#965 Disappears - Guider

Guider is a compressed version of the band's debut, walking a straight road of tempered tempo, dynamics and tone, lacking Lux's stabby spirit, coming across as strangely limp. The only place that works in its favor is on the epic-length, Krauty closer, Revisiting. That track's a minor masterpiece, the rest is filler 2.5/5

#964 Black Dice - Mr. Impossible

A funky piece of fucked up noise-pop-rock, full of samples and squiggles and squonks, devoid of traditional song structures, nor any trace of traditional songwriting. It can sound like gibberish, but underneath there're alien semantics, and careful listening can inspire you to plumb the depths for threads to build anticipations from, so that  you might experience the joy of having those expectations betrayed.

It's a lot of work that may or may not be worth it, depending on how aggressively bored you are with the mainstream alternatives.  Brunswick Sludge is a standout, the pendulum of panning, wobbling vocals offsetting sliding sines, creating a sickly psychadelic headspace. But generally it sounds lazy. Black Dice do scant little to meet you halfway, dumping out a pile of sonic non-sequiturs like half the pieces from a dozen puzzles, with no greater solution and no particular motivation to figure out how they relate.

Why should you put in the work if the band won't? 2.5/5

#963 Disappears - Lux

Decidedly of the Thee Oh Sees vein, this is an emerging post-aughts sound that I can get behind: a relentless rhythm pulse built on restless, elliptical basslines, with the guitars and vocals punching outward, blades slashing gaps in burlap sacks, everything seething and boiling, with dark, rolling details pulling the groove subconscious. Things dip a bit too Jesus and Mary Chain on the second side and the energy wanes, but when the power is on and the wires are live, this is potently listenable, exciting shit 4.5/5

#962 Daedelus - Love To Make Music To

Here, more so than usual, Daedelus bridges the gaps between instrumental hip hop and loop-driven electronica. The common factor is the loops' status as weary old souls, whether they earned their scars from years in record bins, or their eternal existence as mathematically perfect, buzzy tones; the then and now weave together to make something graceful and unexpected. The elegant sense of pacing and flow that underpins it all helps too: Daedelus has an effortless sense of what's come and what should happen next 4/5

#961 µ-Ziq - Chewed Corners

Loopy electronica that inspires one to say little more about it. Not especially evocative of feeling or place, not especially innovative in technique (at least not to my philistine ears), not able to chill me out nor pump me up. A perfectly inoffensive piece of music that I can't find much motivation to listen to 2.5/5

#960 Metallica - Master of Puppets

More carefully constructed and less thrilling than Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets is still a rock goddamn solid piece of rock, everything in its right place, every part loud and fast, except for those parts that are slow and quiet so that the can better set up later hard and fast parts. No dead weight, no wind drag. Sometimes its a little too perfect, humming in place like an ersatz perpetual motion machine sluffing energy. But when it pops, it pops with precision, as on the title track's hammerbacks, Damage, Inc's thunderous closing, and Orion's shimmering, gorgeous progism.

It also represents an important move in Metallica's approach to its subject matter. My main beef with Ride the Lightning is its unimaginative leaning on death as a theme, and as Steve Huey aptly observes, Master of Puppets isn't about power so much as it's about powerlessness. On Lightning Hetfield threatened from above, promising destruction. Here he is merely the harbinger of a greater destruction than himself, telling of doom coming for us all, facing it with defiance and despair, alongside us and as helpless as anyone, making the message at once all the more relatable and all the more terrifying. I can't overstate how much this shift changes the entire feel of the album: it's a move that allows the band to escape its own ridiculousness and become a portent of something larger, achieving greatness via abjection of the throne. This everyman toughguy/vulnerability angle was crucial to their breakthrough appeal on the Black Album, and beats grunge to the punch by about half a decade. Its enough to make you wonder if these guys don't have friends in low places. Real low. Like, in hell 4/5

#959 Todd Rundgren - Something / Anything

Hot on the heels of my longwinded Mellon Collie resequencing deconstruction, here's another album meant to be taken as a series of semi-discrete sides.

As with Corgan's, Rundgren's opus features a whipcrack series of tone changes and sonic swerves, going from soppy ELO pop to delierious Zappa 4th-wall-knocking to Bowie circa black country rock. I can't imagine what the hell people did with it in the 70's, when people settled in for some yacht rock and got pitched overboard into strange tides indeed. It's enough to make you rethink some of these art/rock/pop divides, so talented is Rundgren at the high / low of it all.

Frankly though, at times it just feels like he's showing off, and as a result there's not much soul to it all. The batshit interludes aside, everything feels very carefully planned and overly polished, but its a catchy, complicated, bewildering array of 25 songs that you'll enjoy spending a few listens digesting 4/5