Amnesia Scanner - AS [EP]
A 21-minute slice of ominous and whacked-out electro-grime; awash with dirty deformities, walloping 'what-the's, stutters-n-sputters: muddlement abounds fo sho, but hacked+marred vocal deliveries help accelerate conditions into gnarled club bangers for contorted creatures, and though these six arrangements lurch and confound with the best of 'em, each one does tote a sense of compactness. Comicality amongst the inexplicable: cartoonish boinks and a hook that sounds like "mush head". 6.5/10
Ash Koosha - I AKA I
Still steadfastly squooshin' all kindsa koosha in your hear-holes: right from the onset of "Ote" there's bizarrely blistering bleeps+blops and a pitched-up someone switching between "poopies" and gobbledygook. But such overzealous scrambling is otherwise scarce this time around -- still a sharp+woozy litter of sketchy convolutions and slime-slides and fairly-warped everythings, surely, but I AKA I often finds his sound palette a bit more reasonable (dare I say relatable?) and the compositions steadier (dare I say composed?). Still kinda arduous after about 15 minutes, though, too. But if slowin' your roll increases the capacity for observation and ken, and even makes for moments of poignant placidity, so be it. Cuz I do dare say, I prefer this digestible to the debut. 6/10
Boliden - Landscape and Memory
*******HIGHEST RECS*******
Endlessly enveloped in an airy-n-dubby ghost-ohm ambient fog, which adorns these otherwise meat-and-potato melodies-and-beats with quite the spacious substratum of pensive ethereality. An aura of halcyon remoteness is in full-force and hella absorbing, the compositional bits and pieces accomplish a lot with a little, and each track still forks over individual greatness despite manifest similarities -- do they get repetitious? Oh undoubtedly. Straight-up stagnant, even? Er, yeah kinda. But between the gauzy accessibility and the cushiony tones and the deep-yet-buried bass and the near-celestial atmosphere, this makes for a notable aural tranquilizer -- one that does it (and this is important) while unfailingly pursuing dat groove, only permitting the interstitial "Interstitial" to go full comatose. Which makes for a nice switch-up besides. 7.5/10
Drake - Views
A faceless female's commencing comment forecasts the constitution to come -- "It's a little chilly out there." And considering how promptly this sets sail into a near-bloodless grouse-fest, 'little' may have been an understatement. When "Fire & Desire" schlepps on through at the tail-end of this elephantine track-list, it's a kind of indicative corroboration that those are the two traits this album lacks the most. Well, those and magnitude-moderation: how about accommodating an 80+minute slog with a flow+format that propitiously correlates? What happened to the vigorous bars-4-dayz from that year-gone scrawled-on mixtape? Why not propel the pulse provided by a bulk of the beats and a handful of highlights towards the rife-n-dull not-so-fortunates? But one thing hasn't changed -- blame the length or Drake's Drakiness existing in a particularly listless+bothersome state or both -- and that's guest-spots instantaneously contributing heroic relief by merely deviating from our star-at-hand, without much effort to boot: PartyNextDoor accomplishes it (again) by simply emoting, Future kills it while reiterating the same chuckly line four times in a row. If it interrupts poutingly rattling off yet another surfeit of women and their chosen life-paths instead of settling down with the boy, I say do it up. ~*~meh~*~
Explosions in the Sky - The Wilderness
Sure, they cling to the proverbial post-rock patterns: the piecemeal pacing, the serene silkiness segueing into optimistic alleviation escalating into thunderous intimidation or some other amalgam of vice-versas. But for a sensibly configured 9 tracks in 46 minutes, this does pack in alotta intricate proteanism and satisfying shift-work, sidestepping undue lulls and readily tiptoeing movement-to-movement without wilting towards pure precision. Not that it's without many-a slack or stagy section, but many-a poignant ones and a primarily peachy overall package make for adequate amends. And though it seems they're chiefly used as an apparatus for stability, some xtra exertion on the drums would be nice: "Tangle Formations", I'm lookin' at you. 6/10
O'Brother - Endless Light
Their steadily leaden swirl of partly-proggy post-rock crunchin' is atmospherically appealing, and though overall overcast inching is pretty much intrinsic, they stir up an adequate amount to chaw on -- opaques, acoustics, shimmers+squeals, slo-mo agility, strikingly sharp group-vox harmonizing, a conclusive stretch of ambiance. But whereas the dismal drag is manageable, the melodramatic non-group angst-vox have me rolling my eyes and muttering the band name typically throughout. Indubitable smh moments include when he wants to watch it all burn and that part about the brain-dead infant. 5/10
Puce Mary - The Spiral
///BRAV-FUCKING-O\\\
After provoking just a bit more than a shrug following a live performance in a Brooklyn dive and conspiring to create one of the dullest albums of 2015 alongside fellow-droner Loke Rahbek, I slunk towards this salmon spirality skeptical-yet-hopeful. And maybe I've since grown more masochistic, or her aesthetic has become more efficacious -- most likely a lil bit of this and a lil bit of that -- but this time around she has spawned a screech-n-thud stew that is not only sincerely frightening, but ups the vigor and variance. The all-out bleakness is torturous and engulfing, but its inundation of the digitally damned is quite the riveter: suitability for horror-score material is sealed when a xerox of Hellraiser's Chatterer rattles on through, strident screamin' comes off equal parts abused machine/garbled human/dinosaur in the distance, and it still engages amid lowdown creepin'; staving off inertia and keeping mystery a-flowing. Motifs for deadpan+barely audible spoken word: the marriage of sperm and blood, the scratching and peeling of skin, you know. 7/10
The Range - Potential
*******HIGHEST RECS*******
The opening one-two punch of portentous make-or-break cliffhanger and stately dance-floor euphoria perseveres as a gratifying trend throughout -- it's consistently urgent, gripping, inspirative; and when it comes down to most overarching, celebratory. From surreptitiously championing the voices of uncharted commoners via molding barely-viewed Youtubers into majestic hook-meisters and reappropriated ramblers to clenching clean-n-classy with no forfeiture of detail-n-potency to the utilization of many-a sparkly piano and feather-flutter cymbal with no lapse of sizable significance, he blends catchy immediacy and valuable instrumentals like no one's business -- and has a hell of a time doing it. Perceived commerciality and dramatic pop-leanings may scare off some of the die-hard electro-dudes: oh just submit already. If all else fails, the guy can really champion a voice. 8.5/10
The Thermals - We Disappear
Fuzzy power-chord-pop on autopilot is one thing, but how bout palpable vacuity in both production and performance? They come across clocked in and cursory, fulfilling a duty rather than exerting some oomph -- the squeal+scuzz bookends on the opening track may be the edgiest juncture here, the admittedly magnetic guitar-hook on "If We Don't Die Today" for sure most ear-grabbing, and most of the remaining bulk squeaks by through semi-competent+semi-catchy formalities. Not often do 'oh-oh-oh's and 'alright, okay's and 'woah-woah's sound so bubbly-yet-blank -- and before you know it/barely a half-hour in, they do indeed disappear. But, like, were they ever even really there, man? 5/10
White Lung - Paradise
Continued concretion of their now-distinct and much-entrenched sound, no doubt -- between Way's vehement vox and William's high-string-centric ninja-riffs and Vassiliou's dogged drummin', they have taken a somewhat sapped style and developed their own unmistakable rendition of it. But damn me if this isn't yet another near-carbon copy of their previous albums: okay yeah there's a bit more semi-polish applied, this clocks in at 28 minutes instead of the ushe ~20, "Below" is an even-more conspicuous+spectacular tone-down than "In Your Home" was, and from a technical standpoint, they've improved as a group. How bout that creative growth tho? How bout that taking 2 years to make a 10-track sub-half-hour record (again) only to transmit a touched-up reiteration? Speaking of "In Your Home": now that was a laudable closer. 6/10
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