Wight Weedy Wight starts off fucking amazing - it's about the only stoner rock I've heard that actually makes me wanna smoke weed and listen to it, probably because it's just as much regular psych as stoner - and then it just becomes regular stoner dullsville complete with pained asshole vocals. so close. :(

Speaking of starting off amazing, I was really ready to lay on the hyperbole after the first three tracks on ...Believes in Patterns by I Would Set Myself on Fire For You - I was going to call it the apotheosis of the eclectic-prog-emo sound peddled by the likes of Gauge Means Nothing and the Brave Little Abacus and compare it to As the Roots Undo and oh it would've been great, but then their arrangements just start getting... awkward. They just sometimes don't seem to know what to do with all of their non-guitar instruments, and sometimes they just blunder on the guitar bits, as well. Maybe I'm thinking this because they're from the ATL, but in places they really sound more like a particularly ambitious local band than an artist with over three-hundred ratings on RYM: the male sung vocals are just amateurish in a way that rarely makes it past the local demo stage, and then there's the drum machine and hand percussion on "#" which they seem to have no idea how to integrate into the overall sound and the latter especially seems to exist simply because they thought having congas or w/e on a track would be cool despite not actually fitting with the rest of the music at all or even sounding good.

Ben Klock's Before One is maybe the minimal techno I've heard that best exhibits the traits of actual good minimalism - everything is constantly in flux, with new elements being added or taken away. It doesn't hurt that it fucking bangs like my god. Perfect EP.

The Hospital records (no not that one) comp Sick Music is, at least in its two-CD form, infinitely too much of a not particularly great thing - drum 'n' bass can be one of the EDM genres that I can listen to tons of without getting fatigued, but it has to be, y'know, good and the liquid funk on this comp gets old after... well, it's old practically by the moment it begins, and it just goes on forever and ever.
 
the Mandible Rumpus single is great! Synths, female vox, violin... The b is genuinely creepy.

Kalafina's Seventh Heaven just serves as yet more art pop and j-pop where there's not enough "art" or "j" and... well, not too much pop, but the wrong kind of pop. I'ma still listening to their next three albums and FictionJunction, though, 'cuz they've got a lot of talent and elements that could coalesce into something fantastic, even if only for a song or two.

Oh my - you know how prog was basically disco? Turns out Sylvester, Queen of Disco, had an album of long-form compositions up his sleeve, too! Stars has four tracks, ranging in length from just under seven minutes to just over eleven, and it's absolutely divine (or, rather, much, much better than Divine! He had neither soul nor singing voice!) The Aleister Crowley-biting title track is some kind of weird transitory hi-NRG with actual instruments and is about as uplifting as music gets, even if it's also the one song on the album that goes a minute or two overlong and "I (Who Have Nothing)" could fit snuggly on that Walter Gibbons comp we've all gone gaga for. "I Need Somebody to Love Tonight" is a vision, on the cusp of the decade, of the eighties gone horribly PERFECTLY RIGHT. It's a sly, slinky, nocturnal synth funk groove that does the plastification of soul music so fucking marvelously that you'll forgive, well, pretty much all other black music of the eighties (HYPERBOLE ALERT.) And I'm not saying that the repetitive and oddly almost entirely Sylvester-less "Body Strong" ISN'T filler, I'm just saying that it's got a groove more hypnotic than "Halleluwah" could ever dream of being and is catchier than the Vorlevexian hyperflu, which I just made up, but which I assure you is incredibly contagious. Unless I've forgotten the classicness of Step 2, which I really need to relisten to, I can predict this album appearing on a hypothetical future FACT magazine Best Albums of the 70s List, and it'll probably deserve the honor more than 75% of the other choices.

The Jazz Jackrabbit soundtrack is basically like the entire eighties coming in your ears in bit form, and you can decide for yourself if that's something you like to experience.

Anyway I listened to the second Kalafina album and I'ma have to say that will actually be the last of them for me - the opening track gave me flashbacks to my ex making me sit through a Tim Burton marathon; not a good start. The aesthetic plagiarism continues on each of the next few tracks: we get a number that appropriates Bollywood with the same finesse the Beatles appropriated raga, then some lite industrial rock and I can't even remember the rest because they were each terrible and the first two tracks are six minutes each! Which is a long time for this sort of thing. The one thing I do remember is that the melodies and vocals have the consistency of lukewarm porridge. And yet I still listened to FictionJunction! That at least started well, but by the time we came to the beyond excruciating soft rock/adult contemporary track I had to bail, too. Maybe I just don't like Yuki Kajiura - actually I'm certain I don't, which sucks because I was super excited to start Picante Magi Madonna Magical or wtfever. 

Luis Gasca's For Those Who Chant is basically what you wanted Santana's fusion phase to sound like when you heard herkyjerky orgasming over it - which makes it both strange and unsurprising that the entirety of Santana are on the album, albeit with their titular wankmeister in a subdued role. Turns out that that salsa piano rhythm sounds pretty cool on guitar. Go for it if you want a south of the border take on early electric Miles.

Mirrors' "Shogeki-X" 7" is probably the best punk-era punk single ever - considering that the only ones that give it a run for its money (Ubu's first, "Little Johnny Jewel," and the grandpappy of them all, "Demolicion") came before the Actual Punk Era - I'll even put it up against Poly 'n' Lora, if only 'cuz it's way cooler to namedrop.

I don't know much about juju, even compared to all the other African genres I know nothing about, but the eponymous album from Thony Adex (which I keep reading Thorny Index or Stony Ajax or Thorin Codex, all of which would be good band names) makes me wanna hear more - it seems to combine the percussive element of fuji with a more """"""traditional"""""" band setup (read: geetars) and the a is a sparkling delight - the b, sadly, is a touch less energetic, but it's still more languid than outright soporific, and still contains plenty of tasty interplay between the musicians.