#3829 Car Seat Headrest - Making a Door Less Open

3.5/5 what a mess! what a glorious, stupid, shitty, wonderful album, the most 3rd-album-feeling album I can think of, it's actual position in the discography (19th?(?)) aside. Impossible to critique - all the worst things about it are the best things about it - the disjoint structures, the uneven pacing, the clumsy performances, the weird lazy asides. At times it feels like forced roughness -- how do you make a ramshackle album this deep into a career this newly huge? Others it feels impossibly true and brave. And man Hollywood is an awful song. Like the twin peaks dougie arc - I'm not sure I even like any of it but man it's in my head

#3828 Run the Jewels - RTJ4

3.5/5 as explosively catchy as they've ever been, beats bang and slap and all that. Mike and P sound pissed off and playful beyond all reason, this'd be a lot of fun if it wasn't just impossible to have fun right just fucking now

#3827 Golden Retriever, Chuck Johnson - Rain Shadow

4/5 the opener's a tough one, endless and dissonant, horns and Johnson's pedal steel running against the grain of the ambient hums. But its a rite of passage, earning you a drink from the album's exploding heart. First, a stop through Lupine, a spacy dispatch worthy of late Sigur Ros -- and then you arrive at Sage Thrasher, as unknowable as they come, gorgeous in every phase of its descent into chaos, with Creosote Ring as a fitting closer, that 13-6-13-6 song length cadence subconsciously tying it all together

#3826 Gaussian Curves - Clouds

2.5/5 doesn't work as ambient, there's too much attempt at melody, too much human hand, to reach that magic moment where the music disengages from time. And there's not enough heart in it to work any other way. You're left with something awkwardly approaching new wave, like an instrumental bonus track from a Sting album

#3825 VA - Focus On: Metroline Limited Volume 3

2.5/5 wow this is two hours of very samey music, even as house goes. may you connoisseurs out there derive some subtle note that I cannot

#3824 Sheep, Dog and Wolf - Egospect

3/5 SD&W's got a novel sound, all those lilting affected melodies over hyperbusy clattering rhythms. But it's the same basic trick for 45 minutes, and it's impossible to be delighted by it for more than a few songs

#3823 Moon Diagrams - Lifetime of Love

4.5/5 about as deeply atmospheric as electronic albums come. Lifetime of Love is a blend of styles, but it's ambient at heart, with a transcendent sense of pacing, with vocals early so that their absence is felt for the next half hour, the importance of beats ever-evolving, ending on the only traditional song. Blue Ring // The Ghost and the Host are the centerpiece and the destination, an endless embrace that the whole album approaches and recedes from like breath in repeated listens