#1665 Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell

Hey kid, wanna see a dead body? And then it's your dead body, and it flutters apart in streamers of light into a million pearly butterflies and you cry at the beauty of it.

Sufjan's masterpiece, destined to be an I See a Darkness / Sapphie kind of cult classic, he tells these stories of loss and pain with such grace that they become yours and transcend themselves all at once, bathed in ethereal sounds to perfect for human hands. It cuts so deep, so quick, so well, that it hurts just to listen 4/5

#1664 Refused - The Shape of Punk to Come

I love me anyone who goes for it - better go out in a flaming blaze of shit than putter around making their same shit again and again (right, Spoon?). This is messy, indulgent, ridiculous: hardcore screaming stretched to 7+ minute songs packed with start-stops, going

THUNDERING RIFFS

weird samples

THUNDERING RIFFS


deserts of spare drums and bass


THUNDERING RIFFS

But all that contrast is all along one dimension: the dynamic and tempo shifts are huge, but (parts of Protest Song 68 aside) the tone's always the same, the basic dissonant chords, the same screaming, alternating between seething rage and exploding rage, never really landing a memorable moment, just a sprawling landscape of jagged noise, yellow-orange plateaus of staggering size. So it lacks that immediacy of punk, lacks the rich adventurousness of prog, landing in some strange middle ground that I want to love, but just don't 3/5

#1663 Alabama Shakes - Boys and Girls

Brittany's all they say: girl can belt it. The band's no great shakes (thankyou), but they're solid enough, and the Americana gets some surprising slashes: that rip right down the middle of Hold On, right? The slower songs lean too hard on the vocals, but I dig the pacing: ending with the galloping Heavy Chevy earns major one-more-spin points 3.5/5

#1662 The Bloody Beetroots - Hide

LET'S GET EVEN DUMBER! All I do is work these days, so it's often gotta be pure energy to make it into my headphones.

This is that: a handful of pretty, inspired songs (guests include Peter Frampton? Paul McCartney?) packed amidst 10 more tracks of Daft Punk to 11/ Justice to 16 / by the numbers fistpumping rockist bullshit that, well, does make the fist pump 3/5

#1661 Boys Noise - Out of the Black

Robot nipples like daftpunk, nicking all the robot voices and synthy slashes, replacing all the disco cool with dumbshit maximalist riffage and start-stop noisemaking. It's fucking exhausting by the end, but dammit, I kinda like it - hard, dumb trashy fun, robots on buffer overflow 3.5/5

#1660 Spoon - They Want My Soul

Pity Spoon. When your whole sound is so stripped, so mechanical, so deadpan, so restrained, how do you make a Spoon album that sounds like a Spoon album without making the same Spoon album?

This time they go late-era Black Keys, adding some detuned piano, some mello strings, some shimmering synthies, on top of what's otherwise a bog standard Spoon song. It's not well integrated, not a good faith effort to do something new, just feeling stapled on (esp I Just Don't Understand, yikes), a tarted up grand dame that feels flatly unnecessary 2.5/5

#1659 Future - Monster

I don't know if DJ ESCO THE COOLEST DJ IN ON THE PLANET saved Future's life or what, because the rapper dedicated his latest album to the time spent in jail by DJ ESCO THE COOLEST DJ IN THE WORLD, and every time I find some pleasant piece of sentiment in this overautotuned mess a sample added by DJ ESCO jumps in, telling me who produced it. None other than DJ ESKO THE COOLEST DJ IN THE WORLD, or maybe something about 808 MAFIA. Whatever the fuck 808 MAFIA is. I guess mixtape djs need their props, but this is bullshit.

Is this unreadable? This post has one all-caps bullshit shoutout for each sample in *one* *song*, the last song on the album, same as all those before it, ending the song and the album with a bang, a kid mumbling DJ ESCO THE COOLEST DJ IN THE WORLD 1.5/5