#2143 Motion Graphics - Motion Graphics

Perfect cover art - detailed, detached, itchy, glitchy, fragile.

Snips and samples, Oval-lite gitches, hypermodern virtual life sliced into digital confetti and glued back together carefully and harshly. Joe Williams croon-mutters matching ruminations Hot-Chippily, buried in the mix. It's a serviceable chin scratcher, but too twisted up and fussy to be emotionally or viscerally satisfying 3/5

#2142 Basic Bastard - The Album

Minimal, repetitive house - the tones're warm and natural, the vocals spare and smooth, the vibe cool and easy to have on in the background. Good work music 3.5/5

#2141 Model 500 - Classics

Busy, exciting stuff from techno godfather Juan Atkins. Every song's restless, packed with squiggles and doubleups and shifts and squonks, pouring out mechanical and funky all at once, taking the Kraftwerk man-machine out to party hard.

The sound's analog//retro, and you can hear all the moving parts, but they whir too well, too fast, stay locked too tight, defying to you to disenchant them 4/5

#2140 Bohren & der Club of Gore - Piano Nights

Local metal drummer posted some ominous, oilslick night shots of Boston and called BudCoG the soundtrack. Sounds about right.

Call it stoner metal jazz - piano and sax and brushy drums slowed way, way down, dragged down into a streetlight void of wavering, endless synths, rendered uncanny and ominous and poisonous, but beautiful, an Edward Hopper left in a mouldering basement for a decade or two 3.5/5

#2139 William Tyler - Deseret Canyon

Tyler's got a knack for infusing complex classical guitar runs with imperfect inflections and dusty longing. There's peacefulness and simmering desire that glint with magic. It lacks that perfect pacing and atmospheric shimmer that make Modern Country such a masterpiece, but it'll sweep your extra cycles away just fine 3.5/5

#2138 Studio OST - Scenes (2012-2015)

Spacy electronic drifting. Spacy like, outer space. Like, the universe is so boring. Pretty in an endless, soft-focus nebulae kind of way - atmosphere for the void 3/5

#2137 Scott Gunn - Eyes on the Lines

A pleasant, well-produced album with no alarms and no surprises - electric guitars chugging and swooping along mid-tempo with plenty of reverby half-country flourishes. An even-smoother My Morning Jacket little wafter that you'll probably like better the less you think about it 3/5