This Year's Model

One extra year on top of 40, 198 new albums heard:

• Album of the year is probably Night Shop's The Fountain - every song so full of longing and resignation and pitched right at this moment
  
• So much ambient, most of it necessarily unspectacular. 7.5 hours of Moby especially so
• Darkside's Random Access Memories Memories is the kind of adventurousness every remix project should aspire to
• New albums from Squid, Spirit of the Beehive, Idles, and The Avalanches were all varying degrees of disappointing, but had a lot to live up to.

Most represented:

• 4 Jeff the Brotherhood albums, all are pretty good!
• 4 Kelley Stoltz albums, all are pretty ok!
• 5 Je Suis France albums, still super underrated!
  
• 6 King Gizzard albums as usual!
  

The whole year didn't have much that really blew me away, but that might be the year talking!

See you next one! Maybe!

Gimme Fiction

Herzog (still the 2nd most underrated band in the country) has a lovely new one out in Fiction Writer. It's the fist-pumpingest thinnest lizziest set they've ever put out, packed with bangable riffs and shoutalong choruses.

They've still got that great talent for simultaneously wearing the hats of rock gods and regular dudes, bountiful and generous and honest; like how you might have wished Weezer had grown up into, like sincere Tenacious D. Herzog wants to take you as high as a Boston spaceship, but it's all more ET than Independence Day - the ship's gonna come down to you and a kind stranger will talk to you face to face and say If You're Alone, You're in Our Band Now, with songs about problems delivered with transcendent energy, a spiral staircase to the sky. That's all a way to say, check out the new album, it's a generous dose of just what you need on the home stretch.

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