Not to say no one was paying attention - this is where Logos got the name for his debut album from - but all in all this hasn't gotten into the jungle pantheon the same way Parallel Universe has and hasn't succeeded in online-boosted cult recognition the same way Jacob's Optical Stairway. Which is a shame, because this connects the scruffy and the sublime the same way those two did in less time. It's all there - the dense swarthes of breakbeats, the stretched sample-pack pads, the disembodied ... read more

Okay, so you should know by now: Cocteau Twins were great, Heaven Or Las Vegas was great, the other albums you didn't listen to were also probably great, but this isn't really a Cocteau Twins album, this is just three people who really like Souxsie And The Banshees trying to capture their idols' essence. And since they're not what they would become it's not Important and you can skip it entirely. Do a "Cocteau Twins: RANKED" list and place it near the bottom. Dismiss it as a Juju ... read more

A good album that I probably would've thought was better had literally anyone else made it. Touch Me has a nice little Balearic sway to it, complete with flamenco-ish licks and loose reggaeton rhythm, Aidan & Clara La San calling and responding and piling hooks on top of each other. Times Square sounds like a 2000s house hit sent through a freeway tunnel, Dream A Garden-style flanged guitars sparsely illuminating a hushed beat before exploding into fireworks. That's all well and good, but ... read more

First side is a mix-and-match of proto-vaporwave (Demerol would get reused for Eccojams), blunted arcade ambience and '80s ephemera. Second side consists of 2 sets of cosmic yearning, first watching the lonely night sky from the hood of your car and then suddenly being swept up by the wind and carried across the city, the light from the advertisements and traffic below morping into a blur. I'll think about Grey Level Objects - the way it glimmers and cascades like shooting stars falling to the ... read more

If you, like many people, listened to her later work and thought "Yeah it's alright but this really suffers from a lack of dembows" then boy howdy have I got the tape for you!

Better than the 1996 mix and the only reason I'm in the minority on that is that you nerds still have hangups about early CGI. You should know what to expect by now so for now I'll just suggest that it's more interesting to hear the beginnings of Good Lookin-style ambient dnb crop up in mixes like these - it's like reaching the end of a dark tunnel and having to put your hand in front of your head as your eyes adjust to the light.

A mix for the endtimes. '70s folk and modern R&B and jerk rap and kuduro and goth rock get slowed down to a crawl and flanged so heavily that the end results sound like pools of oil forming on concrete. The thing about JC is that unlike 75% of post-club/post-bass artists his politics inform the subtext of his music (instead of being confined to a Bandcamp press blurb) so the ghosts of BBC documentary interviewees and cheery shopping haul vloggers and finger-wagging British politicians fight ... read more

Downloaded this from a mixtape-hosting site that forgot to add any metadata to the tracks, and the end result has accidentally-dropped-this-in-the-bathtub quality and a DJ drowning out the intros screaming "The World Would Suck Without Girls!" The best way to consume music, is all I'm saying.

I'm sure you can find reason to dislike something that's got a song with the Sexy Bitch beat, a Flocka verse with the line "Stupid tatoos, call me Travis Barker", and Delirious (put ... read more

Bad news first: As nice as it is to hear a Missy verse in the year of our lord and savior 2023 RATATA never quite transcends being much more than a fun DJ tool (and I also probably would have sampled something other than the Boom Bye Bye of 2000s electro house but what do I know). Flowdan rules but unfortunately he has to make room for an underwhelming dancehall hook on Hydrate and tedious vocal drops from noted CIA plant Fred Again on Rumble (kidding, he's just a British aristocrat's kid ... read more

Anything that starts off threatening to brick your headphones is probably doing something right. The drops here sound like what burrito meat looks like, constantly threatening to untether themselves from the usual structure of "here's-the-drop" dubstep. There are moments that are closer to Sd Laika than Skrillex, and even the more conventional tracks sound fucked, e.g. King Jammy starting with a normal reggae-sampling riddim before being interrupted by the sound of a helium balloon ... read more

Lotta delicious distorted breaks on here - fun to remember that at some point techstep/neurofunk was more austere than the brash bro music it mutated into in the late '00s, every beat and bass wobble sounds like it emerged from a beaker, all rigid and antiseptic. Mood-wise it's like the soundtrack of an Alan J Pakula film if Pakula was born 30 years later, '90s cyberpunk imagery clashing with '70s paranoia. You can leave Detroit, a techno pastiche that unsurprisingly has not made its way into ... read more

Coming out swinging with this as your first release makes everything afterwards even more underwhelming. Hip-hop as interpreted by ghosts abandoned on the highway, the broad array of samples and slo-mo beats blurring out of focus as the headlights pass by them. The later stuff has its moments but it spreads itself way too thin - dude doesn't suit as a jack-of-all-trades, and all the genre-hopping reads less as exploring sound and more as giving people who live in RYM genre pages a thing to do. ... read more

Am enough of a fan and enough of a blowhard to admit I miss this Malibu, even if the new stuff is healing in its own right - it's like having the the first beams of sunlight shine directly on you after an emotionally draining night and complaining that it isn't orange enough. Still, stuff like this and Held suggested something else entirely. Her vocals, now amorphous and distant, as if you can only catch faint glimpses of the angels swirling the sky, here whisper monologues into your ear before ... read more

Obviously everyone knows this is snotty over-technical wankwork by and for people who are still impressed by "WHITE GUY RAPS FASTER THAN YOU" videos, every 'punchline' artless and delivered even more artlessly, but too much has been made of the "Just because you're rapping fast doesn't mean you're saying something" line (which is a strawman so it can be rebutted with some BARS, SON) and not enough has been made of the fact that one of these motherfuckers rhymed ... read more

Pleasant enough. Appreciate dude getting the bag - it's not 2019 anymore, so it's nice to see people's reaction to Bladee not be performative revulsion. And there are a lot of nice details scattered within (the bird sounds, those plucks that open the song resonating like a music box, the harmony on the chorus). But it's not 2019 anymore, and as much as I like listening to modern DG it's like visiting a high school friend: They're still affable and you have a nice conversation about what you've ... read more

A more visceral exploration of the emptiness of wealth and the failure of the American Dream than The Great Gatsby.

Mostly a transition between the warped glitch hop of &&&&& and the fragmented sketches of Mutant, except the atmosphere isn't as claustrophobic as the former and the beats aren't as abrasive/memorable as the latter. Maybe her worst album (barring the KiCK stuff, listened to the complete set and didn't find anything to sink my teeth into). Nonetheless, there's always some good things rearing their head - Sisters demonstrates her strength at wrapping mutated rhythms around a ... read more

Maybe one of the only 2010s albums which doesn't feel like it belongs to a tense at all - sure you can situate where the building blocks came from ('80s house, grime, synth funk, Jersey club, Night Slugs-style bass) and you can read that it was released in 2012 but when you listen to it the understanding of linear time seems to fly out the window and all of these sounds get synthesized and recontextualised into newer more exciting territories that recall 2012 and 1982 and 3012 all at ... read more

Underrated this. Truth be told I've put ths on more often than Brotherhood Of The Bomb - mostly because that one's not on streaming but also because this scratches an itch that a lot of trip hop and illbient doesn't. Perversely dank shit. Eroded dubby sonics both claustrophobic and agoraphobic, sludgy hip-hop rhythms slowed down to a crawl, distorted noisy drones flying above you like an air raid, cavernous acid squelches belting out like a shadowed creature belching. If 2 hours and 28 minutes ... read more

A few moldier, hokier spots but by and large hasn't aged as much as you'd expect from an early '90s IDM record. Better than Artifical Intelligence because there's more of a pulse, more focused on groove than "boundary-pushing" rhetoric. Feels like there's a rush coming from these discoveries - zappy synths recall Warp's bleep origins, pads this side of Detroit flutter and float over like clouds on the horizon, chunky breakbeats and cute lil electro drums put the "Dance" in ... read more