#3398 Gang Starr - Daily Operation

4/5 endless laid-back lines with clever knots and a message to deliver: everything you could want. Premier's production's thin and low in the mix by today's standards, but it leaves all this space to breathe: just enough guidance for Guru to trace rhymes through and nothing that gets in his way

#3397 Toshiyuki Terui - What I Think About the World

2.5/5 Wandering guitar lines that sound like instrumental versions of existing songs, or otherwise like something's missing. Could be handy if you're making a movie that needs background music for 11 different sunrise scenes

#3396 VA - Schneeweiss 9: Presented by Oliver Koletzki

3.5/5 -- 3 hours 20 and never boring, an ever-shifting, moodful house meander, good for work, chillout, or rainy weekends

#3395 Air - Love 2

3/5 a swing at being Moon Safari 2: same tricks without that magic. Air's debut had a subtle desperation, this feels like a hedonistic half-hearted grasp for more

#3394 Beak - L.A. Playback

3.5/5 A (quietly, truly) weird, reverby, clumsy band plodding through some offkilter psychedelia that lives up to the cloudy, ramshackle cover photo. In a world with less such stuff floating around it'd be a cult classic. Might still

#3393 Prefuse 73 - Sacrifices

3/5 Between Fudge and Every Color of Darkness, Prefuse seemed to be making a comeback, but Sacrifices is underwhelming. This isn't all the way back into the sludgy morass of the Only She Chapters, but so little of it actually connects. It all seems like its waiting for accompaniment to finish the job, all kinds of half-note sweeps into resolution without any real snap to it, the percussion brushed under the rug. All clever and empty and kinda good but does so little to uprock and invigorate

#3392 The Lemon Twigs - Do Hollywood

3.5/5 An unabashedly goofy, retro, rollickingly Kinksy romp that puts a smile on. Warbled and detuned and weird, but on this side of nice to listen to unlike so many Ariel Pinks

#3391 Sam Shure - Nandoo

3/5 totally fine, dedicated house, flecked with coffeeshop exotica

#3390 Con Funk Shun - Secrets

2.5/5
Syrupy, without enough funk. Too polished, drowning in strings and silky crooning

#3389 Jacques Dutronc - Il Est Cinq Heures (s/t '68)

3.5/5
French garage rock with bite, and some damned pretty Kinksian interludes too. Fiery and inventive, though the language makes it a lot harder for the unfrench to lock into. French just isn't a natural-sounding language for this kind of punchy rock, keeping the universal feel from finding its way through

#3388 Pierre Cavalli - Uma Vitamina Faz Favor

3.5/5
A bossa-nova drifter via Europe, wobbling between classy jazz and vacant (if catchy!) library music. Funky, sunny, and uncanny strange, its own kind of actually very cool

#3387 Max Cooper - One Hundred Billion Sparks

4/5
Slow-growing tones with ghosts in. There's something heartbreaking and insidious lurking in these songs, gaining strength in numbers. The notes feel fragile, reflective, a skittering anxiety onrushing at the end

#3386 Tom Demac - Serenade

2.5/5
The earnest sermon on the title track's just this side of charming the first time, but sounds more pretentious and pathetic the more you hear it. The rest is too minimal to bother with, never summoning any particular place or pathos

#3385 Sunflower Bean - Human Ceremony

3.5/5
Mostly too twee, too slathered in easy arpeggios, but there's just enough Strokesey motorik cool to get it over the hump. Julia Cumming's sweetspot vocals don't hurt either

#3384 Kikagaku Moyo - Mammatus Cloud

3/5
Pure Eastern psychedalics, all drones and tones and the barest tickle of guitar - too aimless for me, lacking their later visceralia. The main reason to stop by is the endless quasi-cover of Tomorrow Never Knows, distilled down to its barest ghost

#3383 Jacques Greene - Feel Infinite

3.5/5
A house backbone keeps it headbobbing, while a menagerie of shiny, swirling vocal distortions weave through. Just on the border of dissonant and hypnotic

#3382 Kiki Pau - Hiisi

3.5/5
Starts off so unambitiously you're liable to quit on it. But after 11 minutes of the sleepiest psychadelia imaginable, a half hour of jamming breaks out, working up a real hypnotic froth. Man we're in a golden age of interesting album structures.

#3381 Waylon Jennings - Lonesome, On'ry and Mean

3.5/5
A solid set of wryly-smiling self-pittiers, with flashes of hot Nashville twang and gospel grandiosity.

Jennings' voice sounds a little put on at times, like he's trying to do Elvis. Weird.

#3380 Thelonious Monk Quartet - Misterioso

3.5/5
I know nothing about jazz. Loose, lively, full of presence and humanity, with an endearing bustle of ambient cafe noise and plenty of little flubs and rough edges. Monk uses space like a wizard. The sax fits in rockily, the friction making its own little spark, Griffin's solos full of raw wit and surprise.

#3379 The End of Electronics - Union

3/5
Icy, metalic post-punk from Russia. It's a neat newness, and that brittle production's nearly perfect, but it starts to feel awfully samey, especially when the words are all endlessly deadpanned Russian

#3378 Prins Thomas - Ambitions

3/5
Thomas explores the acoustic-electronic boundary in subtly new ways here, and some of it works (XSB!) but mostly it just doesn't. Doesn't quite chill you out, doesn't quite get you excited, doesn't quite bob the head. Some soul missing

#3377 UFO - Obsession

3.5/5
Big dumb hard-rock proto-hair-metal that dammit I kinda like. Plenty of glam and Zep influences, with subject matter just one tick above AC/DC, but the melodies are right solid, and those guitar solos frickin' sing.

#3376 Black Beach - Play Loud, Die, Vol. 2

3/5
Black Beach has real potential. But here's three more fuzzed-out songs in the same sludgy space. The songs are decent, but man they're still playing it safe.

#3375 VA - Boogie Woogie Music Vol. 2

4/5
Listen here!

Our oldest album yet, shellac cominatcha from '35! A great little romp: an interesting bit of pre-rock-but-rockin historical perspective, and a lot of fun to listen to besides. All that crack and hiss is just sprinkles if you've got the right attitude.

#3374 Mien - Mien

2.5/5
Man, I don't know, I got lungs like Arthur Morgan over here, so I'll tell you what: I'm just going to drop MIEN's 3-sentence Spotify bio here, and I assure you that how you feel about it will indicate whether this is an album you're interested in:

Inhabiting a modern-day realm in which what is termed ‘psych’ is all-too-often a codified and predictable incarnation entirely at odds with the original free-flowing spirit of psychedelia, it can be a struggle to find a band who can marry the essence of its inception with an adventurous mindset - one with the ability to render their creations beyond clichéd genre trappings and studied thriftstore cool. Who knows whether through study or serendipity, but MIEN - a Transatlantic four-way collision of considerable force involving luminaries who have each forged a reputation for head-spinning audial magick in their own right - are just such a band. What’s more, their eponymous Rocket recordings debut is no less than a rich tapestry of third-eye visions and nocturnal serenades both vivid and vital.

#3374 The Telescopes - Exploding Head Syndrome

3.5/5
Maybe I'm just high _ _but: is this a concept album about having a concussion? The muffled mix puts the music in a little ball in the center of your awareness, in contrast with the sparkies, stray, high buzzes that arc in place like ripped synapses, who're given massive tracts of sonic space to themselves. Everything loops, everything slips, the words are barely audible. It's not that they're far away away from you, you're far away from them. And it doesn't relent. All the round tones stay contained, the sharp ones roam lazily, the pace never quickens, the haze never clears. Glimpses of love lost, song titles told as little sentence snippets, mention of Nothing, End, Why, Never, Don't, "Everything is in the Moment" in French. And then on the last song, a lone buzz and no backup, a sparkie frozen in a moment of waking. And in that quiet the music slinks in, the words clearer and closer than they've been. And halfway through the music rises and the buzz is gone, before coming back deeper, steadier, and integrated into an ascendant full-band sound, still dark and plodding and strange, but out of its frequency oubliette and at full strength.

I don't know if I like it for listening to exactly, but I've never heard production much like it, and no album feels much like it, and heck that's tough to come by these days.

#3373 Lorelle Meets The Obsolete - De Facto

3.5/5
Post-punk weight, pressing down on a sizzling, expanding cloud of shoegaze. There's frisson in this sound that never quite resolves, a feeling of claustrophobic hope

#3372 Chet Atkins - Hometown Guitar

4/5
Atkins is shamelessly showy, but somehow slots cleanly into a dozen tracks across the country gamut. Those instrumentals: Blue Angel -> Get on With It is fuckin fire. And then there's songs with soft cooing vocals as texture; that last one'll take you away.

#3371 Fennesz - Agora

4/5
Perfectly patient, anxious and wondering, long days passed idle. You can feel yourself step outside when you get to the title track and I don't know how he does it. Building spaces out of sound takes time, and Fennesz takes it.

#3370 Death Pesos - Moon Violence

4/5
How many other bands could make songs about Las Vegas, Saturday night and slow drivers in 2019, and make em pretty fuckin fiery? Death Pesos believe in rock, and bang it out loose and trashy with wit to spare. Fun shit.

#3369 Black Beach - Shallow Creatures

3.5/5
Blasted, fuzzy, sludgy garage rock that doesn't do much to differentiate itself from the pack.

Exception: The Youth is Out There shows us Black Beach with the pedal down and their hands off the wheel, ending the album on a thrilling, chaotic 6 minute jam. Need more of _that.

#3368 Buddy Emmons - Steel Guitar Jazz

3/5
Emmons' pedal steel solos are a showcase of expressiveness. He did it. He showed it can be done. But the instrument just doesn't slot in well with the horns: of academic / novelty interest only.