#2688 Eater - The Album

Covers in punk.  A whole thing there. If you're gonna do it, at least fuck it up.

Eater drags Sweet Jane over the coals, pumping adrenaline into its wistful regret; puts manic uncoolness in the horny desperation of Queen Bitch; and shit, they just just straight knock 3 years off of I'm Eighteen and leave it feeling freshly reckless. The originals follow suit, throbbing along at triplespeed. Eater doesn't have time. They're a band of the moment -- what's punk but a fuckyou to the past and future anyway 4/5

#2687 Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile - Lotta Sea Lice

When you look at Barnett and Vile, its obvious that they should work together and obvious that it probably wasn't going to quite... work. At least not at first.

Barnett's an incredible singer and lyricist who brings enough guitar punch to save her from singer-songwriter doldrums. But she needs that intimacy and presence, she's not one to carry a song with her guitar work (Depreston excepted).

Vile's a meandering mumblepuss, and again, a just-ok guitar player, chopswise. But he gets by on feel, just about the best out there when it comes to weaving atmosphere and stretching space and time with some magical sense of patience and tone.

Which is to say, here's two artists who aren't wizards musically, but who have their own magical thing going that makes them special, and the kind of thing that requires a real commitment to vision. Can that commitment survive collaboration?


Nah. Mostly not. The unsurprisingly front-sequenced Over Everything is the one exception - god its gorgeous, that stretched-out Vile pacing, Barnett meandering over top, and their own special guitar tones dancing over top.

But mostly it's just a bit Travelling Wilburys -- blunted, Courtney's sense of personal relation undercut by Kurt's involvement, with no sense that the songs can bear to wait for his sense of timing to unfold.

It's telling that the two other songs that work are On Script, where Barnett gets full vocal duties, and the guitars surge and pile and sweep away, and the seemingly Barnett-solo Peepin' Tom. The songs where the two sing together just don't land, sapping that sense of the actual.

Yet.

I can see it. These are two pointy objects that don't mesh together naturally. But I can see it working, and I hope they stick with it. This feels slapdash. They both need to bow to eachothers' quirks -- let Courtney sing, let the songs run long, and the whole thing could be a sprawling gorgeous mess. I'd die for an album with 4 ten-minute songs, where her words push and give way to spiraling guitar interplay into forever -- that'd be an album that played to their strengths. This is not that album, yet 3.5/5

#2686 Larry Williams - Here's Larry Williams

It's easy to forget how rock and roll ran its entire course around 55'-57' and disappeared for at least as long.  In retrospect, rock and roll is here to stay / will never die / is only just now dying in 2017. Hah! Hah hah!

By 1957 Larry Williams put out his biggest hit, Short Fat Fanny. It's good fun, but already as played out and derivative as imaginable. Nicking longtime friend Little Richard's delivery, the big dumb sax of a dozen songs, and altogether rolling around in rememberthat. Doubt it? It's right on the sleeve, the lyrics dropping references to Blueberry Hill, Long Tall Sally, Heartbeak Hotel, Tutti Frutti, Hound Dog, Blue Suede Shoes, Jim Dandy, and a little bit of gettin' Fever. It's as overtly postmodern a song as the era's got to offer...57! It's kinda brilliant that roundabout way.

But Williams is riding the last wave in, singing about a brand new dance, and great balls of fire, flogging the innuendo that lead us to rock with only the barest concession the the second entendre. Hell, the serpent eats itself mid-collection: he even calls back to his own Bony Moronie on another song.

It's all good rockin stuff, but man, no wonder people thought rock was over and done as the 50's came to a close - this's a feast of freshly rotten nostalgia 3/5

#2685 Satoshi-Makoto - CZ5000 Sounds Sequences

Listen here!

All made on one synth, blahbitty meow.

The result's perfectly pleasant, but familiar: shades of Eno, Gas, Selected Ambient Works, and general nice-tone chinscratchery. There's a juicy, pastel glow to the sounds, but they're in an awkward middle ground between ambient and melodic. There's a great album in this sound, but this isn't it 3/5

#2684 Yaeji - Yaeji

Cool-warm vocals, a shimmering sense of hipness, glowing synth tones -- all worth something. But this feels detached, clinical even in its grasps at connection. Human music 3/5

#2683 Future and Young Thug - Super Slimey

as I said to Aaron:

man, I don't like this, and I feel like its the same underlying thing that makes me not like a lot of modern hip-hop. its not that i hate autotune, maybe I just dont like the way its done here? And the production seems suitable for being really stoned to, but definitely doesn't get me excited. what am i missing?

2.5/5

#2682 Midnight Oil - Deisel and Dust

Much ballyhooed, downright anointed in the Australian press - maybe for its unflinching look at the blood on the hands of the white man. Noble, but wrapped around a bunch of clunky, repetitive songs, leaning hard on anthemic choruses, cloying synths, and gated snares to make totally anonymous pop music with a thin shell of Big Message 2.5/5

#2681 Horace Silver - Song for My Father

I know nothing about jazz.

Sometimes I start to capitalize the word, like, Jazz, like its a title or a month - such is my intimidation.

There's often more structure than I like: too many of those synchronized lines that undercut the sense of liveness, too much theme-solo-solo-solo-theme. But the atmosphere is varied and inventive, full of exotic little angles, and the super hot tunes (Natives are Restless, Kicker) are as fire as the super slinky tunes (Lonely Woman) are ice, with sprightly, touch-packed piano throughout 4/5

#2680 Steel Pulse - Handsworth Revolution

I know nothing about Reggae, but this sounds totally archetypical - that simmering blend of anger and comfort, completely aware of the problems of the world, decrying them and lifting past them on lilting pulses. Calm but engaged, all tragically familiar and retroactively hopeless in 2017 3.5/5

#2679 A. Savage - Thawing Dawn

Savage ditches the rest of Parquet Courts, goes small and dusty and simple, still sounds like Pavement. It's intimate though, trading searing and seething for simple vocal lines and a resigned wit that could share a tea with Courtney Barnett, no sentiment without its crook and barb but set before you so plainly - it's disarming. Feels like a balm, somehow 3.5/5

#2678 Yves Tumor - Serpent Music

Something dark and primal lurks in this music, some sin or victimization long buried. Pure production-era sounds burble up in vague waves and blistering rushes, while song titles nod to serpents, devotion, creation, perdition, demons, spirits. A harrowing freefall into inkblots and tealeaves, no omen promising or clear, a moonless ride into some swallowing unknown 3.5/5

#2677 Knox Fortune - Paradise

Bonus points for blurring lines - this's some weird piece of bedroom production, wobbled psych-pop, shimmering blue-eyed R&B, and/or..? There's flashes of beauty and novelty, but its mostly too whinny, unfocused, and detuned to make any impact 3/5

#2676 The Damned - Music for Pleasure

The Damned are a top 10 punk band of all time for me, so what happened with this dud, landing right between two classics? It somehow finds the worst of punk fuckitism, sounding poorly recorded and almost completely hookless, without finding any particular spark in the impulsiveness.

___f__l__a__t___ in every way possible, a horrible mix blunting the few high points. Totally skippable -- but strangely fascinating as a study of failure 2.5/5

#2675 Bad Sports - Kings of the Weekend

Perfectly ok chuggy Ramonsian punk revival with one gear, no surprises, and little to differentiate it from a dozen similar bands. Bonus points, though, for songs about girls with the names of my last two exes, plus a song named after my birthday - that's about the weirdest lineup since Why? muttered about Navy Blue Hoodies and Khakis (as was the style that year) (dox'd) 3/5

#2674 Beck - Colors

After 3 albums of totally interchangable, candy-shell whatevers (Guerro/Info/Guilt), Morning Phase was a welcome slice of pretty. But even then, it wasn't _that far from Mutations / Sea Change - certainly nothing to put him back in that run of constant reinvention that was Mellow/Odelay/Mutations/Midnite.

But there was ample cause for hope heading into this new one! 10 minute versions of Defriended and I Won't Be Long, not to mention a fucking _killer 20-minute Phillip Glass tribute, showed that Beck had still the ambition and the talent to make something memorable.

And then the lead singles! Wow and Dreams were full of promise, pop songs bent beyond the familiar.

But what we got was basically the 4th entry in his forgettable-era catalog. Outside of those two singles, only the opening title track brings any of the wobbly invention.

Everything else feels like it could have come out of one of those so-hot-now neural network projects.

Someone Taught an AI to Make Beck Songs and the Results Will Blow Your Mind.

I mean, they're catchy, but in a late-era Weezer kinda way, no sense that Beck means a lick of it, and no sense that he's doing anything artfully from the outside. They're just pop songs, and unconvincing ones. They're packed with lines about how I'm So Free now, without sounding the least bit free; about my Seventh Heaven, without the barest hint of happiness; staying Up All Night, but maybe because you had a cup of coffee too late in your workday.

A deeply disappointing album. Beck can make good songs, he just doesn't seem to have the nerve to make an album's worth anymore. Another nail in the coffin of his legacy 3/5

#2673 Stiv Bators - Disconnected

Debut album from the Dead Boys boy, his strained whining weaving its way through some perfectly pretty, haunted classic rock guitar riffs. A desperate romanticism and real sense of shimmering beauty make this worth a listen 3.5/5

#2672 The Saints - (I'm) Stranded

This's superficially another pile of Ramones-gobbling also-ran songs, but it's somehow more. The production's rough and ferocious, the vocals just slightly Aussie-twanged, and those guitars - mostly those guitars, those leads so goddamn sweet.

And even when they slow down they do it right, even when they sound a little familiar. Messin' with the Kid is basically Knockin on Heavens Door, but with this kinda proto Beta Band chug and soaring bass that takes it to a whole 'nother hypnotic level. And again, goddamn those guitars. Can't stop listening. A rocksolid piece of classic rock / punk 4/5

#2671 Adolescents - Adolescents

Adolescents are a band outrunning themselves - relentless, flustering pacing runs through the whole album. Even when they slow down into metal chug the spitting energy just fills the space with more and more hits and strums and bristling nervousness. This is anxious music, this is music that doesn't turn off, that sluffs off sneers by the dozens, turning at least half its punk anger inward. Impossibly tight, effortlessly hooky, incredibly listenable - especially considering how fast it all pours out. Possible best West Coast punk album of the 80's 4.5/5

#2670 Blue Hawaii - Tenderness

I dig those soft, round synth sounds, that ricepaper production - there's a crisp lightness to its housey disco bounce. But there's not enough to it to sustain an album - the vocals get cloying by the end, the whole sound's too flatly sweet to hold your attention 3/5

#2669 King Krule - The Ooz

I've talked about the production era - as contrast with the performance era - when it comes to this thing we can barely call rock. Sounds aren't made by hands anymore, guitars distilled to texture by the likes of Darkside, Ratatat, and late-era Radiohead.

King Krule's a counterpoint though. Through all the shimmery and murk, all the swampy oilslick shine, through layers and layers of echo remnants, there's this sense of an old soul rocker. Those gravelly vocals, those ringing, rich, intentional guitar moments, those seething saxes. Those saxes, like the ghosts of bleating 50's altos, drifting slow and hollow.

Haunted. Barely there, but rich with gasps of once-was.

It's smokily listenable, even as its utterly uncanny, wandering past any notion of song structure, some unholy marriage of dank detuned electronica, dissonant underground rock, and an old Elvis song on The KLF's radio.

I cannot overstate how surprised I was to learn that this miserable, ancient Waitsian poltergeist is gloaming the body of a 23 yearold redhead. Knock me over with a feather. Sound don't lie though, this kids got serious soul, officiating a wedding of old and new, borrowed and blue, like I haven't heard in ages 4.5/5

#2668 23 Skidoo - Seven Songs

Points for giving me no idea what I'm listening to - the closest I can come is outlining some unholy shape, pegged at the corners by a suite of industrial noisefuckers, sound collage bullshitters, 90's minimalist guitarists and Frank Zappa's horn section. It's a haunted, dusty piece of music that occasionally flares to life, a decrepit hospital going up in flames, a dead body's last sudden thrash. Distant and dissonant and strange, but pretty goddamn listenable, considering 3.5/5

#2667 Front 242 - Front by Front

So I'm listening to this while I play Diablo 3, and they make a good pair: both've got the affectation of menace and darkness while still being perfectly pleasant, with enough buzz and momentum that you hang in there even when it's boring.

Front 242's brand of industrial noise is borderline dancable: just enough edge to get your adrenaline piqued, without falling into unlistenability. It's hasn't aged especially well, sounding pretty tame by modern standards, but an interesting data point on the meet-cute between guitar noise and machine blippery 3/5

#2666 Floraline - Floraline

Super-safe pop rock, with only the smallest flashes of electronic intrigue and funk pluck. Linda Sharp's got a nice voice and a slinky delivery, but all the backing's overproduced into shruggery, no human musicians in sight 2.5/5

#2665 Television Personalities - They Could Have Been Bigger than the Beatles

Arriving in 1982, this album landed at the halfway mark between The Kinks' Lola vs Powerman (1970) and Guided By Voices' Bee Thousand (1994), and that feels about right. It's on one hand a shamelessly retro album, blending garagey crunch (two Creation covers!) with Daviesian half-sneers for contemporary Britain. On the other hand, it's a wanderingly adventurous set that would fit right alongside the best of the American underground of the 80's and 90's, full of half ideas, dissonant tones, and buzzing electronics, unfurling across a Pollardian 16-track sprawl.

Which is all to say: great, weird, inventive fun, heaped with ideas and slathered in wry, offkilter wit 4/5

#2664 Chastity Belt - I Used to Spend so Much Time Alone

I gave Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene a pass for being miserable in miserable times, but at least I sensed a little fire in their belly, down their somewhere.

Or maybe I've just had enough. Chastity Belt's latest is a joyless slog, full of half-time Sonic Youth chiming and endless moaning, lacking all of Time to Go Home's brilliant smolder and flash. It's relatable, personal, hopeless, and true, but so thoroughly defeated that it slumps you over into boredom by the halfway mark 2.5/5

#2663 Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - The Kid

A gem of an album, packed with alien twinkles and tones, all the vocal diffusion and subharmonic wonder of Dan Deacon, Laurie Andersen, and Animal Collective at their best. Impossible to grasp, with all the rotating facetry of peak ambient, given creeping form in all those growing surges. I could hear it a dozen more times and still not quite understand what it's doing 4/5

#2662 Skinnyman - Council Estate of Mind

A bedrock piece of UK hip hop, complicated by its relentless use of samples from a contemporary gritty teledrama called Made in Britain. Via endless samples, Tim Roth's 16 year-old Trevor argues with social workers, raging against the system, fearless and explosive, Will Hunting via Sid Vicious, putting his stamp all over the record.

The actual songs are autobiographical, but disjointed - Skinnyman tips back and forth between superstar swagger and scrappy survivalism, without a clear where-I-came-from / where-I'm-at throughline. Which would be fine, but -- look, it can't be overstated how present those Made in Britain Samples are. It's gotta be 10-20% of the total runtime. Skinnyman wants it both ways, to appropriate all that wit and rage and to tell his own story in intimate terms, winding someone else's narrative through a set of songs that don't follow one themselves.

It's muddy. But in as it bounces around in your memory, it works. The album as made is wildly more interesting than the songs would've been on their own, but it also makes for a pretty specific kind of listen; someone flipping between a radio play and a rap album, connected, but barely.

It helps that the songs're solid, full of exciting production, plenty of variation, and lines at that sweet spot of structure. There's lots of end-of-line rhymers, but its simple enough to have that veneer of improvisation, with just enough doubleups to keep you on your toes. The kid's got real flow.

--

Without a close listen or a little research, you'd be forgiven for thinking all those samples are the man himself, recorded from some actual sessions or something. It'd work better if it were true. All the movie's rage feels unearned, and Skinnyman seems like a bit of a wannabe for latching onto it. But it's a bold move, and a totally unique album.

--

God, I feel like I put a "but" clause in just about every paragraph here -- it's that kind of album though: split, conflicted, and almost certainly more interesting for it 4/5

#2661 Tony Banks - A Curious Feeling

Four-fifths of the way through a survey of Genesis's members solo shit, seeking ammunition for blamelaying around the good/bad that is that deeply conflicted band, I'd come down evenly on the split of Gabriel/Hackett (heroes) // Collins/Rutherford as (villains). Tiebreaker time! Tony Banks on deck.

Tony comes out on the winning side. Tony is Good Genesis. Full stop.

There's a real tension and progression and melody in his solo debut. His riffs on the closing of After the Lie rival anything Genesis (or anyone!) put out. That's a melody and a half and a half. Goddamn. What a wallop.

More so than any other Genesis members' solo stuff you hear these echoes of the full band's greatest hits. All those signature glows and ripples and rumbles and flickers and flairs. It almost feels like Banks saying "all that shit you loved, that was this guy, right here". Flashes of Genesis's highlights abound, his footprint made evident in retrospect. Especially in that strange twilight, post-Gabriel, and even post-Hackett, Banks's classical sense of structure and melody was the last bullwark against pop depravity. You can hear all these great moments from great albums echoed, now with a clearer credit. "You"'s lushness, goddamn.

But to his credit, you don't really get that flagplanting vibe. This is just what's in Banks's heart, and it's been pouring out all along. Mellotrons and analog buzzes pulse out, cementing Banks as a great underappreciated keyboard master of a seminal era of the instrument's evolution.

And not unlike Gabriel's simmering existentialism, there's a really personal arc here, of wondering about the value of contribution, of confronting ending and death. It's...actually, really, really great.

This's everything you'd want from a solo debut. A purification of statement, a dovetail from the work you loved in the band, crystallized into a form previously impossible.

The peak next-level Genesis take used to be prioritizing Hackett over Gabriel, but put Banks in that list. This shit's legit, a real stroke of genius when it comes to texture, structure, and tone 4.5/5

#2660 The Dancing Did - And Did Those Feet

To the extent that you can accept that multiple bands can be the best band ever, the Dancing Dead are the best band ever.

I feel a Nik Cohn level of evangelism around this band.

This album is everything right.

It is Minutemen, The Unicorns, Wire, Boredoms, it is ----------

There's a song called:

The Rhythm Section Sticks Together

and it's the perfect encapsulation, tightness and madcap unpredictability, done in 2 minutes or less.

It's a band aware of itself in only the best way. Packed with half-hooks and darkened energy, that impossible combination of sincerity and technicality that only the abovementioned achieved. The Dancing Did don't sound like anyone else, don't fit cleanly into any sound at all, but spooled out a a strangely natural combination of immediate riffs and crackling patience. It's all so assured, the way a second wave band might when backed by a label or scene or sound, but it's out of thin air circa '82, full of alien strangeness and offkilter menace, always keeping you on the back foot, packing in an extra beat or measure or bridge, or dropping one, like some strange northern Flying Nun cousin.

If I had to send an album into space to tell aliens what art rock was, this would be on the shortlist. Or maybe post-punk, though my grip on that term slips every day. It has every ounce of energy and grit and cleverness, it is ground zero for so many things I love about other bands, at once totally arch and without archness. Any pretension is baked in and not put on. It is narrative and strange and personal and detached, it is Slint and Pixies and Chad VanGaalen and more. It is _ele_ccctr_icc_. Good god, The Headmaster and the Fly. Good god.

An album that connects both musically and attitudewise, on point. It is Is This It, Separation Sunday, Damned Damned Damned, etc.

An album that makes you want to scratch your beard and thrash around and start a band and burn down the world. I know I've been rating shit highly lately, but if you want to spend 40 minutes understanding what I think is right in music you could scarcely do better 4.5/5

#2659 Mike and the Mechanics - Mike and the Mechanics

Solo albums are a convenient way to get at who shaped a band's sound, which is an especially interesting question when it comes to Genesis. Who's responsible for their good-era sound? Peter Gabriel's the poor man's right answer, but that's complicated by the icy strangeness of his run of self-titled albums, and by the outright prog mastery of Steve Hackett's stuff. The latter deserves at least half the credit.

What about the complimentary question: who ruined Genesis? Phil Collins' solo albums are readily recognized as even lamer versions of their late-era gated-snare chorus-piles, but don't underestimate Mike Rutherford! His debut solo-ish outing, which bears his name despite lacking a single vocal turn or solo songwriting credit, is equally uninteresting, dime a dozen, hyperproduced 80's Fun Times! pop. You could do worse if that's what you're in the market for, but why would you be?

Fuckit, up next, let's finish this project and see what Tony Banks got up to 2/5

#2658 The Red Devils - King King

A lively little live romp.

It's weird to hear the singer bark things like "let's do a little blues!" when every song's so deeply indebted to the blues its hardly worth calling out.

Got repeatedly blueballed by songs where some kernel of repetition locked in and promised a gun that never went off. Which I guess is a very rock expectation. But when something tiptoes this close to the edge of blues restraint, its natural to want it to teeter off.

You have to admire that commitment, there's something pure about it. They chose an interesting place to draw the line. This manages to keep a lot of the smolder of the blues without ever quite flashing, and the listen might actually be more exciting for it 3.5/5

#2657 VA - Cold Waves of Color Vol. 2 (1982 - 1985)

Volume 2 opens with synthy surges, the same icy precision of the first Color Tapes comp. But then come the tones: rich, textured, and then come the proper guitars. And we see the split with volume 1, detachment is no longer a strategy, rock immediacy is smoldering: guitar buzz, bass grumbles --- this is the cavalry.

Vol 1 had bedroom closeness. And this still feels small, but the ambition's growing. The nerds are making a pass, defcons are ticking. A thrilling little evolution of this splinter scene 4/5

#2656 John Hassell - Aka / Darbari / Java

Repetition repetition repetition. Ambient washes, loops, pulls, pushes, polyrhythms, suggesting structures. Cover art's perfect, natural curves with baked in little cadences. A mysterious, surging piece of minor genius 3.5/5

#2655 John Coltrane - Transition

I know nothing about jazz but

Kamasi called this a big influence, and that squares. You can hear the loosely contained stacking here, shades of The Epic. There's color here. Players splashing around, rolling off eachother, just on the cusp of listenable. I feel like this is a perfect album I don't get yet. Provisionally 3.5/5

#2654 Mount Kimbie - Love What Survives

James Blake's what's wrong with sorta-experimental music, just all the way up his own ass past listenability. So when he shows up on two tracks here I get my guard up. And superficially this has the same problems.

But it gets there, somehow.

You feel it in the bass on that opening track, those distorted guitars. That willingness to deign to engage on a visceral level. Shades of The Range, tapping into some desperation of yelp and distortion.

Human music, I like it.




I say:

I want something new. Old is boring. All the obviously pleasant sounds are staked out. Sounds outside the explored space are, on the balance, unpleasant. Navigate that. And maybe that's demanding, but that's your fucking JOB.

Mount Kimbie, more so than most, is up to the task, finding the bassline heartbeat that guides you into the other meanderings. It's

a) adventurous

b) not lazy

which's surprisingly scarce.

liable to be a grower 4/5

#2653 Mastodon - Emperor of Sand

This sounds like a fucking incredible lost 90's album, and I mean that in the best, most sincere way.

Listen to the vocal / guitar drones of Precious Stones / Steambeather, and tell me those couldn't be the best lost Soundgarden songs you ever found. Like, with way better drums, vocals, and guitar solos. Fucking, Steambreather's the best song Korn never made.

Mastodon's totally shed its hard metal cred, and I'm ok with that. This is hooky // listenable // great, however you wanna cast it. It swoops and swoons and drops the hammer again and again, striking a balance of hard/soft that our teen year hacks could hardly dream of 4/5

#2652 Mastodon - Cold Dark Place

Mastodon doubles down on the accessible sound of Emperor of Sand, going prettier, more baroque, and piled higher with impossibly choice guitar parts.

Choice. like a cut of meat. a selection that prioritizes QUALITY. I mean Blue Walsh. Goddamn.

By now Mastodon's fully shed any metal expectations. They're just making gorgeous guitar-driven music. Sometimes it sounds like goddamn M. Ward.

This's an EP that exudes __confidence.

Pretty, subtle, all the proginess buried in the folds, all the hatred simmering deep underneath, seducing you and running a cut right along your grinning gut 4/5