#1971 The Flaming Lips - Transmissions from the Satellite Heart

Wayne Coyne's voice, that sub-Martschian winge, it really is unpleasant.

Say "Eddie Vedder" out loud. Those thudding Es and Ds and dead-end R: it sounds like his voice, his deep, steady groan.

Say "Wayne Coyne" out loud. That about sums it up.

I wanted to love this, its strange production choices, its lurching prog-ish hitches, its slashes of uncanniness. And I got tempted to love it again and again - I damn do dig that swirling, brilliant build on Moth in the Incubator! The bonkers backing makes up for the vocals most of the time. It's an idea-packed record that you'll admire and occasionally enjoy, but might not love as much as you want to, those shamelessly bleats crashing the bedroom again and again 3.5/5

#1969 Flesh Panthers - Ngc 2632

Relentless, clattering garage rock, packed with scuzz and seared guitars and blownout shouting, band falling down the stairs forever. Glammy swagger and sha-la-la's give the briefest breaks from your inevitable moshing/dancing/thrashing.

Good fun, in other words, but probably more fun live - you can almost hear the club's soundsystem straining, those tinfoil guitars played harder and harder till they slice the little arms to ribbons 4/5

#1968 Kneebody and Daedelus - Kneedelus

I was in a high school jazz band with Kneebody drummer Nate Wood. Lil' trivia for ya.

Kneebody's a knotty little jazz/rock/[?] outfit with some real clean little hitches in their sound. They played mindblowing backup to Busdriver back in 2000something, and now here they are with The Weather collaborator Daedelus -- full circle.

The combination's an incredibly fluid, winding sound: gentle slashes of horns, rocksolid skitter from Wood, with subtle touches from Daedelus. It's jazz rendered otherworldly by unclear means - beautiful, trippy, hooky, as close to early Sigur Ros as that cover alien might suggest, albeit from other angles entirely. And then again and again that jazz spills over genre levees into ambient territory that's more Daedelus's purview, into some unholy rockist hybrid, until the whole plain floods.

I'm a big fan of anything that defies categorization, that thwarts reverse engineering - this fits the bill nicely. Fans of pretty, adventurous stuff will have a good time failing to tease this apart 4/5

#1967 Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - Euclid

A nice counterpoint to those deadboring loopers I've been bashing: this has a real twiggy, organic quality for something so purely electronic. The analog machines are let to breathe, evoking night and space, and the Labyrinth suite lives up to its name, conjuring twisty spaces to fall backwards into. Mysterious, quietly magical stuff 4/5

#1966 Andrew Hung - Rave Cave Level 1

An EP of 3 pointless little bleepbloop loopers from one of Fuck Buttons' button-fuckers. Lo-bit chirps with some higher-fi simmers, bringing no particular getupandmove energy, no particular hypnotic cloaking, no indication that these took more than 20 minutes to slap together.

Small context bonus for ably soundtracking reading about Trump's terrifying war on decency 2.5/5

#1965 Oneohtrix Point Never - The Fall into Time

Six deeply, mechanically minimal tracks, shifting only barely as they loop in place. It makes a certain sense: Oneohtrix always played with time, now instead of dragging individual samples incrementally into detunery, it's the whole song stretched back into a different kind of tunefulness.

The patience, the slow-shift bleeding out from under you, is the album's small thrill. But it ends up feeling like a conceptual wank and won't compete with any of the greats for pure ambient ambiance 3/5

#1964 Ty Dolla Sign - Free TC

Nobody raps anymore. The hip hop station in town's all auto-tuned crooning, all club-ready nonsense. Free TC has just about everybody as a guest, but even the guest rappers barely rap.

There's hope up front, a laidback west coast groove rolling out over the first few tracks. There's even some rapping! But then it just gets waterier and waterier and waterier, a puddle of auto-tune fuckery over forgettable bleep bloops for an hour twelve 2.5/5