#2189 Jimmy Reed - I'm Jimmy Reed

Points for doing it first-ish aside, this's mellow, lazily pleasant, ultimately unspectacular stuff. The mix's thin, the tempo's lazy, the delivery's not especially passionate, the performance's shaky, and there's no deviation from the blues blueprint whatsoever. For some people, that might all be a good thing - this is no-frills stuff in a no-frills genre, but it left me underwhelmed 2.5/5

#2188 Toots and the Maytals - Reggae Got Soul

An album packed with lilting, soulful, searching, light//dark pulse, pulling in a variety of adjacent Jamaican styles. There's desperation and light, the pain and the balm, Toots' voice coming on strong through it all. Rich, enjoyable stuff 3.5/5

#2187 Tycho - Epoch

A perfectly good album, following up on all of the strengths of Awake: those chiming guitars, that chugging pulse, the swirls of unknown electronic bliss. Perfect spaceout/work music.

But Tycho's fallen into the Ratatat/Spoon trap, their albums sound like they're supposed to sound, with only incremental nudges at the edges, lacking the crispness of that instinctive breakthrough expression. Ratatat's latest album ended up becoming my favorite of theirs, and this might take a similar grower-y path, but I can't help but wish Tycho hadn't leveled off so soon 3.5/5

#2186 Starcadian - Saturdaze

Always chasing the Feed Me's Big Adventure dragon - trying to find that sweet spot where someone uses all those superfat synth piles and chippy-chop skitter-drops to make something thrilling, without tipping over into stadium-rave fratiness.

This hits it better than most: an idea-packed, good-fun record with all the best of the 80's revival sound. The stage is set with Kavinsky highway danger, M83 romance, and more screaming guitars and wailing saxes and tom scales than you could possibly need. Throw in some glitchy tricks and some Daft Punk robot-disco - I'll be damned it all works. Despite all the borrowing of borrowing, it pulls it off. A surprisingly cohesive, damned exciting listen,  4/5

#2185 Bon Iver - 22, A Million

I was no big fan of the old Bon Iver - icy, magical, but too whiny, too one-note to hold my attention beyond a listen or two.

But this is different. At its best it's fractured, utterly fragile, crystalline, mysterious, magical.

--

I've spent spare cycles trying to pin down what the 10's sound is, going to be, and 2016 seems to be suggesting that it's the decade of production. I talked about it in my A Moon Shaped Pool review- after the 00's splintering of rock into cute/pretty/wistful/adventurous near-pop, a lot of the interesting music coming along doesn't present rock-traditional performance at all. Any plucking of strings and thrumming of throats is just raw material for something strange and broken - a reflection of our right-fucked, terrified, better-virtual-than-dead present, maybe.

--

Bon Iver's striking reinvention reminds me of Radiohead's latest, but also the autotune-and-worse fuckery of 808s/Fantasy/Yeezus era Kanye, with no small hints of Laurie Anderson's vocal fantasias. The first sound you hear is a held note, buzzing and clipping like a glitched video of a ringing bell, joined by another voice, at least as frail, delivering the least//most reassuring message imaginable through all that tenuousness: "it might be over soon".

It's a staggering way to open a record, and there is only the barest hint of levity - instead the uncertainty turns itself inside out, resolving into a desperate kind of hope. It might be over soon.

A few minutes later comes 715 - Creeks, a fucking landmark track. Just Vernon's voice, twice, dueling dual-autotuned, surging and dropping. Not a single instrument, not a single drum beat, just two minutes of cryptic writhing, chopping you off at the knees. A wildly adventurous, effortlessly effective piece of songwriting.

The album's a bit frontloaded, but it's short, and gets by on its momentum. As the songs grow longer on the second side, as the album's strange surging method becomes familiar, you settle into snow and let the stars burst, marveling at the time dilation of that infintite 34 minutes, over soon, ready to replay.

--

I fetishize, sometimes, the creation born via uncertain means, for alien purpose. But its a fine line between that imagined purpose and chaos, between strange purpose and no purpose at all? 22, A Million rides that line thrillingly close to the edge and lands on four wheels, a highwire wobble resolved, confidence restored, leaving you all the more thrilled for ever doubting it. Even all the cover art symbols, the ascii-fucked song titles, it all works as a strange, novel artifact. I couldn't have seen this coming from Bon Iver - this album gives me hope after all, the long way around 4.5/5

#2184 Baltimora - Living in the Background

Goofy, goodtime euro pop from those Tarzan Boy guys. The rest sounds more or less like you'd expect: very 80's guitars, very 80's synths, with just a touch of nightclub fantasia. Perfectly fine. Not my scene 3/5

#2183 Jack Rose - Raag Manifestos

Rolling, endless waves waves waves of acoustic guitar, surging like tide, crashing onto rocks, Strumming Music taken to biblical extremes. Something like licks, like riffs surface like half drowned dogs, intricate fingerwork swims in the shoals, but all is lost in seas of last measure's notes crashing into the last, crashing into the last, thick with tension and oilslick dread. Elemental, adventurous, brilliantly executed, nearly unbearable 3/5