They’re all about mucking around with monstrously catchy, juvenile surf riffs and then suffocating those infant laughs with a tight plastic bag of reverb; warm, gleeful guitar tones are stripped to their menacing essentials and left to bake in rancid West Coast heat.

He’s on his way to building a grand monument to the craft he and so many before him have lovingly treated; he just needs to make sure each marble block is absolutely pristine before putting it down.

For an established pop writer like Thomas this sort of effort is long overdue, a necessary rung on the twisted, misdirecting ladder towards writing one of those singular, inexplicable albums.

Arrivals is just about a palatable enough affair; a minor stretch at sixty-two minutes but with enough peaks to be eaten in three sittings or so.

There was a time when he did these things for our id, for our deeply rooted disgust at our own celebrity culture and so at ourselves. But here he’s not standing in for anyone, working himself into a feverish sweat solely for his own satisfaction.

Their rhythm section (ooh, two drummers!) is serviceable but generally underwhelming, and song by song the record just falls flat.

I could go song by song and come to the same conclusion with pretty much each one: the dedication to this carefree whimsy of youth ultimately stands as the most impressive thing about Passion Pit, and it wears thin quickly.

To say Yours Truly is stuck in Grandaddy territory isn’t exactly a dig; that band produced four consistently solid records, and it turns out Lytle is as competent on his own as he is with friends

It’s his most focused album in over a decade, and ought to absolutely kill onstage.

This feels, to me, like the sort of rap record we rap nerds lament a dearth of: sprawling and smart, bursting with production that ebbs symphonically but never cluttered over five-minute tracks, a long, warm-hearted record whose length is justified by long, genial verses that build on one another via sharp delivery and three assured mic presences (and one outrageous guest).

Striking stylistic tics like this pop up all over Clues, and the contextualizing effect is undeniable: for good or ill, it’s nigh impossible to hear this album anew, free from preconceptions.

The net effect here is that Super Animal Brothers III is the stem of a great dance record with some irony smeared on it, shit-on-canvass style. Sure, it ends up making a statement, but…why?

Hard Islands is hardly a wash, just frustratingly short of the sound statement Fake wanted to make.

Throughout Crime Pays Cam wobbles between comfort and rote, often landing on the correct side of that division, but illuminating in the process that the gap between laziness and his brand of lazy brilliance is both a crack in the sidewalk and a yawning canyon.

Xuca keeps the listener at a chasmic distance from anything resembling intensity or urgency.

You won’t hate this record; you won’t be any more capable of hating this record as you would a particularly aesthetically pleasing houseplant. But the record’s greatest achievement is that it’s happy with just not being hated.

Miguel De Pedro has instead delivered an oeuvre that plays like a stream-of-consciousness narrative of his growth, and of his many, many tangents, as a musician.

Like an unsettling dream, Actor will stay with you for quite a while, but it isn’t listeners or critics that will be discomfited by the eccentric sophistication here.

Akron/Family are in a state of constant flux, ever changing, so Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free strikes me as no great sea change (no more than usual, anyway). It’s just the latest iteration of a band that’s never twice the same.

The pure emotion and aggressiveness isn’t suppressed or transformed into something else, but rather just given room for some thought, allowed to open itself up and find the strange flowers within.

All of this should read like the ingredients of a truly brilliant album. And perhaps on vinyl it is, but the mastering of Wavering Radiant‘s digital format is atrocious, as heavily brickwalled and distorted as Metallica’s criminal "Death Magnetic" (2008).

Enter the Vaselines serves as a timely reminder of the old ways we found music: for Cobain, one dreams, as a record in a bin somewhere, and for the rest of us, a recommendation from a friend, a cassette loaned around like a dirty one-hitter.

Reintegration Time‘s alright, but it’s no substitute for seeing these guys perform.

The band is becoming, depending on how you look at it, either more like a classic jazz group—solos twisting well beyond the compact call-and-answer of formulaic Afrobeat—or something like a more world music-friendly Tortoise.

This is drone ambiance for your buds, and Buds. Meaning: Crocodiles did good!

Moderat never combines as effortlessly and endlessly as that still-breathless collaboration between Apparat and Ellen Allien, Orchestra of Bubbles (2006), but it is alternately as enjoyable as seeing these two collaborate should be and a roundabout disappointment.

Ultimately, this is the most potent fuck-you that Themselves could give to the thoughtless body of rap that casts their shadow: undeniable greatness in the form of progress that doesn’t look back once it has torn free from its material limbs.

At the risk of sounding redundant, this being Super Furry Animals, there just isn’t that much to dislike.