#2058 Sepultura - Beneath the Remains

Rough-edged, menacing, relentless thrash that rumbles and gallops along, shifting fast -> breakneck -> fast, again and again, packed with all the standard guttural shouting and guitar meedliemeedlies you'd expect. Ace stuff to get you flayed into a rage // numb the rage you've got 3.5/5

#2057 Hop Along - Get Disowned

It's the kind of keening, inflected vocals that could drive you nuts, but something about Frances Quinlan's performance wins me over. Not quite twee, not quite emo - there's a Mountain Goats // Okkervil insistence, a sincerity, a desperation, a well-balanced skeletal mix that leave you bare, a Microphonesian elementalism that keeps it out of your cynisism's clumsy reach, flashes of tuneful joy to make the fall a thrill.

Everything falls apart in acoustic clatter, Frances's voice a whirlwind of flame in the center 4/5

#2056 Pinkshinyultrablast - Grandfeathered

Well-named!

A wave of shoegazey guitar sheen, keening vocal lines, crunch on flicker on shimmmer on a lightbeam of clarity, streaked with Danananakroyd // Fang Island careering joy, Deerhoof at their more tuneful played on top of themselves triply. Well-balanced enough to be absorbing and hypnotic, the occasional laserline tripping a subconscious smile - overwhelming in the best way 4.5/5

#2055 You Am I - You Am I's #4 Record

What a bad band name.
Band is fine, an Australian take on 90's British jangle, packed with bouncealong verses and singalong choruses. They've got local-band soft crunch and easy sweetness, tuneful and toetappable, but not a lot more 3/5

#2054 Simple Minds - Empires and Dance

It's those Don't You Forget About Me guys! Those 80's also-rans.

This whole album feels derivative and uninspired and uninteresting - maybe it did all this first and deserves some here-undelivered credit, but I was waiting for this crap to be over pretty much from go

big dumb drum machine beats + bleating anthemology => totally overlookable without guilt in 2016

2.5/5

#2053 Prins Thomas - Principe Del Norte

Extremely patience, slowrolling near-ambient music, utterly without imagery, just pure texture, a zenlike poem that goes on forever, a complete abandonment of the krauty momentum that started his career. As neverending pulse goes, you could do a lot worse, but there's nothing spectacular here as Thomas continues to drift and drift and drift 3/5

#2052 VA - Mutant Disco

Disco sucks. Which makes it a useful tool for new-wavers, no-wavers, and contrarian soundmakers of all kinds, who can slingshot around disco's gravity into bad taste from behind, who can wink their way into music that's actually kind of fun.

This collection doesn't let arch/noisy pretentions get in the way of a good time - y'all can be as mutant as you want, but you gotta make the people move.

The argument seems to be that there's something good in disco, if only you could strip of its uncoolness, and the easiest way to do that is to make it even less cool and go around the horn. It mostly works, though the album as a whole falls into an uncanny middle ground: not quite easy fun, not quite artsy strange, not quite sure if its making a statement or having a laugh 3/5

#2051 Venetian Snares - Traditional Synthesizer Music

Performed live and unedited on modular synths, though for better or worse this still manages to sound fully prepared, packed with all the same Aphex-adjacent drum squalls and synth meanders you'd expect. Probably interesting to some specific segment of purist-enthusiast, for me it was forgettable, lost in the sea of similar records 2.5/5

#2050 Cavern of Anti-Matter - Void Beats / Invocation Trex

A dizzying whirlpool of beats and buzzes, swirling warm analog synths and live drums played motorik-perfect, machine-man meets man-machine. Propulsive, disorienting, hypnotic, intricate, and surprisingly fun 4/5

#2049 VA - Star Wars Headspace

A who's-who of electronic producers bring you a solid collection of future-leaning electronic buzzers and bangers. Just don't expect too much on the Star Wars side: this is all icy cool, completely outside the movies' atmosphere, just peppered with laser noises and dialog samples.

If you squint, some of the best tracks hook into the emotions that might underlie the characters and stories: ATTLAS finds a wistful longing between the stars, and Royksopp bring the laserchase adrenaline. But the less Star Wars you expect from this product the more you'll enjoy it 3/5

#2048 James White and the Blacks - Off White

Conceptually brilliant: smashing soul, disco and no-wave nonsense into a searing, dancable // unlistenable complication, wallowing in black coolness // white uncoolness (Almost Black Part 1!)

In places it works despite itself: those grooves+beats+ladies on Contort yourself are six dozen sax screeches away from being the first dancepunk song of all time by about 30 years.

But White's admirable commitment to savaging himself and everything within arm's reach comes at the cost of....goodness? Atonal shouting, relentless sax stabs, and watertorture pacing make this a grueling, painful listen 3/5

#2047 Screaming Lord Sutch - Smoke and Fire

A nasty brew of guitar racket, packed with rough edges, down and dirty Bo Diddley via early Kinks, back to basics, ragged and raging and not giving one shit.

It might surprise you that a ridiculous list of superstars were on board - this is no Jeff Beck / Zeppelin record. That page'll tell you those guys hated the album and that's fucking embarrassing for them.

This is rock and fucking roll, and if those guys were too focused on production nonsense to appreciate what a searing, sloppy piece of brilliant proto-punk they'd made fuck'em. I want to retroactively take a point off every Zep album I've ever reviewed.

Sutch gets it, exciting shit 4/5

#2046 Grateful Dead - Grateful Dead (Skull and Roses)

After spending half a dozen reviews being underwhelmed by the Dead, I find myself in the awkward position of kind of starting to like them. Maybe there's something in their easy simplicity that becomes comforting when it's familiar, and their cottony grooves finally finding their way into my heart. Maybe I'm finally getting past my expectation that they be The Greatest Fucking Thing. Maybe I've just gotten some kind of Stockholm, clinging to a band who's voluminous discography I can never get free from.

But there's something humble and heartwarming in these rhythms and tones that puts me right, and one big epic jam in the middle is the sweetspot between too little and too much.

And maybe its the fact that this is a live album that *feels* like it's in a little club, when something magic was breaking out, before the band was an open secret, playing in the open air to millions. This breathes like a moment, like something special - it's the only album of theirs that gives me some fleeting reflected glimpse of what [being there] might have been like 4/5

#2045 Juan Atkins and Moritz von Oswald - Borderland

Oh the boring shit I listen to so I can goose the new-album numbers while I work.

Atkins and Oswald are alltime techno legends, and I'm sure there's something subtle in the craft here that real heads can appreciate, but, well, look at these track names:

Electric Dub
Electric Garden
Mars Garden
Digital Forest

It's like they're pulling the most obvious words out of a very small hat and smashing them together; maybe it's a metaphor for the music 2.5/5

#2044 Moodymann - Moodymann

I'm a sucker for the feel of that lightnight radio, whether its Endtroducing's vinyl labyrinth or Chill Out's endless roadtrip - Moodyman's intermittent muttering helps elevate this murky, dubby adventure to mythic status.

It's a mysterious feverdream of sound and sense, beats like passing cars, pianos wafting on neighbor's charcol, record crackle Detroit heat thick on your neck, a flute riff drop of sweat quickening down your back 4/5

#2043 Starfucker - Jupiter (2012 LP)

Reptillians was one of the first albums I gave a full-on FIVE to on this blog - something about its wiry Unicorns-via-DanDeacon electronics and hooky indie crooning just got my heart banging.

One recent half-drunken 2am I got all fired up all over again. Goddamn those synths! Those doubledup hooks on Medicine, the unstoppable disco of Boy Toy, into a delightful suite of instrumental jams; just wracked with grooves. I willed myself to bed after track 5, aflutter with the promise of tomorrow's finishup listen.

But circa track 6, a cover of Girls Just Want to Have Fun stops everything dead in its tracks. The cover itself is gimmicky and unnecessary (they're boys, geddit?), but it also just happens to mark the Empty line on a frontloaded album - the 3 extra tracks that justified this once-EP's rerelease add five forgettable minutes, and the closing track's a needless rehash of one of the bands first sorta-hits.

Frustrating! Those first 5 tracks all alone would have made for an all-time EP to be reckoned with. Points for that hypothetical, recreatable, tight little package, but this coulda been a full-on contender 4/5

#2042 Prins Thomas - Toransu

An album so bloodless and uninteresting it made me question whether I like Prins Thomas at all. I went back to his debut - no, still good, full of irresistible motorik, an analog bass sound that gave it pulse. This is just old school, slow knobturning builders, variant versions off III, one of his weaker albums. It's fine, slightly interesting to unpack, decent background music, but I've got barnfulls of those. Why do I continue to be fooled by this guy's early promise? 2.5/5

#2041 The Remains - The Remains

It's a shame I heard this right after the Music Machine album - it's a too-smooth shadow of the same basic sound. Tightly performed with a Stonesey swagger, The Remains' debut's enjoyable enough, but it lacks an edge to make it memorable 3/5

#2040 Music Machine - (Turn On) The Music Machine

Exceptionally good 60's garage rock, packed with hooks, grit, fuzz, and frayed edges. Even the covers are better than usual: Hey Joe's the spookier than the 84,000 other versions and Taxman outvenoms the original by a country mile.

Loose // tight, original // grounded, nasty // fun, the garage rock record in its purest form 4.5/5

#2039 Grateful Dead - Blues for Allah

Groovy groovy jazzy funky. Dead's endless jams make a perfect pair to late-late era jazz, there's a looseness, a meandering here that weirdly works, jettisoning the last of awshucks, backporch jams, just letting the licks rise high on the flame.

Last last track's a bit of a meanderer -but--

you know what?

I like this because its what I always expected from the dead by reputation, a legitimate act of indulgence, longwinded in the sincere.

So much of what I've found in the process of trying to get down with them's been...surprisingly tame. Contained. Palatable.

A surprisingly rare act of the guys actually going for it, it's refreshing 3.5/5

#2038 Waka Flocka Flame - Triple F Life: Friends, Fans & Family

Completely unapologetic big dumb club hip hop - every song does what it says on the tin, repeating the title of the song somewhere around 4,000 times, in the intros, choruses, bridges, and outros, peppered with "Waka!" and "Flocka!" and (weirdly?) "flex!" more times than seems reasonable, plus plenty of general grunts and shouts.

There is a song called Fist Pump. Peak Waka.

It's blunt as shit, mostly fun, occasionally clever, the kind of stuff Girl Talk used to put alongside pretty electronics to make the white kids move, but now it comes pre-Gillis'd.

I had a good time, came out exhausted, an ex-kid too old for the club 3/5

#2037 Grateful Dead - Aoxomoxoa

Still can't figure out what I'm missing about the Dead. My distaste for saints like Cream can be chalked up to a lack of muso incrowding // philistine ignorance. But the Dead? Am I not doing enough drugs? Did I need to see them live? Are they virtuoso on some level I'm missing?

They kinda jaunt and waddle by, looseygoosey, and...so what? This doesn't even have any particular jammy sweep or epic scope, just a bunch of songs that sound more or less like Casey Jones, swinging backandforth on self-call-and-response pendulums until they're over. It's right enjoyable in places, and there's a dusty Americana authenticity that I dig, but it keeps derailing itself, from the pointless Rosemary to the sub-Revolution-9 What's Become of the Baby, which would have been annoying and boring at 3 minutes, let alone 8.

There's just enough here to call this good, but I'm still mystified by those that call em great 3/5

#2036 Grasscut - Unearth

Mysterious, wispy, twinkling music that defies clean categorization. Clipping beats, tones, instruments of all kinds whisper in and out, falling loosely into the shape of very pretty soundtracking, bent gently into a pop//indie curve, peppered with muttered vocal samples. Repetition X narrative, full on. The method of creation keeps slipping away. Main maker Andrew Philips is a composer for films and it shows, but these feel like songs written the wrong way around, like one Menomena's computer composition projects, and that thorn of uncanniness keeps it interesting.

I prefer the harder experimentation and comparative lack of pop-pretty vocals on their debut, and there's nothing here to rival The Tin Man's transcendent gut punch, but Unearth's worth hearing - a more-listenable, more pure spiral of tunefulness 4/5

#2035 Kula Shaker - K15 Buried Treasure

K was my jam Summer 2000, bopping around London working reprographics oddjobs. There's nothing particularly special about the 5 non-album tracks that head off this collection: mostly verse-chorus meanderers with none of the monster riffs that make their best stuff fly. The highlight is actually a murkier demo version of Magic Theater.

The remaining 12 tracks are an underwhelming live performance, pulling songs almost entirely off their debut. Crispian strains to keep up with his own vocals, the band mostly sounds sloppy, and the mix is awkwardly separated.

The only reason to recommend this, even to the hardcore Kula Shaker fan, is the set of little glimses of frontman's attempts at frontmanning. Crispian came up in the age of Oasis; he seems detached, dully contemptuous of the crowd and generally like he'd rather be anywhere else.

Finally, the rejiggering of K's tracklist draws attention to how overdone the band's obsession with Grateful Dead and Indian mysticism was, something good sequencing had managed to squirrel away.

A testament to what an overachievement K really was 2.5/5

#2034 Television Personalities - And Don't The Kids Just Love It

A strange collision of Gang of Four post-punk precision and proto-indie looseness - a man in a suit fidgeting in a chip shop, every song a little awkward, trying to contain itself and spilling loose energy here and there, lo-fi proto-GBV with a wry British smile that stops just short of a smirk.

Admirable, clever, inventive, careless in a way rock and roll should be - but ultimately not actually much fun, not actually very catchy. Easier to admire than enjoy 3/5

#2033 Dead Man's Bones - Dead Man's Bones

Do yourself a favor, don't do any research into this one. Treat it like a kid at your door on Halloween- let it be what it pretends. Treat it like a dusty record you found in a dead great-uncle's attic and spun yourself haunted, an echo from an underfunded, undertalented bunch of kids that shouted themselves hoarse just to be heard a generation later. It's a record that has that magic, something small and impossible, so lo-fi and awkwardly paced that it seems beyond awareness of your needs, a record on its own terms, shades of the Microphones circa It Was Hot We Stayed in the Water, at their most atomic and accidentally beautiful; wisps of the immortal Unicorns at their most offkilter and spare.

Children sing and chant imprecisely, frail indie crooning limps in, rickety organs and offcenter claps clop by, humble stums set cobwebs in the corners - it lurches and puffs, a ghost of a record, breathing out and breathing in and breathing out and breathing in through brittle bones, mixed so it sounds ready to crumble if you listen too closely.

Slow, occaisionally overcute, demanding justtheright mood, generally creaky and imperfect -- but it's an artifact: sincerely spooky, quietly beautiful, truly unique, wholly worth hearing. A minor treasure that I was terrifically happy to stumble upon 4/5

#2032 The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Days of Abandon

Impossibly romantic, keeling over, hand to forehead at sunset, The Pains are The Smiths gone French, swelling over with M83 exaltation and Moon Safari wonder, all 80's gone double halcyon. It's beautiful, bursting, twee and frail, teenage heart driving off into the night.

Too one-dimensional to hold up, lacking the drive of the best songs off their debut (shoutout Young Adult Friction!), watering itself down to nothingness by the end - but it'll sweep you off your feet for one sweet swoon 3/5

#2031 The Pigeon Detectives - Wait for Me

Pure early-00's, that angular motorik shoutalong stuff made for bopping along to - think Hot Hot Heat / Franz Ferdinand with a British pop ease that reminds me of...Ash? (Robin?). It's laser-focused stuff, never deviating one inch from its dogged pursuit of each song's (admittedly, often pretty tasty) chorus / riff / sentiment about being a justalittle lovelorn and angsty.

Catchy but forgettable, especially in the whitewash of well-crashed near-identical also-rans 3/5

#2030 We Are the Physics - Your Friend, The Atom

Fuck yes, we can always use more of this machine.

This machine that types in beats, this machine that beats in types.

This freakout, this spazzout, this Devo-via-Polysics, this angular stabbing that smashes Giddy Motors against Enon to find something with nerdy nonsense against a real sense of heart until some ABD cousin of Dananananakroyd falls out.

--

I love me some futurism.

That art with a slash of motion, with a love-hate with the machinery of the onrush of the increasingly human-free dis/u topia. Devo/Polysics/Enon flirted with it, but these guys tackle it head on, pure streaked motion, pure dread + pure enthusiasm, futurism made literal and explicit.

I love it. I love them for embracing it so fully.

It's a pure realization what so many flirted with, just tackling the de//human with full force, a grin that smashes teeth into metal, grins at the sparks, grins at the fire the sparks sparked, grins at the sparkling, flashing endgame 4.5/5

#2029 Diiv - Is the Is Are

Diiv's latest is pure 80's via 00's, that endless arpeggios filtered through endless reverb, that endless post-motorik backboning endless chiming guitars, that shoegazey emoting drifting like a cut-rate ghost through the night.

I keep saying these albums are forgettable, that they have no moments that stand out.

Has the world changed or have I changed?

This time it might be a strength - this is one hours and three minutes that will melt together, that will pull you through on a long not-quite-taut thread until you are through - out the other side a little sleepier, a little happier, only slightly changed 3.5/5

#2028 Pearl Jam - Lightning Bolt

Pearl Jam's got nothing left to prove, no need to stretch to reach the unconverted - if all they do is put out perfectly-ok albums like this every 3 or 4 years they'll still sell out arenas around the world.

So they do what they want. Which means there's nothing new to see here - you could shuffle these songs with Backspacer and the self-titled and end up with 3 reasonably cohesive, totally fine albums.

There's a tonal shift, Pearl Jam sounds like they've burned off most of their anger and are reaching for uplift, sounding more like My Morning Jacket than ever. And that's enjoyable enough. But Vitalogy's my favorite Pearl Jam album; I like them when they reach and get weird, and I can't help but wish they'd take one more swing at it.

But no, they've got their groove (rut?) and its good enough and they're gonna ride it all night long 3/5

#2027 Amboy Dukes - Amboy Dukes

Released just after the summer of love, Dukes' debut is a sampler platter of 60's psychedelia.

Perfectly pleasant, damn pleasant -- British pleasantness gone American, Small Faces' crunch meets Zombies' lush layering. Cream and Who covers rub up against a pair of American blues and R&B tunes, completing the transatlantic highway.

Packed with fuzzed out guitars, harmonies, freakouts and driftaways; damn pleasant, washing away the stresses of a frayed workday as well as anything put out in the intervening 49 (!) years 4/5

#2026 Savages - Adore Life

Savages dive into texture, making a more nuanced, interesting, album than their debut. A buzzed-down mix makes for an uncanny listen, dark and shining, a slow motion movie trailer sword -- ominous, heavy, sharp.

It's easy to forget how unusual this album is, how few bands there are making inventive rock and roll in 2016. It's a taut, frayed take on a lot of mid 00's angles that've been all but forgotten, all that TVotR / YYYs overblown buzz, smashed through restless post-dancepunk skitter, with a careening energy that keeps it from feeling retro. It's better the closer you listen - it takes the curves so well you could miss how twisty the road is 3.5/5

#2025 Floating Points - Elaenia

The glint of a distant spinner, an offkilter 4-part robot tapping elipses in ink footprints, doublespeed loops of sunrises into sunsets, played in caves and dark glades. The cover art sums it up well, those whorls, that frailty, the stray fragments lost from the herd.

Sam Shepard's made a quiet, patient thing that loops and lopes along, light on beats, heavy on repetition, landing somewhere between Oval's glitch skips and Kamasi's slowburning jazz plumes, packed with little ticks and fizzles, smoldering organs, longrolling horns, unknowable electronic squiggles.

It's is dense and spare - intricate. Pretty and organic enough to dodge the "difficult" tag, it permeates your surroundings, the kind of music that makes the snowblasted landscape our your office window look like most important, beautiful thing you've ever seen 4/5

#2024 Montrose - Montrose

Well we figured out what killed the 70's.

This is a solid fuckin album, but it built a bridge from the safety of Zep/Sabbath proto-metal directly towards the island of shiteating hard rock swagger, and in came the masses.

At least as far as I've been able to dig up, it's patient zero, mark it 1973. Fucking, the first 3 lines of the whole album are: "Alright! Come on now! Ooooh yeah!", before kicking into schoolboy nonsense that was way ahead of its time. Listen to Rock Candy: Led Zeppelin covering AC/DC from a universe where time goes backwards. Also, that there is Sammy Hagar on vocals, who went on to catch some virulent new mutation of his own disease down the road, dooming us all.

The star is the man with the name on the sleeve: Ronnie Montrose's guitars are unstoppable, that tone, goddamn. That Space Station #5 riff, so good The Men basically ripped it off to kick off their (awesome) album. And that's one of the better of the 2,000 covers of Good Rockin Tonight I've heard.

A good, hard, funloving raveup, goofing off but stopping just short of the line - if only the 500 bands that came afterwards had as much sense 4/5

#2023 Blackfoot - Strikes

I may have bad taste in music, folks, I think it's time to admit that outright.

I can't tell you what makes this any different than the southern // hard rock I've been shitting on lately: its dumb, shouty, and less pretty/virtuoso/heavy than its specialty peers. But I had a vague, blank smile on my face the whole time, from the overblown opener (featuring an actual "guitar!" shout right before the guitar solo) to the Freebird/Green Grass closer.

It's layered, lightly textured, understately hooky, and heck if they don't sound like they're having a good time out there. This is almost certainly a bad album, but I've listened to it all the way through twice now and dammit I gotta admit I like it 3.5/5

#2022 Ted Nugent - Ted Nugent

Hard rock, all right.

AC/DC, Foghat, Bad Company etc -1975, the year the 70's tipped.

I guess "hard rock" is rock and roll with more _*_attitude_*_

but it's all been sanded down suppository smooth
punk without commitment
Hard Rock Cafe

Nugent's solo debut is pure Hard Rock, his faux-Ozzy whine sounding like it's struggling just to check the boxes next to lines. When Ted sings "got me an overdose of rock and roll" it sounds withered and desperate, like he's going through rock and roll withdrawl. It's all wrong.

The guitar sound's nifty in places, Stranglehold's neverending bass phaser pulse was ahead of its time, and rando outlier You Make Me Feel Right at Home is downright pretty. But most of it's underwhelming and completely forgettable, even for hard rock 2.5/5