The Three Eps

There's a bristly British postpunk scene that I'm excited as hell about. Three great bands with great EPs and no albums. In order of decreasing adventurousness, all full of wit and hooks and piss and vinegar:

Squid - Town Center 

Do Nothing - Zero Dollar Bill
 
Hotel Lux - Barstool Preaching

(honorable mention: Egyptian Blue - Collateral Damage)

Keep an eye on em.

A Weird Exits

Well, here we are, three thousand, eight hundred and thirty-two entries later, give or take - a thought or two about every album I first heard in my thirties (plus a few extra months on the front). And hot goddamn we did it: an album a day, plus a few! But as I'm officially stamped Middle Aged, a baby on the way, a dozen other demands becoming more demanding, I do think this old lark's run its course.

It was fun! The last decade got me thinking more deeply about music, and the thousands of retroactive reads keep me painfully aware of how much I'll always have to learn.

And, look, I have no illusions about having any special talent as a writer, or the value of my increasingly-halfhearted wordplops to the random internet passerby. But if I led any of you four readers out there to a just one well-liked album you'd otherwise not have found? Well, that'd make me pretty happy.

And who am I kidding, I'll probably pop up here with an enthusiastic word or two when I find something especially fine to listen to.

Until then, may you chase your own idiot idea for longer than's remotely reasonable.

Best,

A

#3832 Richard Swift - Dressed Up for the Letdown

3.5/5 soaked in music of a bygone era, jaunty and morose notes from across an ocean of time, spiked with these rare moments of pure joy, but often repeating himself just a bit too much. What must that be like?

And I fear friend, this could be the last song
But we're all good to go

#3831 No Age - Goons Be Gone

3/5 melodic, propulsive, enjoyable, but toothless, all the noisy edges sanded off. As Randal and Spunt creep up on 40, they just don't have that fire anymore - what must that be like?

#3830 1 Trait Danger - 1 Trait World Tour

3.5/5 deeply dumb, just loose as hell, two dudes having a hoot. Those early skits and intros are rough sledding, but you get Clap When I'm Dead and Multiple Computer Mark, and man -- you just don't get hooky, actually pretty funny shit like that to stick unless you're throwing whatever you got. This wouldn't have been better if it was better. be glad it exists exactly as it does. bonus, kinda helps explain Making a Door Less Open's quirky energy

#3829 Car Seat Headrest - Making a Door Less Open

3.5/5 what a mess! what a glorious, stupid, shitty, wonderful album, the most 3rd-album-feeling album I can think of, it's actual position in the discography (19th?(?)) aside. Impossible to critique - all the worst things about it are the best things about it - the disjoint structures, the uneven pacing, the clumsy performances, the weird lazy asides. At times it feels like forced roughness -- how do you make a ramshackle album this deep into a career this newly huge? Others it feels impossibly true and brave. And man Hollywood is an awful song. Like the twin peaks dougie arc - I'm not sure I even like any of it but man it's in my head

#3828 Run the Jewels - RTJ4

3.5/5 as explosively catchy as they've ever been, beats bang and slap and all that. Mike and P sound pissed off and playful beyond all reason, this'd be a lot of fun if it wasn't just impossible to have fun right just fucking now

#3827 Golden Retriever, Chuck Johnson - Rain Shadow

4/5 the opener's a tough one, endless and dissonant, horns and Johnson's pedal steel running against the grain of the ambient hums. But its a rite of passage, earning you a drink from the album's exploding heart. First, a stop through Lupine, a spacy dispatch worthy of late Sigur Ros -- and then you arrive at Sage Thrasher, as unknowable as they come, gorgeous in every phase of its descent into chaos, with Creosote Ring as a fitting closer, that 13-6-13-6 song length cadence subconsciously tying it all together

#3826 Gaussian Curves - Clouds

2.5/5 doesn't work as ambient, there's too much attempt at melody, too much human hand, to reach that magic moment where the music disengages from time. And there's not enough heart in it to work any other way. You're left with something awkwardly approaching new wave, like an instrumental bonus track from a Sting album

#3825 VA - Focus On: Metroline Limited Volume 3

2.5/5 wow this is two hours of very samey music, even as house goes. may you connoisseurs out there derive some subtle note that I cannot

#3824 Sheep, Dog and Wolf - Egospect

3/5 SD&W's got a novel sound, all those lilting affected melodies over hyperbusy clattering rhythms. But it's the same basic trick for 45 minutes, and it's impossible to be delighted by it for more than a few songs

#3823 Moon Diagrams - Lifetime of Love

4.5/5 about as deeply atmospheric as electronic albums come. Lifetime of Love is a blend of styles, but it's ambient at heart, with a transcendent sense of pacing, with vocals early so that their absence is felt for the next half hour, the importance of beats ever-evolving, ending on the only traditional song. Blue Ring // The Ghost and the Host are the centerpiece and the destination, an endless embrace that the whole album approaches and recedes from like breath in repeated listens

#3822 Super Flu - Heimatmelodien

3/5 missing the unexpected momentum and playfulness of their later stuff, everything here's locked in and by the book. Some clever moves but man they come in slow

#3821 Super Flu - Musik 3

3.5/5 a roundly enjoyable hour fourteen, balancing housey patience and simmering momentum, with some real highlights: V13a with its playful knobtwiddling, Gausa with its Moby-via-The-Range emotional shifts, even that red herring opener's a good time

#3820 Spirit of the Beehive - Pleasure Suck

4/5 this kind of smoothshifting bipolar indie rock is my religion. Sludgy and pretty, warping and snapping into shape, dipping into raging bursts of speed and back, unwaveringly catchy and lushly textured the entire way through. Take 21st Road Trip as a microcosm -- effortlessly thrilling, every twist unexpected and inevitable

#3819 Woods - Strange to Explain

3.5/5 Jeremy Earl's voice remains Pumpkins-level defining of the band's sound, and it's still a bit much, but Woods've found a nice, busy rhythmic propulsion on their latest, slathered in _so_much delectable mellotron

#3818 Jeff Rosenstock - No Dream

4/5 more so than ever before Rosenstock sounds like he's just letting it rip. Worry was perfect, album of the decade full stop, that entire back half is Abbey Road to me, and Post felt as shellshocked as any of us did around then, trying to put the pieces together. But any sense of structure's out the window now. Relentlessly, joyously anxious, with bursts of hardcore speed, all barfed out with a roadtrip throughline that hasn't planned it's destination.

Take ***BNB - starts with a dopey, jokey premise, but instead of locking into the concept as a chorus, it fakes you out with a one-timer, mutating the verse feel again and again into something messier and messier and shoutier and Jeffier and Jeffier. Song lengths splinter, speedups and melodies leap from alleys - blistering, confusing, as welcoming a shrepa as you could hope for in likewise times. That I might live to see this fucking legend just one more time

#3817 Dope Body - Home Body

4/5 I'm a full on sucker for offkilter hooks and strange electronic dalliances, in the grand tradition of Je Suis France and Single Frame, here with subtly brilliant, insistent drums as a bonus. Wonderfully catchy, quietly curious

#3816 Erik Hall - Music for 18 Musicians

3.5/5 probably better, as pleasant listening goes, than most performances. So let's be glad it exists. But the thrill was always undeniably in the insidious madness of the physical playing - it's hard to recommend this _too enthusiastically

#3815 Kara-Lis Coverdale - Sirens

2.5/5 clever, all those tones and voices interchangable, stretching infinite landscapes - but man it's a rough listen for listening, often harsh, usually tense, like a soundtrack to a difficult film

#3814 Floating Points - Late Night Tales

4/5 a lovely little ambient opener is a fakeout into a long sidechannel of obscure soul, before drifting back for some extended meandering electronic jams. There's a swoop to the flow, it gets smoothly from one mood to the next, by the end leaving you feeling like, well, like you've made a night of it

#3813 Blur - All the People: Live at Hyde Park 02/07/2009

3/5 it's easy to get caught up in the energy of this one. The setlist is a great trip through the eras, with an unexpected emphasis on older stuff. It's a striking reminder of how many great songs these guys really have. And, the crowd's mixed pretty high, singing along like you've never heard, and you get a real sense of being there in this overwhelming sea of enthusiasm.

But then you start to realize -- or at least wonder, anyway: does Blur suck live?

At very least, they're not _great here. Every song is played tight to spec. No variation, extension, transition, elevation; not one verb you could dredge up that would elevate this beyond a well-currated playlist + crowd noise.

And then there's the fact that they rush so many of the songs, sometimes giving a frenetic live energy, but mostly just sounding sloppy (and there's plenty of missed notes besides). And then there's the fact that Damon just can't really hang with the fast songs, sounding out of breath and a bit desperate. For example: the issues intersect on End of a Century, where the "as you get closer..to fifty" (nee 'thirty') line doesn't have a fraction of the beat it needs to land, Damon gamely working past every line like a child powering though his vegetables.

A worthwhile listen for the medium-to-hard-core Blur fan, but you might find yourself trying to convince yourself you're having more fun than you are

#3812 Dan Mangan - Oh Fortune

4/5 Mangan's voice is weathered and true, and he's just got this effortless knack for making lilting, swooping songs, flecked with horns, ending in elegies. But the real gutpunch is just the prescient feel of this album, the sense of ominous space and burgeoning dread that pervades every song, and feels devastatingly of our current moment 


What happens next
East to west
Lunatics
And it started slow
Ends in a rush
Starts with them
And ends with us
Just pray in the night these walls are enough

#3811 Sunwatchers - Oh Yeah?

3.5/5 you do get a sense of a real band back there. There's a real live feel, a subtle push and pull, alternately rounded and angular, laying the groundwork for that majestic sax. Love the comeback sax is making in rock lately, and these guys really put it front and goddamn center

#3810 Keith Kenniff - Occasus

3/5 pretty, but feels cribbed from a well-worn playbook. All the plinky piano and uncertain wobbles and slathered reverb start to sound like a perfectly blank canvas, here to make you feel, you know, the thing you feel, the ambient version of the pop song railing against generically outlined problems. Maybe that's the point? With that big empty space on the album cover? Probably not

#3809 Chris Forsyth - Peoples Motel Band

3.5/5 some pretty exciting instrumental guitar jamming, finding the balance between waving about and cutting right to the quick. Excellent pacing for the patient

#3808 Once and Future Band - Deleted Scenes

3/5 so so slick. Shamelessly pop prog, reviving the least cool era of the least cool good music around, whitewashed jazzy flourishes, jamband wanderings, and some admittedly pretty great organ runs, all in perfectly bite-sized units. Undeniably catchy, tough to listen to with a straight face

#3807 Peel Dream Magazine - Agitprop Alterna

3/5 maybe I'm just getting bored around the three thousand eight hundred mark, but as I listened to Agitprop Alterna I wondered, how many reviews of this album will compare Peel Dream Magazine to My Bloody Valentine? Will it be all of them?
Or more, somehow?

Let it not be said I'm not a data scientist! Of the 9 different reviews linked to on the first google page of "Agitprop Alterna Review", it's a clean sweep!

• Udara Madusanka Perera - bearing a distinct resemblance to My Bloody Valentine
• Dan Macintosh - remind one of My Bloody Valentine 
• Kaelen Bell - function much like My Bloody Valentine's "Touched"
• Sophie Kemp - bearing a distinct resemblance to My Bloody Valentine
• Andy Von Pip - similar woozy disorientating rush utilised by My Bloody Valentine
• Maxwell Cann - a continuation of the experimental production methods of My Bloody Valentine
• Justice (?) - recalling the likes of Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher of My Bloody Valentine
• Brian Polson - pays homage to the fuzzy, mod-flavored rock of acts like My Bloody Valentine
• Lizzie Manno  - undoubtedly an homage to shoegaze and drone-pop artists of yesteryear like My Bloody Valentine

There are a surprising number of ways to say that! Good job team! I'm not sure I have anything to add. Tychofied shoegaze: pretty, chill, out of ideas, taking no chances

#3806 Jeffrey Silverstein - You Become the Mountain

4.5/5 truly lovely, all the twinkling, sliding, swooning peace of a William Tyler landscape, with a streak of psychedelia and a dash of beats, making for some chill hybrid of Tycho and Delicate Steve at their best. That slide guitar, it surely is sweet. As mysterious and pleasant as anything I've heard in a long time, a patient journey through large spaces inside and out

#3805 DJ Python - Mas Amable

3/5 I love where this starts, because it's beautiful slow and evocative and all I listen to anymore is ambient. But then the offkilter beats come in and all these tacky noises, and there's still these touches of that original beauty but then oh wow ouch the vocals on that 11 minute centerpiece. Bummer fakeout

#3804 Have a Nice Life - Deathconsciousness

4/5 I don't know that I like this. Maybe it's because it fits the times just a little too well (more on that when we get to Dan Mangan). But it's so patient, so unique, with just enough atmosphere and gorgeous slow-motion hooks, and earnest despair, I can't help but really recommend it as something you hear once (maybe save it for wave 2 or  3 of quarantine?). The kind of thing I want to remind myself to come back to again once a year or so.

All the smallness and zero-stakes earnestness of bedroom rock, but at such epic scale, songs stretching to strange lengths, buried in ancient distortion. I can't help but call it really _brave. You hear two guys making songs that are just the fucking songs they want to make, and they're shamelessly huge, without sounding like they have any pretension or aspiration at all, like they just had something they had to get out, and heck if that's not exciting to hear

#3803 Eerie Gaits - Holopaw

4/5 a pleasant little piece of introspection during a walk in strange woods. Every time Ross goes too sentimental, too close to some post-rock climax, a steadying piece of ambiance breaks out, revolving through awefilled mania and a quiet rumination (The Lure Follows Line being the best, wow).

There's borderline embarrassing excitement, balanced against moments of unexpected wisdom and peace, and I guess I see some version of myself in that, a version that balances the things that make me cringe and that I most admire, and knows that some of those are the same things

Holopaw feels like the earnest expression of a guy I'd like to know

#3802 The Spirit of the Beehive - Hypnic Jerks

4/5 you can't make a truly psychedelic album without some real surprises, some true left turns - more Olivia Tremor Control, less Tame Impala. Here's all this haze and wash, but with real fuckin _hooks, late Fugazi lean muscle caught by ambient trapdoors, and some of the most perfect Booksian samples around. That time dilation, no way all this adventure took place over the course of just 38 minutes

didnt I just take you there about an hour ago?

yeah, I'm the same guy. can you take me back to where I was before?

yes sir, right away! where were you before?

just take me there

yes sir!

#3801 Eluvium - Virga I

3.5/5 I will never figure out why these 3 long songs are broken up at the exact points that they are, but then this guy made Shuffle Drones, so don't go to him for orthodoxy in tracklist architecture

I'm not positive the title track isn't just repetitions of a one minute segment, a Disintegration Loop without the disintegration. There's a similar uneasy hypnosis to that landmark, but House Taken Over is the only one that truly finds something beautiful in all the noise and haze

If you've got the patience, you can play this as one 40-minute song and find truly satisfying catharsis in that final aching variation

#3800 Flat Worms - Antarctica

3/5 an underwhelming followup to Flat Worms' blistering debut

s/t was hot and fast, songs about Texas, acceleration, hot sands, motorbikes

Antarctica is, well, about things cold and slow, and it's just a mismatch to their strengths

And there's not the same urgency - I find out only afterwards that Ty Segall (!) and (!) Steve Albini are on board and, I don't know maybe that's just too much effort in play, some spark got blanketed. There's hooks, crunchy production, but it's Dad's clothes

#3799 Dan Deacon - Mystic Familiar

4.5/5 Dan Deacon's transformation from batshit noisemaker to transcendental sherpa is finally complete. After a decade or so of making increasingly amazingly trippy videos for harsh-but-gorgeous songs he's finally dropped the harshbut and made a wonderfully soft, busy, colorful swirling armchair//headphone listen without a single ragged sawtooth in sight. A fractal rainbow sweater. Just look at those song titles! A lovely listen, weaving old tricks (those sweeping automated piano lines, those filtered drones) with the new (some lovely sparse saxes, some actual clean vocals!). Fitting that it ends on the names of ghost towns. Let's get the fuck out of here

#3798 Wamth - Life

3/5 at some point Mena lost that balance from Home, stopped going slow, stopped blurring the edges of his 4-speed skills, let overt harmonies come through, fell ass backwards into a Tycho album

#3797 The Stokes - The New Abnormal

3/5 with every passing year Is This It becomes better and its goodness becomes harder to understand. Years where a new Strokes album comes out doubly so. One thing science has settled on is that that album was very _cool, as in detached and effortless, and somehow perfect. The New Abnormal is not that. The band sounds tense and subtly sloppy, and Casablancas sounds like he's having trouble keeping up, tiny gasps and surges to push the words where they need to be, and no number of studio snippets and winking asides can cover for it. Even putting Basquiat on the cover broadcasts a doomed plan for engaging in looseness

#3796 Skatebard and Lauer - Volpe

2.5/5 three criminally boring and idea-light songs, not even especially dancable. feels phoned in

#3795 Bjorn Torske - Byen

4/5 almost every song on Byen has a backbone of deadsimple old-school synths, some foundation of tangible, visible, hard-edged waves. And on top of that familiar, elemental crunch comes disco, rumbling drums, sparkling synth lines, samples of birds, and a million ways to bob your head and move your ass. A wonderful hybrid. The Norwegian scene lives.

#3794 The Necks - Body

3/5 remember those big brick pocketknives with like, 50 tools, until it doesn't fit in your pocket? Arty, timemelting minimalism into a jammy raveup center into an ambient fadeaway. An advertisement for a show I'd go to, but a better ad than a tool. I can't think of any possible hour of my life where this wouldn't be all wrong for some 15 minutes of its runtime

#3793 Warmth - Home

4/5 the difference between good and bad ambient is necessarily subtle. Agustín Mena does one thing very well: moves voices into the mix slowly, evolves voices even more slowly, and builds in subtle rhythms, little ghosts of clicks and heartbeats moving at paces more readily expressible in bpms. And every once in a while there's an actual melody, played low and slow and repeatedly and far apart. And he does all these things well, adding the barest scent of some distant place and, there you have it, good ambient from just one stone

#3792 Christina Vantzou - No. 3

3/5 a giant, patient mix of soundtracky, classical-adjacent drones and readymade electronic reverb. There's flashes of something enormous and elemental, with constant instrumentation shifts to keep you off-balance. But I'm not sure more is more when it comes to this kind of music, and it never adds up to more than a numb sense of unease

#3791 Ed Schrader's Music Beat - Riddles

3.5/5 I can't help but give Dan Deacon a lot of credit for this one. All its best moments, those twinking piano backings, those huge buzzy basslines, the general manic spirit - are the producer's hallmarks. All the actual songwriting and vocals and melodies are good enough, but not especially memorable

#3790 Underworld and The Necks - Appleshine Continuum

4.5/5 I haven't gone hard on a song like this in a long time. Each blur of a workday lately's been marked by at least one Appleshine Continuum playthrough.

Straight 4s makes for a straight underworld song for the first five minutes or so, but then little by little the beat compounds, and a bassline sidles in, and long organ drones lurk. And then its just a jazz trio magma jam, with only the barest electronic flourishes, and that strange patient dance goes on and on until the half hour mark (!) where something really remarkable happens: we just take off the yoke and a full on, maximal/minimal Necks groove breaks out, a Reichian raveup, endless texture, all upright bass and rumbling piano, and then just the sweetest outro you can imagine.

Apparently done in one take and it flows so slowly without a seam on it. Every part works and it is not boring and it is goddamn great background music to anything, that insistent beat as everything shifts in such slow motion. Perfect quarantine music, a second heart when yours is tired

#3789 The Necks - Three

2.5/5 the desert cover, the 20 minute songs, everything about this should have been catnip to me, but its all so busy and dissonant and tense - I can't see focusing on it, and I can't think of any activities that would be improved by having it on in the background, so

#3788 Hailu Mergia - Yene Mircha

4/5 wonderfully jazzy jaunts through African forms and beyond. Half the songs are downright dancable, and the other half still do sway, all balancing artsy improvisation against irresistible throughlines

#3787 Lindstrom - On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever

4/5 you gotta hand these Norwegians one thing - after they found the peak space disco sound 8 or so years ago, none of the big names are stuck in it. Better to become Liars than the Rapture. Of these four long songs, two are beatless and near-ambient and are the best of the bunch. The title track's all interpretive dance, lurching from motion to motion without overarching structure or form, and its, kind of incredible, in its frustrating way. Swing Low Sweet LFO's the other highlight, endlessly paced, rippling arpeggiated patronuses bounding through negative space. Even the closer's a mysterious anticipation of a moment that never really comes. Each song bordering on boring in some interesting way.

#3786 Skatebard - Vill Stil

3/5 packed with clever little sound design gestures, this guy clears the presets when he gets a new synth. Skatebard gets a lot of mileage out of a small idea and minimal hardware, except when it's a long road to nowhere -- man those 11 minute tracks are slogs

#3785 Skatebard - Skateboarding Was A Crime: In 1989

3.5/5 shamelessly repetitive, retro synths, with that signature Norwegian crunch and a sneakily playful spirit

#3784 Pearl Jam - Gigaton

3.5/5 some nice rough edges on the production, little cliffs and hitches. And the do lyrics have some bite. But Vedder's voice sounds worn out, the whole album's more like a shadow of the glory days than usual. This all might have made more sense 6 months ago, but now we are defeat

#3783 Nils Frahm - Empty

4/5 spare even by Frahm's standards. A trio of a piano, a body at the piano, and the room. slow, and small and afraid and achingly aware of our surroundings

#3782 Robert Shredford - Robert Shredford

3.5/5 crunchy, catchy, charming enough, a slack step slower than most

#3781 Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts V: Together

3.5/5 I wonder how this will sound on the other side of the pandemic. Now, it sounds like a glimmer of hope, a silver string of connection, beauty in the slow endlessness, marbled with thick veins of sympathetic anxiety*. This is a good time for long slow songs.

* I still haven't finished Locusts, which is a solid block of anxiety

#3780 Ulla - Tumbling Towards a Wall

3/5 all the hiss and motionless rotation of Gas's Pop. Mysterious, tapping into something less universal, more mechanical

#3779 Chuck Johnson - Balsams

3/5 still chasing that Chill Out dream. Ambient pedal steel sounds like a perfect recipe, but it's actually too much, too samey, a little tuneless, can't find that empty space

#3778 Circles Around the Sun - Interludes for the Dead

3.5/5 as ambient and endless as we need. The songs that hew too close to their Grateful Dead inspirations are distracting, the rest are perfect interstitials for shows that never start

Ten Years Holy Fuck

Man, I started this thing ten years ago today, just kind of as a goof.

I thought, it'd be kind of neat to know when I first heard an album.
And while I'm taking note of that, I might as well give it a rating.
And while I'm at it, I might as well write a little review.
And whoops an album a day, plus a hundred or so.

It's a silly little blog that very, very few people have read, and as far as I know nobody reads regularly, and I have no damn idea why I stuck with it so long other than that's kind of my thing to never quit anything. Dr Alex Eagle Scout.

It's made me more thoughtful about music, but maybe to a fault by now.

I turn 40 in June, and man that's a weird sentence to actually write and then read.

By then I'll have reviewed every album I heard for the first time in my 30's, and I think maybe that's where I can argue that I've made my point. So let's sneak in another hundred or so, and I'll give it all a proper sendoff thenabouts. Thanks for reading - I don't know who I did this all for, but maybe it's you!

#3777 Childish Gambino - 3.15.20

3/5 strangely paced songs that run into eachother, or maybe those are just the days. the timestamp tracknames, mocking anchors. the best songs stomp, dressed and ready for now-cancelled festivals

#3776 Dogleg - Melee

3/5 relentless rolling sheets of guitars and one very specific kind of shouting, with brief bursts into Japandroids exaltation. numbing before long

#3775 Porridge Radio - Every Bad

3.5/5 Dana Margolin chant-yelps at her demons, an exorcism lit by blistering guitar shimmer, as difficult and gorgeous a rock record as you're likely to find in a single package

#3774 The Districts - You Know I'm Not Going Anywhere

3.5/5 the first four songs* are just gorgeous, swelling, swirling wonders of texture and longing, reverb and atmosphere rising off like night heat. A really exciting new direction. Which makes the rest so disappointing -- aside from the only rocker (a pretty good one!) barging in at the 9 slot, it's mostly aimless and unmemorable. They seemed to know what to frontload, here's hoping this's a step towards a masterpiece

* the first four songs were great, full of harmonies and mystery, and everything that came after was a letdown? is this a concept album about TV on the Radio's career?

#3773 Vundabar - Either Light

4.5/5 they don't make em like this any more, blooming with details, shimmering with easy momentum, vintage Shins meets vintage Strokes, some lost '01 classic.

Vundabar's early stuff was fucking brilliant, one angular, surfy hookstorm after another. They never quite recaptured that magic, but this is a clean break*. Synths lead the way like never before, backing vocals swoop in and flank, Hagen's vocals and guitar work showing subtle new depths. Less Dick Dale, more Brian Wilson, the kind of lushness that blurs the seams in its craftsmanship. The kicker's the way it all hangs together, a solid, well-paced front-to-back, put-it-on-again listen that you just don't get too often these days

* never gonna stop missing Antics' drums though

#3772 Folke Rabe - What??

3.5/5 what if not music? Very nearly pure math, waves changing so slowly you can practically see them, a slowmotion timelapse of a city sunrise, notes turning into LFOs and back, the real song hiding in the harmonics between the choices, like switched on Strumming Music (humming music?). A three-half-hour chinscratcher, but not without real, if subtle, moments of beauty

#3771 Keith Fulleton Whitman - Playthroughs

4/5 ambient is all I want to listen to these days. A lovely one. Something this patient and pretty and simple is surprisingly hard to find. Modena's nearly perfect, a communion with essential waves

#3770 Trifonic - Emergence

3/5 some pretty gestures, some interesting skitters, but more Postal Service than Boards of Canada; the insistence on _always being pleasant holds it back. man those breathy vocals have aged badly

#3769 Weedeater - God Luck and Good Speed

3.5/5 hookier than most stoner metal (Wizard Fight!), with some variety peppered in (Alone!), but still sludgy and heavy enough to be your weighted blanket. Shame about the goblin vocals

#3768 Luomo - Vocalcity

3/5 extremely patient, older-school deep house, riding one well-shaped loop, it only ever so slightly, shifting the ground underneath a bit more, for 10-15 minutes at a time. A pleasantly stoned kinda listen

#3767 Nubya Garcia - Nubya's 5ive

3.5/5 i know nothing about jazz. good flowing energy, playful solos, a wonderful rhythm section that evolves the songs with rolling textures

#3766 Antoine Berjeaut - Moving Cities

4/5 anything Makaya McCraven touches is worth your attention. His signature future-looking tightness is here, so hooksome you're not sure it's jazz, but too adventurous to be anything else. Hard to say how much credit he gets, but his name's on the cover, so. Either way: a swooping, skittering bewildering textured shapeshifter, Kamasi and Thundercat via King of Limbs with an extra thousand volts through it

#3765 Ovlov - Greatest Hits, Vol 2

4/5 great, simple songs elevated by great production - those crisp drums, that luxurious guitar fuzz. pure crunch for days

#3764 Summer Salt - Driving to Hawaii

3/5 hawaiian prom band swayalongs, low key beach boys just drifting along. what a strange record to make. pleasant enough but damn if I know what to do with it. maybe its just what i need, but too far away

#3763 Ratboys - GN

4.5/5 luscious, crunchy guitar textures with a thousand tricks up their sleeves, alongside chiming vocals, effortless hooks, and _fucking _pedal _steel. A real special slice of perfect indie. Any album that puts a song on all three of my playlists for hanging out with Jo must have done _something right

#3762 Caribou - Suddenly

3/5 those tactile, legible synths, those wonderful vocal bends and chops, all this adventurousness undercut by endless straight-up mopey, crooney singing

#3761 Wasted Shirt and Ty Segall - Fungus II

3.5/5 Segall's monuments of fuzz circled by Chippendale's manic Steadman-raven fills, a slowmotion social disintegration. Harsho's a highlight, sputtering apart like it's melting your hardware. Insidiously patient and strange

#3760 Tycho - Simulcast

3/5 it sure is a Tycho album. a nice little listen full of pretty textures and polite beats. But man I couldn't pick these new songs out of a lineup of Tycho songs -- I can't remember the last time an artist spent 4 albums exploring so little territory

#3759 Tracy Bryant - Hush

3/5 pleasant enough clopalongs, with all the deadpan swoon of Kurt Vile, if lacking some of the gumption - not a lot of chances taken not much stands out

#3758 Kelley Stoltz - In Triangle Time

3/5 still think Stoltz is wildly underrated, but this collection of songs feels a bit phoned in, as geometrical and predictable as its thematic triangles

#3757 Trace Mountains - A Partner to Lean On

3.5/5 I can't tell you exactly what makes this feel like NMH. Something about the melodies, that lilt that weaves though the dreamed and the real, those moments where a chord hangs suspended in air and levitates you with it. And then there's that really direct quote 2/3 of the way through the opener. However you get there. It taps into something sentimental, unclear which tolls paid to get there. K and E6 and all the rest. It's not a knock exactly, but it inspired me wonder about the alchemy that lead to the greatest indie moments of a bygone half-generation; a fun journey but a bit of a distraction, but right pretty if you can see the forest for the trees

#3756 Chastity Belt - Chastity Belt

3/5 dating these things by listened-time rather than review-time creates weird gaps, a symptom of treating this blog as data before expression, an infection that insidiously pervades the project. I sit here burned out and a month behind and in the right thick of a global pandemic (historians: March 20th feels like the thick of it, and I do hope that doesn't seem grimly hilarious in retrospect). And this is maybe the right time for Chastity Belt's final abandonment of hook and spark. Such an honest album. What else could you feel around now. A rainy day spent in bed waiting of the night to come.

#3755 Boris - Live at Third Man Records

4/5 blistering, capturing all of the scathing texture of Pink with a spark of live energy. Proof that Boris is a legitimate threat, from whiplash thrash high to smoldering stoner low

#3754 Flat Worms - Flat Worms

4.5/5 it's not that Flat Worms don't come out the gate hard. their relentless post-motorik hits from beat zero, songs that so go go go with names like Motorbike, Goodbye Texas, Accelerated.

But that's all windup, something subtle happens that ignites all that laid powder, that shoves that momentum into a drift and pedal down, right around White Roses, into 11816, into Fault Line, and there's that sense of something that in increments grew out of your control, a speed wobble a third of the way down a hill of unimaginable steepness and abrasive potential. That texture roughens, the complexity ratchets, and you can't say that the album's changed exactly, but that you failed to appreciate the cumulative effect of psychic acceleration. One of the insidiously excellently paced albums, rivaling Faux Ferocious and The Men for irresistible forward tilt into breathlessness

#3753 Tera Melos - Treasures and Trolls

3.5/5 spiky jelly and big crunch peanut butter done all double decker

#3752 The Men - Mercy

3.5/5 like one of those saturdays you wake up off cycle and can't get going, even coffee dulled. The strangest pacing; a negative image of Open Your Heart's roaring start; endless, lumbering Americana stirring only reluctantly to gather scraps of rock vigor. current mood.

#3751 The Egyptian Lover - On the Nile

4/5 you couldn't make this now. electro so simple and pure, a punk of moment. deadpan, weird, cool, something ancient in those textures

#3750 A Strangely Isolated Place - The KLF's Chill Out (A New Dimension)

3.5 (listen here) pleasant ambient, with vague hints of what made Chill Out great, but doesn't capture that road feel at all, and that's the thing that makes the original so special

#3749 Tame Impala - The Slow Rush

3/5 on the subject of how long things take. Lush, pretty, easy enough to space out to, one long samish song, same tempo, falsetto, feel, an hour of variations on a theme for better or worse

#3748 Tokyo Police Club - TPC

4/5 wherin i treat every review like I'm trying to get the right answer on a test, because that's how I'm wired, which I must confess to myself is not very rock and roll. tempering that pure pop from Mellon Collie into something more worthy of the reference, hooky, ansty, full of fuzz and beauty, great pacing -- that great little act break of Ready to Win

#3747 Tokyo Police Club - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Radness, Pt 1 and 2

3/5 like a moth to the flame of that amazing album title. still got those hooks, too goddamn pop though, without even a touch of that old edge, just look at those song titles

#3746 Battles - Juice B Crypts

3.5/5 what hubris, to take months of work, a lifetime of practice and ideas, and try to sum it up in a crapped out daily afterthought. what the fuck am I doing with this project. loopy swoops, a melodic twin of their history of rhythmic perversions, disorienting fun

#3745 Young Guv - GUV I

4/5 didn't think they made jangle like this any more, a weird, swooningly pleasant long 80's psychedelic throwthrowbackback, just getting over the ever rising lip of my heart

#3744 Beatrics Dillon - Workaround

3/5 good title, songs driven by some curved math, intellectually strokey but frustratingly belligerent about avoiding any one straightforward thing, leaving hooks to the negative space

#3743 White Reaper - You Deserve Love

3.5/5 as sunny as big-riff rock comes, pure Thin Lizzy // Cheap Trick soaring, one foot on the ground before liftoff. Simple, hooky, could have been a hit if this kind of thing was remotely in style, all the bolder cause its not

#3742 Endless Boogie - Vol I, II

2.5/5 I love a long songs and I love a good crunchy guitar sound, but man. An hour and a half of very ok jams that sound like they were real easy to make - expect Vol. XCIX, C any day now

#3741 Jamie xx, Gil Scott-Heron - We're New Here

3/5 Richard Russel gets inspired by the xx to make a weird Scott-Heron album, Jamie xx makes even weirder, even less Scott-Heron remake. This sounds more like a Jamie xx album that samples the late great master, which is fine, but the least of the 3 (so far!) versions

#3740 Gil Scott-Heron - I'm New Here

4/5 a noisy//quiet, ever-strange album that finds that sweet spot - far enough afield to be exciting without tipping into discord. Scott-Heron's words are backed with sparse, harsh energy, one moment bristling with electronics, the next laid bare with nothing of the sort. And the words themselves are personal and precise like few others could muster. One that'll stick with you

#3739 Makaya McCraven, Gil Scott-Heron - We're New Again

4/5 maybe it's the singer-producer disconnect of the original that makes I'm New Here such tempting fodder for remaking. Richard Russel took Scott-Heron's contributions in such a strange direction, what others might be possible?

Contrast with the ouroboran influences that lead to Jamie xx's dilution of I'm New Here's best qualities - McCraven's take sounds more like what the original album could have been; it seems very safe to say _should have been. Jazzy, weird, and fucking __immediate, and critically keeping the bookending monologues intact, making them even more impactful by weaving them into the album's essence. Unpredictable, alive, live, paced to float and sting and gloat at the center of the ring, before succumbing to drink. Weathered, weary, bracingly vulnerable, but still dangerous

#3738 Kiwi Jr - Football Money

3/5 slack, agreeable, one-hook wonders, one after another - an enjoyable game for remarkably low stakes

#3737 Yellow Magic Orchestra - Public Pressure

3/5 YMO's stilted bleeps make the transition to the live setting surprisingly well! The vocals give it the songs some urgency, and the live synth parts have little imperfections that bring human excitement to the lockstep grooves. It sounds downright danceable, cool, even?

#3736 Yellow Magic Orchestra - Yellow Magic Orchestra (US)

2.5/5 very clever at the time, making those melodies out of such basic electronics, with those plinky exotica flourishes. But I can't remotely recommend you bother with these baubles in 2020 except out of historical curiosity

#3735 Ryuichi Sakamoto - Thousand Knives

3/5 ahead of its time, deeply quirky, dipping into sparse soundscapes and roughshod electronic beats and understated loungey piano. But this hasn't aged especially well, sounding quaint, arch, almost weird for its own sake by now

#3734 Daedelus - The Bittereinders

2.5/5 a suite of electronic experiments that leave an awful lot of work to the listener. I don't think it's worth it. Daedelus evokes plenty of atmosphere - under all the shimmer there's a specter of grinding tension, of oppression and heat, of horror lurking just out of frame. But the connection to the historical inspiration is _real abstract. If the music's going to be this uninterested in being listened to, the thematic throughline's gotta be a lot more legible before I can be bothered

#3733 Dogleg - Remember Alderaan?

3.5/5 a scrappy little fist of angular anger. a fun listen that sounds like it was even more fun to make

#3732 Zack Mexico - Run Out of Money and Die

4.5/5 mellow, hypnotic, rich and rocking, with dips into weirdness. Beta Band meets Je Suis France, all spun out across a cosmic hour, some grooves stretching time, some just passing through

#3731 Pup - Morbid Stuff

4/5 pup weaves death and depression and anger into a damn near concept album - a bit slower, a bit older, but still raging, still hooky as shit, sounding pretty sunny for all the doomy themes. That cover says it all, the pastel thrill of something bad about to happen

#3730 Elvis Depressedly - Holo Pleasures / California Dreamin'

4/5 I almost blew right past this. It sounded at first like a halfbaked mess, or maybe a studied affectation of lo-fi. And it might be one or both, and now I'm not sure it's a bad thing - but it sounds goddamn _good, subtly lightyears better than a the hundred similar records. The overblown guitars, the tiny beats, the tapedeck friction, it's so warm, so close, as bedroom as they come, indie pop perfection.

Either Cothran got lucky or he's a damn skilled producer; these songs don't sound accidentally flawed, they sounds worn, bloomed, molted and mulched; dying, but alive

#3729 Jeff Parker - Suite for Max Brown

4.5/5 endlessly unpredictable, never less than enthralling. A gorgeous, mysterious blend of styles. Jazz from some forgotten future, structures, drifting down as loose jams, snippets, loops, but never straying from the idea that music is for listening to. Kamasi meets McCraven. Puzzle pieces that surely work together, laid our in strange formations. Some mysterious kind of magic.

#3728 Squid - Lino

3.5/5 a simmering, mini-masterpiece of patient rock texture. There's no sign here of the blistering, brilliant EP they'd put out two years later, but there's still some nascent unknowable magic. The longer two songs here don't sound slowed down... they just unfold this way, as naturally and inevitably as glaciers. Even Squid's career's a slow burn, as they dribble out a song or four at a time; every snapshot of their evolution's worth hearing. A first-round-pick Band To Watch.

#3727 The Snails - Songs from the Shoebox

3.5/5 Samuel Herring's searching howl never really matched Future Islands' synthpop detach. But with The Snails everything makes sense, his earnest strain matching the ragged, half-goofy sincerity of these shambling, sax-streaked rock songs, summoning pathos and bathos and crackling frisson

#3726 Bryan Scary - Birds

4/5 Scary's a criminally overlooked songwriter; a wizard, a true star. Birds is another suite of effortless pop, full of baroque and proggy flourishes, as graceful and fluttering as its subject matter

#3725 Bonnie Doon - Dooner Nooner

3/5 (not to be confused with Bonny Doon!) clumsy Sonic Youthy punk racket, lofi in every way possible - unremarkable, but charming in an indie pop kinda way

#3724 Sofia Bolt - Waves

3.5/5 Pretty, personal, true to Bolt's LA-via-Paris provenance, folky sunshine lightly marbled with rock frisson, breezy with a whisper of doubt

#3723 Klaus Johann Grobe - Du Bist So Symmetrisch

2.5/5 retro-synth-packed Swiss dancepunk with German lyrics, half-familiar and difficult to remember

#3722 Zack Mexico - Get Rich and Live Forever

3.5/5 agreeable, slack grooves and surfy rumbles, effortless hooks given time to breathe, with a resonant, welcoming voice at the center. A little too slack though, lacking some of the punch of its sister album

#3721 Grant Hart - Hot Wax

3.5/5 that opener's a kick, a perfect 60s nugget that never was. None of the rest reaches those highs, but there's enough organ licks, garagey guitars and earnest yelps from Hart to have a good time with

#3720 The Vacant Lots - Endless Night

3.5/5 you know you're gonna get good texture with covers like that. Neo-motorik in no rush, cutting lazy lines down the blue slopes

#3719 Flamingosis - Pleasure Palette

3.5/5 samply grooves, hazed and wobbled, halfway between vaporwave and instrumental hip hop. cool warm chill

#3718 Operators - Radiant Dawn

3/5 Daniel Boeckner brings that Wolf Parade feel, and the synths are all swirly and agreeable, but it's all a bit hollow. Tempos middling and locked in, no big moves or moments, as just-there as the cover's big black pyramid, as songs named Terminal Beach, Days, Low Life, and I Feel Emotion. Heck, maybe that's the point, but it's not much of a thrill to listen to

#3717 Dougie Poole - Wideass Highway

2.5/5 old school country ballad feel with a modern streak sounds relevant to my interest. But there's a detuned haze on the whole thing, like the record player sluffed a few rpm, that sets my goddamn teeth on edge

#3716 Olivia Tremor Control - John Peel Session

4.5/5 a thrilling, swirling mess, the spirit of eight songs captured perfectly and spun together, improbably reinventing all those squalls and fancies and flourishes from OTC albums. Just loose enough to thrill, as pleasantly, bewilderingly psychedelic a seventeen minutes as you're likely to find

#3715 Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross - Watchmen: Volume 1

3.5/5 all the tracks are simple on paper, and some of their tricks are familiar by now, but man these guys can put just the right sheen on those synths and textures. Clip the attack here, filter in some fuzz, some magic happens. Shame about all those spoken interludes - they set the stage the first time and fuck the flow all the way up every time after

#3714 Hot Flash Heat Wave - Neapolitan

3/5 plays like a cut-rate Surfer Blood, which ain't so bad, just with less memorably hooks and a misleadingly vaporwavey album cover

#3713 Johnnie Frierson - Have You Been Good to Yourself

3/5 utterly guileless, plainspoken soul songs about god, roughly recorded, backed by little more than an electric guitar and a foot on the floor. As scruffily folky as can be, but none to thrilling beyond that simple charm

#3712 Night Shop - In the Break

4/5 some of the slow songs drag, but man Justin Sullivan is a wonderful songsmith, spinning out open-road slow-burning energy, overflowing with skin-prickling detail. There's no unnecessary note in the backing, just an endless scrolling backdrop of endless sky, shades of Josh Ritter and bandmate Kevin Morby

#3711 Wallows - Nothing Happens

4/5 hooky indie clipin along agreeably, dancing through styles. Shows vulnerability that risks tipping into self-pity, but I'll take it for those last two songs, swooping the best Neutral Milk impression since Hidden Driver right into a Carseat-worthy climax

#3710 Flume - Hi This is Flume

3.5/5 scattering and fragmented, each song skittering in a different direction, some knob turned past its intended purpose; a cobble of artifacts. A bit of a bad trip to listen to, but the pacing keeps the new ideas coming fast. Fun to watch it all fall apart once or twice

#3709 Dance with the Dead - Near Dark

3/5 hard-driving video game music real, with proper guitars and synths, a now-familiar fusion of electronic headbobbing and metal headbanging. Heads will move. All nostalgic and exciting enough, but nothing stands out or sticks

#3708 Radical Face - Ghost

3/5 a hushed night creeping through your parent's old house, a sky full of stars; the awe you experience when you're truly alone with the world. Fuel for bored souls looking to soar, but I'm too jaded now

#3707 Ultiimate Painting - Ultiimate Painting

4/5 slack, hooky, noodling, with that sweet surfy haze, Pavement meets Courtney Barnett on a long left. The kind of casually pretty indie we don't get so much of anymore

#3706 DaBaby - Kirk

2.5/5 this doesn't speak to me. And that's nobody's fault, I'm pushing 40. this is just how things are now

#3705 The Darkness - Easter is Cancelled

3.5/5 such thorough, unwinking commitment to the huge awesome riff and the shriek of sweetest anguish from the heart. Hooky, glammy, shameless joy, even if it starts to lose its punch on the second half

#3704 Gauche - A People's History of Gauche

3.5/5 wafts of B52s hooky art-trash, with a slathering of that '19 sax, bratty angular, angry, lasers focused on the rotten core, melting down like a deerhoof, as annoying as the truth

#3703 Lizzo - Cuz I Love You

3.5/5 blasting pure-pop production, Lizzo can belt, and has a lot to say. Good swaggering, strutting, staggering fun - though the self-love message feels a little pushed sometimes

#3702 Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes

4.5/5 file these guys along Garbage as a band that has, when you really count it out, a surprising number of songs you know. That drawling yelp, those slapped brushes, but mostly that, impossibly huge , open , twangy a c o u s t i c guitar . a million microchallenges, every note on the edge or a tangibly staked respite against it.

bratty, annoying, but goddamn - it is alive as shit, and there's simply nothing else like this out there full stop. a weird tortured essential mess

#3701 Tipper - Forward Escape

3/5 you know Centipede, the fleas? the way you're fighting the titular crawlie and these other assholes drop in, straight down, at speed? there's a lot of that here. clever gestures, minor mindblow moves, but it's all a scatter of crosscutting tricks

#3700 Tipper - Jettison Mind Hatch

3.5/5 an absolute master of the audio space, that opener is a sphere of experience, and the rest is a trip. A perfectly named album, music that can give you an extra dimension to escape the otherwise encircling. Tipper's been at this a long time -- he has his snakes of sound welltrained, they rear at his command, warp and bend and close in for an embrace

#3699 Twin Peaks - Lookout Low

4.5/5 man Twin Peaks wants to be the Rolling Stones and I mean that in the best possible way. They want to be the best part of best era rolling Stones, Americana rolled out with the casual expanse that only exile can bring. There's horns, ladies, honk and tonk, dust and twang and spliff and spike and everything you could hope for. And goddamn is there ever still time for them to become, with all due respect to White Reaper, the world's best American band. Guitars that exhale, drums that follow slowing hearts, and a sentiment to hitch yourself to just before the shutdown

#3698 Monster Rally - Adventures on the Floating Island

4/5 Feighan finally got there. He had an idea for tropical grooves, but they were always a bit detuned, a little clunky, never actually relaxing, mired in some uncanny valley. But he's got there - this is what Dr. Jacoby got down with, the kind of thing that make you want to pin up your own tropical paradise and rock to a tape in a coconut

#3697 Black Coffee - Music if King 2019 Appreciation Mix

3.5/5 sure is house. Flow is rocksolid, feels good in the ears. Makes you wanna groove. Count it.

#3696 The Rain Parade - Emergency Third Rail Power Trip

4/5 file this under the few paisley underground albums that got there. all that crunch and swirl works, crystallizes, gels. Melts era, finds its space, occupies it, invites you in

#3695 The Three O'Clock - Sixteen Tambourines

2.5/5 hey remember that kinda backhanded praise of Baroque Hoedown? whatever magic that was that kept the Three O'Clock from being annoying evaporated and now it all seems kinda twee and no thank you

#3694 The Three O'Clock - Baroque Hoedown

3.5/5 some breeze rides under all this jangle, all this 60's dredging, the nasal vocals, it just finds that updraft and sails. simple songs in just the right shape to bring you up