Score: 7.5/10 . Like the more party-oriented Snowgoons, Spectacular Diagnostics are a production team out of Germany which puts together boom-bap LP’s employing mostly black American rappers to wreck shop on the tracks. Raw Studies, to its credit, feels just that — nothing is overproduced, rather favoring eerie, tense and jazzy MF Doom-like beats (these […]

 Score: 4/10 . More than being viably tense or innovative in any way, Britain’s The 1975 are noteworthy to me for their uncanny ability to consistently shirk total disaster, time and time again. Around Spring of 2016 or so, I was subscribing to NME, setting me by a stroke of luck narrowly within their free-of-charge […]

Score: 8.5/10 . To be honest, a lot of the criticism on Jeff Tweedy has been so stupid, for lack of a better term, lately, that it’s almost impossible to imagine any of it materializing into a sound analysis and appreciation for the emotive things he’s doing these days, almost turning the payment of any […]

Score: 2.5/10 . There’s a lot of things I could say to introduce this new Smashing Pumpkins album, each of which is probably equally sad. One would be that I actually WOKE UP on this cloudy Midwestern day in late fall with Liz Phair’s “Polyester Bride” in my head and in the mood for some […]

Score: 10/10 . More and more, the Grateful Dead just seem tailor made for this era of free music streaming we’re living in now. They were always a great touring band, with incredible musical chops, as this new abridged version of the Pacific Northwest box set of this year will indicate. They seemed to never […]

Score: 8.5/10 . THE FUNS were classified as “punk” as Bandcamp, which is beyond undoubtedly a severe misnomer, as their lengthy, multilayered songs stretch out into something way more creative and rewarding than power chords and moshing. Still, I’m definitely not complaining that I found them on the recent “punk”wave (the six-minute length of opener […]

Score: 8.5/10 . It turns out I’m late after all getting into this crooning casa nova David Loca and his band Part Time: this is his sixth album under this title apparently, in addition to many others with other bands. Bandcamp listed him as “greater London” but then the album blurb itself seems to attach […]

Score: 5.5/10 . The Bandcamp blurb for this new J Mascis solo album delivers this gargantuan introduction taking us all the way back to the 1980s and the spawn of Mascis’ band “Dinosaur,” spanning six-odd arduous paragraphs and including just about every useless piece of information under the sun, it seems. And, in general, Elastic […]

Score: 7.5/10 . I probably should like Crush Crusher from LA’s IAN SWEET (via Brooklyn) more than I do. The influences she lists on the Bandcamp page for this album, after all, are basically hand-picked out of my choice basket – Bjork, Dirty Projectors and Deerhunter (especially astounding since none of these artists are necessarily […]

Score: 10/10 . LA canary-crooner Kadhja Bonet’s sophomore LP Childqueen opens with, ironically, a little message that’s very universal and avoidant of the egotistical, naïve and hubristic: “Every morning brings a chance to renew”. A couple of things jump out at you, then, right away in your encounter of this new and majestic brand of […]