#970 Tobacco - Maniac Meat

Is it too late to have Tobacco produce the next Beck record? Beck's two guest tracks on this album are certainly more exciting than anything he's put out on his own lately. It'd be a good fit: as on his albums with Black Moth Superrainbow, Tobacco uses warped, fractured electronic means to achieve perfectly catchy pop ends. At its best, it can be thrillingly toe-tapping and strange.

There're pacing issues that keep it from being great though: some of the songs run about 10 bpm too slow and about a minute too long, overextending their reach. Frankly, the album as a whole could cut at least a few songs and be better for it. But before it goes all Fruit Stripe on you, its a pretty tart little package 3.5/5

#969 J Dilla - The Shining Instrumental

Dilla's signature atmospherics and inventiveness are on display, but none of this quite pops on its own, coming across as waverey and indisctinct, more like the hangover than the high. The problem is that, while the man's beats are legendary, previous releases looped them just enough times to give you a taste, to let the groove sink in, and then moved on. Here they're stretched to full-track length, and without the verses that stretched them they hang baggy and uninspiring 2.5/5

#968 Blu and Exile - Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them

Thoughtful, effortlessly complex rhymes with heart to spare, spun over pretty pretty production. You get a sense of a mournful Blu, aware of death and resigned, pouring his heart out, looking for meaning in the words, finding it, and needing more and more. A hip hop In the Wee Small Hours, this works for dark night atmospherics and close listening alike 4/5

#967 The Rolling Stones - Some Girls

The context of this album is key. The Stones had been on a downslide since the Exile days and the styles of the time were overtaking their basic hard-rock approach. Here they're thrashing against the world, lashing out at oddball angles, clattering and jangling like they hadn't since, well, the Exile days. From the disco bump of Miss You to the refracted New Wavism of Shattered, they less try to approximate the fashions of the time than set them up in a room, get drunk, and put the resulting staggering and smashing on tape. The slower songs (Far Away Eyes, Some Girls) fail to spark, but the rest is as exciting as the band had been in years. Decidedly worth hearing, in all of its defiant pop-art ramshackle glory 4/5

6/25/14: god, this really is one of their best, it's a mess, it's a blast

#966 Tom Waits - The Heart of Saturday Night

Tom Waits in his early days, not yet a growling beast, but a tuneful, mournful bard of the empty hours of the night. His beat moments cool as they come, full of Beck/Dylan phantasmagorica: dude knows his way around a turn of phrase. But at times he sounds just this side of Billy Joel, longing loungily without much edge to speak of. It's a mixed bag musically, but worth a visit for the vivid portrait it paints 3.5/5

#965 Disappears - Guider

Guider is a compressed version of the band's debut, walking a straight road of tempered tempo, dynamics and tone, lacking Lux's stabby spirit, coming across as strangely limp. The only place that works in its favor is on the epic-length, Krauty closer, Revisiting. That track's a minor masterpiece, the rest is filler 2.5/5

#964 Black Dice - Mr. Impossible

A funky piece of fucked up noise-pop-rock, full of samples and squiggles and squonks, devoid of traditional song structures, nor any trace of traditional songwriting. It can sound like gibberish, but underneath there're alien semantics, and careful listening can inspire you to plumb the depths for threads to build anticipations from, so that  you might experience the joy of having those expectations betrayed.

It's a lot of work that may or may not be worth it, depending on how aggressively bored you are with the mainstream alternatives.  Brunswick Sludge is a standout, the pendulum of panning, wobbling vocals offsetting sliding sines, creating a sickly psychadelic headspace. But generally it sounds lazy. Black Dice do scant little to meet you halfway, dumping out a pile of sonic non-sequiturs like half the pieces from a dozen puzzles, with no greater solution and no particular motivation to figure out how they relate.

Why should you put in the work if the band won't? 2.5/5