I got a pretty solid routine these days: 2015 New Release Rush (part 1 of 2)

I'm running low on time, so I broke one of my crucial tenets -- I have heard some of these albums less than four times, though no less than two under any circumstance, even after the point when I was surely going to tear off my hair if I heard Dan Bejar sing another stupid line. These reviews are also very unpolished and casual, but if you don't expect too much from me you might not be let down.

After I got this post ready I noticed that basically every review below is either an impatient pan or an ecstatic celebration. "Real" critics hopefully aren't this beholden to their moodiness.

Jason Isbell: Something More Than Free (Southeastern)
A former member of the Drive-By Truckers, this singer-songwriter delivers pretty much what you'd expect from that pedigree. Not being a fan of the band in question I can't say how pleased acolytes would be but to neutral ears the opening cut "If It Takes a Lifetime" suffers from less of the self-seriousness and generic production that plagues the rest, which is largely morose tear-in-beer shit, albeit with some lyrical whoppers like "I thought everyone like me was dead" and a stanza about how God is "a pipe bomb."

Tame Impala: Currents (Interscope) [hr]
Kevin Parker's most delightful album to date finds his absurd mixture of sensibilities reaching its zenith with the fusion of pot-stoked old-fashioned LP listening (there are even two songs on which the record seems to be skipping) and, uh, gay disco and early '80s synthpop. The homoerotic "Cause I'm a Man" rubs up with the catchy purity of "The Moment" and with bass-driven raunch & roll on "The Less I Know the Better". Yet it all hangs together and becomes impressively seductive thanks to Parker's far-out snotty-yet-wistful vocals, crooning out gems like "they say people don't change but that's bullshit / they do" and an entire mumbled psychedelic rant about running into an ex downtown. The center of it all is "Eventually," an act of pop bliss through sheer hypnosis; it makes me dizzy even sober. Since it begins with its craziest tune -- a loping, lumbering epic called "Let It Happen" drenched in synths that fumbles through drugged-out repetition in multiple parts, the world's laziest rock opera -- you learn quickly if this is for you, but if it isn't I gotta wonder what kinda fun you're having out there.

Ashley Monroe: The Blade (Warner Bros.)
Acceptable, mostly melancholy country, well sung with a few biting moments lyrically ("if the devil don't want me, where the hell do I go?" could've been the mantra of Leslie Van Houten or similar). Likely less forgettable for fans of the genre than it is for me.

Eleventh Dream Day: Works for Tomorrow (Thrill Jockey)
Chicago alterna-rock dinosaurs apparently have remained a working unit all these years, which I didn't know; they were only ever on my radar as the support act or headliner for bands I was interested in, and though I barely remember the songs that led me to form my faint opinion of them, nothing here makes me think I've missed much. I admire the integrity of bands who plug away at this very basic guitar-and-propulsion style for decades on end without (seemingly) much financial reward; I'm glad they're enjoying themselves, but not a thing about the lo-fi recording style, the listlessly delivered vocals and yelps or the generally lackluster songs appeals to me. I don't even have the energy to determine if the target is deeply sincere rockers or irony-addicted former slackers but if you fall into either category, Check It Out.

Titus Andronicus: The Most Lamentable Tragedy (Merge) [c]
Ain't nobody got time for this. Ninety-minute, 29-track collection of proggy punkish shouting resembles Fucked Up's David Comes to Life and is equally insufferable, with almost no variance between songs and an exhausting attempt at a "storyline," which nine times out of ten is bad bad news for an album. The second half is slightly more listenable than the first just because it has a few jarring -- if still fairly insipid -- moments of Celtic pop, blessed silence and general dicking around and isn't all one thing... but as a formerly huge fan of this band, I can't think of a more disheartening record I've heard lately. I could not wait to eject it from my life.

Gwenno: Y Dydd Olaf (Heavenly)
Inoffensive Welsh language solo debut for former Pipettes member is Björk-lite, pretty much. It isn't exactly good but it's passable.

Chelsea Wolfe: Abyss (Sargent House)
Noisy, metallic goth wailing run through with some electronic teases here and there; this is music with a very specific audience that I am not in, but it's less awful than a lot of loud droning that comes across the desk.

Future: DS2 (Epic)
Accomplished but irritating, druggy, slightly apocalyptic third album from the increasingly celebrated Atlantan, one of the grittiest rappers to become a bona fide star in recent years. Musically, it's alarmingly spare and confrontational -- taking cues from the sound of latter-day trap but using that aggression to build a sound so paranoid and pained it becomes more disorienting than perhaps any other album of its stature. Future also deserves commendation for his use of Autotune not to bury the seams of his voice a la T-Pain but to emphasize his unworldly paranoia. This is a pretty great idea for an album, but it's an absolute failure in practice because of a combination of poor writing, repetition and the limitations of Future's eye-rollingly infantile persona. If you can look past lyrics about the codeine in his piss, his thumb in her butt, his contractor building him a pool and the day he spent at the laundromat, you still have to get past the unmitigated (and weirdly mismatched) sense of drunken, spaced-out dread pouring from every second of each song. One can easily hear the art and craft in this but it's not a pleasant zone to spend time in.

Royal Headache: High (What's Your Rupture?) [hr]
The sort of thing you didn't know you needed -- a 28-minute slab of tuneful punk rock from Sydney. It reminds me of a Terry Malts a bit, which is to say like a thrashier version of the Jam. In the best tradition of their countrymen the Saints, the band breaks it up brilliantly midway through with the impeccable, soulful Byrdsian ballad "Wouldn't You Know"; it gets under your skin right away. The Replacements-like love song "Carolina" is also a nice outlier. But the fast ones are solid too, all distorted pop with great hooks and sing-song choruses, favorites being "Another World" and the triumphantly big "Love Her If I Tried". Apparently the entire album tracks a broken love affair, a sort of wonderful irony for music this infectious and full of joy; what better way to heal, really?

Beach House: Depression Cherry (Sub Pop) [hr]
At times, Beach House can uncomfortably straddle a line between shoegaze and the humdrum mooniness of new age; by removing the amplified live drums and the more conventional pop songwriting of Bloom, this might seem in theory like a step backward. Indeed, I've listened to this dozens of times now and still can't remember which song is which, but what's more telling is that I've listened to it dozens of times and it hasn't yet become remotely tired. The songs might be incomplete in the abstract but they do boast towering melodies and an immersive sound behind their mild sensation of automation. As on Bloom, every sound in the duo's canon is magnified, enchantingly so. In the end even "Sparks," the return to Teen Deam-like discordance, soars rather than digging in its heals. No one who comes to Beach House for more-of-the-same can be dissatisfied with this, but the hints of evolution that reveal themselves with time are surprisingly reassuring, and a lot of them are tied not to the music itself but to Victoria Legrand's singing. Take, for instance, her badass, profoundly beautiful vocal on "10:37," her best ever. Take "PPP," which has her mumbling along in a "Revolution 9"-like trance before she blindsides with a full-throated tune to rival them all. Beyond just being a perfect zoning-out record, this achieves even more than Bloom an out-of-time, floating sensation that seems to freeze the world around it. It's like being stoned in a planetarium, and every song sounds like a grand finale... although it will take them some time to best the mixture of aching beauty and bottom-heavy rollicking on the brilliant "Bluebird," unseating "Norway" (or "New Year" on some nights) as their finest song to date.

The Foreign Exchange: Tales from the Land of Milk and Honey (s/r) [r]
This long-running duo's latest crazed electronica/hip hop slumber party only really works as a nostalgia trip, but what a trip! Genre-hopping cloud of delectable decadence brings us squarely back into the heat of a clubbing night in the hi-NRG days. It's corny, but it's unbelievably sexual and invigorating. It has nothing unique to offer. You won't care.

Advance Base: Nephew in the Wild (Orindal) [r]
Maybe it took a second album to make a guess at the difference between CFTPA and Advance Base, at least one less superficial than the kind of synthesizers and recording devices in use: Owen Ashworth does not seem very concerned with "evolving" any more. In most respects this is practically a twin of A Shut-In's Prayer; the tempo is consistent, the melancholy maybe a tiny bit draggier, the instrumentation and melodies sometimes minute variations on prior songs. That said, no one with a taste for Ashworth's marvelously peculiar sensibility will complain if you put this on at a party, although the other partygoers might give you a tough time. Above everything else he sounds comfortable, which is what allows him to unashamedly put out something called "My Love for You Is Like a Puppy Underfoot," with a vocal by Jody Weinmann that offers no concessions to those who think being adorable and twee is now an unforgivable hipster move. "The Only Other Girl from Back Home" is the strongest cut on offer here, with Ashworth demonstrating his literary penchant for occupying the shoes and hearts of others as eloquently as on Vs. Children. The rest is a little morose and familiar, but also -- in his usual fashion -- extremely lovable.

Yo La Tengo: Stuff Like That There (Matador) [hr]
The warmest band in rock music is telling two stories here. Thirty-one years after their formation, they provide a sequel to their 1990 acoustic album Fakebook, a jangly folk-rock moment in time that shed every trace of inside-baseball indiedom and provided a long exploration of its authors' personalities that was then unprecedented in its intimacy and grace. They've evolved a lot since then, but the Fakebook concept itself is so singularly appealing that it's somewhat incredible they've not returned to the well all these years. It's indeed true that for the hypothetical person who only ever fell hard for Fakebook and otherwise cares little for Yo La Tengo, this is another exception; the album returns to the quartet format of the old release (with long-gone Dave Schramm taking over lead guitar, James McNew replacing long-gone Al Geller on bass) and also closely matches its mixture of covers (the lion's share), acoustic renditions of old Yo La Tengo songs, and a few new originals. Crucially, however, the album also continues down the path laid out by 2013's Fade, especially on the new songs like "Rickety", as the once wildly unpredictable unit continues to attain a hushed, ethereal beauty that increasingly feels like their gorgeous response to a contented aging process. As such, it's a more melancholy and calm affair than Fakebook, but in the end hardly less of a pleasure, especially after you spend some time living inside Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley's lovelier-than-ever vocals (Hubley's in particular). Best new song: "Rickety," with the three full-timers echoing in perfect harmony, Kaplan crooning out in front. Best old song: though it's nice to hear the words to "Deeper into Movies" clearly (and nice to have confirmation that nothing could turn "All Your Secrets" into much more than a trifle), the heretofore neglected "The Ballad of Red Buckets," revealing textures as haunting and complex in its stripped-down variation as those on any of the band's old-fashioned raveups. Best famous cover: Hubley wringing new regrets out of "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" just barely trumps the fragile, unforced feeling she lends to "Friday I'm in Love." Best obscure cover: Sun Ra and pre-funk George Clinton have their moments of glory but somehow the part that gets a lump in my throat every time is the version of "Butchie's Tune" by the Lovin' Spoonful. That's a band I love but I've never heard that song, and now that Hubley's revision and the band's shattering arrangement has taken up permanent residence in my heart I'm not sure I ever want to.

Destroyer: Poison Season (Merge) [c]
Dan Bejar's follow-up to Kaputt seems to prove my suspicion that I can only put up with him in the context of either that album or the New Pornographers. This is fussy and irritating, without any of the pop smarts and throwback imagination of the vintage dreamscapes of last time out. The preoccupations of a deeply pretentious soul like Bejar's only function outside the blessed privacy of his own home and cult-filled concerts when there is some sort of music for them to rub against.

The Arcs: Yours, Dreamily (Nonesuch)
This straightforward rawk is not surprisingly the work of Dan Auerbach, on vacation from the Black Keys, and notably less offensive than his work with that band (which isn't difficult). Like most side projects it's cluttered and suffers from an serious deficit of identity, but at a time when "roots rock" doesn't seem as automatically bad as it once did, this doesn't warrant too much sniping.

Empress Of: Me (XL) [c]
The most pretentious, overly formalist brand of NYC singer-songwriter meandering; it doesn't become more palatable because it has dance beats and is classified as "indie elctronica." Empress Of's recycled chillwave and "EDM" are one thing but the songs have the same wispy unfinished quality of FKA twigs', only less ambitiously weird. So would you rather be sideswiped by a pickup truck or hit head-on by a car?

Dungen: Allas Sak (Mexican Summer)
Started to mellow out on progressive rock a few years ago, not that it's something I enjoy in the classic sense, but I see how its basic principles aren't so different from some of the trickier art rockers I dearly love, such as Radiohead and Joanna Newsom (though Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear still test every ounce of my patience; it's in my genes probably). There's also the fact that a very different kind of stuffy, snobbish formalism more beholden to the stuff I did like growing up has taken over the indieverse in the last twenty years. That said, while this long-established long-on-hiatus Swedish band seems perfectly polite, they call to mind a lot of what I naturally dislike about prog as a genre, flutes and eternal wanky guitar solos and cerebral compositions, overly mannered vocals and shapeless flaunting of dull musical virtuosity. I don't hate it, I just can't listen to it without fidgeting and/or giggling.

The Underachievers: Evermore: The Art of Duality (Brainfeeder) [r]
Part of the base appeal of the Underachievers' weedy east coast revival thing is the obvious counterintuitive contradiction between their woozy psychedelic lyrics and the banging throwback music and delivery: PM Dawn and Leaders of the New School talked a lot of the same sort of mystical guff but hardly ever bounced like these two. Brilliant later artists like Talib Kweli and Mos Def infused their lyrical consciousness with welcome brashness and an eye on the floor, but Killer Mike is the only other rapper I can think of who's so successfully melded rock & roll aggression with KRS-One style preaching, engaging even when it's silly or wrongheaded. This effect is somewhat tempered on Evermore because the group has taken care to split the record into two halves. The first has all the weird stuff, the edutainment, the late-night philosophical smoking; you can get hung up on how flighty and repetitive it all is but they're still great MCs and there's plenty of variance between tracks. Then on the back half, the pair goes on a "Backseat Freestyle"-like rampage of dredging up every hedonistic trope in the rulebook, either for satirical purposes or just to get it out of their system. This is probably the more fun half to listen to but it's kind of a shame to hear them compartmentalize themselves, and not nearly as provocatively as Danny Brown did on Old. Still, it's all in the delivery; you won't find stuff like the uncommonly fierce lite-jazz-plus-Nas masterstroke "The Dualist" or the grinning "Generation Z" on an X-Clan album. Plus AK's a far better critic of hip hop status quo than I am: "My lyrics above gimmicks, my music like drugs / when I listen to yours, I don't even get a buzz."

John Grant: Gray Tickles, Black Pressure (Bella Union) [c]
Right Said Fred meets wispy indie bro shit and Queens of the Stone Age rawk nonsense. Not even Tracey Thorn can redeem this.

Neon Indian: VEGA INTL. Night School (Mom + Pop) [c]
Please please please please please just shut up. This kind of bonkers sensory-overload stuff is bad enough without the elements of various played-out and reappropriated dance music subgenres. A sound collage of good times filtered through the impossible misery of memories xeroxed so many hundreds of times they've faded to a sickly gray.

***

As of this moment I'm about two months behind where I should be on 2015 stuff. To head off a similar catastrophe next year, I'm going to be starting 2016 stuff simultaneously with wrapup on last year's reviews and supplemental stuff. The timeframe I'm expecting will be something like this:
- 2015 New Release Rush part 2: around Feb. 7th
- 2015 Also Recommended: around Feb. 10th
- 2015 Top 10 List & Honorable Mentions: around Feb. 17th
- 2015 List of Lists: around Feb. 25th
- February 2016 music diary: on track for March 1st.
However, if I ultimately run behind on something, it will be the year-end stuff from last year, not new music; it'll be Done When It Gets Done. That should fix the scheduling problem and get me back into a workable routine.

See you along the way!

Hanging on if only by a thread: Autumn 2015 music diary (part 2 of 2)

By now you know the drill and if you don't, you can look back at this post for full explanations. Welcome to the least reliably scheduled music blog on the web. This post was meant for October. It's here now. Two further album review collections will follow, then a best-of-2015 post, and then more timely reviews of old and new music will hopefully resume, new music in posts just like this, old music in a new format I will explain when the time comes. Merry late Christmas.

Shamir: Ratchet (XL) [r]
Giddy Las Vegas vet pumps out solid neo-house music with good beats and great, attitude-laden vocals despite a paucity of major hooks and some pedestrian writing. The throwback, itchy '90s-style production is a real coup in a time when drugginess of a very different, more lethargic kind is the order of the day on the dance floor, but Shamir's sensual yet ungendered singing is the big attraction, solely excluding the unduly stretching they attempt on the ballad "Darker," the only real dud here.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Multi-Love (Jagjaguwar)
Guitarist Ruban Nielson's project was a big bloghype circa 2010, at which point he generated a lot of buzz by sheer force of mystery, though the work's never seemed like more than polite lo-fi of a kind that often generates undue attention these days. I wasn't compelled to give more than a cursory listen to the group's first album and skipped the second altogether; to my therefore uninformed ears this obvious departure sounds like a midlife crisis album, a bit somber and ponderous with a few well-appropriated R&B textures and one too many heinously overlong acoustic guitar solos (by which I might mean just one, though it feels like a lot). It's totally inoffensive alternative-lite, and pleasant enough.

Thee Oh Sees: Mutilator Defeated at Last (Castle Face) [r]
Long-running, hard-driving California garage rockers, historically a blind spot for me, offer up some respectable riffing and are generally impressively eclectic, running through an exciting slate of heavy and soft, sometimes instrumental and often belted, rockers and rollers.

Jamie xx: In Colour (Young Turks) [r]
Nobody familiar with Jamie Smith's previous work with his band the xx and in his collaboration with Gil-Scott Heron would question the idea that he's a bit of a sadsack, having recorded some of the most beautifully morose dance music of the last half-decade. On his first solo album even the sole solid attempt at hedonism, the doo wop-derived Young Thug guest spot "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)", sounds mostly like an anthem for people doing their best to convince themselves they're OK. Parts of the festival of dancing and despair here are sublime; these are specifically, with one exception, the vocal cuts like "Loud Places" and "Stranger in a Room," not coincidentally the songs that feature the other two members of the xx on vocals. However, the four-minute bleep-out "Obvs" finds some sort of gorgeous middle ground between Oneohtrix Point Never and Beach House; the rest is fine, but this stands out because it doesn't seem rooted in Smith's musical past and completely fulfills the album's dream of a moody comfort zone in the weird context of disco.

Sun Kil Moon: Universal Themes (Caldo Verde) [c]
The poet laureate of oversharing returns with an even more ridiculous slate of glorified diary entries; there's a world of difference between this chronic asshole's exhaustively detailed chronicles of his sheltered life and the pain and passion a true artist like Tracey Thorn, Ezra Furman and Patti Smith can wring out of their private worlds. Musically his work remains not-exactly-terrible, but it's really hard to hear that over the din of his man-child puffery. The last song in particular, wherein Mark Kozelek once again flaunts his friendship with a musician (Ben Gibbard) he mistakenly thinks is a hip name to drop then tells us all about harassing Jane Fonda in a hotel lobby and quizzing strangers about their lives (presumably so he can use the information he gains as fodder for either song lyrics or one of his petulant onstage rants), is one of the greatest atrocities ever committed against the idea of recorded music. Actually, it makes me question the value of freedom of expression, civil liberties, etc. Total time: 70 minutes, 9 seconds.

Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment: Surf (s/r)
"Social," eh? Extremely boho hip hop slash jazz slash R&B commune is plentifully musical and has lots of high-profile guests, but it comes down on the wrong side of uber-friendly "consciousness" like so much hipster rap. I can't be the only one whose bullshit detector goes off the charts when I hear a song informing me of being uncool is actually, like, really "cool," especially when these meaningless, vaguely anti-counterculture platitudes are being delivered straight into my face by the likes of Big Sean and Jeremih. (See also: Miguel's song wondering if he's "normal.")

Sharon Van Etten: I Don't Want to Let You Down (Jagjaguwar EP)
Somewhat easier to digest than Are We There, its full length counterpart, but still rather monotonous despite the singer-songwriter's obvious talents. The songs are angsty but measured and formal, expressing a lot of apprehension about the future of a relationship cracked at its core by a career-based conflict. Blah.

Muse: Drones (Warner Bros.) [c]
I used to think there was something sort of fun about the way this onetime Radiohead ripoff went in the exact opposite direction of fellow Radiohead ripoffs Coldplay and became a schlocky-as-hell outfit just this side of hair-band heavy metal. I was wrong, although props to them for staying abreast of the latest war-mongerer controversies.

Mates of State: You're Going to Make It (Barsuk EP) [NO]
In which the once-vibrant and engaging duo yells at the Youths for looking at their screens all the time and seems to genuinely believe this is a cutting insight. Not only is it a disingenuous and fake thing to be upset about, it's the height of Boomer-like Rawkist hypocrisy, coming as it does from a band who got a big paycheck for a Verizon commercial barely a year ago. As with everyone who grows up and becomes an unempathetic, cantankerous pig, you have to want to look into the eyes of these two and ask them what the fuck happened to make them such boring old grouches, but as a Tuned-In Millennial I reckon I'm 2 busy looking at the "apps" on my "phone" to think about it too much lol!

Lady Lamb: After (Mom + Pop) [hr]
Working as a video store clerk enabled Quentin Tarantino to blossom into the overly clever, emotionally stunted rich kid he fantasized about being in his youth. Taking the same job on the graveyard shift in coastal Maine -- some years after the lion's share of such outlets in the nation had long since shuttered -- apparently helped Aly Spaltro refine herself into a profoundly perspicacious observer of humanity, the sort of collector of details whose grasp on the strands of thought that comprise a person's life can utterly blindside you. She writes a lot about being on trains, and the weird moments shared with strangers; and she writes a lot about the moments of unstated, dead-air strangeness between people who are intimate. And oh, incidentally, she's a Rock God -- and in the best tradition of Rock Gods from John Lennon to Killer Mike, she''s both a personally-driven, self-examining writer and a lover of the well-turned pop hook who can use these gifts to the same end: cathartically self-doubting but never tortured, sunny but never superficial songs boasting wonderful lyrics, high emotion and major musical eclecticism. Armed with some of the best melodic guitar playing on an album this year and a voice that thrills at its highest and lowest registers, she is expressive in a timelessly no-nonsense manner, singular as she is in subtle ways. Her work and interplay with her solid backing band is precise, never slapdash, and without becoming stuffy, really quite ambitious -- especially in its composition, with songs like "Violet Clementine" and "Dear Arkansas Daughter" launching into boldly disparate sections that somehow come together a la "Paranoid Android" or Buffalo Springfield's "Broken Arrow". The most widely praised songs on this criminally overlooked record, "Milk Duds" and "Billions of Eyes," boast the best lyrics -- and allow Lady Lamb to stand apart from the other most moving lyricists-rockers of the year, Courtney Barnett and Ezra Furman, who'd never try to put across songs quite so perfectly worked-out and intricate -- but are in many ways less compelling than the guitar-driven, rock & roll workouts like "Heretic" and "Spat Out Spit"... but why make a distinction? There's not a lackluster moment to be found here, and so much on the offer you'll spend ages pleasurably discovering new nooks and crannies in it.

Everything Everything: Get to Heaven (RCA) [NO]
Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh. Unlistenable, maximalist British rock about "the state of the world" or something; how many Insightful Tunes do we really need about such cultural horrors as the news cycle and -- oh dear -- "social media"? Stuart Price's involvement in this is befuddling.

Richard Thompson: Still (Fantasy)
How dumb and desperate we get in our old age. Still an engaging guitarist and sometimes a good singer. A lyricist increasingly as shallow as his son. And the arrangements are abysmal folkie MOR; Jeff Tweedy's contributions as producer seem only to enable the blando echo chamber feeling in this trip down sulk lane. Cultists will probably find their hearts in it somewhere.

Kasey Musgraves: Pageant Material (Mercury Nashville)
Musgraves has a fine voice but the songs she cowrites are still awfully generic; the safety of slick Nashville production numbs everything anyway, but one assumes she's capable of something stronger than this many songs about manners, how nice everyone "in town" is, the IMPORTANCE of FAMILEE. She knows her audience, I guess, but that seems to just inflict complacency in this oft-hellish genre. Key I-can't-believe-a-human-being-wrote-this lyric: "Mind your own biscuits and everything will be gravy."

Meg Baird: Don't Weigh Down the Light (Drag City) [hr]
It's right out of the California textbook, really (just like labelmate Joanna Newsom): multi-instrumentalist and artiste of beautiful, stark, sometimes Celtic-ish folk, a sublime collision of the exotic and homegrown, was previously a psych-rocker, now uses a pop-based command of the aural stage to craft songs stirring but minimal. The music of Appalachia runs deeply in her blood quite literally, but you don't need to know that to be mesmerized by her voice and songwriting, immersive and atmospheric but inviting, even incisive at its strongest ("Past Houses" and "I Don't Mind", both ghostly; the relatively rollicking "Good Directions"). I'm aware that Drag City's distribution model isn't incredibly convenient, but take the time and cash to seek this one out if you're at all fond of this kind of music; as far as modern stuff goes, it's like the best moments in Sam Amidon's output sustained for full length.

Thundercat: The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam (Brainfeedr EP)
Lightly funky architect of smooth, backward-looking L.A. R&B is part of the same utopian universe of post-modern soul as Flying Lotus and Shabazz Palaces, but this quick bite of his talents is too bloodless to make a big impression, honestly sounding more like carbon-copy bands like Yeasayer than any new or exciting artist, though Thundercat apparently made crucial contributions to two of the most acclaimed records of 2015: Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly and Kamasi Washington's The Epic while recording this disc. The music is fine, even promising, just not particularly memorable.

Vince Staples: Summertime '06 (Def Jam)
In interviews, Staples seems like a brilliant dude with a pretty coherent artistic philosophy. So why is none of this evidenced by his actual music? Just like on his EP last year, aside from the occasional undeniable peak, Staples seems like one of the most overly practiced and insincere MCs in the current wave of hip hop. The production choices (No ID is the prominent contributor) are even less moving, a weird aesthetic fixation on Enter the Void-like drugged out dread fused with ringtone-rap minimalism. Sometimes the sheer lethargy of it all is infectious in a way that you can sort of respect ("Lemme Know," the endearingly pathetic hook that leads off "Loca"); otherwise, nearly every song sounds like someone freestyling over one of those fucking haunted house toys you can buy at Dollar Tree. The album picks up near the end, with the last few tracks hinting at a concept of sorts: despair over the spiritually and economically barren world Staples' generation inherits. Maybe I'm just too far out of Staples' age bracket, or maybe I'm not on enough downers?

Miguel: Wildheart (RCA)
The unkind way of looking at this is to say that Miguel's become druggy and a little ridiculous, like a parody of the Weeknd; after the knee-jerk passes, though, it does all make sense. Big guitar songs and the throaty choruses of grunge and hair metal were already in his blood way back, so a guest spot from Lenny Kravitz isn't an out-of-this-world proposition. The rock moves can be silly at times, but not nearly as silly as the coked-up seductions "the valley" and "destinado a morir," which resemble the output an alien might produce if it heard a Prince LP. On the former in particular, Miguel sings the word "fuck" in a high-pitched, oddly convicted register as though it's his first time using or even hearing the word. Pleasures do come around; the Lionel Ritchie-like "waves" is nearly as blissful and fully-constructed a pop song as "Adorn," and "a beautiful exit" is a perfect entrance number. Missteps like "NWA" -- one of the most annoying songs in the history of recorded music thanks to its use of a drum machine sample that sounds like your roof leaking into a wok -- make it a hard slog even as it seems directed at sheer mindless pleasure; does that ever not backfire?

Bilal: In Another Life (eOne) [r]
Bilal's most assured record so far -- if he's no less ambitious than sixteen years ago, he's learned to hide it behind a relaxed Stevie Wonder-like charm. The songs remain derivative but they're a pleasure to listen to, and Kendrick Lamar and Big K.R.I.T. each figure in strong, buried guest spots. This never approaches the best moments of Miguel's album above, but I also never get the urge to turn it off, which is a major advantage.

Ezra Furman: Perpetual Motion People (Bella Union) [hr]
Twenty percent Mick Jagger, all grinning command and pure attitude with the periodic evidence of untold emotional damage; twenty percent Gram Parsons and Janis Joplin in all their abused bottle-swinging sorrow; sixty percent pure unadulterated rock & roll -- big body-shaking chords 'n' drums, doo wop backing vocals, sax solos right out of a Bill Haley & His Comets single, all cleverly interpolated into a cycle of well-turned phrases that chronicle making breakfast naked, sitting and waiting, and teaching friends and lovers how to feel really really really bad. That makes this sound like a festival of practiced and even smarmy playfulness and dread, and to some extent that applies; "Wobbly" and "Hark! To the Music" are funny, catchy tunes that make amusing hay out of the horrors of a life of isolated excess... or just isolation... or just excess. As Furman himself puts it at one point, "I've got a bright future in music as long as I never find true happiness." And yet, when it comes right down to the bitterest moments, the dark nights of the soul from which the best rock & roll ballads were always born and for which they were built, Furman's jokes and slogs have a genuine feeling of torture and loss, and why shouldn't they? The empathy of the spill-your-feelings partnership on "Hour of Deepest Need" expands to the audience to such a degree that you finally feel as if it's us to whom he's singing. The miseries of "Haunted Head" and "Ordinary Life" are devastating to anyone who's ever been in or around depression and mental illness, and the petty casualness with which he tosses them off is part of the design. Anthems come and go, about a restless year, not wanting to be a bad guy, and a body that was made in this particular way so fucking relax, but where he trips and chokes you up is when he issues an emotional tour de force, a plea for understanding and compassion like the Paul Westerberg-worthy "the human mind gets way fucking sick of beauty / and I know, and it's happened to me again and again." One point this can drive home is how wit doesn't have to solely equate to irony: only a real bona fide singer of the most classic brand could peak his best, starkest song with "Sometimes the wound hurts powerful indeed / But sometimes you just got to let that sucker bleed" behind a huge climactic moment of banged-out piano and have it come off not as an appropriated blast-from-the-past melodrama but a fully justified indulgence. Invariably Furman's articulate missives come to us with harrowing detail, good humor and a directness that will knock you on your ass. Invariably he sings them beautifully. Invariably the songs are as engaging and lively as the words. Invariably this is brilliant, soulful music as pure as it comes in this year or any.

Wilco: Star Wars (Anti-) [r]
This self-released, quick bit of raunch panders to consumers like nothing else in the Wilco catalog by sheer virtue of its Google-fucking title and the cat picture that adorns it, but the music itself is also clear fan service to those left in the cold by Wilco's last two or three albums, which legend has it are lackluster blando Dad rock, whereas this is serious unfussed-with straight-ahead guitar punk rock etc. As someone who loved all two or three of those lackluster blando Dad rock albums and admired the band's refusal to second-guess its instincts, I find this a regression; "raw" Wilco seems pedestrial now. There are some good riffs that drone out to oblivion and a few good slow ones, but I prefer the version of the band that doesn't think it's charming to pretend not to give a fuck.

Leon Bridges: Coming Home (Columbia) [hr]
Bridges is younger than I am by six years but the songs he writes and records are American mythology as timeless as something from Woody Guthrie or Skip James, only his language of choice is that of pre-Motown soul of Sam Cooke's era and ethos. Of course Bridges is hardly alone in his ambition to duplicate the extraordinary sound of black radio in the late '50s and early '60s; from Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings to Charles Bradley, the urge to connect on nostalgia for some of the finest recorded music in our nation's history is an understandable compulsion that drives a number of careers, specialized and worldwide. What makes Bridges different is not how painstakingly his producer Niles City Sound commits to not only the musical stylistics but the tape hiss and fidelity of the years in question, the audio equivalent of Super 8's lens flare, but that the songs completely deliver; over half of them sound not like forgeries but like lost classics. And the forgeries are pretty good too; it's actually to Bridges' credit that his voice -- heavenly at its best -- is stretched past its limits on a few cuts. It suggests that this is a born experimenter who's simply driven by an out-of-time affinity for something ageless. Past the already beloved title cut, try "Brown Skin Girl" if you want to rock, "Pull Away" and "Lisa Sawyer" if you want to roll, the disarmingly spirited closing "River" if you want to be shattered. The best pure throwback record of any genre in years.

***

FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME:
* Kwabs: Love + War
* Darkstar: Foam Island
* Alex G: Beach Music
* Erykah Badu: But You Can't Use My Phone
- Dave Rawlings Machine: Nashville Obsolete
- Idjut Boys: Versions
- Jay Rock: 90059
- Low: Ones and Sixes
- Telekinesis: Ad Infinitum
- Mac Miller: GO:OD AM
- Battles: La Di Da Di
- Leona Lewis: I Am
- Ryan Adams: 1989
- Disclosure: Caracal
- New Order: Music Complete
- Shopping: Why Choose
- Janet Jackson: Unbreakable
- Apollo Brown: Grandeur
- The Spook School: Try to Be Hopeful
- Corb Lund: Things That Can't Be Undone
- Israel Nash: Silver Season
- Glenn Mercer: Incidental Hum
- Dilly Dally: Sore
- Mogwai: Central Belters
- Car Seat Headrest: Teens of Style
- Guy Garvey: Courting the Squall
- Martin Courtney: Many Moons
- EL VY: Return to the Moon
- Ty Dolla $ign: Free TC
- Talib Kweli & 9th Wonder: Indie 500
- Le1f: Riot Boi
- Logic: The Incredible True Story

***

REJECTS:
Field Music: Music for Drifters [NYIM]
Robert Forster: Songs to Play [NYIM]
LA Priest: Inji
Matrixxman: Homesick
EZTV: Calling Out [NYIM]
Julio Bashmore: Knockin' Boots
Stacy Barthe: BEcoming
Omar Souleyman: Bahdeni Nami [NYIM]
Lianne La Havas: Blood
Golden Rules: Golden Ticket
Public Enemy: Man Plans, God Laughs
Gunplay: Living Legend
yuk: a n a k
Night Beds: Ivywild
The Weeknd: Beauty Behind the Madness
Max Richter: (From) Sleep [NYIM]
Lana Del Rey: Honeymoon
Dave Alvin: Lost Time
Richard Hawley: Hollow Meadows [NYIM]
Craig Finn: Faith in the Future
Gary Clark, Jr.: The Story of Sunny Boy Slim
Micachu & the Shapes: Good Sad Happy Bad
Lucero: All a Man Should Do
Glen Hansard: Didn't He Ramble
David Gilmour: Rattle That Lock
Nicolas Godin: Contrepoint [NYIM]
Baio: The Names
Keith Richards: Crosseyed Heart
Mercury Rev: The Light in You
Julia Holter: Have You in My Wilderness
Guilty Simpson: Detroit's Son [NYIM]
The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die: Harmlessness
Graveyard: Innocence & Decadence
Stick in the Wheel: From Here [NYIM]
No Devotion: Permanence
Patty Griffin: Servant of Love
The Dead Weather: Dodge and Burn
Sexwitch
U.S. Girls: Half Free
Girl Band: Holding Hands with Jamie
Peaches: Rub
Chvrches: Every Open Eye
the Icarus Line: All Things Under Heaven [NYIM]
Frankie Lee: American Dreamer [NYIM]
Kylesa: Exhausting Fire [NYIM]
Hey Colossus: Radio Static High
Autre Ne Veut: Age of Transparency
Eagles of Death Metal: Zipper Down
Mercury Rev: The Light in You
Wavves: V
Visionist: Safe [NYIM]
City and Colour: If I Should Go Before You
Protomartyr: The Agent Intellect
State Champs: Around the World & Back
Demi Lovato: Confident [NYIM]
Evil Blizzard: Everybody Come to Church
Luke Haines: British Nuclear Bunkers [NYIM]
Dan Friel: Life [NYIM]
!!!: As If
Son Little
Vanessa Carlton: Liberman
Killing Joke: Pylon
Fuzz: II
The Yawpers: American Man
British Sea Power: Sea of Brass
Wolf Eyes: I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces
Rabit: Communion [NYIM]
The Chills: Silver Bullets [NYIM]
Columbia Nights: In All Things
Young Thug: Slime Season 2
Natalie Merchant: Paradise Is There [NYIM]
Trust Fund: Seems Unfair [NYIM]
Anna van Hausswolff: The Miraculous
Lanterns on the Lake: Beings [NYIM]
Wreckless Eric: AmERICa [NYIM]
Teeth of the Sea: Highly Deadly Black Tarantula
Jeff Lynne's ELO: Alone in the Universe
Alessia Cara: Know-It-All
Boots: Aquaria
Kirk Franklin: Losing My Religion [NYIM]
Jeezy: Church in These Streets
Enya: Dark Sky Island [NYIM]
Ringo Deathstarr: Pure Mood
Freddie Gibbs: Shadow of a Doubt
Adele: 25 [NYIM]
Lubomyr Melnyk: Rivers and Streams [NYIM]
SOPHIE: Product
Jadakiss: Top Five Dead or Alive

***

SONGS OF THE SEASON
I've been listening to what you've all been listening to. It's devastating, really, isn't it? It would be a loss anyway, but he was making some of the best music of his career recently. What's reflected below is pure emotion; as latecoming fan -- only got into most of his albums about seven years ago -- I retain some very emotional attachments to the first custom-made career survey mix CD that my friend Steph gave to me. For more on Bowie, I give her the floor and invite you to read her remembrance of him.

Lianne La Havas "Green & Gold" [Blood]
Gunplay ft. PJK "Just Won't Do" [Living Legend]
/
David Bowie "Five Years" [The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars]
David Bowie "Sweet Thing" [Diamond Dogs]
David Bowie "Look Back in Anger" [Lodger]
David Bowie "Andy Warhol" [Hunky Dory]
David Bowie "Moss Garden" ["Heroes"]
David Bowie "Modern Love" [Let's Dance]
Ezra Furman "Hour of Deepest Need" [Perpetual Motion People]
The Chemical Brothers ft. Beck "Wide Open" [Born in the Echoes]
Leon Bridges "Pull Away" [Coming Home]
D'Angelo "Another Life" [Black Messiah]
Lady Lamb "Violet Clementine" [After]
Courtney Barnett "Nobody Really Cares If You Don't Go to the Party" [Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit]
Miguel "waves" [Wildheart]
Carly Rae Jepsen "Emotion" [E-MO-TION]
Jamie xx "Obvs" [In Colour]
Vince Staples "Like It Is" [Summertime '06]
Meg Baird "Past Houses" [Don't Weigh Down the Light]

*****

The room was empty, but...: Autumn 2015 music diary (part 1 of 2)

Designed to be the September post, but calling it that would seem silly at this point. Boo. I swear I'm doing my best to catch up.

ALBUM REVIEWS
Due to a pair of unforseen, praiseworthy records springing up from the evals, you get 22 this time!

Young Thug: Barter 6 (Atlantic)
Enunciate, dude!

Great Lake Swimmers: A Forest of Arms (Nettwerk) [NO]
Stop enunciating, dude! A tragic slide into MOR awfulness continues, and it'd be inoffensive enough if their first couple of records hadn't been so brilliant. Like Iron & Wine, this group -- a coincidental discovery I was once so proud of making for myself -- is an object lesson in why not to give your heart to folkies: sooner or later they'll stomp on it. Every song sounds like a Lowenbrau ad.

Speedy Ortiz: Foil Deer (Carpark) [c]
Same as before, so much done-to-death modern rock from the days when that was a profitable radio format. I get why this is a nostalgia trip for some folks but I didn't even like this kind of stuff in the '90s.

Alabama Shakes: Sound & Color (Rough Trade) [hr]
A straightforward, if adventurous and incredibly tight, rock band channeling the White Stripes, David Bowie and Al Green in equal measure? And they're (deservedly) popular? Escaping from the roots rock formalism of their previous work, this red-hot album boasts well-written, brilliantly performed, eclectic songs that get bolted into oblivion with dynamic guitarist and singer Brittany Howard at the helm. Howard's showstopper is the wild "Gimme All Your Love" but the band is best when demonstrating full synergy on cuts like the overjoyed road-movie "Shoegaze," the instant nostalgia creator "Don't Wanna Fight" and the pure glammed-out punk of "The Greatest". On the slow ones, they evoke the sensation of plumbing the depths of a box of old unknown eccentric 45s more than any of the groups ostensibly designed to do the same thing. What a joy this is to hear; it's perhaps slightly overlong but I'm not gonna complain.

Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufeld: Never Were the Way She Was (Constellation) [r]
This collaboration between popular bass saxophonist Stetson -- who does a lot of session work with hype bands -- and Arcade Fire violinist Neufeld functions as a solid atmosphere for zoning or working or dinner or whatever. Then you find out it was done without a single loop or overdub and suddenly your impulse is to start the whole thing over and listen intently from beginning to end, as you'd swear it was essentially an electronic record.

Blur: The Magic Whip (Warner Bros.) [r]
During the twelve-year gap from Think Tank to now, this became an Important Band... In a way it's comforting that they don't sound like one here. It's a slapdash record, which is a good thing, and sounds even more than usual like a group of outtakes from the Jam. Its charm and modesty are the ideal response to a post-breakup surge in popularity, but it does still manage to go a bit too far in the direction of trying to please multiple contingents. There's no sense of growth. Maybe that's all right.

Ciara: Jackie (Epic)
It didn't get as much attention as it deserved, but Ciara's last record was one of the leanest and most intensely fun R&B albums of the decade. This breakup album, inspired by her relationship with Future and her becoming a new mother, is distressingly bland by comparison, though her voice remains a juggernaut. The economy and hooks are both absent; what we do get goes for the painfully obvious, sounding like a slate of third-tier radio songs. She has every right to proclaim herself a bad motherfucker, write a love song for her kid and put the ex in his place, but it's all so undercooked.

Hop Along: Painted Shut (Saddle Creek)
Philadelphia indie rock band boasts great lyrics and fairly ordinary songcraft & singing, albeit with some Mary Wells-like stretching of range courtesy of leader Frances Quinlan. There is a decently robust sound here, so your taste for Quinlan's vocals could easily make this major for you.

Kamasi Washington: The Epic (Brainfeeder)
The backdrop of this fair to middlin' three-disc collection from the L.A.-bred tenor saxophonist sounds like the ambient music in Tomorrowland or something; the completely ridiculous lyrics on the finale could fit right in at the Carousel of Progress.

Hiatus Kaiyote: Choose Your Weapon (Flying Buddha) [c]
Smooooooooooooooooooooooooth generic ass lite-AM shit. (See, I don't have a pro-Aussie bias!)

Prurient: Frozen Niagara Falls (Profound Lore) [c]
2 CDs of sludge and tink and buzz.

Jim O'Rourke: Simple Songs (Drag City) [r]
The ordinary, shrouded in mystery, on O'Rourke's first conventional album in a decade and a half. O'Rourke obviously is better known for his work with other artists, but this is a surprisingly appealing record. Anyone fond of the grim, self-deprecating output of the best '70s singer-songwriters should get a kick out of this well-sung, intimate, immaculately recorded cycle of wit and despair.

Surfer Blood: 1000 Palms (Joyful Noise) [r]
Dollar signs were visible over Warners executives' heads when they signed this ruthlessly hardworking, now unceasingly troubled band five years ago; after a domestic violence scandal involving singer John Paul Pitts left their public standing deservedly shaken, the weak Gil Norton-produced sophomore album Pythons was barely promoted when it finally appeared from the Sire imprint. Now the band's meteoric major label rise and fall rivals Interpol's as the indie era's fastest self-correction, and they are back on a shoestring. And then comes news that guitarist Thomas Fekete -- single-handed architect of their shimmering, pointed sound -- is struggling with a rare form of cancer. In between all the bad news and bad acts is a album that's actually solid; they sound pretty depressed these days, which has improved their sound immeasurably after the misguided Cars move that was Pythons. It's too long -- could lose at least three cuts -- but all the songs eventually feature some striking hook or another; it's not always unpleasant to dig through the mess to find them, as on a song like "Saber-Tooth & Bone" that begins as a slog and grows increasingly pleasurable. The record in general most clearly resembles their obscure EP cut "Drinking Problem," the direction they really should have started taking years ago. There are still bits and pieces of "surf" music -- basically, Weezer meets the Barracudas meets Built to Spill, in this band's definition -- in songs like "Feast / Famine" and "Island" (virtually a clone of various songs on their first album, though better recorded) but Astro Coast was at its best when it diverged into a surprising taste for the driving power of a well-amplified lick. A good example is the inspired transition on "Grand Inqusitor"; even if both divisions of the song are a tad labored, it's riveting the way they collide. Similarly, "I Can't Explain" begins as the saddest song they've ever done, then hits upon that heavenly chorus. But Pitts sounds tired (check out "Dorian") and the only signs of real evolution are on "Point of No Return," which sounds a bit like... U2!? At any rate, a fun album that's actually better than the sum of its parts, and a step in the right direction for them.

The Tallest Man on Earth: Dark Bird Is Home (Dead Oceans)
It's the eternal folkie problem: what does "evolving" sound like? A half century after Bob Dylan came up with the best answer thus far for that question, singer-songwriter Kristian Matsson, compared so often to Dylan at the beginning of his career despite bearing only a superficial resemblance, attempts to fill out a set of songs about his divorce with a full band and elaborate producing and engineering for the first time. To say the least, it's a jarring transition. Three albums of stark, solo strumming and singing made this conclusion almost inevitable, but one wishes he had taken on less safe points of reference. Bruce Springsteen seems like the overriding informant, with second track "Darkness of the Dream" rife with Born to Run Bossisms, but the inflix of an almost Celtic influence -- the first time Matsson's really allowed himself to "sound" European -- on songs like "A Slow Dance," "Beginners" and particularly "Sagres" give uncomfortable memories of Sting's post-Police Muzak. For someone whose music has been so appealingly intimate, a bid for the lush and epic is probably logical enough and the songs do come through eventually (the only outright bad one is a piano balled called "Little Nowhere Towns" that's as obvious and spineless as it sounds): "Singers" is pleasing in its slight complementing of his traditional sound, and the gradual, disarming buildup on the title cut -- which closes the record -- marks the first time that the integration of the fuller sound seems to properly fit with the material as written. The electric guitar that rang out on Matsson's 2010 cut "The Dreamer" was surprising and enriching in a much more striking manner than this, but maybe a second record in this format will allow him to smooth out the rough edges in the bad clashing of material and arrangement.

Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba: Ba Power (Xango) [r]
Absent of both the cutting, raw anger of the near-masterpiece Jama Ko (2013) and the immediate crossover appeal of I Speak Fula (2010), this album remains worthwhile just for the opportunity to sit and listen to one of the world's finest bands chill out and engage in their often riveting interplay of vocals, percussion and ngoni. Kouyate's wife Amy Sacko sings more than on the last two albums and in fact her voice dominates, as does more elaborate production that's not always as complementary as it should be. Likely the biggest reason for the reduction in urgency is that Jama Ko was recorded in the midst of an Islamist military coup, the same one documented in this year's acclaimed film Timbuktu; in that sense, the moments of calmness are a relief. But this is a matter of degrees -- for anyone who loved the previous records, this will be a delight, and it's as fine an introduction as any; you'll come away wanting more.

The Wave Pictures: Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon (Moshi Moshi) [hr]
This trio from Leicestershire was somehow unknown to me despite having formed almost twenty years ago and having collaborated with the Mountain Goats; they already have a rich, exhaustive discography -- this is their fourteenth album. But this is an immediately striking, invigorating introduction. Behind classic rock riffage (there are even two CCR covers!) and hook-filled anthems, lead singer David Tattersall has Tom Verlaine and Jonathan Richman in his blood, and the main attraction here is in fact his coy, evocative, frequently sublime lyrics (mainly written in tandem with renegade art school refugee Billy Childish). The music is danceable and catchy and every great thing you want from the best rock & roll, but what keeps you coming back is the thrill of listening to Tattersall bouncing around spinning everything into blissful, detailed, intricate image: the telephone three floors above, the neighbors not screaming at each other for once, that first cigarette, curling up like hedgehogs, being at "the Pattersons" (Paul McCartney once said about "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!": "the Hendersons -- you couldn't make that up"), frogs singing loudly in the distance, a room that's empty but the iron's still burning and a goldfish is circling, and everyone at the station dressed in black except for you. These feel like real spaces, real people, real moments, and it's a joy to live in them. That guitar music can still be sublime should give us all hope.

Ghostface Killah & BadBadNotGood: Sour Soul (Lex) [hr]
Ghostface is probably well past his prime at this point and the Canadian jazz-dance unit BadBadNotGood's work is often pedestrian, but the two are somehow an unexpectedly perfect combination in 2015, even when Ghostface slips into overly trodden "pimpin' ain't EZ" territory. The band's work and production are magnificent, even if it backgrounds the star attraction; if you have to have it delivered as mood music, it's worth it to experience the sheets of weird aural bliss and under-the-skin grooves (and, sure, the occasional spy movie theme song) reached thanks to the collision of a great MC's perfect delivery with a dynamic, adventurous band with a bottomless well of influences to draw from. It's not quite Astral Weeks -- jarring appearances from the likes of Danny Brown on the menacing "Six Degress" prevent a full-on Beautiful Music onset occasionally threatened by the instrumentals -- but Ghostface and the band manage to intensity one another's work, giving us what's probably his most inspired work in the better part of a decade and their strongest ever. More, please.

Holly Herndon: Platform (4AD)
San Franciscan DJ and sound-collage artist indulges in ear-tickling futurism; this sort of like a Oneohtrix album with shades of singer-songwriterism. It feels slapped together and doesn't hang, but it's still promising. The track that consists of audio from a RedTube clip is kind of out of place, though.

Hot Chip: Why Make Sense? (Domino) [r]
The worst Hot Chip album is better than James Murphy's best, but they do seem to be following trends now; their unabashed EDM record comes a full two years after Cut Copy's equally ignored and much more successful stab. Always listenable and danceable, they've passed into the same murk that started to plague New Order in the late '80s. I maintain that a long break after the tremendous One Life Stand would've helped, but I understand why it probably wasn't possible.

Nao: February 15 EP (Little Tokyo)
Pretty, pleasant, well-produced R&B; just a taste. Highly derivative, including of artists -- FKA twigs, for instance -- I can't stand, but more palatable because it's more anonymous, oddly. (Like Stone Temple Pilots versus most other grunge bands; RIP.)

Chastity Belt: Time to Go Home (Hardly Art) [hr]
Wondrous, minor-key post-punk schlock from the Pacific northwest lets the melodies right out in front while arming them with sheets of powerful, ringing guitars. There's an anti-slutshaming anthem and a smart, bleak relationship song called "Trapped" ("Why are we so concerned with endings? / we can be happy for a while / now when I close my eyes I envy anyone who feels all right"), and the generational critique "Joke," which finally goes further on the accusations made in Pavement's "Here." But the one that haunts the most is the fierce opener "Drone," mournful and melodic and sludgy but somehow utterly distinct and sharp, and built on a sneering, powerful chorus that deserves to go down in some kind of history: "He was just another man trying to teach me something." It's not all in the delivery but the delivery is something, and like the record as a whole it digs into a dedicated mood while never losing a sense of profound urgency. A slow-burning stunner.

Built to Spill: Untethered Moon (Warner Bros.) [hr]
If you went to college (or were supposed to be in college but didn't go, not that I'd know anything about that) in the early 2000s this was one of your favorite bands. Not that you remember, but their four seminal albums remain terrific in a fashion rare for the staples of their era. Since 2001, Doug Martsch and his band have gone on quietly, churning out plenty of respectable music but few of the moments of passion that infused records like Keep It Like a Secret. That's what happens, even to good or great musicians, and there are few out there greater in more understated a fashion. This, then, comes as a complete shock: Built to Spill's best, clearest, most incisive collection of songs in well over a decade. The strangest thing is that the record comes, conquers and leaves as casually as if power and fire underneath their best work had never gone away at all -- this is the sound of a band for whom the drone, the awe-inspiring riffs, the perfectly accented and extended hooks come naturally. Of course nostalgia factors into this; "Living Zoo" sounds like it just stepped off a time machine, and when you get lost in the perfect construction and meaty distortion of "Another Day," it's like... y'know, Alternative Is Alive. The band's lineup is more unstable than ever, though maybe the chemistry's improved this time around, but Martsch's obvious dedication has probably never been so evident, even if his lyrics still have the twinges of the sophomoric that always wavered between charm and irritation. He's as distinct and brilliant a guitarist as ever, though, and he's only improved as a singer over the years, to the point that album climax "When I'm Blind" could pass for mid-'70s Neil Young. When that song comes back for that last, unexpected chorus, well, who knew an aging guitar band could still providde such holy-shit moments?

***

FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME:
Albums I heard in part that warrant further consideration; capsule reviews, short summaries or rejections will follow. I err on the side of caution here, allowing for mood etc., so a lot of these are probably not good. The ones at the top with stars next to them are the ones that really stood out to me and I may not have even been able to turn them off. They are almost guaranteed to become recommendations.

* Leon Bridges: Coming Home
* Four Tet: Morning/Evening
* Ducktails: St. Catherine
* Field Music: Music for Drifters
* Carly Ray Jepsen: E-MO-TION
* Blackalicious: Imani, Vol. 1
* Robert Forster: Songs to Play
- Wolf Alice: My Love Is Cool
- Nils Frahm: Victoria
- The Internet: Ego Death
- LA Priest: Inji
- Matrixxman: Homesick
- EZTV: Calling Out
- Rachel Sermanni: Tied to the Moon
- Ghostface Killah: Twelve Reasons to Die II
- Julio Bashmore: Knockin' Boots
- White Reaper: White Reaper Does It Again
- The Chemical Brothers: Born in the Echoes
- Stacy Barthe: Becoming
- Omar Souleyman: Bahdeni Nami
- Lianne La Havas: Blood
- Golden Rules: Golden Ticket
- Public Enemy: Man Plans, God Laughs
- Gunplay: Living Legend
- yuk: a n a k
- Night Beds: Ivywild
- AFX: Orphaned Deejay Selek EP
- The Weeknd: Beauty Behind the Madness
- Max Richter: (From) Sleep
- Helen: The Original Faces
- Widowspeak: All Yours
- Lana Del Rey: Honeymoon

***

REJECTS:
Dismissed from consideration. NYIM = "it's not you, it's me." The rest seemed pretty bad to me, but remember I don't listen to these start to finish (except those that were listed under "further investigation" last month).

The Monochrome Set: Spaces Everywhere [NYIM]
Allison Moorer: Down to Believing [NYIM]
The Go! Team: The Scene Between
Follkazoid: III
Pokey LaFarge: Something in the Water
Colleen: Captain of None
Toro Y Moi: What For?
This Is the Kit: Bashed Out
Stornoway: Bonxie
Polar Bear: Same as You [NYIM]
STS x RJD2
Rhett Miller: The Traveler
Georgia Anne Muldrow: Thoughtiverse Unmarred [NYIM]
Indigo Girls: One Lost Day
SOAK: Before We Forgot How to Dream
Girlpool: Before the World Was Big
Leftfield: Alternative Light Source
Prinzhorn Dance School: Home Economics [NYIM]
No Joy: More Faithful [NYIM]
Desaparecidos: Payola
Helm: Olympic Mess
RP Boo: Fingers, Blank Pads and Shoe Prints [NYIM]
Trembling Bells: The Sovereign Self
Meek Mill: Dreams Worth More Than Money
Failure: The Heart Is a Monster
Refused: Freedom
Stevie Stone: Malta Band
Best Friends: Hot. Reckless. Totally Insane.
Veruca Salt: Ghost Notes
Samatha Crain: Under Branch & Thorn & Tree
Ratatat: Magnifique
Flo Morrissey: Tomorrow Will Be Beautiful
Iron & Wine and Ben Bridwell: Sing into My Mouth
Flying Saucer Attack: Instrumentals 2015 [NYIM]
Warren Haynes: Ashes and Dust [NYIM]
Jill Scott: Woman
Watkins Family Hour
Kasey Chambers: Bittersweet [NYIM]
Liberez: All Tense Now Lax
Seven Davis Jr.: Universes
M.E.S.H.: Piteous Gate
Daniel Romano: If I've Only One Time Askin' [NYIM]
Red River Dialect: Tender Gold & Gentle Blue
The Maccabees: Marks to Prove It
Haiku Salut: Etch and Etch Deep
Deaf Wish: Pain
Iris DeMent: Trackless Woods [NYIM]
La Luz: Weirdo Shrine
The Phoenix Foundation: Give Up Your Dreams
Georgia
Ultimate Painting: Green Lanes
Mac DeMarco: Another One
Dr. Dre: Compton
Teedra Moses: Congnac & Conversation [NYIM]
Teri Lynne Carrington: The Mosaic Project: Love & Soul
HEALTH: Death Magic
Slime: Company
Neck Deep: Life's Not Out to Get You
Palehound: Dry Food [NYIM]
Sweet Baboo: The Boombox Ballads
Barrence Whitfield & the Savages: Under the Savage Sky
Ghost B.C.: Meliora
Mick Jenkins: Wave(s) EP
Deradoorian: The Expanding Flower Planet
DRINKS: Hermits on Holiday
The Telescopes: Hidden Fields
Finale: Odds & Ends
Defeater: Abandoned
Maddie & Tae: Start Here
Hooton Tennis Club: Highest Point in Cliff Town
Frog Eyes: Pickpocket's Locket
Willis Earl Beal: Nocturnes [NYIM]
Foals: What Went Down
The Dear Hunter: Act IV: Rebirth in Reprise
Ane Brun: When I'm Free
k-os: Can't Fly Without Gravity
Blank Realm: Illegals in Heaven
The Wonder Years: No Closer to Heaven
Lou Barlow: Brace the Wave
Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats: The Night Creeper
FIDLAR: Too
Dam-Funk: Invite the Light
Public Image Ltd: What the World Needs Now
Travis Scott: Rodeo
Andra Day: Cheers to the Fall [NYIM]
Petite Noir: La Vie Est Belle
King Midas Sound: Edition 1
Rosie McDowall: Cut with the Cake Knife
Ought: Sun Coming Down

***

SONGS IN HEAVY ROTATION
The Go! Team ft. Samira Winter "What D'You Say?" [The Scene Between]
Polar Bear "We Feel the Echoes" [Same as You]
STS x RJD2 "Doin' It Right" [s/t]
/
Chastity Belt "Drone" [Time to Go Home]
Alabama Shakes "Don't Wanna Fight" [Sound & Color]
Built to Spill "When I'm Blind" [Untethered Moon]
The Wave Pictures "The Goldfish" [Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon]
Yo La Tengo "Butchie's Tune" {Lovin' Spoonful cover} [Stuff Like That There]
Björk "Unison" [Vespertine (2001)]
Twerps "Shoulders" [Range Anxiety]
Pavement "Major Leagues" [Terror Twilight (1999)]
Van Morrison "And It Stoned Me" [Moondance (1970)]
Surfer Blood "I Can't Explain" [1000 Palms]
Ghostface & BadBadNotGood ft. Elzhi "Gunshowers" [Sour Soul]
Bob Dylan "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" [Highway 61 Revisited (1965)]
The Decemberists "Shiny" [5 Songs EP (2001)]
Stone Temple Pilots "Interstate Love Song" [Purple (1994)]

******

Clarity clarity clarity clarity clarity clarity: New music diary for summer 2015

From the beginning of this blog's existence, the idea was that -- since I get an equal amount of enjoyment from listening and responding to music both new and old -- every new (current year, that is) release reviewed herein would be followed by a catalog writeup. A 1:1 ratio. However, reviews of old records routinely require more concentration and dedication, new ones more research and energy, so it seems logical at this point to split the two into separate routines. Thus from now on, the monthly regular posts will include no reviews of old records; those will be presented and archived separately in ways that will be explained in the near future. There won't be a timeline on those reviews any longer. New LP reviews, though, will start to correspond much more to release dates, though I can't accommodate more than twenty new albums in a month. New dedication to this cause came about because I recently joined the current decade and began using Spotify on a tablet and smartphone, which has made this stuff a lot easier to do consistently and fluidly.

The slightly altered format will also give a bit more information about what sources bring me to the albums that are reviewed here, and what material is being set aside behind the scenes. Very little of the writing on new albums is going to be as polished as something you'd want somebody to get paid for, and in fact I'm trying to scale things back to keep this all both relaxed and fun for me, but hopefully it will remain helpful all the same.

***

ALBUM REVIEWS
The 20 albums below, released in the first half of 2015 (we're behind), were all heard multiple times by me, and all fit at least one of the following criteria:
- They have received an average of 80 or above on Metacritic with at least ten critical reviews contributing.
- They were recommended by one of three specific sources: they received Pitchfork's Best New Music tag, even though these days P4K seem often to only define one of those three words in the same way I do; they were rewarded 4.5 stars from AMG (R&B and hip hop only); or they received an "A" from Robert Christgau in his Expert Witness column, currently situated at Noisey. These sources can and will change; Pitchfork is the only one I've consistently used since starting this thing in 2010. There are other specific critics I trust and try to follow around as they switch gigs, and friends whose advice carries extra weight with me; at some point I'll try to elaborate some on this.
- They are new albums (usually excluding covers albums or seasonal records, with some exceptions) or EPs by artists who've been given a "highly recommended" review by me within the last ten years. I do not count live albums, compilations, etc. as "new releases" for the purpose of this feature.
- Investigated by me for separate reasons on a previous month of auditions and evaluations (see below), they moved me enough to advance to the full-capsule category. This generally will only happen with records I really really love, enough so to add to my workload here!
- Metal albums are excluded from all of the above. I have no understanding of them and thus I don't review them. I also ignore certain artists it is established I absolutely hate, such as Kurt Vile, Drake and Sleaford Mods.

Matthew E. White: Fresh Blood (Domino) [c]
Virginian DIYer has a distinctly commercial sound; you'll discern quickly whether or not it's for you thanks to his (for me) nails on a chalkboard voice, which reminds me of a fusion between alt-J (whose music I actually like) and '90s one-hitters Eagle Eye Cherry and Everlast.

Madonna: Rebel Heart (Interscope)
Follow-up to MDMA came much more quickly than I expected, and at first I was pleasantly surprised because I'd thought she was likely on the verge of descending into confining her energy almost exclusively to touring. And this album, particularly on the front end, thankfully doesn't prompt the wheels-coming-off feeling of the last two but it still feels unsettled. Madonna is constantly confronted by sexism in the press via mouth-breathers who wonder why she doesn't settle into the adult contemporary doldrums instead of asserting that women her age actually like and want sex and expressing such with a sense of perk and energy. That sort of thinking drives me bonkers, but it's unavoidable that the strongest moments here are when Madonna quits trying to court the youth vote. The first couple of songs are relaxed, assured dance music with a breezy, grown-up nonchalance not unlike what Pet Shop Boys did with former M. associate Stuart Price. The rest vacillates between two weird extremes: elder-statesperson scolding and faux-"current" stuff. The former figures in weak pieces like "Joan of Arc," full of unbecoming "perils of fame" hogwash, and the latter is exemplified by a couple of Kanye West production guest spots, lyrics about "the Illuminati," and songs with titles like "Bitch I'm Madonna." No one can take away her iconic pedigree but the quest for an eternal image leaves the music circling the drain.

Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (Interscope) [r]
Is it permissible to call a spade a spade and admit this is bloated? I get it -- validated when the autobio went wide, he is everyman no longer and now a messenger, and as with so many superstars before and after him the sense of responsibility has become overwhelming, particularly in a year when the value of human life is so openly being questioned by murderous authority. Lamar fortunately is talented enough to process this into a compelling, admirable and often brilliant artistic statement, but the result is overlong, sprawling, overambitious. One thing for sure: it's not an album whose mark will be forgotten, thanks maybe less to its intermittently pleasurable, consistently confrontational music than to its unexpectedly timely politics -- George Clinton in tow for real and in spirit on the second recent record after D'Angelo's to call Parliament-Funkadelic and, yes, Sly & the Family Stone to arms as more than sonic wallpaper (Tupac shows up too, standing in as King of Denmark) -- and the engrossingly alive sound, making liberal use of live instrumentation that suggests the arrangement mastery of not just Arthur Lee and Flying Lotus but Marvin Gaye. It's nice to have a record that so boldly and slowly reveals its patterns and structures, denying even more than good kid, m.A.A.d. city the comfort of structred hooks ("i" comes closest with its Isley Brothers sample but tantalizingly breaks down into chaos); though it nevertheless offers up experiences as distinctive as the whimsical "For Free?", defiant "The Blacker the Berry," and blissfully slamming "King Kunta," its best songs "How Much a Dollar Cost" and "Momma" are its most apocalyptic, personal, audibly important. Righteous as it is, taken together it ends up sidelining his most distinctive features, with even his demented flood of vocal inflections from tirade to coo seeming overly worked over and contrived, but that's probably why he's proud of it: it's a message to the people, his people, in the most traditional sense, and that is the salve that eases his fuzziness and guilt over his own popularity. The biggest hypocrite of 2015 is still one of the most dramatic and gifted MCs going; his bid for a legacy is less pop than Section.80, less direct than good kid, as harrowing as either.

Twin Shadow: Eclipse (Warner Bros.) [r]
George Lewis Jr. goes full-bore on principled late '80s FM, power ballads and big dumb pop, and it's undeniable that he's exceptionally good at it, blooming as a consummate performer all but inaudible on his thoughtful, tricky debut Forget but in greater evidence on the tremendous Confess, possibly the record released in the last five years that I've spent the most actual time playing. Mixed in with all this is an unmistakable bid for a kind of pop-Jesus schtick that seems naturally outdated; the songs would've been radio fodder a long time ago, which seems to be the point Lewis wants to make about populism and the relentless universal romance of a late night. The indie rock press doesn't understand it -- major label move and all -- because they don't understand that "being ironic" isn't necessarily the only reason people listen to old Whispers and Al Jarreau singles, so they are powerless to comprehend the beauty in the maxed-out hooks of the insta-classic "Old Love / New Love." At bottom, though, this does all feel a bit rushed and like it was done this way on a dare. His remarks about rockist elitism may be on point, but these songs play less to his sense of flummoxed romance than the likes of "Patient" and "Run My Heart." But as repetitive and a bit lacking in nuance as they might be, these songs do fully convince; he may still be playing clubs, but he looks and sounds the part of a megastar.

Tobias Jesso Jr.: Goon (Matador) [c]
Elton John meets obtuse hipster folkiness and the news is bad. Canadian singer-songwriter plays piano, is very classicist and throwback in the vein of Father John Misty, so he and I don't get along well. He's said his prayers every night since 1995, and I don't even like the stuff to which he's paying homage. The album cover, which looks like a joke, sets the stage: forlorn-looking white guy with messy hair glares straight back at you as if a mirror. The one redeeming facet is that is voice is more versatile than usual, with equally distinctive high and low ranges. So you get the acid casualty sound of "For You," some George Harrison guitar on "Crocodile Tears" (which even sounds like the name of a Hari song)... but the Cat Stevens-like "The Wait" is the closest to tolerable that this gets.

Heems: Eat Pray Thug (Megaforce) [hr]
No way could Heems' proper debut live up to the often awe-inspiring imagination and exuberance of Das Racist's Relax, a record I'm still mad you all slept on; sometimes he cares a lot but sometimes he doesn't even care, and he feels too little need to suppress his depression, insecurity, anger -- but that doesn't make him maudlin. If anything, it makes him as vital a reporter of the American experience in this century as Glenn Greenwald or Kendrick Lamar (though he's so New York he still won't bump Tupac, and oddly in a way I find that more sympathetic than Lamar's open-ended interview with same). And also, don't take it to mean that Eat Pray Thug is absent of pop, just that its pop is intentionally mangled and undercut by Heems' constant and eloquently expressed doubts and caveats. The record lays out its punkest, most direct expression of the author's MO straight away with the witty and messy "Sometimes," and from there it never becomes any less defiantly individual, often musically (the trap-like insanity of "Jawn Cage," the unabashedly emotional alterna-pop of "Home"), more often lyrically (the harrowing pair "Flag Shopping" and "Patriot Act," both heartbreaking remembrances about the experience of being brown in the U.S. just after 9/11; bless Heems for placing them far enough apart on the album that it doesn't become overwhelming, but I suspect that by being grateful for this I'm only exposing my own white privilege), and always vocally. Heems is among the most distinctive MCs ever to work in hip hop, and his mumbles, singing, shouts and drawls perfectly express the mixed-up empathy and apathy, passion and scrawl that make him a major, unpretentious, unvarnished storyteller in the grandest tradition. He embellishes, glosses over nothing (to his label's apparent chagrin, as they essentially put this record out in secret) because he doesn't need to. Not that he and his former bandmates hadn't done so already, but this completely defies the ignorant "hipster" / "joke rap" stereotype affixed to Heems and to Das Racist, although unless you get your music info exclusively from you-know-where, you knew that already.

Earl Sweatshirt: I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside (Columbia)
Mysterious Odd Futurer's depressive flow is instantly recognizable but one can't dispel the feeling he's kind of a brat, and the beats are uninspired. Best album title of the year, though.

Lightning Bolt: Fantasy Empire (Thrill Jockey) [NO]
"Noise band from Rhode Island," say the press listings. Fuck you, this is metal.

Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (Mom + Pop) [hr]
Barnett is an Australian singer-songwriter with throttling warmth and wit; it's almost impossible to hear her work and not be riveted. The music she and her capable, pointedly rollicking four-piece band create -- loud but not noisy, brash but soft -- is so addictive, clear and invigorating that the incredible, quietly passionate and well-observed lyrics can fly by almost unnoticed. This is where the lyric sheet packaged with the album is a blessing; even taken separately, Barnett's streams of compassionate consciousness are a pleasure, and like the best pop storytellers of our time from John Darnielle to Heems to Kate Tempest, she thinks far afield of a world solely her own, and in detail: "Breakfast on the run again, he's well aware he's dropping soy linseed Vegemite crumbs everywhere. Feeling sick at the sight of his computer, he dodges his way through the Swanston commuters, rips off his tie, hands it to a homeless man sleeping on the corner of a Metro bus stand. He screams 'I'm not going to work today!' Gonna count the minutes that the trains run late, sit on the grass building pyramids out of Coke cans!'" And all this sung and played with the energy you'd expect devoted to an otherworldly pop confection, which it somehow is. If you need proof that such a verbose album can be musically giant, start with "Depreston," one of the most coherent anecdotes ever delivered in perfectly catchy song form, blessed with a curiously dark and beautiful arrangement. If you need proof this is good old rock & roll, start with the searing "Pedestrian at Best." But really, start anywhere -- the album is sprightly at times, ghostly at others, worried, nostalgic, conscious, always human, and never once flags.

The Paranoid Style: Rock and Roll Just Can't Recall EP (Worldwide Battle) [r]
In their music, cynicism and most of all (inevitably) their vocals, this band is like a slightly grittier take on early Blondie, which is not meant as a reduction -- their invariably catchy songs are solid, if somewhat sloppily mixed with enunciated vocals a little too far out front for me. Elizabeth Nelson rails against idealism; her singing is frayed and awkward at times, the songs slightly rote, but the music makes quite an impression and is instantly appealing. This is a quick enough trip via Spotify that you don't really need the push, but try "New Age Tricks" if you want a good first taste.

Ryley Walker: Primrose Green (Dead Oceans) [hr]
Unabashed hippie-ish psych-folk from Rockford, IL lands because of its beauty and sincerity, and because Walker has a strongly emotive voice that will likely remind you of Nick Drake and/or Richard Thompson. Musically, he resembles neither, and in fact the most obvious aural influence is Astral Weeks; improvisational and almost jazzy at its best, this is clearly the music of -- ugh -- "vibes," but it's refreshingly simple in its ambitions and makes for some of the most perfect road music to come down the pipeline in a good while. Songs don't jump out specifically and the record is a length that won't try your patience, but I keep coming back to "Sweet Satisfaction" as the quintessential moment here.

Sufjan Stevens: Carrie & Lowell (Asthmatic Kitty) [r]
Stevens' trajectory from Michigan to Seven Swans to Illnoise to Age of Adz was virtually unmatched in his chosen genre in terms of his constant progression and the refinement of his writing and performing. Carrie & Lowell is more of a piece with the tossed-off EP All Delighted People from 2010, signifying mostly a heels-dug-in commitment to lyricism and melody over distinctive sound. To these ears it's a bit samey, but others are finding it far more profoundly effective, and one assumes your experience with the grief at its center (as with Bjork's Vulnicura) will determine your relationship to the record. His work has never sounded more organized and polished; it's also suffocatingly formal, despite often arrestingly personal -- even oversharing -- lyrics. His is still a voice for the ages.

Lower Dens: Escape from Evil (Ribbon Music) [r]
These Baltimore indie rockers put on a hell of a show when I saw them in 2011; they'd have been the breathless stars of the evening were they not opening for the Walkmen, who were at their most magical that night. Their music was cerebral and incisive, but leader and guitarist Jana Hunter's considerable stage presence was the real takeaway. On their newest work, Hunter dominates and the sound has changed, her ever more flamboyant rock star delivery -- she's like a far more universally appealing version of Future Islands' Sam Herring -- casting a riveting shadow over pulsating, disco-tinged post-punk. (The cover even looks just like Hot Chip's The Warning, if you doubted its intentions.) The beat is unceasing and permanent. At its best -- the opening three songs, particularly the audacious "To Die in L.A.", and the arresting Joy Division tones of closer "Société Anonyme" -- the work is tense, focused, crafty and detailed. Synths abound, but the voice and snaking guitar lines are the story, Hunter the obvious star, and one who clearly loves what she's doing. The songs become less distinctive as the album progresses, however, and despite striking moments it all gradually recedes into an anonymous backdrop, as though its unflagging energy can only go so far to conceal a lack of variance. Indeed, tallying ten economical songs in just forty-one minutes, it still feels unfortunately longer than it is. As a full-on reveling in a sound, though, this is practically unbeatable, and with Twin Shadow's Confess and Chromatics' Kill for Love the ideal late-night rock record of our time.

Jlin: Dark Energy (Planet Mu)
Indiana electronics. Chirpy, confrontational, headachey, with obtuse samples not unlike those on Aphex Twin's early recordings but not nearly so cleverly incorporated.

Curren$y: Pilot Talk III (Jet Life) [r]
Like Paul McCartney, a guy who's eager to please to a fault, now somewhat hilariously running for cover under the rubric established by his one really notable proper studio record despite the fact that there's not that much daylight between the various episodes in his career anyway. This one is most significant because of the strange marketing strategy behind it; you can buy it at a premium with a bunch of Achtung Baby-like bonus appendages, or you can stream it for free. In this manner it may be Curren$y's most forward-looking record, because there is a decent chance the entire music industry will be floating in the free-listening / luxury-to-own cesspool in a matter of years, bad news for those of us who like music we can hold and touch. But whatever lets smaller artists survive is best, I suppose. As for the music, the first single "Briefcase" has lyrics so unignorably oddball you can immediately tell the guy feels liberated without the Warner Bros. bank. The last song "Alert" is fire. Everything in between is pretty good, fun to listen to, pretty par for the course; OKPlayer's price is righter than the label's.

The Mountain Goats: Beat the Champ (Merge) [r]
A concept album the way Little Deuce Coupe was, the most hard-hitting Goats record in the better part of a decade comes out swinging, driven much as The Life of the World to Come was by one of John Darnielle's many public enthusiasms -- here, pro-wrestling, mostly in the idiosyncratic, largely regional iterations he enjoyed as a child. The lyrical results are personal, shattering, transcendent, particularly on the first three songs: "Southwestern Territory," the desolate sound of a dead end with a heart attached; the extraordinarily vicious "The Legend of Chavo Guerrero," which in its oblique tracking of father-son relationships starts to reveal that this isn't really or completely all about wrestling; and the instant fan favorite "Foreign Object," as catchy and weird as anything in this rich catalog. The musical advancement and often complete capturing of a complicated, forlorn, slightly nostalgic and longing mood make you want this to be as phenomenal as it initially seems. While an improvement on the scattershot if passionate Transcendental Youth, it's still fatally front-loaded despite its focus, with too many near-dirges toward the end (though "Luna" is a unique moment, and the words to "Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan" are essential Darnielle poetry). As ever, Darnielle gives us much to contemplate -- starting with a Wikipedia binge for this universe about which I'm unlikely ever to know much more than he has to teach me -- and he and the band continue to evolve: this is a feat of often masterful storytelling, with steadier-than-ever backing assistance.

Young Fathers: White Men Are Black Men Too (Big Dada) [r]
Earl Sweatshirt and Death Grips put together couldn't come up with an album title this eyebrow-raising and weirdly tone-deaf, although it probably has a different tone coming from non-Americans. The follow-up to Mercury Prize-winning Dead from this Scottish collective resembles a traditional hip hop outing even less -- more moody and layered, with droning and broken rhythms and all very indie, alas -- and provides some sense of a more collected, early '90s-style conscious activism. Not sure if that's good or bad but the songs are plenty engrossing.

Waxahatchee: Ivy Tripp (Merge) [c]
Katie Crutchfield's breakthrough Cerulean Salt was a standout in the c. 2013 overflow of strongly '90s-derivative indie singer-songwriters; her songs were personable and sharp. Her Merge debut seems somehow too ordinary; the songs are weaker, but much more to the point, the performances and production are altogether less inspired. Nothing about it sticks. I'm not fully able to articulate why this leaves me so cold and I'm clearly an odd man out despite really being keyed up for it, so give it a listen yourself.

Twerps: Range Anxiety (Merge) [hr]
Once in a while a band, like this Melbourne indie-pop quartet, comes along that reminds me what I frequently love about melodic, lyrical college rock. Wispy and sincere, they most handily conjure memories of R.E.M., the Go-Betweens and the Bats, strongly driven by gentle Byrds-infected guitar riffs and a terrific male-female vocal blend provided by dual guitarists Marty Frawley and Jules McFarlane. A nostalgia trip is nearly inevitable, and the record is quite ready and willing to drift winningly off into sleep alongside the likes of Real Estate, whom they've supported. But if you give it all of your focus, it has an unexpected bite easily of a piece with its influences. Take the early, surprisingly hard-hitting dual punch of Frawley's hungover lovelorn anthem "Back to You" swiftly followed by McFarlane's lilting alienation on "Stranger," halfway between Paisley Underground and Flying Nun. The performances sing and swing and seldom wear out their welcome, even the lightly drummed five-minute fadeout "Empty Road," and the rough-hewn vocals add to the charm of catchy chestnuts like "Love at First Sight" and "Shoulders," but every full cut here ends up revealing its rewards, and at least some of them usually come immediately. This is never more apparent than on the extraordinary centerpiece "I Don't Mind," an achingly moving masterpiece of latter-day jangle that sweeps you up and knocks you out with its sheer unguarded romance. This is an album full of gems, but that song is so grand that even the band can't resist leading off with it. Smart, affecting, quiet and unassuming, this is the sort of music some of us wait years to seek out, and it's the kind of thing that never hits for the jugular but will -- if it's in your wheelhouse -- most assuredly become a permanent and valued part of your life.

Pinkshinyultrablast: Everything Else Matters (Shelflife) [hr]
This would be a genuinely oddball band of hyperactive neo-shoegaze noisemakers even if they didn't hail from Saint-Petersburg. With an initially extremely alienating but stunningly incongruous mixture of electronic beats, feedback drawl and screaming walls of sound within almost prog-like sprawling song structures, stabbing guitar lines, enveloping reverb and fizzy synths, the record captures the airy mood of dreampop simultaneously with a heaviness atypical of such unabashedly vague vibe music. The music is unpredictable, the songs collapsing naturally into one another without becoming completely indistinct. The sound is gorgeous and alien -- with, as corny as this sounds, a feeling of being transported to icy plains and all sorts of underseen landscapes -- and packs quite an atmospheric wallop, sounding more massive than one could attribute to a mere five-piece. If I had to compare it to anything, hard-to-pin-down mystery and all, it's probably Cocteau Twins, and there's not quite enough press about this for me to check and see if I'm just being ignorant, but this truly does sound like one of the more unique and exciting records of its kind in a good while.

***

FURTHER INVESTIGATION TO COME
This is a list of records that were auditioned recently (see explanation below) that are in the running to be evaluated further. This isn't to be taken as an outright recommendation of these records, but it's worth noting that something about the cuts I heard intrigued me enough to set them aside for future reference; I will listen to these from start to finish at least once. Complicated as this sounds, it's the most efficient system I've come up with to weed through so much music. On occasion a record strikes me to such an extent that it immediately gets placed in the queue for a mainline review; this happened with the Twerps album above. A level below that are albums that would hypothetically receive asterisks on the list below, which means they stand a better than average chance of receiving complete reviews down the road. (Pinkshinyultrablast's album was an example.) When I spend more time with these albums next month, they will either appear as regular capsules, in the "also recommended" list at the end of the year, or will be demoted back to the reject pile. So consider this an albums list for the truly adventurous.

- The Monochrome Set: Spaces Everywhere
- Allison Moorer: Down to Believing
- Chastity Belt: Time to Go Home
- Lonelady: Hinterland
- The Go! Team: The Scene Between
- Follkazoid: III
- Pokey LaFarge: Something in the Water
- Colleen: Captain of None
- The Very Best: Makes a King
- Toro Y Moi: What For?
- This Is the Kit: Bashed Out
- Stornoway: Bonxie
- Polar Bear: Same as You
- Built to Spill: Untethered Moon
- Wire
- Stealing Sheep: Not Real
- Knxwledge: Hud Dreams
- STS x RJD2
- Rhett Miller: the Traveler
- Della Mae
- Mbongwana Star: From Kinshasa
- Georgia Anne Muldrow: Thoughtiverse Unmarred
- Valet: Nature
- Indigo Girls: One Lost Day
- SOAK: Before We Forgot How to Dream
- Girlpool: Before the World Was Big
- Leftfield: Alternative Light Source
- Prinzhorn Dance School: Home Economics
- No Joy: More Faithful
- Sarah Cracknell: Red Kite
- Bully: Feels Like

***

AUDITIONED REJECTS
Each month, I troll the Metacritic database for all recent album releases that have received an average of at least 70, which alas -- music critics are by and large a kinder lot than their cinematic brethren, or maybe the number of niches has just gotten too unwieldy -- is most of them. This -- for several years now, but I'm only now being this open about it -- is how I attempt to get a handle on the music that doesn't fit the criterion addressed at the top of this entry. If something grades in the low 70s and has less than ten reviews, I ignore it; I probably miss some good things as a result, but for my sanity I have to cut things off somewhere. In the upper seventies, that changes to five reviews. I also gather up the records that made it into the eighties but with just a handful of reviews attached. Laugh at my compulsiveness if you want, but this is how I found Kate Tempest among many other favorites of recent years; we can no longer count on PR and cool labels to bring us all that we need to hear.

Please note: I don't listen to these albums in their entirety. In a method borrowed from several other critics with similar ambitions, I play the first few cuts of each album. Sometimes, I can't even make it through one of them but I try very hard to give them at least a minute, a cutoff time I picked up years ago when I did a singles-review column called Wuzzon. Singles that failed to generate any kind of emotion from me after a minute were ignored; albums whose first few tracks I feel negative feelings or no feelings at all about will be listed below, as rejects. I never previously considered "showing my work" in this process, but it dawned on me that it may be helpful if, for instance, I eventually wonder why I never wrote anything about something listed below, or if ages from now I determine I need to take a look at something and wonder why it sounds vaguely familiar. There's also inevitably the chance I could just change my mind. I'm choosing not to do any "writing" about the material here, but I've included a special note on certain records -- "NYIM," which stands for "It's Not You, It's Me." This notes that my dismissal of the record is not to be counted as an actual criticism against what I heard of it, but that it is just so completely not to my taste (a metal record that slipped through, for example, or most modern country) that I can't hear or say anything of value related to it. The rest are objectively bad. Just kidding. But I could defend my boredom about them more concretely if I had to; thankfully you kind folks won't require that of me.

Villagers: Darling Arithmetic
Calexico: Edge of the Sun
Gallows: Desolation Sounds [NYIM]
Rocky Votolato: Hospital Handshakes
John Moreland: High on Tulsa Heat [NYIM]
Passion Pit: Kindred
Squarepusher: Damogen Furies [NYIM]
Eska
Olivia Chaney: Longest River
George Fitzgerald: Fading Love
Bill Fay: Who Is the Sender?
Nai Harvest: Hairball
Braids: Deep in the Iris
Mew: +-
Shelby Lynne: I Can't Imagine
Django Django: Born Under Saturn
Mikal Cronin: MCIII [NYIM]
Metz: II
My Morning Jacket: The Waterfall
Oddisee: The Good Fight
Coliseum: Anxiety's Kiss
Mac McCaughan: Non-Believers [NYIM]
Torres: Sprinter [NYIM]
Best Coast: California Nights
Nadine Shah: Fast Food [NYIM]
The Alchemist / Oh No: Welcome to Los Santos
Van Hunt: The Fun Rises, the Fun Sets
Snoop Dogg: Bush
The Weather Station: Loyalty
Prefuse 73: Rivinton Nao Rio [NYIM]
The Early November: Imbue
Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell: The Traveling Kind [NYIM]
Blanck Mass: Dumb Flesh
Patrick Watson: Love Songs for Robots
Paul Weller: Saturn's Pattern
Graham Parker & the Rumour: Mystery Glue
Twenty One Pilots: Blurryface
The Story So Far
Brandon Flowers: The Desired Effect
Du Blonde: Welcome Back to Milk
Joanna Gruesome: Peanut Butter
A$AP Rocky: At.Long.Last.A$AP
Rachel Grimes: The Clearing [NYIM]
The Vaccines: English Graffiti
Turbowolf: Two Hands
Maysa: Back 2 Love
Rolo Tomassi: Grievances
Jaga Jazzist: Starfire
Four Year Strong
Nozinja: Nozinja Lodge
Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard: Django and Jimmie [NYIM]
Algiers
Dawes: All Your Favorite Bands
Florence + the Machine: How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful
Dean McPhee: Fatima's Hand
J Fernandez: Many Levels of Laughter
FFS
Jenny Hval: Apocalypse, Girl
Ash: Kablammo!
The SteelDrivers: The Muscle Shoals Recordings
Hudson Mohawke: Lantern
Genghar: A Dream Outside
Heartless Bastards: Restless Ones [NYIM]
The Orb: Moonbuilding 2703 AD [NYIM]

***

SONGS OF THE SEASON
Normally -- if I actually continue to include this feature -- it'll be Songs of the Month. These are the songs, new and old, that according to last.fm and my own estimates I've listened to the most in the relevant time period, or that I'm simply most obsessed with at the moment, and also songs from evaluated albums that I liked even though the records overall ended up in the reject bin. (Those are listed on the top.) In a lot of cases, the most-played songs will correspond to album reviews from this current post; sometimes it will give a hint of what you'll be reading a lot more about here very soon, as my schedule with these things overlaps quite a lot; and sometimes it's entirely arbitrary.

The Allo Darlin' song below is from an album I only had time to listen to in full once last year, which I now see was a mistake. I listed "Half Heart Necklace," from the same record, as one of my twenty favorite tracks of 2014, but "History Lessons" has turned out to be the one that haunts me. The lyrics, vocal and arrangement are all perfect. I tried and failed to learn to play and sing it myself. It is stunning and even just on its own would give enough reason to reevaluate the record and band as a whole in the near future. Meanwhile, Susanne Sundfør's "Fade Away" is -- especially in conjunction with "Accelerate," just before it on the album -- one of the most brilliant pop songs of the decade. And finally, when I got married in September, there was no first dance; that will be happening at a party we're throwing in the spring. But the Kinks song, a discovery from the vinyl-only compilation named, was certainly running through my head the entire time.

- The Unthanks "Mount the Air" [Mount the Air]
- Bop English "Dani's Blues" [Constant Bop]
+
- Susanne Sundfør "Fade Away" [Ten Love Songs]
- Twerps "I Don't Mind" [Range Anxiety]
- Allo Darlin' "History Lessons" (2014) [We Come from the Same Place]
- Courtney Barnett "Depreston" [Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit]
- Lower Dens "To Die in L.A." [Escape from Evil]
- The Mountain Goats "The Legend of Chavo Guerrero" [Beat the Champ]
- Kendrick Lamar "How Much a Dollar Cost" [To Pimp a Butterfly]
- Twin Shadow "Old Love / New Love" [Eclipse]
- Heems "Flag Shopping" [Eat Pray Thug]
- Ryley Walker "Sweet Satisfaction" [Primrose Green]
- Curren$y "Alert" [Pilot Talk III]
- Bjork "Pluto" (1997) [Homogenic]
- The Kinks "There's No Life Without Love" (rec. 1967) [The Great Lost Kinks Album]
- The Paranoid Style "New Age Tricks" [Rock & Roll Just Can't Recall]

The September and October posts will follow in the next few weeks, sans wordy explanations; save those into a handy Notepad folder so you can keep up with this blog which I know is extremely vital to your day to day life! But honest to goodness I love you all, goodnight.

The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads (1977-81)

(Sire [orig] / Rhino [reissue])

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This extraordinary, crucial document of one of the best live bands in rock & roll history is a comprehensive ballooning of an already generous vinyl release from 1981. As brilliant as Talking Heads' studio albums were, the grit and energy of their live performances is beyond anything that could be duplicated offstage. Few bands had such teasing, sensual interplay even from the beginning, and as the lineup and sound broadened, this collection shows that their work only grew more exuberant. It's not that they lose focus and precision, it's that their world gets bigger.

The unique approach on both vinyl and CD versions gives The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads -- so named because of David Byrne's deadpan song introductions; the record starts with him declaring "The name of this song is 'New Feeling'... and that's what it's about" -- the sense of a story being told. The band applied such ambitions to the majority of even their more obligatory work; the film Stop Making Sense was a concert movie with a subtle story arc, the music video collection Storytelling Giant strings the work together in an oblique, artful way hardly befitting the PR slant of such an exercise, and the two-disc best-of Sand in the Vaseline is filled with puzzling asides and jokes. And here: rather than a capturing of a performance in a single era of this dynamic band's career, it's divided in half between their punk years and the point when their output was increasingly infused with R&B, soul and African influences.

The first disc covers the band in the '70s, from the new-wave CBGB's days through their evolution to a more muscular, virtuosic live act, mixing a clever restraint with an unheard-of connection to their audience. Yeah, they are weird... but you're with them all the way, and for all the tongue-in-cheek (mostly?) conservatism of Byrne's early lyrics, their irony is an act of subversion, and their rhythmic intensity and endlessly surprising eclecticism are already in place. To hear the band dissect and distort "Air" and "Heaven" is the kind of pleasure for which you never dared hope, with several cuts topping their studio variants (particularly "Mind"), but the unforgettable moments are that stunning, brooding "Stay Hungry," exposing all of the song's repressed sexuality, and an enormously moving "Big Country," a song I wouldn't have expected to make a good transition to the stage... but this manages to top Eno's cut, already one of the greatest songs in rock music, not least because Byrne almost sounds angry and Chris Frantz fills both ears and heart by taking a disarmingly poignant song in an even more striking direction. Byrne's voice is in fact a major asset here generally, cracking and stumbling through the familiar songs to reveal in them a new humanity and fragile sensitivity, making even the rearranged "Animals" and "Psycho Killer" somewhat melancholy, single-handedly bringing out new worlds in the songs. It may be the best vocal work he has on record.

The first disc of Rhino's reissue is likely the most durable of the pair because it is driven so much by individual songs, but the second is a magnificent album in itself, reproducing the entire setlist from the 1980-81 Remain in Light tour, rife with soaring guitar lines from Adrian Belew and uproariously grand performances from everybody. The very idea of stretching "Born Under Punches" to eight minutes and bringing "Houses in Motion" to explosive life is exhilirating even just in theory, but to hear them is to be stunned. The band is looser than on the subsequent Stop Making Sense, which documented their next and final world tour in 1983, delving into the kind of jams and tangents that led to the composition of these songs in the first place.

They were never more expansive or impressive live than in this period, and Rhino's uninterrupted document is as close as any of us will ever get to being there. It's not an exaggeration to compare it to, say, a Miles Davis album from the early '70s -- this is provocative, demanding, cerebral music, but it's also body music, and it stands in surprisingly sharp contrast to the cheeky novelties of disc one, where "Love -> Building on Fire" might evoke Television but remains a joyous piece of innocence and purity. On the Remain in Light-era tracks, even the older punk-period songs suddenly seem like dark, ambitious delvings into a widescreen dark night. Not only were they never stronger, they were never more serious.

Talking Heads seem to become more popular all the time, but it's hard to say whether this album -- which went unissued on CD for two decades, inexplicably -- has properly been canonized in the manner it deserves. Not even counting the thrill of hearing these songs taken from new angles, it gives the listener who's gobbled up the band's eight albums the feeling of having stumbled upon a whole new set of tunes or maybe a whole new band; virtually none of the selections duplicate or more than superficially resemble their studio counterparts. Not one cut here isn't impressive. (Why the fuck didn't "A Clean Break" make it to one of the Eno albums, anyway!?) This is a definitive document of a remarkable band in their prime. The only problem is it will only make you want to hear more. Luckily, there are some immensely rewarding bootlegs, but that's another story for another day.

***

[Includes material from a review posted in 2004.]