#3522 Eno Moebius Roedelius - After the Heat

3/5 Cluster and Eno, having shipped their practice tapes a couple times, figure out their electronic trickery and dickery enough to make some some songs. There's slow moments given time to breathe, landscapes, melodies, reflection; enough structure from which to appreciate the squonkery. It's still not _great, but at least they came with table stakes.

#3521 Cluster, Eno - Cluster & Eno

2.5/5 Cluster's previous album sounded like clumsy Eno experiments, and now we're official. Lots of "hey that's a weird noise, keep making it, here's another one", too little music that evokes mood or setting

#3520 Cluster - Sowiesoso

2.5/5 beatless and boring for krautrock, tuneless and ugly for ambient. Adventurous in invention but lazy as musicmaking execution

#3519 Bon Iver - i,i

3/5 I listened to this on a very long walk home, and again on a long bus ride, in spaces more befitting its charms than my usual work soundtracking, and it still left me cold. 22 A Million got by because it was so adventurous in its explosion of the Bon Iver sound, and this has touches of that, but mostly it's unsticky crooning and production ornamentation (Hey Ma the only exception, and even that's half the gutpunch of Over Soon or Creeks).

#3518 Justin Jay - Everything Will Come Together, pt. 1

3/5 pleasant enough, but halfhearted and slight. So midtempo and consistent and unadventurous compared to Home. Everything Will Come Together, pt 1, makes me want to remind Jay that no it won't, not on its own (or maybe it's outlining a plan to make pt 2 the good one?)

#3517 Sparks - Hello Young Lovers

3.5/5 for my money, I'll take this over Lil' Beethoven for my late-era Sparks repetition-fest. More quietly strange, without the sharp edges of cringey bitterness. From the unpredictably direct opener to the closing howl against obscurity, everything swoops in placing, seemingly content to amuse itself. 20 albums deep, this might just be Sparks finally out to pasture, humming to themselves about what might have been

#3516 Brian Witzig - The Iron Horse

3.5/5 funky enough, and gets the production dust and pop right, that bit of retro mythology elevates, everything a bit road-worn. pretty good poker music