#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?

#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

#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

#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

#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

#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

#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