#3533 Kwiaty - Kwiaty

3.5/5 solid record held back by being very familiar (the very 90's underground/shoegaze sound) and very unfamiliar (the to-me unintelligible Polish lyrics). Also, too many slow songs. But flashes of frission

#3530 The Car is on Fire - Lake and Flames

3/5 TCioF veers off the dancepunk road to nowhere, sands down its spikes, adds a lot of atmosphere and production, and ends up with something much richer. A sprawling, 23-song indie romp, packed with ideas, none of which really grab me, but I admire the band's nerve to become something wildly more interesting than their blueprint

#3529 The Car is on Fire - The Car is on Fire

2.5/5 Brittle dancepunk, the yelp of the Dismemberment Plan prickled into Hot Hot Heat bristle. The nasal vocals are pretty rough, and the angular hopscotching gets exhausting

#3528 The Car is on Fire - Ombarrops!

3/5 TCioF continues to evolve on their last album, bouncing from idea to idea. Songs morph constantly, electronics and production tricks in every exposed seam.

It's all very clever, but the lack of personality and urgency hold the band back. If these songs are about anything (sleeping seems to be a theme??) it's more of a puzzle than I can solve, and tricks are no substitute for hooks

#2555 Michal Minert - Space Jazz

God this overflows with things to like. Packed with djshadowready soulful samples, justice-big electroriffs, blasts of horns, prefuse startstops, washes of reverb, slashes of rightangle rap -- like, who the fuck is this kid? Cursory reading says he tours with a full on fucking band and goddamn I want to see _that_

It's spacy, sure, but immediate, empathetic, hard-edged, thrilling -_ all this kind of bracing shit that is the negative space of not space and not jazz and coming at ya hard. I mean, put on Another World and tell me you're sitting still and I'll shut this whole motherfucker down. That shit is _fire_ and the rest is reflected heat 4.5/5

#2150 Funk Factory - Funk Factory

A wildly writhing album -- a tangle of funk guitars, burbling bass, soulful rhythms, jazzy flourishes, swooping choral oooohs and scattershot vocal pops. Organ swoops through and out to space. Guitars light the floor on fire and jump out the window. Synthy burbles melt faces and melt themselves.

Superficially there's flashes of p-funk, and prescient touches of Kamasi Washington, but Funk Factory's soulmate might be Zappa - this is as restless as his bent pop, as knottily jazzy as his Hot Rats instrumentals.

Fuck, even that doesn't do this justice - one of the most lively, unpredictable albums I'ver heard in a while, a band twisting hard through chicanes only they can see 4/5