#2350 Mitski - Puberty 2

Mitski's low cooing, too-personal details, and simple, pulsing, chugging, 1-2-3-4 backing give Puberty 2 an icy bedroom-indie intimacy. It's quietly unsettling, making love with a stranger who seems to have known you all their life, cracking your heart to glimpses of beauty (Fireworks!). Xiu Xiu lite, the Princess of Carrot Flowers, an insidiously catchy, strange little record 3.5/5

#2349 Goodie Mob - Soul Food

Classic Southern hip hop, that stutter-step cadence, those slowroll beats, all packed with love and resistance to struggle, overflowing with a sense of place, community, truth, presence. Strong stuff 4/5

ps well shit, some time a couple hundred back I cocked up the numbering. So we jump back up a hundred. The new version, coming some day, will fix all this.

#2248 Nicholas Jaar - Sirens

Jaar doesn't stray too far from his Darkside sound, until he slowly does, riding those mysterious loops and basslines into Spanish crooning, Booksian samples, island bop - its a seductive slide into unfamiliarity.

If you're not familiar with Darkside, shit, well this is a silky, pitch-black, purple-streaked, mysterious, inky, slithering, pulsing little piece of disappear. Doubly worth checking out in that case 3.5/5

#2247 Babymetal - Metal Resistance

There's two obvious routes out of this album: to bristle at its manufactured idol-metal emptiness, or to get past the context and be taken by it's heedless, hooky momentum. I want to be won over, and at times it's grudgingly good fun. But attitude matters in rock, and the lack of credibility undercuts the riffs again and again, and they get less and less thrilling as the album piles them on 2.5/5

#2246 Kyle Dixon - Stranger Things Soundtrack

M83 imagined an 80's that never was, voiced by a music that never really existed. Dixon takes that a step further. His soundtrack drips with menace and romance, with the dark, naive thrill of being young in an uncertain world, full of possibility and fear, pulling hard from M83, and from Kraftwerk's warmest moments, packing every track with blistering, blossoming, analog texture.

The pacing's slow, completionist. This's no Fight Club. It doesn't quite capture the atmosphere, the feel. But the sound's just too sweet to ignore, too packed with endaround pathos, every tone knowing the frequency-key to your heart's darkest maybes 4/5

#2245 Martha - Blisters in the Pit of My Heart

Charmingly British pop-punk, overflowing with tight little guitar hooks and twangy little vocals and a bursting sense of miniature, raging enthusiasm and fidgety rage. Makes me smile, with a Boston (the band) kind of hookiness, like Tom Scholz was turned into a teenager, plopped in England, fully aware that 2016 would find him, 69, irrelevant, but alive 4/5

#2244 Bomb the Music Industry! - Adults!!!...Smart!!! Shithammered!!! And Excited By Nothing!!!!!!!

Maybe  my favorite album title and album cover and album title / album cover combination.

Rosenstock brings  clumsy    enthusiasm  and staggering   fallover  punk energy to  every fragile little  moment, bringing uncool  sincerity back to skittering   ska,  the 'scene ' creeps  through   every  bar, until your jaded heart accepts it's not put on and you just believe it. Do try to keep up 3.5/5