#2651 Chad VanGaalen - Light Information

Somewhere in musical space there is a place of power where certain leylines cross. Where lurching dancability, post-punk post-motorik, and searching indie arpeggios convene.

In this place Wolf Parade howls, Interpol interlopes, Unicorns traipse, Arcade Fire flickers past.

Add Chad to this mostly-Canadian pantheon, the nervous energy of his album splinters anxiety into shards of joy and release, an uncorking of everything stopping us up.



I remember the polite fear I felt talking to people in the countryside just outside Toronto circa 2016. This is the natural extention.



I briefly tagged this with Segallsphere, so strongly does it buzz with the energy of Ty Segall, John Dwyer, Mikal Cronin. <- al.="" ashes="" blend="" chad="" clue="" especially="" et="" experimentation="" for="" in="" of="" p="" psychedelia.="" release="" riffage="" searching="" some="" that="" the="" ubovich="">VanGaalen's body horror obsession rides on, never stronger than the Upstream Color nightmare of Host Body, but it seems less about shock value than about a vector for grappling with the basic nightmare that is our own frail architecture, our consciousnesses in jars on stilts.

And through it all, it is hooksome and wholesome and welcoming -- curl up in a sympathetic knot of deeply human warmth and despair 4.5/5

#2650 Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Mambo Nassau

Wildly weird, obliquely cool, way way ahead of its time: it's impossible not to see this as patient zero for the kind of erratic start-stop mania that Deerhoof, Ponytail, Zach Hill got into. Talking Heads taken all the way. All that cheeky yelping, all that livewire bass, pushed out of place by new wave rejectionism, but with this lush African sensibility to make a harrowing kind of sense out of it. On its own unlistenable, unignorable wavelength 4/5

#2649 Mungolian Jetset - Schlungs

What a strange pile of beats and bangers and wobbles and whiplash. Hypnotic, moving in unexpected directions, varying song lengths and tones, attacking the same big, slow bodyrocking weaponry from every angle. The vocals are tacky, mostly, but I'm reminded of Basement Jaxx, who never bothered drawing a hard line between dancable pop and technicolor freakout, in a good way 3.5/5

#2648 Morgan Delt - Phase Zero

This could be another Tame Impala re-re-heating, but it escapes that gravity on the back of that magical production.

There's something upside-down about the sound, something as inverted as that cover art's impossible colors. It's a remarkably vertical album in a way that's hard to explain. Things are in different places in the mix than you expect, everything quiet is close, everything loud is far away, and everything's migrating to and fro as you try to keep a bead on it, turning inside out on every prime-numbered bar. It's intoxicatingly disorienting. The songwriting's a little muddy, but its hardly the point, riding that production alone this's one of the most subtly gorgeous albums I've heard in ages 4/5

#2647 Mr. Fingers - Outer Acid EP

The structure's dead simple, all wash and squiggle at medium pace, though I'll admit something alive in between the beats etc, all patient ecosystem, all emergent pattern 3.5/5

#2646 Gemini - In And Out Of Fog And Lights

Totally fine house. It shimmers here and there, melts away a work hour or two, with plenty of twinkling loops that're prettier than they have to be, but it doesn't altogether blow my hair back. And man, some of the vocal samples are awful, especially track 5's clunky "...I love you..." sample 3/5

#2645 Boof - The Hydrangeas Whisper

Like some flower, some Fibonacci sequence, some fractal, this takes time to reveal its patterns. What seems familiar at first evolves and evolves into something stranger, until you're not sure what kind of album you're listening to, like you're at some 10,000 ft view of other albums you've heard, and all their squares blur into larger blocks. Beats and samples and noise and pulses and hypnosis, a house backbone prickled with ambient and instrumental hiphop and jazz.

Take Emi's M, that samples the main piano hook from Take 5, but doubles up one of its riffs to bump it into 6/8, and saps the whole point of the song. I can't tell if that's hackery or brilliant -- but in the moment it works, this echo of something familiar made hooksome.

Somewhere 7 or so songs in you'll look back and wonder how you got here and feel like you can see the path, like it couldn't have gone any other way. A quietly brilliant record that reveals more the deeper you dig into it 4.5/5