#663 Human League - Dare

If you know Don't You Want Me, and I think you do, you get the basic idea, but three things to know if we're using that as a starting point:

• That song is actually better than you might realize, painting a curiously complex narrative that you could have missed if you dismissed it past the hook.
• That's the last song on the album, a truly unusual place to slot it and a truly strange way to end the album. Strange, possibly brilliant, evoking the uncharacteristically poppy songs that would later close albums like Loveless and Emergency and I.
• The rest of the album is a lot stranger that song might lead you to believe. A lot stranger and a lot better.

This is arty new wave cusping into synthpop, icy and detached and strangely listenable, still exciting, sending shockwaves informing Britpop's disinterest, Madchester's dancy edge, and 10's 80's revival bands like Cut Copy.

The central conflict here is between detachment and longing, between alienation and an irrepressible alien heartbeat. It's all summed up in the album's best known track, pushing you away and then asking, absentmindedly, don't you want me? The conflict and complexity belies the term synthpop: this is music that still, always, strives for more 4/5

#662 Shellac - At Action Park

Another Steve Albini act showcasing his penchant for raw, thunderous post-punk.

Everything is bone-dry and huge.

Any reverb gated beyond gated, with clipped instant decay on every drum hit and guitar screech, every note swiping from the darkness and gone in a flash. The exception is the clattering, dry bones bass, landing somewhere between The Giddy Motors and Korn's excesses. The vocals are similarly deadpanned, Falling from Albini's mouth in lumps. The result is an album that is both aggressive and aggressively disinterested, hooky and headbobbable, but almost by accident.

The problem is the sameness of the sound, exhilarating at first, wearyingly familiar after as few as 3 tracks, with no standout moments outside of the occasional clever lyrical turn. Maybe this helps explain why Albini's had greater success as a producer than a frontman: songwritingwise he's something of a one trick pony, better served when someone else's ideas are the object of his considerable production chops 3/5

#661 LFO - Frequencies (UK Version)

Fuck this is boooooooring.

I don't care if acid house is supposed to be repetitive, or that its about feeling, or that this was a formative album, or any of that crap. There's tons of acid house that manages to evoke emotion, create mood, create something, it's out there in droves, but this is just loops and loops with no head, no heart, no soul, no purpose at all.

Listen to You Have to Understand and explain to me why that's not one of the worst songs you've ever heard. Just lazy looping, amounting to nothing, evoking nothing, while being actually actively annoying with its shrill, vacant vocal sample bleating again and again and again. Imaging your friend made this song and played it for you. How good a friend would that have to be to listen to it and smile blankly for its entire 4 minutes. I'd assume they were taking the piss. I would spend every second of that four minutes trying to come up with something nice to say, and I'd come up dry and it would be awkward and that friend wouldn't play his music for me anymore. Which is just is well, because this hypothetical friend is not very good at making music that I want to listen to.

Maybe I just don't get it, man. This isn't in my wheelhouse. I admit it.

But I call bullshit on this. This is boring, amateurish music and there's a long line of things I'd listen to first even if I was in the mood for this kind of thing 1.5/5

#660 Chic - Chic

Disco sucks!

Or so I've heard.

I'm not convinced this is really a disco album though, this sounds like funk to me, even if its smoothed-out slightly douchey funk*.

And you know what, it's actually pretty good; maybe it got in during some hair's-breadth pure phase of disco's weird mayfly-fast lifecycle. The band wants you to dance ("Dance, Dance, Dance" AND "Everybody Dance" as song titles) but its pretty classy about it, full of hush and coo. Sau Paulo in particular rolls on sunset horns with cloudstrip strings, all on top of some pretty darn clever bass, sounding like a great lost Air b-side.

There's hints here of things that could be terrible when blown out of proportion (something Chic themselves would do in an album or two) but here the restraint actually gives it a good dose of something you don't associate with disco: it's actually kind of cool 4/5

* and what is Falling in Love with You doing on this album? That is a goddawful song that isn't disco or funk or anything I want to hear.

#659 Big Black - Atomizer

Steve Albini has a way with sounds, producing some of the sharpest, harshes guitar records in mainstream-ish alternative 90's rock (including, probably most famously, In Eutero). Here's his some of his earliest, self-created music: honed to a noisy industrial edge, with a hellbent guitar sound that soars like Loveless's evil twin.

The real key is the nasty, hissing drum machine that whirs at the album's heart. This isn't the bum-bum-bip-bum Casiotone looping you might expect, this is lurches and lunges with sinister energy. Its a heck of a sound; ugly, yet strangely inviting, heavy, but exhilarating instead of exhausting.

This is as pure as Albini would cut his particular brand of scathing rock and roll, decidedly worth hearing once if you're any kind of student of the era 4/5

#658 Ultraísta - Ultraísta

A curiously Garbage-like project, with producers Nigel Godrich (most famously working with Radiohead) and Joey Waronker (most famously working with Beck) fronting their band with an unrelated, undertalented female singer to make slightly soulless, reasonably compelling, electronic-tinged rock.

If you're any kind of fan of recent Radiohead this will sound familiar, and the album is mostly interesting as a referendum on Godrich's role in that band's recent sound. Similar buzzy, 5 on a flat tire bass and unknown square wave poltergeists rule the songs, and Waronker's clipped, precise beats even evoke King of Limbs-era post-post-punk skitter.

The problem is Laura Bettinson's singing, which simply don't have the Yorkeian personality to stand up to the production, landing somewhere between Broadcast* and Dirty Projectors on the mewling female inflection scale, providing vocals but little voice. Consider Easier, where she swoops the titular word up an octave or so as the main hook: the result is so baldly just a note, there's nothing to the delivery that constitutes performance as a frontwoman.

Interesting, but rarely compelling; for my money I'd rather just wait for whatever Nigel and the Radiohead boys cook up next 3/5

* good call, Dusted

#657 Big Boi - Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors

There's a new wave in hip hop, and if My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy didn't start it, it was certainly the most prominent standard-bearer. Its an era where it's ok to try to do weird, experimental things, to dabble in electronics and rock and sounds beyond time, without being labeled a sellout. It's an era where making something truly beautiful is an achievement. And perhaps most crucially, rappers are allowed to be vulnerable, to be brought down by the same everyday problems that plague us all, crises of confidence and troubles with love and the ghosts of the mistakes we've made.

And all of that applies here, with noisy, emotionally resonant production driving you into yourself, providing escapism through rhymes and rhythms and textures and the feelings they evoke alike. It's some Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness shit, disarming and diverse and curiously affecting if you let it in.

Phantogram produces three songs and they're the album's best and most representative, swirling perfect bass and humm and synth and female vocals and chops into something unreal, with a backbone of right solid rapping to hold it all together. Elsewhere, She Hates Me delivers a post-Runaway autotuned confessional, matched only by Tremendous Damage's stutterstep, heartbroken R&B for quiet desperation.

The album is overlong, as rap albums so often are, but its stuffed with enough ideas that it might, believe it or not, justify its length. Mellon Collie indeed.

Is it too late for Outkast to get back together? There's a simmering longing for those days under the surface here. With all the growth as an artist Big Boi has shown, maybe he could take the lead and take some of the pressure off Andre. Dré as sidekick to Big Boi's future-blown masterey? It's just crazy enough to work 4.5/5