Wait, Danny Brown is actually crazy tho. in a bad way

Do you like Qwel?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V41vB4I3B34

he has beef with atmosphere which is probably a good thing.

I haven't heard him. Sounds pretty good.

I didn't even know Atmosphere was still around.

The Good (B-) Part 3


30. Boards of Canada – Tomorrow’s Harvest
I was never the biggest Boards of Canada fan, but I'd still consider Music Has the Right to Children and the subsequent In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country EP to be essential listening for anybody interested in electronic music of that time. Geogaddi, while good, offered diminished returns, I thought, and Campfire Headphase was where I lost interest. I barely noticed that they didn't release any new music from 2007-2012, but by the time this album came out, I felt like maybe I was ready to hear what a new BoC album had to offer. The break did them good, and I think this record is better than the two that preceded it. All they really had to do was pick up a compatible thread from current electronic music and filter it through their own signature sound, much like what Mouse on Mars did with their 2012 comeback album Parastrophics. In BoC's case, they've embraced the dark, moody, minimalist soundtrack-like music of artists like Demdike Stare, Raime, Haxan Cloak, and recent Shackleton. It suits them perfectly.


29. Locrian – Return to Annihilation
I don't really have a problem with the style of music that Deafheaven plays, and Locrian makes the case that melodic, atmospheric, shoegaze-y black metal doesn't have to be dull and predictable. Their music is dynamic and varied beyond just loud/quiet and heavy/soft. They employ a broad sound palette, creating a wide range of moods and textures, and they are able to create real tension and give their music dramatic weight beyond typical, soaring, "cinematic" post-rock tropes. A lot of the time they accomplish this by keeping things on the quieter, more ominous side, giving much more time to build anticipation toward the moments of heavy catharsis. I suppose this record may require a little more patience than Sunbather, and maybe that's why it's gotten less attention.


28. Rob Mazurek Octet – Skull Sessions
A dense, monolithic record of avant-garde jazz fusion that never gets too skronky, too repetitive, or too weird. Mazurek (cornet) has assembled an excellent band - including John Herndon of Tortoise on drums - with vibraphone, flute, sax, guitar, keys, and a few other things who keeps things lively and alive through each of the lengthy pieces that make up the album's 65 minutes.


27. Power Trip – Manifest Decimation
Power Trip play thrash that almost sounds like it could have come straight out of the '80s. They add a little bit of an extra hardcore bent, but not much. These eight songs are so much fun and rip by so fast that it doesn't really matter if they contain a single original idea or not, though.


26. No Joy – Wait to Pleasure
No Joy aren't particularly original, either, but even as tired as shoegaze/dream pop revival is, they somehow manage to make it sound fresh. The melodies are just irresistible. "Hare Tarot Lies", "Slug Night", and probably "Wrack Attack" are the standouts for me, but there's not a bad track on the whole thing.


25. Washed Out – Paracosm
It's interesting how the whole chillwave thing has shaken out in the years since Washed Out, Neon Indian, and Toro Y Moi first hit the scene. Of all of their debuts (and I would also include Memory Tapes in this group of frontrunners in that first year), I liked Neon Indian's the best. I thought Washed Out was sort of empty and overrated, and I didn't like Toro Y Moi very much at all. Then Toro Y Moi surprised me with Underneath the Pine, one of my favorites of 2011 and still my favorite thing to come out of chillwave. Neon Indian's second album that same year was good but initially somewhat disappointing, and Washed Out still wasn't doing much for me. Now with this last round, the tables have turned again. Neon Indian's third album still has yet to arrive, and Toro Y Moi's was a regression. Washed Out, however, has finally made an album that really made me feel something. His music has deepened since his debut, and now he's crafting immaculate pop music with real emotional heart. It's the same warm, twilit, nostalgic vibe as ever before, but he's really managed to mine much more deeply and effectively into its bitter sweetness.


24. Foxygen – We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic
This has fallen a bit for me over the course of the past year, but it's still a fun record that makes me smile. I'm not sure now if it's even really an improvement over Take the Kids Off Broadway (which is also very good). While the songs here are more polished and memorable, the messiness of their debut had a giddiness to it that was infectious, and it seemed to point to a lot of different possibilities. Here they seem pretty close to settling into a career sound, and the MGMT comparisons don't feel too far off. Still, I don't think MGMT have recorded anything that can touch "No Destruction" or "San Francisco", and they probably never will. Foxygen may very well have some even better songs in them.


23. Mostly Other People Do the Killing – Slippery Rock
My favorite of the 3 Peter Evans-related projects of 2013 that I heard, this is Moppa Elliott's band down to its four core members - Elliott on bass, Evans on trumpet, Jon Irabagon on sax, and Kevin Shea on drums. They play a sort of freewheeling, omnivorous kind of avante garde jazz that keeps things lively, grooving, and fun. The cover gives you no idea what this will sound like (forget any notion of any kind of '80s anything), but it does give you a sense of this band's playfulness and energy. They came to party, and maybe to shake up any preconceptions people may have about jazz being overly stuffy, intellectual music; boring background stuff; noisy, un-melodic and inaccessible in the case of free or avant-garde; or, in general, dead.


22. Steve Gunn – Time Off
Steve Gunn is the guitarist in Kurt Vile's band and just all-around awesome. This is, obviously, a guitar-centric album of laid-back, breezy, folk-rock that showcases not only Gunn's excellent playing but very strong composing abilities as well. Lyrics and vocals are minimal but are present and fit perfectly into the mix. He basically puts Ben Chasny to shame here, or at least everything Chasny has done in the last ten years or so.


21. Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke, Oren Ambarchi – Now While It's Still Warm Let Us Pour In All the Mystery
Another entry in the series of collaborations by this trio, this one is a lot like their previous effort Imikuzushi which I loved. In fact, this is very nearly as good. Extended heavy psyche improv with Haino in top form. This one isn't as heavy start to finish as its predecessor, but it's a little more varied and maybe a little more approachable.

TOP 20

With Youtubes™!

The Good (B) Part 4


20. VHÖL – s/t
"They weaved among the trees at breakneck speeds." That's from a Return of the Jedi audio/picture book that was sampled on the Dr. Octagon album Ocatagonecologist, and it's stuck with me from listening to both that album as a teenager and the Star Wars audio book as a kid. And I thought of it here because I was trying to think about something to say with the phrase "breakneck speed", and that quote popped into my head. It's, you know, about that chase scene in the movie on the Ewok planet with the speeder bikes. This album doesn't make me think of that at all. It makes me think of Motörhead, beefed up, sped up, and magnified by about a thousand. This is supposedly some form of black metal, but it couldn't be further from some of the more ponderous, leaden, "atmospheric" stuff that's been all the rage lately. This is pure, vicious rock and roll.


19. Pissed Jeans – Honeys
I never really listened to Pissed Jeans prior to 2013 even though I always knew they were in my wheelhouse and was pretty sure I'd like them. I guess when their last album came out, all the way back in 2009, I was still kind of working my way through some of the original noise rock bands that Pissed Jeans draw so heavily from. Yeah, they're kind of Jesus Lizard redux, but then the Jesus Lizard borrowed owe a lot of their sound to The Birthday Party anyway. In the end, who cares? Matt Korvette isn't David Yow, and frankly, I liked Pissed Jeans' everyday, mundane life lyrics a lot more than The Jesus Lizard's kind of cartoonish mania. And maybe this isn't the best Pissed Jeans album, but being the first one I ever really listened to (I've now heard King of Jeans and Hope for Men), it's probably my favorite. There are some genuinely funny songs here, particularly "Cafeteria Food", and in general it's just a thoroughly solid noise rock album.


18. Yo La Tengo – Fade
Yo La Tengo is one of the best bands of the last twenty-five years. This is a very good Yo La Tengo album, possibly the best one since And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out. They're not doing anything new here, but they're doing what they do best, something only they can do. This is the only band that could give you the sprawling, all-encompassing "Ohm", the heart-breakingly beautiful "Cornelia and June", the propulsive yet effortlessly pretty "Stupid Things", and close it off with the poignant, majestic "Before We Run" and make it sound like "just another Yo La Tengo album". They make absolute mastery such an easy thing to take for granted.


17. Portal – Vexovoid
I think this album marked a turning a point for me. It may be the reason that I decided to seek out so many metal albums in 2013, and it definitely helped steer me toward a certain style - brutal/technical death metal - that I have really enjoyed. I heard this fairly early in the year, and it floored me. This is some dark, thick, heavy stuff, but it's also dizzyingly complex. It can be downright disorienting which, coupled with the brute force of it, makes it especially indelible. This takes the meticulously crafted mood and atmosphere of a band like Neurosis - probably my favorite metal band, still - and funnels it through a hurricane. I never thought I'd be some who's "into" metal. The over-the-top, contrived, generally kind of corny "evil" motifs, most often accompanying classic rock played a little heavier with ridiculous vocals of one kind or another. Not much metal really sounds truly dark and scary. This does.


16. Julia Holter – Loud City Song
I didn't like Ekstasis, and prior to this album I didn't really get why anyone cared about Julia Holter aside from, you know, her looks and stuff. But then this came around, an enormous leap forward, and "Horns Surrounding Me" in particular is just fantastic. I'm not really sure what to compare it to. Kate Bush, maybe? There's definitely precedent in like '80s - early '90s sophisticated art pop stuff, but Holter clearly has her own sonic territory staked out here. Just between that song and the spacious, droning beauty of "Hello Stranger", she's established a sound both that's interesting and moving. And there's so much more here than just those standouts. The charming quirk of "In the Green Wild", the nighttime groove of "This Is a True Heart", the melancholy beauty of "He's Running Through My Eyes", really the whole album. You know it's probably too low on my list, but I'm too lazy to try to rework it now.

The Very Good (B+) Part 1


15. Autechre – Exai
I've been an Autechre fan for about 15 years now, and in that time their output has been fairly consistent and, one could say, fairly similar. There have been subtle changes in direction supposedly driven by changes in their creative process, but every Autechre album post-Confield pretty much sounds like further explorations and refinements of the sound world they had already built by that point. In that time there was one particular highlight that I would rank among their best albums - 2004's Untilted - which felt like an attempt to take things back to more beat-driven, accessible territory. It struck a perfect balance between their meticulously crafted, experimental sound textures and deep grooves. This album succeeds at nearly the same level by going in a totally different direction. This is Autechre's most expansive and exploratory record, and it's possibly more insular than anything they've ever put out. Autechre sound as if they are wholly unconcerned with anything else going on in electronic music at the moment, and that's mostly a good thing. It's difficult to pick highlights from an album like this as it's a very particular headspace that really requires total immersion. I find it so engulfing and transportive that even at over two hours it doesn't feel too long.


14. Faux Fur – s/t
OK: Women was one of my favorite bands of the past several years, and their album Public Strain is still my favorite thing to come out of the 2010's so far. At the end of 2010 they broke up when brothers Pat (lead guitar, vocals) and Matt (bass, backing vocals) Flegel got into a fight on stage. Then in early 2012 guitarist Chris Reimer died in his sleep at the age of 26 from a pre-existing heart condition. Women only released two albums and a couple of singles. They were great, and they ended tragically and too soon. It shouldn't be surprising then that there have been a lot of other people like myself, wishing there could be more music from these guys, feeling kind of awful about the whole thing, wondering what the surviving members are up to and what related projects are going on. Getting to the point, this band does not feature any former members of the band Women. It does however feature a third, younger Flegel brother, Andy, and he and his bandmates (particularly vocalist Jean-Sebastian Audet who also records as Un Blonde) are definitely of like mind musically to his two older siblings. In fact, you could easily describe Faux Fur as Women Jr., and anyone familiar with that band would get the idea. There is something a little bit brighter, poppier, perhaps more youthful about Faux Fur, though. This, their debut album, is fantastic, and you can get from their Bandcamp page for whatever price you want to pay, including nothing.


13. These New Puritans – Field of Reeds
The best latter-day Talk Talk impression I've ever heard, easily surpassing what Shearwater did on their albums Rook and The Golden Archipelago. I mean, this isn't really pure imitation. It sounds almost like Radiohead doing Talk Talk, moreso than Radiohead already has. I've never paid attention to this band before, and from what I can tell they weren't doing much worth paying attention to prior to this. So maybe they've even got a Talk Talk career trajectory going! Looking forward to hearing where they go from here.


12. Bill Callahan – Dream River
Bill Callahan does it again. Really, this is very similar to his last two albums which were both fairly similar to his last album as Smog, A River Ain't Too Much to Love. There's not a single thing wrong with that, either, as that was a great album, and Callahan's last two albums have also been excellent. He is one of the best songwriters working today. His songs simultaneously seem to impart sage wisdom and behold the world in wide-eyed wonder, and they do it with a remarkable economy of both words and notes. "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." Callahan continues to make the profound sound simple.


11. Gorguts – Colored Sands
My favorite "proper" metal album (you'll see what I mean by that when I get to #9) is this, a tour de force of technical death metal. Like Portal (look, the Gorguts guy is wearing a Portal shirt in that video!) and Ulcerate, but Gorguts has been around way longer. I'd never heard them before this album and still have not yet heard their earlier stuff, but this is everything you could possibly want want from this kind of music. Brutal, intense, mathy, weird, awesome. There's one track that's just a string ensemble! And it's excellent! Then it's followed by my favorite track on the album, "Enemies of Compassion", which is like the best math-rock/metal hybrid I've ever heard.

Thanks for doing this Drink. Enjoying it. Our tastes always intersect at weird places.

Actually motivating me to do my Top 20.

Yeah man, I want to see your list.

Also a little disappointed we didn't get a list from harry or k(olchaka). Unless I missed them.

The Very Good (B+) Part 2

(some brief NSFW moments in this video)
10. Califone – Stitches
Never underestimate Califone. That's when they'll get you. This album came out relatively quietly to some fairly mediocre reviews. Even though they've lost some members (is Ben Massarella gone?), Tim Rutilli trudges on with a bunch of guest musicians, recording at home and in a bunch of different places, and manages to come up with one of his strongest batches of songs, right up there with Roots & Crowns, Roomsound, and Quicksand/Cradlesnakes. This is not, by any means, a "lesser" Califone record. It's at once familiar and different, ragged and gritty but pretty and wistful, as pretty much all of Rutilli's music has been.


09. Raspberry Bulbs – Deformed Worship
I've seen this labeled as "black metal" and rounding out the bottom portion of several 2013 lists of best metal albums, but it isn't really metal. It's raw, primitive punk rock with some early black metal influence. It does sound fairly similar in spirit to like '80s Bathory and early Darkthrone, and that's a great thing. Black metal kind of got a lot more serious, grandiose, and polished in the '90s and '00s, and it lost some of the raucous, punk and hardcore influence that made the early stuff fun. This is some dirty, menacing stuff, but it's also a really good time.


08. Dawn of Midi – Dysnomia
Is Dawn of Midi jazz? They play acoustic instruments often associated with jazz, but their music is miminal and tightly controlled without much room for improvisation. They play hypnotic, repeating patterns which subtly mutate and evolve, and the end result is closer to electronic dance music - minus the electronics - than it is to jazz. It's totally captivating. The closest thing to this that I can think of is some of Hauschka's recent stuff, particularly Salon Des Amateurs, but Hauschka lacks the propulsive grooves that Dawn of Midi maintains throughout this record. A headphone record that will make you to get up and move, and one pretty much unlike anything else I've heard.


07. Dreamdecay – N V N V N V
This just came out of nowhere, and it's almost too good to be true. This is a new noise rock band to get excited about if you like that sort of thing. This is like the best aspects of all of it, all rolled up into one band! Heavy, but not really in a metal kind of way. A solid, metronomic, Krautrock-type rhythmic foundation with mathy, abrasive, dissonant guitars slashing and intertwining on top. And they have a sax player! It's too much!


06. Youth Lagoon – Wondrous Bughouse
I like Youth Lagoon's first album Year of Hibernation, but it was a little bit easy to take for granted, and, frankly, to forget. Partly because it sounded a little bit indistinct, a little bit like a whole lot of other bands. The songs on it are good but are not especially memorable and kind of blend together. Here on Trevor Powers' second Youth Lagoon album, though, he has totally overcome that. Standouts "Mute" (which does have a real video, but I hate it) and "Dropla" in particular leave quite an impression after only a couple of plays. The songwriting throughout is stronger, but mostly it's the production that puts it over the top. Those chaotic, clashing electronic noises layered over rich melodies and drifting, morphing song structures create a unique kind of wistful, psychedelic fantasia. It's a little bit like '90s Flaming Lips, a little bit Animal Collective, maybe a little Beach House. He's taken the influence of his contemporaries and recent forebears and pushed it into a new, very personal direction. It's some beautiful stuff to get lost in. I want more.

TOP 5

With candy!

The Great (A)



05. Fire! Orchestra – Exit
The best Mats Gustafsson-related project I heard from 2013 is riveting big band avant-garde jazz fusion. This thing is a monster. It's made up of two sidelong pieces, and each one is full of dense, energetic playing and exciting twists and turns. "Exit! Part Two" in particular is thrilling as the portion in the performance above can attest to. This is the best new jazz album I've heard since I started paying attention to new jazz albums... which admittedly hasn't been that long. This is truly an excellent record, though, in any genre.



04. My Bloody Valentine – m b v
I was never really a shoegaze guy. I liked My Bloody Valentine and thought both Loveless and Isn't Anything were great albums, but I was never obsessed with them or desperately hoping they would someday get back together and record another album. But I probably never fully appreciated Kevin Shields as a sonic visionary, possibly because I came to their music fairly late, after I'd heard so many bands that they had influenced. I understand now, with this album, how Shields was really the one guy ideas out of the whole movement. Sure, Slowdive's Pygmalion is brilliant, but it's really kind of a move away from shoegaze and dream pop towards Talk Talk-style artpop. This may actually be the only album since Loveless to really push shoegaze forward and still sound like a shoegaze record. Sure, it sounds like just another My Bloody Valentine album on the surface or after a cursory listen or two, but let's not forget that there are only two other My Bloody Valentine albums like this, and neither of them are quite like this one. There's a definite progression across Isn't Anything to Loveless to m b v that shows Shields unearthing deeper and stranger possiblities in the sonic universe that he has created. This really does take Loveless a step further, and I honestly think I like it more.




03. Viet Cong – Cassette
I talked about the band Women a little bit on the #14 entry on my list, Calgary band Faux Fur. Well, this band is made up of former Women bassist/vocalist Matt Flegel and drummer Mike Wallace plus guitarists Scott Munro and Danny Christiansen from two other Calgary bands. I saw them live back in September, and they're fantastic. They are at once more technical and poppy than Women. I wouldn't call them better just yet, but I think the potential may actually be there. I was pleasantly surprised by this to say the least. I had expected the younger Flegel brother, Pat, Women's lead guitarist and vocalist, to be the most likely source of any worthwhile new material post-Women. So far his work with Androgynous Mind and Cindy Lee (really both the same band, I think) has felt slapdash and uncommitted. It's understandable if he's a little bit lost after what happened with his former band, but as much as his recent output has felt aimless and sloppy, Viet Cong seems strikingly focused and stacked with potential. This cassette (now taken down from the Bandcamp page, unfortunately) is a little rough sounding, I'll admit, and they actually sounded much tighter and cleaner live, even in the shitty little venue where I saw them (Star Bar, Atlanta). Still, the songs are here. "Oxygen Feed", "Unconscious Melody", and "Structureless Design" in particular are like Deerhunter with twice the energy, imagination, and ability. "Select Your Drone" is cool, but I'm pretty sure they developed it much further by the time I saw them live. I really hope they're working on a fully polished full-length right now. I need it.



02. Holden – The Inheritors
James Holden has mostly been known as a DJ and remixer and hasn't released much original music of his own over the course of his career. In fact I believe this is only his second album of original material, and it seems to be very different from the dance music he works with as a DJ. This is some intentionally messy, gritty, analog stuff, that sounds both old and totally new at the same time. Due to the vintage equipment he's using, it sounds a little like Tangerine Dream and some older electronic artists like that which in a roundabout way makes it also feel a little bit like recent vintage-sounding groups like Emeralds. But where Emeralds go kind of warm and New-Age-y, Holden keeps things cold, tense, and a little bit ominous. The record can get a little bit repetitive, maybe, but I think it works perfectly as a hypnotic whole. It's easily one of the best electronic albums I've heard in the past several years, totally divorced from and unconcerned with whatever current trends have been governing most new electronic music. It's inherently timeless. A truly wonderful and rewarding record that I could just as easily place in my top spot of the year.




01. Parquet Courts – Light Up Gold
And here we go. Yes, this was originally released in 2012, and later on, maybe in hindsight, I will consider it the best album of 2012 instead of the best album of 2013. Whatever. I'm just really happy that this band and this album exist. It's just about perfect. Sure, it's not particularly original, but it's not exactly been done to death, either. They're not just ripping off Pavement. They're ripping off the same influences that Pavement was like The Fall and Swell Maps and, in some ways, doing a better job of it. They are kinda similar to Tyvek, too, but Tyvek has only recently approached being this good after several years, and Parquet Courts have shot right out of the gate ahead of them. It's just about everything I want from indie rock. It's smart but not serious. It's even funny in parts. It's warped and just a little bit weird but not whimsical. It's everything in perfect proportions. It's just what I needed.

quite a list and well thought out, wished I liked that number 1, your review nails it

pardon my drunkenness -- but i LOVE your YLT review....

that Califone is my #1.

and just entering a full on obsession with Callahan/Smog. not sure what took me so long.

Thanks, e!

Yeah, all three of those are so perennially great that it gets way too easy to take them for granted. And I've kind of shuffled the Califone around in my top 10. It could easily have been higher.

All of These New Puritans albums are really good. I didn't listen to this one a lot so that's probably why it didn't make my last.

I'll check out Hidden next.


I know it's already March, but I wanted to do a couple more things here - EPs/singles and reissues.

For right now, here's my 2013 Spotify playlist:
http://open.spotify.com/user/chasedbybe ... dTLb72ngOK

2013 EPs, Singles, Splits, etc

Not really meant as a list of the best singles (like pop songs, etc.) but rather the shorter releases that didn't belong on the albums list.

Very Good (B+)


01. Grizzly Bear – Shields: B-Sides
Shields was my favorite album of 2012, but for some reason I slept on this B-Sides comp until very recently. It's excellent! In fact, I like a few of the songs on this EP as well as or better than anything on the album, particularly "Will Calls" and the other two demos. I think Grizzly Bear's one major fault is their tendency to fuss over and overly polish their songs in the studio to the point of losing any edge or imperfection, and these demos - still very layered and detailed - have more space and energy to them. The plaintive, shoegaze-y guitar that comes in at the chorus of "Will Calls" gives it an emotional punch that gets muted in much of Grizzly Bear's music. I even like the remixes here, something I usually hate - electronic remixes of indie rock songs. I had heard the Nicolas Jaar remix from its original Record Store Day release, and it has continued to grow on me. The Liars remix is the weakest of the three, but it's still not bad. I'm a sucker for Lindstrøm's glossy, funky, syrupy disco, and his remix is probably my favorite. In all, a much better EP than I had anticipated.



02. Un Blonde – What Surrounding
Un Blonde is a solo/side project of Faux Fur (#14 on my album list) singer (and maybe guitarist?) Jean-Sebastian Audet. Like Faux Fur, it sounds little like Women, but as would be expected, it's a little rougher and more homespun-sounding than his full band. It's also a lot more interesting and edgy. This kid seems really talented, and he should have a full album coming out sometime this year. This EP was second of two EPs he put up on his Bandcamp page in 2013, and sadly both have now been taken down. (If you like him, it pays to check in with his page from time to time because he's been putting things up and taking them down pretty rapidly over the past years. I've missed at least a couple of things.)


Good (B)


03. Moin – EP
Moin is the dark, minimalist electronic group Raime under a different name. As Moin, they play something a little bit closer to rock, almost like a stripped down This Heat or Slint. All tension with no real release, gritted teeth and clenched fists, on the verge of... something. It's captivated even though it never quite does exactly what you want it to. It plays with your sense of anticipation, giving you just enough - guitar swells, snippets of vocals - to string you along. They have to date only released these 3 songs on this EP and one on a split with Pete Swanson, but I'm really eager to hear more. Definitely way more interested in this than I am in their work as Raime.



04. Ital Tek – Hyper Real
I decided to finally check out what Ital Tek was about after a friend recommended it, and I started with this EP and an earlier one. Now it could be that I just haven't heard a lot of current electronic music in this style, and maybe there's a lot more out there that would make this seem less special, but for now I think this is just great. I love the sort of skittering rhythm and how that hearkens back to the '90s IDM stuff that I really loved, but it does so without sounding anything like it. There's not a hint of drum 'n bass or jungle here, and it also doesn't sound like dubstep, house, or any current techno I'm really familiar with. I've seen this called "footwork" and maybe even "trap", but ultimately, it doesn't matter to me. This guy makes fun music. I dig it.



05. No Joy – Pastel and Pass Out
No Joy continue their winning streak, and they continue to show musical growth. The first two songs on this EP feel maybe a little denser and darker than anything on Wait to Pleasure and hint toward some interesting possible new directions. Pretty much exactly what you want from an EP like this. Keeps you guessing about what will come next while also satisfying on its own.



06. Thee Oh Sees – Moon Sick
Record Store Day release and I suppose something of a companion piece to Floating Coffin. Possibly the best thing to come out of RSD 2013, and being an EP, it didn't break the bank. These are 4 solid Oh Sees tracks, not one of them a throwaway.


07. Parquet Courts – Tally All the Things That You Broke
Clearly a stopgap release with nothing quite as inspired as any of the best tracks on Light Up Gold. "You've Got Me Wonderin' Now" is solid. "Fall On Yr Face" is a blatant Fall homage/rip. "He's Seeing Paths" is kind of a goofy pseudo-rap reminiscent of early Beck. A fun little EP but nothing too essential.


08. Hellier Ulysses – Ulysses Hellier
Cool little band somewhat in the spirit of Women/Faux Fur/Viet Cong/et al that I believe is from here in Atlanta. I caught them live at the same show where I saw Viet Cong. They're kind of scrappy, mathy, jerky, and weird, but melodic and beguiling at the same time. This is a pretty short EP - six songs coming in at just under eleven minutes. There's enough going on in that amount of time to tell that there's something to these guys, though.


09. FIS – Preparations
Dark, minimal electronic music. Ominous noise and deep bass. Pretty cool.


10. Un Blonde – s/t
Earlier Un Blonde release from 2013 (or first ever?) is also good.


11. Dope Body – Saturday
Two solid songs from this fun noise rock band. Check out the video for "Leather Head".


12. Lone – Airglow Fires
Two warm, sunshiny tracks from Lone, one of the better current house producers. I don't even like house, usually, but this has that certain something.


13. GOAT – Dreambuilding b/w Stonegoat
Two more GOAT songs for anybody who, like me, wanted more after 2012's World Music. Big band psyche jams.


Pretty Good (C+)

14. The Flaming Lips – Peace Sword: I like this better than The Terror.
15. Starkey – Blaster: Trap? Fun, whatever it is.
16. Parquet Courts – Borrowed Time: Two solid B-Sides here.
17. Autechre – L-event: Not bad but doesn't work as well as Exai
18. Hellier Ulysses – Demo
19. Liars – I Saw You from the Lifeboat/Perfume Tear
20. Pete Swanson – Punk Authority
21. The Body – Master, We Perish
22. Yo La Tengo – Super Kiwi
23. Burial – Rival Dealer
24. Factory Floor – Fall Back


OK (C-)

25. Perfect Pussy – I Have Lost All Desire for Feeling: Put the word "pussy" in your band name - but don't include the name of any Southern city or state - and you're automatically buzzworthy in the 2010's.
26. Kingdom – Vertical XL
27. Dan Deacon – Konono Ripoff No.1
28. Nicolas Jaar – Brian Eno x Nicolas Jaar x Grizzly Bear: Grizzly Bear remix is really good, but the Brian Eno one is boring and pointless
29. Thurston Moore & Loren Connors – The Only Way to Go Is Straight Through
30. TNGHT – Acrylics: A little disappointing after the previous EP.


Meh (D+)

31. Actress – Silver Cloud

hfs. don't know how i managed to miss this the first go-round. reviewing now, comments later. at first glance quite a few i've never heard of-this should be fun

Nigga what the fuck did you seriously put Parquet Courts at #1? Them niggas are perpetually stoned and starving.