#2196 Easy Star All-Stars - Dub Side of the Moon

The All-Stars surprised me with their take on Ok Computer. It was actually pretty ungimmicky, full of listenable versions that stood on their own and cast new light on the originals.

This's probably the album I'm likely to return to: it's a good spaceout listen, with some fun twists, running off into cloudy outros, making bigger swings on the big moments, and trying weirder takes on the weirder songs.

But there's nothing essential about it. It does not escape the gimmick trap.

Meeting the stoner-ready expansiveness of Dark Side doesn't require much of a stretch, and there's no real heart in the performances. Ok Computer's desperation and tightness made for a more challenging adaptation and a more rewarding listen - if you only hear one ESAS gone-reggae album, start there 3/5

#2195 Joyce Manor - Never Hungover Again

Mildly exciting pop-punk that sounds like a watered-down version of better bands like The Thermals, Cloud Nothings, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Japandoids. The problem's a lack of danger: even when the songs get fast there's no real sense of the wheels coming off. The chords change right on cue, the vocals strain uncharmingly and without no risk of breaking, the words lay out simple problems that'll probably turn out fine.

Not every punk band has to fling itself headlong into the river, but c'mon, at least give us a sweat 2.5/5

#2194 Starcadian - Sunset Blood

Themed like a soundtrack to a Stranger Things-esque 80's/Steven King/sci-fi movie, this album does got its moments of M83/Daftpunk/Vaporwave charm. The standout tracks are the propulsive, delightfully glitchy instrumentals (Sgt Tagowski, Pompey Pirate) that make you want to lightcycle off into the night.

Unfortunately, most of the album leans too hard on robot vocals, lazy disco tempos, and over-simple artificially-sweetened hooks -- it ends up sounding an awful lot like Random Access Memories (which came out six months previous).

Sunset Blood's uneven, and not as strong as Saturdaze, but there's enough hooks, swerves, surprises and robot-pop innovation to make it worth a listen 3.5/5

#2193 Car Seat Headrest - How to Leave Town

Impossibly bedroom. Those drum machine beats, those intimations of weakness.

But where your usual bedroom album is small, full of 3-chord 3-versers about narrow details and universal platitudes, this goes in the total opposite direction.

The songs are sprawling, endless, strange.

The sentiments are so personal they become universal (dig the verse about disillusionment with Brian Wilson), universal doubts made strangely small, wrapping yourself in a comforter against the hugeness of the universe.

Musically its a sloppy mess, lacking most of the hookiness of Teens of Denial, most of the rock power of Teens of Style, laying down scattershot synths and guitars as surging backdrop.

But lyrically, kid had it all along. For a certain band of smart, sensitive, quietly terrified, coping-with-coping-with-being music nerds, Will Toledo is fucking Jesus.

Listening to this, in retrospect, its incredible he progressed from this to Teens of Denial. What the fuck will he do next? 3.5/5

#2192 Drive-By Truckers - American Band

As the record spins up you hear this charming hybrid of Neil Young and Mountain Goats' John Darnielle. The vocal sound strikes you first, and onward to the musical headlong churn, to the combination of large-scale protest and small-scale personal desperation. There's real magic for a few tracks there, as the dawn breaks on America, helpless and hopeful and desolate and dying.

But then some energy's lost, some paucity of ideas is revealed, and the intimate edge falls off, and you're left chugging through another 8 or so lazy tracks, the lockstep choruses buttressed predictably by the verses' underwhelming observations, sounding like B-sides off of Neil Young's lamest swings at relevancy. The songs putt along at halfassed Americana tempos, reveal no new musical ideas, leaning on lyrics that aren't as profound as they hoped they'd be.

There's a spark here that didn't quite catch flame. Here's hoping the Truckers get angry, get weird, get a bug in 'em that inspires them to do something their heroes never would've 3/5

#2191 Trap Them - Crown Feral

That tunnel/cloud/portal on the cover says it all - Trap Them latest is mysterious, disorienting, furiously propulsive, out of control, turned around. There's surges and start-stops and unexpected moves, but the energy's more about hardcore immediacy than prog wankery. There's not so much weird time signatures as a twitchy willingness to stab timing in the neck for a bar or two -- no showy guitar histrionics, just relentless waves of frantic motion.

You get a slow burn to open, and after that you're down the eldritch drain, barely a pause from the ever-changing nightmare thrill-ride, never boring for one second, full of mayfly riffs and punishing changups (those drum bursts on Speak Nigh. motherfucker). A knotty, mysterious, headlong metal album, packed with subtle labyrinths to spend a century or two hurtling through 4/5

#2190 Meshuggah - The Violent Sleep of Reason

Brilliant, mysterious, insidiously simple, super-complex metal. A gigantic, hypnotic knot of guitars thundering at you, a slow-rising tide of destruction, the next hundred years in gristled timelapse. Don't let your ear chase those time signatures, just brace for the slow wash of the inevitable 4/5