#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

#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

#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

#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.

#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

#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

#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.

#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

#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

#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

#3738 Kiwi Jr - Football Money

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

#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

#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

#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

#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

#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

#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

#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