Score: 5/10 . I’ll say this about Richmond, Virginia’s Andy Jenkins: he’s a guy who seems to know how to pull some strings. Specifically, he’s got more record labels than he’s got albums (I always wondered how that worked). And he knows how to land himself one he** of a producer, too, who dripped on […]

Score: 7/10 . Jay Rock is an LA emcee who’s been doin’ it for a few years now: Redemption is his third LP, out on Top Dawg and Interscope, and features an impressive array of guest performers such as J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar (elsewhere cited as a writer as “Kendrick Duckworth”) SZA and Future. In […]

Score: 8/10 . Today I’ve decided to handle an LP, for basically being sick of general blogosphere obviousness which would theoretically plague someone in my position, of instrumental songs composed in the 1970s, each apparently at different sessions, by a dude (who played all the instruments) who I’ve never heard of in my life. On […]

Score: 7/10 . There are lots of things I liked right from the start about Melody Prochet’s full-band project Melody’s Echo Chamber, one of which was actually the fact that it hadn’t put out a new album in five years: to me this spoke of a certain craftsmanship, a driving ambition to perfect the sounds […]

Score: 0/10 . Ok, there is no “personnel” section for the initial Jo Passed album Their Prime on its Bandcamp page, and under “Credits” it says only “released May 25, 2018,” so I’m a little at a loss as to who’s doing what here. In this big, huge quotation it seems to say that the […]

Score: 10/10 . We’re in such an age of doing it yourself, with all these douche bags doing things like giving advice over Facebook on how to be creative, or successful in the creative arts, and publishing pictures of themselves on the john for their album cover or whatever just trying to stand out in […]

Score: 6.5/10 . I think some time around 2013 we all got used to music getting infinitely poppier than the traditional vanguard has been, at least structurally speaking. As recently as 2009, we’d enjoyed as the veritable giants of the scene certain mavericks like Battles and Dirty Projectors, bands that would push their opuses out […]

Score: 9/10 . Narcotic, atmospheric pop is sort of a thing, at least in the ears of Dolby Disaster & Co., and while I wait forever for this phantom Deerhunter album to come out (it’s like the phantom menace) I might as well turn my head up and down and turn it turn it around […]

Score: 7/10 . Sometimes integrity comes at a price. I’m talking about singers actually writing their own songs and lyrics, here. In the case of the Scottish Franz Ferdinand’s fifth LP, then (which seems like an astonishingly scant amount of albums for them to have out at this point), it rears its ugly head in […]

Score: 10/10 . Whether it’s 2013’s caustic You’re Nothing or the next year’s wholly unfortunate Plowing into the Field of Love [1], Iceage seem to be making a name for themselves in memorable album titles. Then, being a fan of indie rock it’s hard not to take this new one in as a reference to […]