#1971 The Flaming Lips - Transmissions from the Satellite Heart

Wayne Coyne's voice, that sub-Martschian winge, it really is unpleasant.

Say "Eddie Vedder" out loud. Those thudding Es and Ds and dead-end R: it sounds like his voice, his deep, steady groan.

Say "Wayne Coyne" out loud. That about sums it up.

I wanted to love this, its strange production choices, its lurching prog-ish hitches, its slashes of uncanniness. And I got tempted to love it again and again - I damn do dig that swirling, brilliant build on Moth in the Incubator! The bonkers backing makes up for the vocals most of the time. It's an idea-packed record that you'll admire and occasionally enjoy, but might not love as much as you want to, those shamelessly bleats crashing the bedroom again and again 3.5/5

#1969 Flesh Panthers - Ngc 2632

Relentless, clattering garage rock, packed with scuzz and seared guitars and blownout shouting, band falling down the stairs forever. Glammy swagger and sha-la-la's give the briefest breaks from your inevitable moshing/dancing/thrashing.

Good fun, in other words, but probably more fun live - you can almost hear the club's soundsystem straining, those tinfoil guitars played harder and harder till they slice the little arms to ribbons 4/5

#1968 Kneebody and Daedelus - Kneedelus

I was in a high school jazz band with Kneebody drummer Nate Wood. Lil' trivia for ya.

Kneebody's a knotty little jazz/rock/[?] outfit with some real clean little hitches in their sound. They played mindblowing backup to Busdriver back in 2000something, and now here they are with The Weather collaborator Daedelus -- full circle.

The combination's an incredibly fluid, winding sound: gentle slashes of horns, rocksolid skitter from Wood, with subtle touches from Daedelus. It's jazz rendered otherworldly by unclear means - beautiful, trippy, hooky, as close to early Sigur Ros as that cover alien might suggest, albeit from other angles entirely. And then again and again that jazz spills over genre levees into ambient territory that's more Daedelus's purview, into some unholy rockist hybrid, until the whole plain floods.

I'm a big fan of anything that defies categorization, that thwarts reverse engineering - this fits the bill nicely. Fans of pretty, adventurous stuff will have a good time failing to tease this apart 4/5

#1967 Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - Euclid

A nice counterpoint to those deadboring loopers I've been bashing: this has a real twiggy, organic quality for something so purely electronic. The analog machines are let to breathe, evoking night and space, and the Labyrinth suite lives up to its name, conjuring twisty spaces to fall backwards into. Mysterious, quietly magical stuff 4/5

#1966 Andrew Hung - Rave Cave Level 1

An EP of 3 pointless little bleepbloop loopers from one of Fuck Buttons' button-fuckers. Lo-bit chirps with some higher-fi simmers, bringing no particular getupandmove energy, no particular hypnotic cloaking, no indication that these took more than 20 minutes to slap together.

Small context bonus for ably soundtracking reading about Trump's terrifying war on decency 2.5/5

#1965 Oneohtrix Point Never - The Fall into Time

Six deeply, mechanically minimal tracks, shifting only barely as they loop in place. It makes a certain sense: Oneohtrix always played with time, now instead of dragging individual samples incrementally into detunery, it's the whole song stretched back into a different kind of tunefulness.

The patience, the slow-shift bleeding out from under you, is the album's small thrill. But it ends up feeling like a conceptual wank and won't compete with any of the greats for pure ambient ambiance 3/5

#1964 Ty Dolla Sign - Free TC

Nobody raps anymore. The hip hop station in town's all auto-tuned crooning, all club-ready nonsense. Free TC has just about everybody as a guest, but even the guest rappers barely rap.

There's hope up front, a laidback west coast groove rolling out over the first few tracks. There's even some rapping! But then it just gets waterier and waterier and waterier, a puddle of auto-tune fuckery over forgettable bleep bloops for an hour twelve 2.5/5

#1963 VA - [Cease and Desist] DIY (Cult Classics from the Post-Punk Era 1978-82)

13 icy, repetitive, taut, simmering little rants - totally minimal, mostly hookless, but strangely engaging. This's an expertly-curated collection, laying out a sense of scene and delivering a surprisingly fun, personality-drenched 44-minute tour 4/5

#1962 Grimes - Art Angels

Wildly, overtly, aggressively pop, more so than you thought Grimes could go.

Don't let the panting, Die Antwoord-worthy meltdown of SCREAM fool you - heck even Kill V Maim's squirrely blowouts are red herrings - this is an album packed with sunny melodies, big easy beats, and high-polish production.

As pop? It's better than most. We'd be lucky to have the youth of America hooked on this. Its still weird, still packed with little flourished, pulling pop in the right direction. But don't come in expecting too much - it's cloying more often than it's daring, less Bjork than Beautiful Garbage, and ends up sounding less than totally sincere 3/5

#1961 Ben Lee - Grandpaw Would

It's a catchy little singer-songwriter album, full of clear feelings and pretty touches. But boy is it twee, especially once you know that Lee was 17 at the time. Feel like I should be able to get past that. Can't.

There are some nice little narrative threads: the callbacks to The Pixies, to Lee's songwriting struggles, to "the girl". It's cute. But if you're going full singer-songwriter, I've got to feel like you're telling me your real story - or at least let me suspend disbelief. This put a skeptical look on my face by track 3, made me say "oh cmon" by track 12, and by the time I got to track 18 (eighteen!) I was just sticking around out of completionism 2.5/5

#1960 Life Without Buildings - Any Other City

Sue Tompkins is a mess, yelping and wringing and flinging herself about // Sue Tompkins is in control, repeating lines again and again until she gets them right and drills them in. No punkass song's gonna tell her when she's done.

The band keeps time with clockwork efficiency, a pulse for Tompkins' to scrawl over, vulnerable and menacing and unstoppable, the most interesting girl you ever dated, too much for you to handle 3.5/5

#1959 Born Ruffians - Ruff

This is a nice bounceback after the too-pop Birthmarks, bringing back some of that indie wonder and angst and hope - a little grit to offset the leftover sheen. It's hooky, pretty, and very very indie rock, adventurous, if only incrementally 3.5/5

#1958 Billy Bragg and Wilco - Mermaid Avenue

Billy and Wilco make songs out of unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics.

And that's the story of what you're going to get: some folksy sentiments, some Wilco indie-country-indie, and a lot of general mismatch and hodgepodgery. Wilco sounds shackled to the format, the lyrics' personal impact is undercut by the guest-writer/performer format, and the whole thing feels awkwardly reanimated. I've never found collaborations between greats to work, from the Travelling Wilburys to the New Basement Tapes - tight-knit vision makes for the best rock.

Exceptions for lyrics that are so damn good they just carry the project. Walt Whitman's Neice is endlessly, wryly witty, and Unwelcome Guest is quietly devastating. And well, Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key's just plain pretty as hell. But in between there's a whole lot that just feels unnecessary 3/5

#1957 Blitzen Trapper - VII

There were hints of this sound in Black River Killer, and now its everywhere, licks of soul, funk, and big boombaps alongside wobbling trumpets, slide guitars, and wailing harmonicas. There's no avoiding comparisons to Odelay, what with those hiphop beats, country flourishes, psychedelic imagery and crackling experimentalism. In fact, these guys have a lot in common with Beck: those swings between downhome simplicity and bigcity shitstorms.

But what made Odelay so great was the way it kept you guessing, right to the end. VII just happens to run out of steam right at track 7, settling down to a lazy simmer over those last 5 tracks. I like where the band's pointed, and the first half throws some sparks, but this feels like an understuffed course correction after American Goldwing's too-simple sound 3.5/5

#1956 The Ozark Mountain Daredevils - It'll Shine When it Shines

I do love it when I can feel an album's creation shining through - Ty-loose or Kid-A-tight, I just wanna feel it. There's an effortless energy to these guys that I dig. It's country shuffle and stomp, with a rock and roll backbeat backbone - all pretty, driving forward at a pace that's --just-- fast enough to put the wind in your hair, but not fast enough to muss it up. This is some ur-Blitzen-Trapper bullshit.

Every song sounds easy to make, easy to listen to, but it's never cloying, never boring, never full of itself, it just flows out like a river. I could listen to this all day, on porches, with cards skipping on felt, with a whiskey and a couch and a night gone by 4.5/5

#1955 Born Ruffians - Birthmarks

This is polished as hell, especially given how ramshackle they used to be.

Maybe it's the agreeable fake-rough vocals and approachable melodies, but there's something in this that smells designed for girls, in a tacky, capitalistic kind of way. Nicking little bits from Phoenix, Mumford, Hot Hot Heat, and a thousand other indie touchstones reinforces that overslick impression.

Which makes Rage Flows frustrating as hell: it's a /killer/ track, setting up expectations and knocking them apart again and again, ratcheting up tension perfectly across verses until the blasted, clipped production is tuned right over the top into a terrifying, thrilling speakershredding climax. I want to hear the album that *that* band made 3/5

#1954 Harmonia - Musik von Harmonia

Meandering and droning and formless, even for Krautrock, this pulses and flows, with spatters of guitar and wobbles of electronics in no hurry to get anywhere, sounding improvised. There's a purity to that - this is better than average hypnosis grist, with little "how'd they make that noise" puzzles waiting in the wings 3.5/5

#1953 Oneohtrix Point Never - Garden of Delete

I've claimed it before, but this time I mean it: this is the payoff for all those years of annoying, slurred, detuned electronic fuckery that we suffered through in the early 2010's. It was Oneohtrix's own Replica that really jumpstarted the movement, so it's fitting that he's here to show us the way out.

There's still samples slurred to oblivion, but they're alongside a hundred other tricks and constructed into actual songs, into actual arcs of experience, into something you might want to actually listen to. It's one of the most impressive combinations of wild experimentalism and actual listenability I've heard in ages - there's enough melody and flow and beauty here to work its way into your head, seducing you into its strangeness, changing the room around you underneath your awareness.

Skitters, drones, buzzes, warps, woofs, chops, pulses, stutters, and it's all got that magical sense of being untouched by man - an album launched into space, corrupted on a trip past a distant sun, reconstructed by alien robots with poor motor control.

Special award for having the perfect album title and cover.

Put it on when you've got something creative to do, something that can stand up to a little disintegration 4.5/5

#1952 Blitzen Trapper - American Goldwing

Perfectly pleasant as country rock goes; Trapper can still nail that backbeat backbone, with those vocal hooks and the solo at justherightspot. It's so conservative though - I accept we're never going to get anything as gloriously batshit as Wild Mountain Nation again, but there's nothing here that even matches Furr's slightly-adventurous highlights.

Heck, there's not a single moment on here that betrays its 70's disguise: this could sidle right up alongside Skynryd or CSNY and fit right in. If you're down with that, this'll soothe you good, but fans of the band's previous work might be left underwhelmed 3.5/5

#1951 Goat (Sweden) - World Music

Guitars, drones, chants, polyrhythms, there's nothing to moor to as everything swirls psychedelic, there's no repeated riffs, just waves of noise that rise up underneath and islands of beauty and relief. It's the best and worst thing about the album, that wailing indistinctness - it's a full on hardline 60's trip if you're willing to commit to it, packed with monument and detail 4/5

#1950 Goat (Australia (Metal)) - Sign of the Dead

Add it to the list of essays I'll never quite write: accidental musical discovery in the internet age.

Latest example: I'm listening to an album by Australian band Goat, and it rolls past its Spotify endpoint into their next album, a doomy metal album by a completely different (also Australian!) band called Goat*.

Weirdly, I almost thought this was the same guys from a different era. It's got other-Goat's disarming earnestness, underproduction, and stripped-down underpromising//overdelivering charm - even if the sunny acoustic's been replaced by nailbombed guitar/bass. These're clearly dudes who love music, who really want to make music, and said fuckit and set up a tascam and banged out some clumsy, thin-mixed doom that I totally enjoyed listening to 3.5/5

*and neither of these bands are the Swedish experimental Goat the Cleveland pop Goat the Seattle jazz Goat the Spanish dance Goat and boy is Spotify confused

#1949 Goat (Australia) - Circles

It's a small record, probably made by buds in a garage // living room // barn, chugging along earnestly, a little hookless, a little boring -- but strangely charming. The relentless acoustic clatter, the sunny little chord changes, the Wolf Parade-lite howling vocal inflections, they won me over.

It sounds unforced and sincere, downright effortless. Enough for me 3.5/5

#1948 Styx - The Grand Illusion

Second-tier 70's week continues!

See, I'm learning about myself here: I'll take goofy indulgence over plodding devotion to the blues and the road and being a simple kind of man anyday.

I'm totally falling for the lame overproduction, the proggy flourishes, celebrity's-an-illusion fairy tale. This lands somewhere between Journey, ELO, and Rush on the hokey art-rock band map - it's not as catchy//sincere//virtuoso as the rest, but dammit, I had a good time coming along for the romp 3.5/5

#1947 Foghat - Fool for the City

Maybe it's all the deadboring stuff I've been listening to, but I actually kinda like Foghat's goofy, half-baked experimental//pop indulgences right about now. The harmonies are goofy, the proto-hair-metal shrieks are goofy. Mark it: album cover, album name, band name - all goofy. It's overproduced and sloppy, like drunk Steely Dan, but dammit it kinda won me over. Plus, Slow Ride's an all time jam 3.5/5

#1946 Bachman Turner Overdrive - Bachman Turner Overdrive

The core sound's good enough: those forward-leaning drums, that Canadian-Skynyrd guitarwork. But man, for a band all about roads and gears and trucking this band is in no damn rush to get anywhere - every song goes on way longer than it should. I must have muttered "is this song still going?" 3 different times. Which is weird, because they're only 4-5 minutes long, but that feels long when the pace is so slow and there's only a GBV song's worth of ideas powering the whole thing. Plus, god! There's never any climax or anything - the song just churns and churns and stops.

Maybe it's all about that endless road hypnosis 2.5/5

#1945 Ride - Going Blank Again (Extended)

I usually go for the original releases, but I accidentally listened to the rerelease with 4 extra tracks, and I have to admit it made the difference. Some people were disappointed that this made some pop concessions compared to Nowhere, but I feel like those extra 4 tracks, especially the 11 minute closer, bring this back to epic scale. It's packed with shoegaze layers, sanded into aerodynamism but still jumbo-jet, still intimidating.

I'm still not a super big shoegaze guy, but this's more fun than most 3.5/5

#1944 Fuzz - II

The riffs are huge, and they rule. It's heavy and nasty: the fuzzed out bass juggernaut, the screaming guitar solos, the neckbreak dives into overpowering guitar noise maelstroms. But I feel like I don't like it as much as I should, somehow. Have we finally reached saturation on the Ty Segall sound?

There's something overstuffed and plodding about this, even as it's great, even as it's hooky, it's just so much, so loud, for 67 minutes - it's numbing. It makes me appreciate the great Ty Segal albums, which managed to give you room to breathe, in the mix and in the sequencing.

Possibly the perfect Segallsphere album to go to if you want pure dedication to riffage, but not my first choice overall 4/5

#1943 Free - Tons of Sobs

Heavy British blues revival rock, sticking pretty close to the master form, tearing off into something new here and there only occasionally. There's some ripping guitars, and inb4 Zepp, Sabbath, etc. if you're into history. But if we're talking about the actual listening - too much blues-debt for my taste 3/5

#1942 Bad Company - Bad Company

I don't know how these guys got off the ground. Their later stuff is a little better, but man, their first album is some real generic brand, cut-rate 70's rock and roll. Slow paced, unmoving, unimaginitive, unexciting. It's fine, but aggressively unspectacular - the kind of stuff I'd expect to hear some dads making on a Tuesday night at the eighth-best bar in town 2.5/5

#1941 Herzog - Cartoon Violence

God I love these guys - Weezery power-pop crunch + slide-laser guitar + too-old weariness + unexpected structural swerves. It checks [so] [many] [boxes] [for] [me]

Unexpected, lively, tuneful, hooky and fun, all railing against the pre-middle-age limpdickery I'm kicking my way through right about now. Young people music for old people that somehow makes you feel like you're not fooling yourself 4.5/5