiling with bottled intent.

Why
Do
They
Hide
Their
Bodies
Under
My
Garage!

That song, the way it rides its title hook to death for 8 minutes like a long-lost Liars B-side. It's almost great.

But there's the problem rightthere: this sounds like a B-sides collection, like runts that suckled meekly at the sound. It's too samey and brittle and aimless, whip this sound into actual songs and you might be onto something 2.5/5

#1727 Calexico - Edge Of The Sun

My Morning Jacket
\
 |
this album
 |
 \
Mumford and Sons

That brew of dusty folkism, funky pulse, anthemic grasping, topped with pop whip. I feel like Calexico used to have a bit more soul, this is mostly pleasant // just pleasant, all a bit forgettable3/5

#1726 Serena-Maneesh - S-M 2: Abyss In B Minor

This shit's wild enough that maybe Rundgren doesn't get all the credit for just-reviewed Runndans' trippiness after all - SM songwriter/guitarist Emil Nikolaisen's got some good weird flow going on.

Where SM's debut was just pure Placebo shoegaze, this is a wild, wooly, ramshackle piece of searing chopsage, a moving castle of guitars, distorted vocals. The way-too-Bloody Melody for Jaana aside, this is actually pretty exciting stuff, tearing shoegaze apart and putting it back together at cranky angles 4/5

#1725 Marilyn Manson - The Pale Emperor

There's a stern confidence to Manson's latest, a bit like NiN circa Ghosts. He's not out to shock you or otherwise grab your attention by the scruff - whatever audience he's gonna get that way, it's been got.

This is just songs. Each one rides a bluesy mantra and a thunderous // rumbling beat of choice, and in the first minute you know more or less what's coming in the next 4 or 5. Watching the little details creep in, letting the groove seep into your head unnoticed has its small pleasures.

The Pale Emperor is about the right title: Manson's the ex-berzerker, and now he sits and surveys his kingdom bathed in white flame impassively, no one left to conquer or impress 3/5

#1724 Todd Rundgren/Emil Nikolaisen/Hans-Peter Lindstrøm - Runddans

What a wonderfully weird album. Lindstøm's unbeatable space disco pulse provides backbone to Rundgren's meandering, scattorshot ideas, and Nikolaisen's choppery. The starship wheels from ambient to throbbing groovability with ease, doubling back on its themes in ways that feel right even as they catch you off guard like a kink you didn't know you had.

Uneven in places? Sure. But that's outerspace man, you don't get to see the backside of the galaxy without working through some wormholes. Bracing stuff 4.5/5

#1723 Mumford and Sons - Wilder Mind

I finally figured it out: Mumford and Sons are a secular Christian rock band.

Made for big, broadly relatable, euphoric climaxes - you can just picture the earnest 22 year old girls with their heads lolled back singing along to every word that was written just for them. The banjos are gone, but the format's the same: everything's a climax, or a build to a climax, or a setup for a build to a climax. There's the odd exception, but even the shimmering, simmering Monster feels like an extended setup for Snake Eyes' inevitable, slowburning eruption.

Is it so wrong to have high-low structures? And isn't the album actually rather pretty in places? It is, it is! But its that neverending catharsis, that eternal grasping - none of it reads true, it's all just too damn built to break you down.

Put it this way: if I'm gonna like an album I usually have to be able to say yes to this question:

"is this a band I'd want to be in?"

I'll pass on these guys. I don't think they're really a band. I don't think they're up there making their music or otherwise doing their thing, they're enthralled to making all the people out there feel this way and then that, and it's exhausting, and it shows 2.5/5

#1722 My Morning Jacket - The Waterfall

Like all MMJ albums, this kind of slips through my fingers, a hazy memory.

But I generally like it. It's lush, pretty, kicking all the grasping as newness that marked Z and Evil Urges, mostly tamping down JJ's needling falsetto, leaving a confident late-era rock record dripping with craft, packed with a mushy songiness that you can sink all the way down into. There's enough here that I can feel it slowly seeping into my bones the way this band is, I'm told, supposed to 3.5/5

#1721 Les Baxter - Ritual of the Savage

Album's kinda goddamned cool.

Can I say that? Seems wrong.

Word is, this spawned "exotica" circa 1951, and it's full of Asian (?), Polynesian (?), South American (?) sounds, all washed in strings and orchestral sensibilities.

Can you call and album called, fucking: Ritual of the Savage, with fucking tikis on the cover, cool?

Dammit, it is, it's exciting and adventurous, in structure and melody and instrumentation, all soundtracking to trip to hither and tither. Maybe it's kitsch, maybe its exploitative. I gotta say, when I listen though, I am transported, and I feel like I am on a fantastic journey fraught with mystery, through time, and then space, and fuckit if I do enjoy that very much.

Essential listening, one way or another

4.5/5

#1720 VA - PC Music, Vol. 1

Pop music whipped Warholian into post-pop.
Cooing vocals clipped and pasted into ransom notes.
Sharp decays peppering melodies with little notes that say "note".
It's a cute idea, subtly creepy // joyous, but damn annoying by the end 2.5/5

#1719 Les Paul - The New Sound

Ripping fast guitar dexterity, just pure notes, not unlike Art Tatum's piano runs, actually. Paul works in loads of styles, tipped off by the song titles: Brazil, Hipbilly Boogie, Lady of Spain, etc.

As a showpiece of every damn thing anyone'd heard to do with a guitar up till then, it's a thing to behold. But, and maybe this is sacrilege given the rep of the man's guitar's, the actual tone is damned annoying, a squealing, trebbly little scribble that I just wanted to end by the end. Hard to really love something, virtuosity aside, that is so unpleasant to the actual ear 2.5/5

Month in Review: April '15

Yow. Nother good one. It's amazing how much you pack into a month. Went through a mini hiphop kick, continued to root out Roo-players, kept a closer-than-usual eye on new releases, even checked out a little jazz here and there. But first, back to the same old story:

Album of the Month
 
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - I'm in Your Mind Fuzz - Their masterpiece, the perfect blend of wooping riffy freakouts and dreamy floatalong psychadelia. When these guys cut lose they cannot be beat by any band under the sun.

Also Recommended!

Brian Eno - Thursday Afternoon - I repeat: possibly the finest piece of hardline ambient ever.

DJ Format - Statement of Intent - Perfect combination of hard-edged // labyrinthine lyricism, backed by effortlessly exciting hip hop production.

Art Blakey Quintet - A Night at Birdland Vol. 1 - Rocksolid jazz that pops off the wax.

The Sonics - This is the Sonics - Shockingly solid album from the garage rock firstwavers.

Camel - Rain Dances - A quietly toothsome take on prog rock.