#2136 Scott Hirsh - Blue Rider Songs

A right pleasant drift of country swoon and honkytonk shuffle, with the occaisional blissful drift right on up into the moon. It's understated, My Morning Jacket or Wilco without the unbecoming ambition, just a humble passing through, little flourishes in the form of a rumbling sax accent, a lady passing though for the chorus, a few unfortunate Framptony guitar parts.

Still! It mostly puts right about the right amount of chrome on the worndown sound - at very least, Raga of the Sea and Blue within Blue are worth your 6 minutes to melt to 3.5/5

#2135 Holger Czukay - Movie

Take everything endless about Can and everything scattershot about bent-pop Zappa and here you are. Czukay's solo debut takes disco jangle and a splattering of samples and folds it all into aimless krautrock jams, a dizzying, hypnotic piece of puckish madness.

Cool in the Pool is its Frontier Psychiatrist, that one track when the adventurousness condenses into something downright hooky, but the rest is all over the place ever-boring/ever-exciting - a gem if you're in the market for something unique 3.5/5

#2134 Midriffs - Subtle Luxuries

Listen / buy here!

There's a great little surfy pop-punk scene here in Boston. Personal favs Vundabar are the perfect example - the two bands have a similar racket: those those startstops, those keeeee guitars, those oooooooOOOOOOooooos.

But Midriffs got their own thing going, scraping your knees with rattling FIDLAR scuzznshriek, always ready to fall backwards into a spacy aside, tripping onward, unpolished and vital 4/5

#2133 Nevermen - Nevermen

I want to like this. It's squirmy, dabbling in psychadelic swooning, meandering noises, bursts of hard guitars, and the occasional hip hop blast. But it just doesn't work. Musically it comes close, but those vocals are at odds with eachother, cooing, chiming singsonging, rapping, Nu-Metal rapping, Nu-Metal screaming, and on and on.

Nevermen seem to simultaneously want to be intellectual and experimental and indie and hard and intense and revolutionary. It's a tonal mess that comes across as trying way too hard too do way many things and doesn't end up pulling off any of them 2.5/5

#2132 Dr. Feelgood - Down by the Jetty

I keep expecting to like these classic pub rock albums better, but this just sounds like - well - a pretty decent band you might see at a bar on any given night. Fair enough.

Lee Brilleaux brings some bark and grit, and the spikey guitar playing bristles up the faster songs, but it's a totally anonymous sound in 2016 2.5/5

#2131 Eggs Over Easy - Good 'n' Cheap

This's a fun nugget for the amateur music historian, a '72 nudge on the British pendulum, away from prog and general rock bombast, back to blues-revival grit, leading to pub rock and punk by extension, arriving right alongside Americana classics like Exile and Muswell Hillbillies. Neat, right?

Absent that context, it doesn't sound like anything all that special though. Pretty similar to stuff that came before and after, every song plodding along with dust and rustle and a distant memory of the blues. It makes for a slow-day listen, but drained of any ambition other than to shake off the frills it ends up feeling uninspired 3/5

#2130 Africaine 808 - Basar

Labyrinthine, slow-writhing electronic music. A tangle of non-Western beats skitter and pulse, driven by their own motives, while pulses and squiggles and drifting Orbitalisms dance over top.

A sludgy lull around Nation / Ready for Something New nearly kills the momentum, and the whole thing runs a bit long, but I'm reminded distantly of Since I Left You - it's an album with its own agenda, that moves at its own pace, running across personal, secret contours that could take years to map 3.5/5