#1954 Harmonia - Musik von Harmonia

Meandering and droning and formless, even for Krautrock, this pulses and flows, with spatters of guitar and wobbles of electronics in no hurry to get anywhere, sounding improvised. There's a purity to that - this is better than average hypnosis grist, with little "how'd they make that noise" puzzles waiting in the wings 3.5/5

#1953 Oneohtrix Point Never - Garden of Delete

I've claimed it before, but this time I mean it: this is the payoff for all those years of annoying, slurred, detuned electronic fuckery that we suffered through in the early 2010's. It was Oneohtrix's own Replica that really jumpstarted the movement, so it's fitting that he's here to show us the way out.

There's still samples slurred to oblivion, but they're alongside a hundred other tricks and constructed into actual songs, into actual arcs of experience, into something you might want to actually listen to. It's one of the most impressive combinations of wild experimentalism and actual listenability I've heard in ages - there's enough melody and flow and beauty here to work its way into your head, seducing you into its strangeness, changing the room around you underneath your awareness.

Skitters, drones, buzzes, warps, woofs, chops, pulses, stutters, and it's all got that magical sense of being untouched by man - an album launched into space, corrupted on a trip past a distant sun, reconstructed by alien robots with poor motor control.

Special award for having the perfect album title and cover.

Put it on when you've got something creative to do, something that can stand up to a little disintegration 4.5/5

#1952 Blitzen Trapper - American Goldwing

Perfectly pleasant as country rock goes; Trapper can still nail that backbeat backbone, with those vocal hooks and the solo at justherightspot. It's so conservative though - I accept we're never going to get anything as gloriously batshit as Wild Mountain Nation again, but there's nothing here that even matches Furr's slightly-adventurous highlights.

Heck, there's not a single moment on here that betrays its 70's disguise: this could sidle right up alongside Skynryd or CSNY and fit right in. If you're down with that, this'll soothe you good, but fans of the band's previous work might be left underwhelmed 3.5/5

#1951 Goat (Sweden) - World Music

Guitars, drones, chants, polyrhythms, there's nothing to moor to as everything swirls psychedelic, there's no repeated riffs, just waves of noise that rise up underneath and islands of beauty and relief. It's the best and worst thing about the album, that wailing indistinctness - it's a full on hardline 60's trip if you're willing to commit to it, packed with monument and detail 4/5

#1950 Goat (Australia (Metal)) - Sign of the Dead

Add it to the list of essays I'll never quite write: accidental musical discovery in the internet age.

Latest example: I'm listening to an album by Australian band Goat, and it rolls past its Spotify endpoint into their next album, a doomy metal album by a completely different (also Australian!) band called Goat*.

Weirdly, I almost thought this was the same guys from a different era. It's got other-Goat's disarming earnestness, underproduction, and stripped-down underpromising//overdelivering charm - even if the sunny acoustic's been replaced by nailbombed guitar/bass. These're clearly dudes who love music, who really want to make music, and said fuckit and set up a tascam and banged out some clumsy, thin-mixed doom that I totally enjoyed listening to 3.5/5

*and neither of these bands are the Swedish experimental Goat the Cleveland pop Goat the Seattle jazz Goat the Spanish dance Goat and boy is Spotify confused

#1949 Goat (Australia) - Circles

It's a small record, probably made by buds in a garage // living room // barn, chugging along earnestly, a little hookless, a little boring -- but strangely charming. The relentless acoustic clatter, the sunny little chord changes, the Wolf Parade-lite howling vocal inflections, they won me over.

It sounds unforced and sincere, downright effortless. Enough for me 3.5/5

#1948 Styx - The Grand Illusion

Second-tier 70's week continues!

See, I'm learning about myself here: I'll take goofy indulgence over plodding devotion to the blues and the road and being a simple kind of man anyday.

I'm totally falling for the lame overproduction, the proggy flourishes, celebrity's-an-illusion fairy tale. This lands somewhere between Journey, ELO, and Rush on the hokey art-rock band map - it's not as catchy//sincere//virtuoso as the rest, but dammit, I had a good time coming along for the romp 3.5/5