April's Best and Worst Albums

BEST ALBUM OF THE MONTH

BILL FAY: Who Is the Sender? (Dead Oceans)

If you want to make the rest of your afternoon sound like an astronaut's funeral—like the most perfect, loyal astronaut's funeral—look no further. If you want to understand what it sounds like to taste human tears off a catered turkey sandwich, just fucking stop right there. If you want a Kafkaesque lesson in how to be more Kafkaesque, pour yourself a glass of rotten milk and listen to this motherfucker over and over and over and over again.
WHALEBONE

WORST ALBUM OF THE MONTH

MARK KNOPFLER: Tracker (Virgin EMI)

If JNCO can attempt to make a comeback in 2015, I guess the dude from Dire Straits can give it a whirl, too. Let me stop you right there, by the way. I don't give a father fuck if Mark Knopfler has been going at it hard his whole life, releasing records and shit. It amounts to a snail's fart of influence to anyone but that crew of powder-white micropenises who've Soap'd their way down the rails of life. Also, isn't Mark Knopfler a Nazi?
HARLOW BOOT

BEST COVER OF THE MONTH

AMERICAN WRESTLERS: Self-Titled (Fat Possum)

You want to hear some real Illuminati shit? I worked at VICE for five years only to quit to be in a band that everyone said sounded like Pavement. I was always a little bit sore over never getting the coveted gold VICE ring. Years later, I'm in Sydney, Australia, hanging out with Stephen Malkmus, who tells me he just fucking got one for playing a VICE party—nay—extravaganza. I bet I shrugged and said something like, "Seriously?" and the Malk said he would mail me the ring he got—he doesn't want it. And here I am again.
DICK PEE

WORST COVER OF THE MONTH

WUTANG PARENTAL ADVISORY:
Explicit Content Volume One (Self-Released)

Reviewing new Wu-Tang stuff is like the final scene in Enter the Dragon where Bruce Lee keeps fighting mirrors: It's impossible to tell if I think this is kinda average because I'm not compensating enough for the shadow of the original Wu-Tang Clan oeuvre or because I'm somehow being too critical for fear of having overcompensated in the first place. But fuck it. This sounds like it'd mix well with Rich Boy circa 2009, it's cool they released the first single in multiple remix-friendly formats, and "Stay Up" is in the early running for the top drunk-strolling-around-the-city track of the summer. RIP Osiris.
DJ BLUMPKIN THE BLUMPKING

DEATH GRIPS
The Powers That B
Harvest

I'm 95 percent sure that Death Grips are a vast internet musical conspiracy perpetuated by 4chan, and that all the combined PR for their continued half-baked releases and fan-betraying PR antics is the collective effort of the thousands of 14-year-old Swedish kids that populate the forum. I have my suspicions that a few influential meme bloggers on Tumblr may be involved somehow as well. Those first few records were good, especially as a musical accompaniment to your BMX ride to work at the movie theater. It's a tough three miles, sure, but someone's gotta be able to afford to fill Mom's Volvo with gas.
UNCLE RUMPUS

KENDRICK LAMAR
To Pimp a Butterfly
Interscope/Aftermath/Top Dawg

One summer's day, during a humdrum BBQ, the woman who used to live with my girlfriend had a full-blown nervous breakdown in front of me and her sorta boyfriend. She pissed all over the floor like an animal. That's nearly as bad as a girlfriend texting you "You should think about getting an STD test" a week and a half after you tell her you're in love with her. Ladies, if you're about to fuck a guy who lives in a dorm room, I bet you a billion dollars he thinks it's gross for someone to swab his penis. Fellas, you know how you're always worried that you're gonna get a boner at the doctor's? These STD doctors flick your dick like it's overcooked gnocchi. Now listen: I've felt two really confusing emotions due to Kendrick Lamar. Right out the gate, I reinforced a wall with wood and books during the breakdown because my girlfriend's former roommate kept wailing "Bitch, don't kill my vibe" over and over again, like she was amping herself up to murder us; little did I know, she was having one of those "silent raves." What's more, there is no emotion in the English language (though I'm sure there is one in German or the type of Dutch spoken in Flanders) for when an attractive lady doctor rocks your testicles while you babble about how trifling love is until she tells you that although you don't have cancer, your heart could explode at any minute. For men, this situation is as dizzying as walking a dog blindfolded through a corn maze. It'd be like if you started dating someone who lived with a crazy person who used to be a lawyer and behaved like South By happened every weekend and that Kendrick Lamar was Jim Jones, but in place of Kool-Aid, Kendrick gave away lobster-claw Bloody Marys by the bucketful, exuding a vibe not to be fucked with. Once you have a vibe, you don't want anyone to fuck with it. I take Xanax for the same thing, and it costs less than $2 a pop. Kendrick Lamar convinced George Clinton that he was the new Eric Clapton, which indicates that maybe music is no longer an imprisoned… hahaha, gotcha.
HOLIDAY NISSAN

ACTION BRONSON
Mr. Wonderful
VICE/Atlantic

We were gonna give Mr. Wonderful Album of the Month if Action had written his own review of the record (which we put out), but he didn't. So we're just gonna give him the classic conflict-of-interest smiley face instead. Fuck, that's obnoxious!
REVIEWS EDITOR

CANNIBAL OX
Blade of the Ronin
IGC/iHipHop Disribution

Wanna hear some non-El-P production and some bullcrap about Pokémon? No? Really?! Man, I wish I could at least endorse this on the principle that The Cold Vein is an untouchable classic—but we're a long way from that one. I'm gonna go YouTube that Def Jux doc from 2002 and imagine this never happened. That being said, why wait so long to put out a record at all if you can't top rhyming basement with adjacent in the first place.
B. J. ARMSTRONG

TWIN SHADOW
Eclipse
Warner Bros.

A year ago, I visited this awful college friend who had moved to LA after a long stint on the East Coast. "I don't know how I ever lived in New York for so long without losing it," he said to me between taking rips from his e-cig and sips of a $15 juice that smelled like donkey semen. "It's just, like, so much chiller here. I finally feel like the real me." A couple months after my visit, this guy went to Coachella and popped molly for the first time while Twin Shadow played. He was wearing a leather jacket and had to be rushed to the chill-out tent after suffering heat stroke and shitting himself mid-set. To this day, he says it was the best concert of his life.
DJ PJS

LOTIC
Heterocetera
Tri Angle

There's this Cronenberg movie called Scanners in which telekinetic humans fuse their minds with technology. Lotic is almost definitely a Scanner, but on top of being able to manipulate a laptop into creating futuristic techno music, he probably uses his powers to make factory machines come to life and engage in metallic, spark-filled orgies with no safeword. This record sounds like a world where soulless cyborgs experience all the ecstasy and sexless humans are left to watch them poke one another from a distance in a postapocalyptic club-cave.
GIMP MAN JR.

TYONDAI BRAXTON
Hive1
Nonesuch

I'm a hundred years old and I don't get why that place in Boston shut down and Battles aren't playing at Berklee tonight. Fuck the internet; ACAB. I'm like, play Mario Kart all day and beat off to XHamster all night. I sold all of my records to buy what I call a "tattoo gun," and what's left of my taste in music is a dwindling fart noise in my brain that—if you listen closely—sounds kinda like the Locust.
JIM FINCH

SUUNS AND JERUSALEM IN MY HEART
Self-Titled
Secretly Canadian

Every morning, when I wake up in my 1987 Cadillac Allanté, I go swig-for-swig off a bottle of Pepto Bismol and the cocksucker-red flavor of Mad Dog 20/20 before my mail is delivered by a young Laotian man named Haimi, which I guess is Lao for "the seeker." He always delivers my mail in bulk, crammed in a manila envelope covered in mango grease. It's mostly junk or some alimony thing, but sometimes it's a press release about two bands who have collaborated on something, and man, that really gets my dick hard. Shit, like that's why I stay on the force basically.
THADDEUS WEAKBISCUIT

JEFF THE BROTHERHOOD
Wasted on the Dream
Infinity Cat

On top of the fact that these guys make unabashedly balls-out dude rock and have an admirably goofy shit-eating attitude despite being workhorses and running a successful label, they look like the inbred McPoyle twins from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. They've also decided to wean themselves off the evil sterile teat of Warner Bros. What more could you possibly ask for?
DADDY GNARBUCKS

THE KING KHAN & BBQ SHOW
Bad News Boys
In the Red

I was at SXSW or Chaos in Tejas or one of those excuses to do bad blow in the Porta-Potty at Red7 last year, and someone told me the dude from King Khan was doing sound, and I was like, Wow, here's a guy who is so good at being front and center and destroying faces every night that he's actually doing the music world a mothersucking service by making other bands sound good live. Later I thought to myself, Wow, here's a guy who is so good at being front and center and destroying faces every night because he can make other bands sound absolutely awful live. I did a quick Google search, and I'm pretty sure Mark Sultan hasn't done sound at Red7 ever. Not even one time.
ABE SEEDY

SWERVEDRIVER
I Wasn't Born to Lose You
Cobraside

Goddamn it. I'll never forgive Swervedriver for stealing the riff from Mayhem's "Deathcrush."
PENIZ PUMPZ

NOEL GALLAGHER'S HIGH FLYING BIRDS
Chasing Yesterday
Sour Mash

Like a Rube Goldberg machine
That sucks out your brain
And pull-unties your sweatpants
REVIEWKU

LITURGY
The Ark Work
Thrill Jockey

I recently ran into Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the brains behind one of the most disdained bands in NPR-metal. He told me this new album was partially inspired by the Russian composer Scriabin, who wanted to create a music-and-light opera that would be performed on a river and involve the audience. While it was happening, the music and light would interact in such a way that it would trigger the unveiling of the apocalypse, and the country would simultaneously experience the sublime before burning to death—or something. If this album gets even close to enacting what Scriabin imagined, then all the haters can shut their traps before they spontaneously combust in apocalyptic flames.
JIMMY HUNT-HENDRIX

LIGHTNING BOLT
Fantasy Empire
Thrill Jockey

Here we have something like 77 contact microphones set up systematically through an especially petite wormhole as it funnels the wake of an esteemed celestial wizard's heroic fart. Pummeling glittery guitars paired with the wizard's college roommate's cousin's former dental hygienist performing what appears to be the beginning of a promising self-exorcism makes my Dr. Seuss hat stand straight up; what about yours? Could you leave the black light on for me, please? Gives me powers. Thanks, y'all!
BECA GRIMM

MODEST MOUSE
Strangers to Ourselves
Glacial Pace

I once saw Isaac Brock lay into a homeless kid in Portland with a vitriolic Ayn Rand rant about how he slept under bridges but survived, by-fucking-God, without bumming bucks like some shithead. The kid pushed Isaac, and he reeled back to swing before some roadies broke it up. Soon after, my mom drove me home. We got ice cream on the way, and I licked it contemplatively. That was a very important moment in my young life, Isaac. Everyone should have his heroes taken down a peg.
DINGUS CORIANDER

GIRL BAND
The Early Years
Rough Trade

You ever have one of those days when everything just sucks so goddamn much? Your wife divorces you and your mom dies; then at the end of the day, you Dutch-oven yourself in an ALF sheet on your best friend's futon. I can't tell you what this record did for my misery. You get the picture; I'm a piece of shit.
HARPER G.

DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
Kintsugi
Atlantic

It's 2015, and Seth Cohen is 27. RISD was a lifetime ago, and Chrismukkah even longer. His comic career is done, and each Chris Ware New Yorker cover further wilts his desire to draw. His new sketches feel destined for the sock drawer, next to his wedding ring from Summer and other emblems of his failures. Now comes "the new Death Cab album." Cohen sits and listens, then listens again, anxiously replaying Kintsugi and trying to find some meaning in it, though the songs are as cold and foreign as the title itself. Still, he sits, hoping with each restart that the music will bring him back to a time when things were easier; when albums gave him visceral, emotional reactions; when he could put on "Title Track" and feel somehow more aware of the physical space around him. But he just starts the album over again, and again he feels nothing.
RIVER DONAGHEY

OF MONTREAL
Aureate Gloom
Polyvinyl

Instead of giving you the detached, Pitchfork-esque, Thesaurus.com-cribbed bullshit review I was thinking of writing, I decided to leave you with this: It's worth checking this record out and even more worth seeing this band live. They do wild shit, and sometimes they play earlier shit that you'll confuse for their new shit because this sounds a lot like that.
SAMEER NASEEM

SARAH BETHE NELSON
Fast Moving Clouds
Burger

Every once in a while, the world's prayer for the next Natalie Imbruglia to tear us up and leave us lying naked on the floor is answered. But how would she appear to us? The elders have spoken for years about the illusion turned into something real, and many old texts allude to it, but conversation has run dry. Until now. I guess the fortune teller was right. This is how I feel.
OZONE LIAR

PURITY RING
Another Eternity
4AD

Love 'em or hate 'em, I still wish that instead of a band, Purity Ring were a proto-futuristic masturbation apparatus/gang that existed solely as a Subreddit where you could crowdsource jelly-filled chocolate cakes with pornographic images printed on them (however that would work, don't ask me) but also where there were Bible verses over the porno and you could send the cakes to your friends and enemies alike!
CEE-LOO BIAFRA

SUFJAN STEVENS
Carrie & Lowell
Asthmatic Kitty

While I've never tried to quit drugs, I'm pretty sure that the first relapse must feel a lot like listening to the new Sufjan Stevens album. I know it's embarrassing, but I feel so warm and comfortable as his whispers blanket me. In the back of my mind—a voice—a sense of dread: I know this isn't going to end well. I didn't even touch this stuff for like eight years. I'd made so much progress! I was listening to rap music. I was happy. Now I'm choosing to throw it all away—and for what? A sad-eyed Christian man singing about his mom and his stepdad and masturbating while you check your texts. Am I gonna die like those other junkies who get tuned up after taking nearly a decade off the needle?
YUSUFJAN ISLAM, FORMERLY KNOWN AS SUFJAN CAT STEVENS

MADONNA
Rebel Heart
Interscope

In 2015, I think it's a fairly good barometer of how out-of-touch a person is when she releases the hounds on someone who leaks her dingleberry of an "art thing." I just want to know if she took the trip to Israel herself, adorned in a Stargate headdress and an expensive cloak as she stepped out of her helicopter, the one that ultimately took a nerd to prison. And I wonder if she said, "Bitch, I'm Madonna" before the nerd got chloroformed or whatever happens in a scenario like this.
CLOUDER SANDBONE

BJÖRK
Vulnicura
One Little Indian

Our reviews editor asked a magician on a boat in New Zealand what he thought about the new Björk record, and this is what he said: "I met Jay Z. I met Kanye West, too. I've magician'd myself outright twenty years, back and forth on this vessel between Wellington and Picton. Magic gets real good 'round near Karori Rip; something about the swells, eh? I think I met Björk once; that's a bit of all right. Musicians sail for free given they put on a performance—fuckin' passengers hate it, though. That's why I picked up the wand, eh? Little sleight of hand'll keep anyone happier than a ruckus."
NIGEL THE BOAT MAGICIAN

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Cinderella: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Disney

I had a realization the other day that all Elton John did for the Lion King soundtrack was steal the good parts of Roxy Music songs off Stranded and tweak them to be about warthogs sucking their own dicks. The masterminds behind this 'Derella soundtrack couldn't even be bothered to do that. Anyone with a gun can force a bunch of piano players to smoke cocaine and masturbate themselves with some woodwind and brass instruments. Who the hell is in charge at the Magic Kingdom these days?
FRENCH CANDLESTICK

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Furious 7: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Atlantic

There are a few small mysteries that may always baffle the female gender, and the way these brain-bleedingly bad movies satiate men's lust for oil and blood is one. But let me tell you, it's sick as shit to watch Vin Diesel's creatine-inflated brachioradialis muscles pilot a GTO out the back of a goddamn airplane midflight. Fucking fuck. [Frothing sound.]
JOHN GREY JR.

SCHARPLING AND WURSTER
The Best of the Best Show
Numero Group

Tom and Jon have asserted themselves as the true masters of radio for this generation. They're the Two Stooges of the Orson Welleses of our time. We're sayin' these guys are the Opie and Anthony of goddamn Howard Sternses. When these motherfuckers get on the phone, forget it—magic rains in folks' ears and out their privates, ready for intercourse.
BRANTLER FOOTSTEEM

GABI
Sympathy
Software

It's super difficult to find someone who doesn't like Breaking Bad. I always avoided the thing because so many people declared it mandatory viewing material. Then one day when I felt like I could either full-on commit suicide or watch it, I put the whole damn thing on my MacBook Pro, and now look at my dumb ass watching Better Call Saul.
AWESOME BROOM