#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

#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

#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

#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

#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

#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!

#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.

#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

#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.

#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

#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

#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

#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

#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

#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