#2694 Crass - The Feeding of the Five Thousand

Do They Owe Us a Living? is one of the greatest punk songs of all time. It's as angry and hooky and blunt and recklessly tight as anything out there, branding you with its message in a minute twenty.

And this is one of the great art punk albums, end to end. Harrowing, fearless, slashed with flashes of noise and screed, dropping to seconds of silence in the flash of an A-bomb, but packed with hooky moments and thrilling production. It's as unflinchingly furious and nasty as a totally enjoyable album can be. An unequivocal, bracing classic 4.5/5

#2693 The Jam - In the City

Arguably better than the more polished (great!) All Mod Cons and (also great!) Sound Affects. There's nothing to compete with Tube Station / That's Entertainment, and the pacing drags by comparison, and it's a little hook light, and..

So not as good, but The Jam sound rough, harried, hungry - its more true to the frustration at the heart of their sound, a more-perfect bridge between their punk / retro contradictions, and more exciting in its own way 4/5

#2692 DJ Python - Dulce Compañia

Icy, shimmering ambient / house, sliding into space slowly, finding wormhole shortcuts between Latin offbeats. Spacy, peaceful, but laced with tension, a trip just on the line of too much 3.5/5

#2691 Errorsmith - Superlative Fatigue

Too much human music. We've been at this for what, coming up on 40 years? And electronic music mostly still sounds grasping and immature. Maybe I'm applying rockist impulses where they don't belong, but I feel like I've got to do all the heavy lifting to appreciate some of this shit.

Behond Errorsmith showing off his million-wave additive synthesizer, or something. The first couple tracks are wanky human-not-human showoff reels. When it turns into actual music, sure, those're pretty rich tones, and they skitter like a skitterer do, but it feels like a demo reel more than anything worth hearing in its own right, a bunch of sounds in search of structure, melody, or movement 2.5/5

#2690 Spirit Adrift - Curse of Conception

A doom metal album that can't help but indulge in big soaring 80's guitar operatics.

Or maybe a 80's revival band walking resolutely into swampy suicide.

Out of step in two utterly inconsistent ways, changing tempos and tones constantly and subtly, hopeless and hopeful all at once. A conundrum, a weird piece of metal pieced together by aliens that don't understand human emotions, maybe better for it 3.5/5

#2689 The Rezillos - Can't Stand the Rezillos

Loose-as-fuck newwave/punk, dipping into the goofy scifi tip before just about anyone, with shades of psychobilly rollick creeping in. They sound like they're actually having a good time, very uncool in '78 3.5/5

#2688 Eater - The Album

Covers in punk.  A whole thing there. If you're gonna do it, at least fuck it up.

Eater drags Sweet Jane over the coals, pumping adrenaline into its wistful regret; puts manic uncoolness in the horny desperation of Queen Bitch; and shit, they just just straight knock 3 years off of I'm Eighteen and leave it feeling freshly reckless. The originals follow suit, throbbing along at triplespeed. Eater doesn't have time. They're a band of the moment -- what's punk but a fuckyou to the past and future anyway 4/5