whoohoo big shitty review dump post:

Abner Malaty's Astral Decay is maybe the only album I've ever heard that could be considered eco-industrial, but otherwise it's about bogstandard for its scene.

At the Hideout by Jaap Blonk, Jeb Bishop, Lou Malozzi and Frank Rosaly shows the veteran freaky mouth sound maker in fine form, and is one of two albums featuring Rosaly that are near the top of last year's improv pile.

Ras Shiloh's Babylon You Doom basically just serves as a reminder to why no one listens to modern roots - 's'not terrible, but it just feels like a hollow retread of much better records with shoddy production and keyboard tones.

both volumes of Wizzz(!) are totes excellent, but the second is the truly exceptional, superior one despite the first comp featuring my beloved Christine Pilzer.

Peter Lemer's Local Colour is an mid-60s ESP-Disk new thing album and actually really pretty good but the thing I want to point out is that the artist's last name is only one letter away from "Lemur" and that's exactly the sort the pseudonym that a lemur would take when recorded a supposedly human-made jazz album, the crafty beasts! You can file it next to other all-time Lemur-created jazz classics like Destination Out! or any early Gato Barbieri album.

Games' That We Can Play basically turns vaporwave into typical hipster retro synth pop blah and who wants that? It's supposed to give you flashbacks to that time you took acid in Toyko in 1987, not sound like... the actual eighties, y'know?
 
The more I think about it, the more The Sound of Philadelphia: Gamble and Huff's Greatest Hits really feels like a nostalgic moneygrab, like the black version of a Yet Another Chicago Best Of, but, hey, the music's too good to deny no matter how it's packaged: you might think they shot themselves in the foot by putting "Love Train," "Back Stabbers," "the Love I Lost," the title cut AND "Me and Mrs. Jones" in the very first six tracks, but, c'mon, there's so much more to that scene! And except for Teddy Pendergrass' creepy sexytime jam "Close the Door," the second half is up to par with the first and you still get "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now!" There's more comprehensive (and better) Philly comps, but eh get this for yr uncle or whatever if you've got a cool black uncle and not a disgusting racist fundamentalist uncle cracker turd person like mine!

Surgeon's Basictonalvocabulary is probably the best 90s techno album with a track named after a 70s rock genre ("Krautrock"), but it also probably doesn't have much competition, unless there's a Luke Slater album featuring a track called "Zeuhl." Extra props should be given for the dreamy interlude "Waiting," which sounds like a digitized excerpt from some forgotten library album. 

Guido Deiro's Vaudeville Accordion Classics might not have the charm of the calliope, and two full disks of marches, waltzes, rags and foxtrots, with the occassional polka, tango and mazurka, all scored for one instrument might prove a little samey, but pick any dozen tracks at random and you've got a classic the whole family can love - even my family, who suck and I hate them!  

I reviewed an earlier album of theirs fairly positively but all I have to say about the other Rovo I've jammed is that they are godawful boring, even with live and slightly lo-fi (as on Tonic 2001) and even when in jazz fusion drag (as on MON.) Heck, MON might be their most unfathomably dull!

Speaking of dull, there's really no reason to listen to the Roland Kovac New Set, no matter how much the idea of krautlibrary tickles yr fancy.

You ever get a wish answered and then wish you hadn't wished that wish? I was wishing pretty hard for a while at the beginning that Professor Longhair's Complete London Concert would be instrumental, because his voice is so hesitant and thin and I love the combination of boogie-woogie piano and bongo, but then the last two tracks are instrumental and they're really boring, so I guess the vox are necessary. Plus, who wants to hear "Tipitina" sans "mallawalladalla"s?

the Cough/Windhand split just makes me realize I don't like sludgey doom or doomy sludge metal? like at all? or maybe they're just bad examples of the genres.

Birds and Blades, by Bury Gie and Even Parkour, might've benefited from being one disk, but what a doozy that first disk is! Mayhem, I tells ya', pure surreal mayhem, perfect sensory bombardment music.

Robert Mandel's East-European Hurdy Gurdy Music is just the thing if you crave a new hurdle-gurdle album because you've heard everything by Valentin Clastrier and Dominique Regef, but don't want anything too challenging. It's not really exceptional otherwise, however. Oh and it has bapgipes!

When the Fizzbombs' Surfin' Winter EP started I thought "my god, finally a band combining the joys of buzzyfuzzynoisy no-fi black metal production and indie pop songwriting!" but then it just seemed too tame: too retro on the songwriting side and not noisy enough after all. Stick to the "Sign on the Line" single, 'cuz that's just about perfect.

Rockstone - Native's Adventures With Lee Perry... might not make you reconsider your all-time top five Black Ark productions, but it's still super swell, with lyrics that, while a little closer to than Paul Simon than a lot will be comfortable with, run rings around most non-dub poetry Jamaican lyricism.

It's a bad comparison for two main reasons (genre and quality) but structurally Allesandro Allesandroni's Prisma Sonora can't help but make me think of Cheryl Lynn's debut: they both have seven great tracks (though nothing on Prisma Sonora comes close to any of the good tracks on Cheryl Lynn, obviously,  'cuz that's one of the best albums ever) followed by two slices of treacly sentimentality with no redeeming factors whatsoever.

Solaris' Marsbeli Kronikak is... well, it's just an eighties prog album. It's not despicable, for an eighties prog album, and it's not neo-prog, thank glob, but... eighties prog is one big whatevs.

actually this is getting unreadably long,so I guess I'll split it up into two posts.