Records

KILLER MIKE

HOPE FOR AGOLDENSUMMER

BEST COAST

HECUBA

DAWN GOLDEN AND ROSY CROSS 
Blow Remixed
Mad Decent

HEY SALLY

COLE WILLIAMS
Out of the Basement, Out of the Box
Self-released

1) This is the kind of music they would use during a movie montage showing the strong female lead “getting shit done.” 2) I wouldn’t be surprised to hear this playing at a fancy pool party thrown by adults who have savings accounts and get those neat color filters for their pool lights. 

GINGER BEEF

KILLER MIKE
R.A.P. MUSIC
Williams Street

SANTIGOLD
Master of My Make-Believe

Atlantic

If you’ve swallowed the hype and are expecting the Santigold’s second album, you will be disappointed. At times she tries to shelter herself from the shitstorm that follows all sophomore albums with a lyrical shield made of scrap metal from hip-hop and reggae clichés. The truest moments are in the space between the lyrics, like the “Hey, hey, hey” on the stirring “This Isn’t Our Parade.” The single “Big Mouth” supposedly mocks Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, which just reminds me that Katy Perry exists. Cool it with the music-snob bullshit and give the thing a goddamn smiley already.

SOPRAH

DEL THE FUNKY HOMOSAPIEN AND PARALLEL THOUGHT
Attractive Sin Parallel Thought Ltd.

Not sure if backpacker rap is the same thing as stoner rap, but I feel like Del gets pigeonholed for making at least one of those (maybe both). This record gets a little Native Tongues-y with the jazz and chill-out samples, but dude deserves credit for making hip-hop that doesn’t make me feel like I need 200 milligrams of MDMA and about 8 million shots just to keep it down. He also deserves credit for sticking with that honker of a name nearly two decades past the point it wasn’t corny. I mean it. 

THE M.A.N. 

Killer Mike is so smooth and fluid, yet hard at the same time. He’s like a nanostructured amorphous solid, or Slimer with a boner. If he were to pull up in his car in front of my place of business right now, I’d take a knee at his wheel like they do at football games when a player’s been injured. It would be the only way I’d know how to fully express the sentiment “You killed it, black man.”

RYAN GOSLING

CFCF
Exercises
Paper Bag

CRUCIFIED BY THE CFCF

PHEDRE S/T Daps GOSSIP
A Joyful Noise
Columbia A Joyful Noise still has the same basic sound the Gossip had before they dropped the “the,” but there’s a little less grit. Electric crunch swapped for gentle synths, less howling, and more falsetto. There’s also a noticeable absence of head-shaking anger and an increase

ROBIN BACIOR 

DANA BUOY
Summer Bodies Lefse

PLASTERED BOYS 

HECUBA
Modern Germ with wizened skin and stupid hair, and the decor is minimal VIDEO LOVE Mon Ange Lentonia

Oh, great, a new French electro album. Like I didn’t have enough musical options to get herpes to. 

INDIAN BUMMER 

ROOMRUNNER
Super Vague Fan Death 2:54
S/T Fat Possum There was a time during high school when I, as a young goth, would go to the weekly downtown Wednesday-night street fair in my town and walk around in a velvet cape purchased from some store with a name similar to The Werewolf Cave. The air smelled like fog machine and stale incense, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before I went down on my first gothic vagina. Those times were beautiful, and this album takes me right back to them.

THE SPITS Kill the Kool
In the Red SATAN’S SATYRS
Wild Beyond Belief
Trash King Productions BEST COAST
The Only Place Mexican Summer O.C. EVANS THE DEATH
S/T
Slumberland GRASS WIDOW
Internal Logic HLR Man, imagine being a lady. Just walking around everywhere with your hips and breasts and asses and midlength curly hair all gently bouncing in step; wearing a dress or some shit. Imagine having a sweet, high-pitched lady-voice and getting together with a couple of other women and some guitars and making your slightly different voices all sync up as tautly as your periods, then snuggling all up together in a big gorilla’s nest of blankets and pillows while something noninformative is playing on the TV. What a life. I guess there’s the whole “rape thing” to deal with, too, but let’s not split hairs here: Girls got it pretty fucking made. 

BURZUM
Umskiptar
Byelobog Productions

BROKEN WATER
Tempest Hardly Art BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE
Aufheben
A TEEN DAZE
All of Us, Together
Lefse

ALEX HOLMES

CODEINE
When I See the Sun 
Numero Group GEOFF BARROW AND BEN SALISBURY
Drokk
Invada Drive The Life of Mammals RUFUS WAINWRIGHT
Out of the Game
Decca/Polydor I want Rufus Wainwright to spit in my mouth. I want to bathe him. While I’m drying him off, we don’t even have to speak if he doesn’t want to. This is how unhinged of a fan I am. His last album, Songs for Lulu, I reviewed as “Album of the Decade.” I was ready for this album to be great. It’s not. It’s terrible. And my heart is broken. The only theory I can offer is that his new sober life as a father, and a soon-to-be husband, has sent his muses running for the hills. Rufus, get back to being heartbroken, get back to watching the sun rise with an overflowing ashtray between you and a new naked body each morning. Here is my number: 917-539-3963. I will be that body/ashtray.

THE SPRING STANDARDS
Yellow/Gold
Parachute Shooter I would love the shit out of this if I were a middle-aged woman coming home after “a long day at work” before drinking “some wine” and watching Mad Men and thinking about Don Draper plowing me like “a harvest.” It’s not a bad album—I just think at least one member of the band needs to develop some sort of semicrippling addiction by the next one or at the very least buy a distortion pedal, because if this album sounded any more like a hug it would have arms. 

NED HEPBURN

SOSO
That Time I Dug So Deep I Ended Up in China
Girlie Action VIOLENS
True
Slumberland These guys have probably heard the Smiths a time or two, and yet somehow this makes me want to cruise down the highway in a convertible that I don’t have now and probably never will. But I can dreeeeeeam!

HOPE FOR AGOLDENSUMMER
Life Inside the Body
Mazarine

Every time I eat soy or tofu mushed into the shape of a burger or chicken wing, I always think about how I wouldn’t mind eating soy or tofu if it tasted a little more like a burger or chicken wing. Similarly, I wouldn’t MIND listening to muff-diver music if only it didn’t always sound SO MUCH like muff-diver music. Backstory on this group is that they deliver babies in people’s homes when they’re not plucking their lesbian banjos. Neither of which I mean sexually.

HOT GYNO

JON PORRAS
Black Mesa Thrill Jockey Friday Night Lights MOUNT EERIE
Clear Moon
P.W. Elverum & Sun Whenever a long-term personality-cult rocker puts out a new record it seems like the only reason to say you don’t like it is to troll the fans. In this case, all the Elverum fans I know are growing a redwood or are great artists, so I’ll leave them be. (Sound of gentle chimes.)

KATY PERRY Teenage Dream: The Complete Confection
Capitol

Katy Perry’s pretty, but she’s not really a singer or a dancer. Madonna’s not a great singer, but she can dance, and she had the right mixture of talent and mediocrity that she was both special and relatable to yearning but boring suburban girls. Lady Gaga is the starlet of now and beyond because she’s actually in control of what she’s doing, plus she’s talented. Katy Perry makes me sad because she is a step backward and her music is really shitty, even for pop. If pop is great, it doesn’t need explanation. You just say, “Candy tastes good.” But this candy doesn’t taste good. It tastes sad and stiff. It tastes like she’s struggling to stay in tempo while the producer angrily claps his hands in time on the 30th take of “California Girls.” The sexuality feels forced and fake like she’s some Operation Monarch CIA sex puppet. With Lady Gaga or Rihanna I get the sense that they’re genuine pervs who like getting porked. Katy Perry seems like a very wholesome, normal woman, and I don’t feel like her fun party persona is working.

JIGGAHEAD CREEK

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Best of Perception & Today Records
BBE Enough with the fucking funk and soul comps already. What is this, my dad’s second wedding?

LOS MITICOS
DEL RITMO S/T
Soundway There are a bunch of kids in Monterrey who make this slowed-down, super-stoney cumbia music that’s basically the Mexican version of chopped ’n’ screwed and which sounds terminally fuuuuuucked. This ain’t that, though. This is your standard Mexican-restaurant-sounding PUMICE Puny
Soft Abuse Record nerds love freaky New Zealand things because they’re obscure, but also “good” in pretty normal terms. Case in point, the new Pumice, an album of “laboriously crafted” songs bowled right down the center of its country’s underground style guide. This guy’s been doing basically exactly this by himself since 1991, but this time there’re more than 100 copies of the record.