"i had one enemy that was powerful, and another that was weak. so, i convinced them to fight each other. now i have two enemies that are of moderate strength, and neither pose me any serious threat."

things tend to work out for me.

"but, why can't we all just, like, love each other and get along?"

ugh.

fucking idiot.

in any scenario where you have two enemies, you always want those enemies to fight each other, instead of fighting you.

it's divide and conquer. it's the oldest tactic out there.

when the vikings came down from the north, what did the pope do? the answer is he gave them swords and told them if they converted to christianity then they could find great riches by fighting the arabs. 

that's how europe liberated the parts of it that muslims had conquered.

christians and muslims killing each other off is a good thing. let them slaughter each other. i don't have a side in that conflict; i want them both to cease to exist. it's easier than having to fight either of them, separately, ourselves. so, it follows when i see muslims killing secularists, my instinct is to support sending christians to fight the muslims. if the result is more dead christians and less dead socialists, that's a definite net benefit for western society.

that has nothing to do with why i opposed invading iraq. i've been over that.

the chinese don't want to buy our dirty canadian oil.

the chinese want to sell us their electric cars.

that's right.

the great delusion in exporting oil to china is not comprehending that china is moving on past oil, while america remains lost in the backwardsness of a petroleum economy.

the only major economy that we're going to sell filthy tar sands oil to is the united states. nobody else wants our filthy, stinky, dirty oil.

hopefully, the chinese knocked some sense into carney. nobody will ever knock any sense into danielle smith.

- there's no market

- because there's no market nobody wants to pay for the pipe

- if we do this ourselves, it's going to cost billions, and we'll just end up dumping it into the ocean

alberta needs to get a new economy and move on and stop dragging the rest of us back into the 20th century.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/china-trade-mission-carney-9.7046150

instead of bombing the fascists in iran for slaughtering civilians, trump is threatening to slaughter civilians, himself.

see, this has always been my greatest fear: that the muslims and christians stop killing each other and unite to start killing socialists, instead. any sort of detente between the republican party and islamic fascism is western culture's worst nightmare.

would you want to die in a ditch fighting to separate from a country that is five times your size and identical to you in every way, up to an accent?

i can tell you that if i was in ukraine, i'd be draft dodging, too. i'd be trying to get out.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/ukraines-new-defence-minister-reveals-scale-of-desertions-as-millions-avoid-the-draft/

right now, protesters in iran should be focused on storming and taking over prisons, like this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evin_Prison

don't kill the ayatollah in a strike.

let the protesters capture him and hang him on a crane.

they're not shooting a few people. it's not a bad apple in the police force. it's not an accident. it's the systemic targeting and mowing down of "apostates" and "anarchists".

they need to take over the jails.

the word "iran" is a transliteration of an ethnic designation that iranians call themselves. there is no correct spelling, other than one we decide, by converting their alphabet to ours. but the iranians never wrote much. at the height of the iranian empire, they mostly wrote in aramaic, and later on actually wrote a lot in greek, which is weird because the greeks were their enemies.

the iranians call their country arya.

iranians call themselves aryans.

iran and aryan are exactly the same word - etymologically, functionally, literally. they mean exactly the same thing.

this is the reason the germans were obsessed with conquering iran in world war two. they sent special designations to persia and afghanistan. they were trying to break through the urals for liebensraum, but they were actually trying to get to iran.

the iran=aryan equation is not a debate. this is basic fact; nobody will argue about this. the use of the word aryan in archaeological texts was initially borrowed from iran and only co-opted by race theorists later on. it's literally the same word. however, linguists will get very mad at you for suggesting that eire - the word the irish use for ireland - is the same word as iran, but their arguments don't held up. for example, they argue that the roman word for the island was hibernia. but that's like saying that mexico couldn't be the indigenous name for mexicans because cortez called them indians. 

i think it's probably correct to point out that the irish and iranians basically use the same word for themselves - eire in ireland and arya in iran - as evidence of the indo-european migrations. these two groups are retaining an ancient self-designation in the furthest reaches of their ethnic expansion, the westernmost extent and southernmost extent.

what i'm getting at is that iran is not a "middle eastern country" in the way that iraq is and trying to draw any sort of parallel between iran and iraq is ignorant. iran is not arab, and they have resisted islamization for centuries. the iranians are not a distant, foreign culture. iran, like russia, is a fundamentally european civilization, on the outskirts of europe's geography. you should think of them as being more like us and less different than us.

europe fought a 1500 year war against christian colonialism and won.

iran has been fighting a similar war against islamic colonialism since the 7th century ce, but they have not won yet, and my solidarity is firmly with the secularists on the ground that are waging the long war to reassert iranian indigenous sovereignty in the face of islamic imperialism and arabic colonialism.

so, here we go.

the arab funded western media and saudi dominated press, which treats al jazeera like an independent source rather than state funded media by a brutally oppressive regime, is going to try to convince you that removing the nazis from power in iran is going to lead to something "worse".

well, it might. in fact it probably will. but when it does, it will be because america put it in place, not because the iranians want it (similar to what just happened in syria. you may criticize assad, and i would suggest you're empirically wrong, but the nazis that the turks put in power under american direction are infinitely worse, except thsat they do what we tell them, now. it's a brutal dictatorship and an american client. that's what we want. it's not what they want. and now we're deporting secular syrian refugees to go home to face the niqab, because it's safe to live in a theocratic fascist state, so long as they don't host russian naval bases anymore.).

the actual truth - and you will not see this in any media, anywhere. there will be a conspiracy of silence about this - is that underneath the state-mandated clothing requirements, the vast majority of iranians are basically white europeans. they speak a european language. they held to indigenous european religious practices longer than europe did. but they've been battling a centuries long attempt by arabs to colonize them and convert them to islam. this is very, very different from iraq, which was at one point sumerian, but eventually became the centre of semitic civilization, and the alpha-culture of arabic history. iraq and iran are not sister societies on the same side of history, they are bitterly sworn enemies that have been at war for millennia. iraq has been trying to colonize iran since the start of islam, and iran has been viciously resisting the whole time.

it is for that reason that the saudis want to install their own government, and if they succeed then it is true that the government will probably be worse than the existing one. but this is like the pope installing puppet kings in versailles, while the people storm the bastille. biden would 100% support the saudi puppet king. trump is a loose cannon. the next republican will snap back into place. this might actually be a short time window.

we need to understand that the people in iran are trying to storm their bastille. they are trying to overthrow their theocracy. they want secularism and they want democracy. if we help them, the outcome will be good for everybody everywhere, including iranians, and certainly including jews.

...well, that is, everyone, except the saudis, who will now have that functioning democratic society in their region that they have been trying to prevent for eons and that might succeed in absorbing the kurds where any arab state would fail.

and, by extension, except for washington because washington's most important ally in the region is the saudis and washington primarily follows saudi direction in the region. the jews do the dirty work. the saudis make the decisions.

do you know anything about the spanish revolution? americans and brits and franks and people from the colonies went there to fight the fascists. they pleaded with the british, and they pleaded with the americans, for help, and nothing ever came. capital decided that the fascists in spain were preferable to the revolutionaries. in the end, they were massacred by stalin.

i am not an isolationist, i am a revolutionary socialist. i support global revolution everywhere all the time, including here. i am not opposed to intervening in iran. the iranian government needs to be overthrown. but i understand the reality of the forces aligned against the iranian people, and the american state is not on their side, even if you or i are.

the hard part is understanding that trump is their best hope and that when this time window closes, it's back to theocracy in iran, potentially for decades. they will not overthrow this regime without outside help and no conventional american decision maker will choose secular democracy over a fascist client state.

and nick cave can go fuck himself.

my immediate family came to understand, eventually, that the best birthday present they could give me is to not bother me on my birthday.

i've always absolutely hated birthdays, and absolutely hated birthday parties. i didn't want to be the centre of attention. i didn't want to be special. i wanted to blend in with the furniture and for my family to fuck off and leave me alone.

i have pictures of me at birthdays when i was under ten, and i'm frowning or crying in all of them. i really hated it. i found it traumatic to be expected to interact with all of these people i mostly didn't like.

as i grew older, i wouldn't celebrate anybody's birthday, or religious holidays, or hallmark holidays, or calendar events or anything. starting around the age of 13 or 14, i would lock myself in my room on every possible event - other people's holidays, my holidays, whatever. family would come over, and i would wait inside until they left, and come out after dark to get leftovers. it didn't matter what the event was.

i've never had a lot of friends, but nobody ever knew when my birthday was, because i never had birthday parties. i wouldn't even tell anybody. i didn't want anybody to know.

i'm 45 today and i still hate birthdays and i still want people to go away and fuck off.

the ai moral panic is going to continue for a while.

don't be like alex jones, fake leftists. please.

you will, though. because what we call progressives today are five years away from becoming exactly what we called conservative 100 years ago, conservatives have become liberals and the left has completely evaporated.

but if you're a capitalist bastard, don't let your greed make you complacent.

it's a matter of time before the left returns from the ashes, to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of capitalism, and stripped of it's corruptions and impurities. the death of the contemporary left, globally, just means that when it returns it will have no baggage left to deal with, no confusions, no co-opted structures, to start. it will begin anew. 

go throw the chip in the lava pit, progressives.

the world will move on without you.

what tech companies are trying to market as "artificial intelligence" is really just a server side search engine. it's a more powerful search algorithm that uses much more connected and integrated sets of data. but what's happening is essentially that each of these companies is independently mirroring the web - the same way the internet archive (the wayback machine) has been doing for years - and then conducting search algorithms on the archived data. this is more powerful and allows for more developed outcomes, but it isn't anything fundamentally different than searching.

i actually took graduate level courses in ai in university when i was studying for a computer math degree. i know what i'm talking about. that journalist over there probably doesn't, and neither do you.

what we call ai is not cognition, it's a decision tree. you train a program to search a database for information. when you train it, you get it to follow paths along a directed graph (that's the math used, graph theory; that's a technical term, directed graph), which is no different than a rat learning how to navigate through a maze. while a rat demonstrates some level of intelligence, the algorithm uses statistics and shortest path algorithms to guess at outcomes. over time, the program remembers the short cuts and goes back to the same places, but it's still not fundamentally different than searching. it's fancy searching. searching 3.14. whatever.

it follows that when some company's ai throws back child porn, it's doing so because somebody searched for it and it follows that going after elon musk for this is equivalent to going after google for somebody using google to search for child porn. google/twitter may bear some minimum level of responsibility for not filtering results, but the process of censorship is very fraught with peril for free speech.

the culprit that the law needs to go after is the person searching for the child porn, not the algorithm that performed correctly when asked to search for the child porn.

there's an anecdote i heard in a hitchens speech many years ago. i don't know it's accuracy, but it doesn't matter.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, author of the first great dictionary of English language, was visited by a delegation of respectable ladies of London.

“Dr Johnson,” they said, “we congratulate you for omitting all indecent or obscene words from your dictionary.”

“Ladies,” said Dr. Johnson, “I congratulate you for looking them up.”

the canadian liberal party, which is just copying the canadian conservative party at this point, wants canada to be just like venezuela. and mark carney and danielle smith are going to end up like maduro and his wife.

i don't really care about the well being of canada's political class, but are we going to let them drag the rest of us down with them or are we going to rise up and put an end to fossil fuel extraction for good?

selling oil to china will not create "prosperity", it will create sanctions and war.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carney-canada-china-trip-canola-tariffs-9.7041086

i purchased groceries on friday, enough that it should last me for the rest of the month.

i need a new blender.

for now, i'm going to continue to eat through the rest of the food bank food, and get through that broccoli soup a little later. one of the things they gave me was a package of smoked meat, that's been in the freezer for a while.

i bought a number of items explicitly for this that i don't eat a lot of but that i like and consider junk, like dill pickles. i enjoy the dill pickles, but they're just empty calories. they're going to be eaten in my tomato sandwiches and my caesar salad, but i needed them for the smoked meat sandwiches.

i bought a loaf of french sourdough, as well. these are the big loaves, so that you cut one piece in half to make both sides of the sandwich. i'll use the rest of it for my french broccoli soup.

- i took four of the middle pieces out and cut each in half, and toasted all of them

- two of the slices were put aside to eat with margarine only

- two were for thick smoked meat sandwiches

- i put the smoked meat in the microwave, covered, and zapped it for 33 seconds five times, waiting for a small time frame in between.

- i put four pieces of bacon on the stove

- the sandwich is built as follows:

- sourdough bottom

- caesar dressing

- smoked meat

- yellow mustard

- dill pickle

- monterrey jack

- bacon

- cheddar cheese

- frank's

- sourdough top (with more mustard)

i'll have that with a tall glass of orange-grapefruit juice.

i'm not a jew. i don't care if it's kosher.

the best way to avoid paying high interest rates is to stop borrowing money and start saving money instead.

yeah, i would be strongly opposed to this.

it's an overreach of state power to tell private lenders what rate of interest they can charge. these are private contracts and people enter into them freely of their own will. restricting interest rates is islamic fundamentalism, and it reeks of anti-semitism. it should be rigorously opposed by everybody interested in freedom.

the actual result of a policy such as this is that emergency loan services will go out of business, taking away a service that people sometimes rely on and need. these loans will continue to happen, but they'll happen under the table, with more severe outcomes for people that can't pay the debts. lending out money to high-risk people at 10% interest will no longer make business sense, and the businesses will stop doing it. the result is not a decrease in interest rates, but a decrease in access to lending.

you want to continue to legalize and regulate high interest lending so it can be overseen by law enforcement, not drive it underground and make it worse by trying to ban it.

the state might step in and provide high risk loans at low interest if it wants, but it wouldn't have to interfere in private decisions made by consenting adults in order to do it.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-credit-cards-interest-rates-savings-banks-dba221f122789427c1c625ba873c9b71

they're not going to get support from the united states or europe, who are too busy jerking off arab princes.

the kurds, once again, offer the only hope for peace, stability and democracy in the region. my solidarity is with the coalition developing to overthrow the neo-nazi government that's recently taken over syria, with nato and specifically with turkish backing.

https://www.kurdistan24.net/en/story/886252/alawite-and-druze-leaders-declare-full-support-for-kurds-call-for-federal-system-in-syria

the iranian regime doesn't care about the well-being of the people protesting on it's streets. they're a bunch of apostates. they'll mow them down with machine guns before they meet their demands, or accede any power to them.

it's important that the protesters continue to broadcast to the world that they want a revolution, but they're largely wasting their time, on their own accord. there is no path to peaceful change in iran.

the question as to whether it's in us interests to intervene or not is an open question and i acknowledge i will not like the outcome, but this regime isn't going to be dismantled from the inside. overthrowing this regime will require the intervention of outside actors, and the use of violence.

the american tactic of generating unrest and provoking instability to topple governments without the use of military force requires some concept of democratic functioning in government as a prerequisite in order to be successful, even if the protests can get to critical mass. in the 21st century, critical mass will merely result in massacres and slaughter. populations cannot defend themselves with rifles against drones and tanks.

this tactic did not work in venezuela because the class divisions in the society were too deep for bourgeois support to get to critical mass, and there was simply no way to provoke enough unrest to topple the government, without first addressing the material conditions of workers, which workers understood would dramatically worsen in a return to banana republic economics and bourgeois democracy.

this tactic will not work in iran because the government would be just as happy to slaughter the apostates and do away with them than listen to them, anyways.

i want to be clear.

the correct way for new york city to deal with explicitly pro-hamas/pro-nazi protesters is not with a police response or with tepid political "condemnations". this is new york city. the correct way to approach this is to mobilize on the ground and brutally, viciously beat the shit out of them on the street - to cut them down in public and show the world that nazis are not welcome on the streets of new york, and this is what happens when nazis go there and try to set up.

you don't deal with these people by being nice to them.

you have to bludgeon them. you have to cut them down.

it appears as though new york city needs a good round of nazi head smashing by activists on the ground.

they should go in with clubs and just beat the shit out of them.

the only good nazi is a dead one.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/09/we-support-hamas-chants-put-mamdanis-israel-stance-at-center-stage-00720393

i've read a fair number of attempts to deny that the romans named the region after the greek philistines.

but, in fact, in much of the sources an f is used instead of a phi. the word used in much of the roman and later arab writing is filistin, which became φilistine and then palestine, in english. most languages still retain the soft 'f' rather than the hard 'p'.  

there was a greek tribe called the philistines, of which palestine is etymologically derived from, living in the region as well. the philistines entered the region around they year -1200, in a migration referred to in historical sources as the invasion of the sea peoples. the philistine migration is recorded in ancient egyptian sources, and their greek ancestry has been upheld by recent dna tests. they are actually spoken of quite widely in the hebrew bible and their presence on the coast is also recorded in greek sources, like herodotus. it was the aryan greek philistines that wittle semitic david confronted with his slingshot (in the myth/legend recorded in the hebrew bible).

the philistines lived on the coast and had a string of cities there from the bronze age collapse to the eventual conquest by alexander, when they were absorbed into the new greek kingdoms in the region (the ptolemids and seleucids). they had a very big influence on the region, including influencing the religion in the generally-thought-to-be-arab enclave of petra, who worshipped a sky god named "dyushara", a clearly indo-european name that is linguistically identical to greek zeus or latin deus.

modern palestinians are descended from classical period hebrew groups, not the ancient greek philistines. you can find the odd blonde palestinian, and while they might imagine they have crusader ancestry, they're probably actually dragging around philistine dna. there was also a group that lived just outside the region, in the desert, and was called arabs by the roman and greek sources, but they weren't the same people that invaded it in the 7th century. those people that invaded are called saracens in the roman sources, are described as being "as black as the night" and migrated north from yemen. arabs were light skinned, like the jews were. the romans said the saracens were from arabia, as that is where they entered the empire from, and it took some time for the romans to understand what the fuck was actually happening, in terms of a migration event from yemen taking place. the muslims record this in their own history, as well. for the first several centuries, the roman sources actually consider islam to be a christian heresy by the desert nomads, related to the monophysitism of the egyptians. and, islam does consider jesus to have been human, like the heretical monophysite christians in the area did.

the romans did not imagine the term philistine. it was already there, and is in fact embedded in the hebrew mythology, itself. the jews were there (at least after cyrus), but the maximum extent of israel, which is something described in the oldest part of the hebrew bible, was not always reality. it's not like the romans just renamed the current state of israel to palestine. in fact, there was a historical division consisting of a north and south area, and that goes back to the assyrians, and is also noted in the hebrew bible, as well. the size of the hebrew state grew and shrunk over time as different people came in and out of the area, and the ability of the jews to project power and put vassals under their control increased and decreased; sometimes, the jews exerted authority over the other tribes, and sometimes those tribes exerted authority over them. the map wasn't set in stone by a dictate of god in the bronze age, held in place for centuries and then uprooted by the romans, like ultra-orthodox jews today would have you believe; maps are constantly changing things, in perpetual flux and evolution. history exists.

i don't know enough about classical period pottery to know who made this, but finding it somewhere in the south of the levant does not automatically make it jewish. there was a greek tribe in the area for essentially the entirety of the biblical narrative (which is a nationalist mythology and not history) and they left plenty of their own garbage there. there were also other west semitic groups, like phoenicians. an expert would be able to tell if the pottery was greek or semitic by examining it closely and the idea that it could have been "syrian or philistine" is entirely in the realm of plausibility. 

the artifact should be labelled by the group they think made it and an expert should be able to determine that.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/jewish-group-palestine-label-rom

to state the obvious, the descendants of the last shah of iran should not be invited to any council or table that is determining the country's future.

this article is a pile of capitalist bullshit.

first, the numbers are incredibly misleading. if 86.5% of total housing is owned by the people that live in them, and 1% is owned by large corporate investors with 100+ units, how much of the rental stock is owned by large corporate investors?

the answer depends on the vague data provided by the other categories but is at least 1/13.5 = 7.5%.

however, of that 13.5%, the chart says that:

- 1% is owned by investors with more than 100 units, almost none of which would be lived in by the owners

- 1.6% is owned by investors with 10-99 units, of which some small amount of them will be lived in by the owners and

- 10.8% is owned by people with 2-9 units, of which some large percentage - 35-45% - is going to be lived in by people that own them.

so, split of a third of 10.8% and put it in the non-investor category. 100 - 86.6 - 10.8/3 = 9.8.

1/9.8 = 10.2%. so, roughly 10% of the housing stock in the united states is owned by institutional investors. 

if you include the 1.5% that own more than 10 units, it's now 2.5/9.8 = 25%, or 1 in 4 houses.

these are more accurate and more reasonable estimates, but it apparently varies dramatically by region, with the cities in the northern states having almost none of this (yet) and cities in the south having a much higher percentage than 25% of the rental stock by owned by large investors.

it does matter who owns the houses. when 10% of the houses are being bought by the bank, it drives up prices and reduces availability. further, these are not your big, fancy houses in the suburbs, either. these are smaller, more modest houses that the banks can rent out to low-to-middle income people. that's the point; they're scooping the available housing up and forcing the lower middle class to become renters, rather than owners, while still handing out massive mortgages to fancier houses for richer people. it's like the institutions have decided that you have to have a certain level of wealth before you can have the privilege of ownership and it's just safer for the bank to own your house otherwise, considering you'll be paying off the mortgage until you're 60 anyways, and you're probably going to die before then because being lower middle class also means you're morbidly obese. your mortgage might as well be your rent. so there's no point in pretending you own the house to begin with; just let us deal with it.

now, that being said, that doesn't mean you should just hand the mortgages out like plots of land during colonization. americans with an attention span may remember what happened the last time that happened, and the answer is it crashed the whole economy for over ten years. but, the pendulum has now swung too far the other way. where we were once concerned about bad mortgages being traded on open markets (which was crazy shit) and blowing everything up, we're now concerned about it being too hard to buy a mortgage at all.

in canada, we have something called the canada housing mortgage corporation, and it buys bad mortgages and stops housing bubbles from crashing. our system didn't experience the effects of subprime mortgage lending due to the existence of this crown corporation that bailed everybody out, quietly, behind the scenes. the united states might want to look into something like that.

but we are experiencing the effects of housing shortages, and on greater scales because we have much less housing, a much smaller population and are recovering from much higher levels of recent immigration, proportionally. a ban on large investors in canada would not be the primary fix, either, but it would help, and it should be being considered. i have argued this point previously as well.

i don't know the percentages in canada, but it doesn't matter - whether it's 3%, 5%, 15% or more of total rental stock, it would make a difference in increasing ownership and reducing the ability of the rentier class to survive on rent as income.

second, the article describes the smaller category of investors - the ones that own 2-10 properties - as "small businesses". i do agree that these smaller owners are the larger underlying problem. calling them "small businesses" doesn't make them less parasitic, and if you look at the math, it's generally the opposite - "small businesses" don't operate on economies of scale, don't have unionized labour and are generally far worse actors, generally, than large corporations are. most socio-economic problems are made worse by the bourgeois class - which is the marxist term for "small businesses" - and the socialist solution to solving most of those problems is to consolidate the businesses into larger conglomerates, that can operate on economies of scale and afford to pay union wages. socialism is particularly contemptuous of the small business owner. it's the libertarians and the small-l liberals that are always jerking themselves off over the "small businesses". as a raving socialist, i'd like to essentially do away with all small business, by combining them all into huge corporations that are owned and run and operated by the workers. there's nothing left-wing or socialist about attacking big businesses; that rhetoric belongs to the free market libertarians, who exist on the political right. socialists want super production, and we want the end of competition, which we think of as stupid and wasteful. we want big corporations run by workers that are organized into cartels and don't compete with each other, but operate at full capacity, produce at scale, offer full employment and generate obscene profits, for the benefit of workers.

socialism isn't about the size of the enterprise and, to the extent that it is, socialism needs big businesses to function, not small ones. socialism is about who owns the businesses; it's about abolishing management and having the workers take over. a real leftist, a real socialist, would agree that attacking big businesses is right-wing populism, and not helpful in advancing socialism. socialists are supposed to have contempt for the small business owner, the bourgeois shop keeper that can only provide for themselves by exploiting their hired labour, and not for the unionized corporations, operating at scale, that have profits to distribute to the proletariat.

in context, it's the smaller landowners that are the ones eating up the bulk of the housing stock. the flip of the calculation i did suggests that at minimum 75%, and probably closer to 90%, of the rental housing stock is being taken away by smaller scale investors who are forcing would-be buyers to pay their mortgages instead of their own mortgages, by stepping in and outbidding the first time buyers. the article is presenting this as though these bourgeois, small-business owners are providing housing opportunities, instead of preventing them - as though the bourgeois rentiers are building the houses, rather than buying older stock, which should be available for new buyers, as first houses, but isn't because they can't compete with the more established buyers, when they come in and scoop the houses up. instead of paying down their own mortgages over time, these lower middle class renters instead end up paying for the children of the bourgeoisie to attend college, or to move into new houses in their early 20s. this exploitation of the lower middle class by the small business class, the bourgeoisie, is the much larger social problem, and the thing the state should really be stepping in to prevent.

i've suggested that one way to prevent small business owners from exploiting lower middle class workers in this way is to require some amount of actual ownership of a property - 75% or 80% - before you're allowed to rent it. this would ensure that you can't buy a second or third house and then get somebody else to pay the mortgage on it, which is not small business behaviour in a traditional bourgeois sense, whatever you think of that, but rather explicitly exploitative rentier capitalism. it's feudal thinking. it's immoral, in any civilized society, to buy a house and then immediately rent it out to pay down the mortgage, but this is what a very large percent of the rental stock on the market actually is. banning this exploitative behaviour would both force rentier capitalists to sell their investor properties to new owners, thereby increasing home ownership, and reduce rents across the board. the exploitative small business bourgeois class would suffer primarily in terms of their ability to pass on wealth to the next generation, but who gives a fuck about them? abolishing small-scale inheritance in favour of more wealth redistribution at the bottom is a good thing, not a bad thing, as this is real wealth, and what actually needs to get spread out more to better increase actual equality. those billions of dollars in elon musk's stock portfolio are not real wealth, they're just numbers in a database, and trying to spread it out is just going to crash the dollar and create inflation. real wealth redistribution requires redistributing real wealth. banning rentiers from renting properties they don't really own would be a massive step forward in any redistribution project.

for now, trump's proposal is reasonable and should be adopted. it's not a silver bullet, not a panacea, and won't solve the real problem, which is creeping feudalism in the bourgeois class and the state's tendency to enable small business to exploit the poor, and then call it beneficial (to them), rather than condemn it as exploitation, and pass laws to put an end to it. in bourgeois capitalism, the state legislates the bourgeois class above the law. however, it will help. it's a start.

don't believe the capitalist nonsense in the bourgeois press.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/01/08/housing-trump-order-corporations-home-purchases/

the ndp needs to strongly prioritize finding an electable candidate in the upcoming toronto byelection (none of the current leadership candidates fit that description) and put everything they have into winning it.

if they can't give the liberals a strong run in downtown toronto after carney's catastrophic showing to this point, it may be time to shut the party down and go home.

i've taken a subset of the year-end analysis as the records i'm considering worth noting, for whatever reason. this is sort of a best-of after all and is the re-organized, ordered list.

the full list is a few posts down, or you could check out the np: list on the side.

green means go, B+, A-, A, A+. these are releases i truly recommend checking out.
yellow means proceed carefully, C+, B-, B. these are not quite there, but almost.
orange means proceed only with extreme caution, X, E. sometimes, a lot of effort is put into something and it still sucks anyways, especially if it's made by millennials, who have a reputation for trying as hard as they can and still miserably failing. i am isolating these into their own category. i admit that some people may find something worthwhile in these records, despite the reality that they objectively suck.

however, note that only new releases from 2025 receive a colour code. notable re-releases may appear in this list withot a colour.

gumdrop	gumdrop	2025	los angeles, usa	X	this is a curious combination, and i prioritize novelty and creativity above almost everything else in music....except composition. you still gotta write the songs. sometimes, something like this is necessary to get to something else, and sometimes it just rots in obscurity. i don't know how seriously to take this, and i don't know if it intends to be taken seriously, but i can point out that i heard this this year and took note of it. i'm reminded a little bit of an album from 2019 called 1000 gecs that i liked a little bit in terms of being novel but likewise wasn't certain if i should take seriously. that record did very well, over time. this particular combination of chiptune production and screamo-rap vocals may hit me as beyond goofy and difficult to interpret as art, but the kids really like it, and i guess that reflects their decision not to take life seriously. when life gives you lemons, throw them at the cops. yet, it's not vacuous pop music, either; there is some thought put into making this impossible to take seriously and i have to take note of that as performance art, even if i wonder about the songs, themselves. that's the question, here: this is fun and silly, sure, but can you listen to this? i don't know. however, if you've succeeded in perplexing and confusing me, you're doing something right, even if i'm not sure whether you've succeeded in making substantive art, yet. i'm going to grade this as X, for now.
black country, new road	forever howlong	2025	uk+ire	F-	the most pretentiously cheesy soundtrack for the worst children's movie never made. recommended age range: 7-13. i hope their ten minutes are up, now. listen. if you're somebody's too conservative mom and you don't want them listening to sluts on youtube, maybe there's something valuable to you here in the wholesomeness of the music. i don't have kids. if i did, i wouldn't share your thought processes. but it's not my job to find music for your kids to listen to that's wholesome and decent. i'm just pointing out that this is artistically equivalent to a julie andrews movie and not to a brilliant progressive rock record. that's my job, here. your kids can sing along if they like, but you should be checking your head if you're an adult that's into this. that's my point. but, i bet jk rowling loves them. update: i just want to add that, due to the fact that i'm typing after a chromebook crash right now, i have spent extra time listening to this record. i also wanted to make sure my slam was informed, and i think it is. i have an E category and i'm explicitly not putting it in there. i'm purposefully snubbing it. i want to suggest bjork as a far more likely influence than joanna newsome, which seems to be the general consensus and would appear to both be completely wrong and a mischaracterization of the quality of the music. i am not a joanna newsome fan, and i don't like country or folk music very often, but i realize she's relatively abstract, in her genre. this is not abstract music. i actually really want to double down on the idea that this is primarily influenced by children's music, and that's what this in truth really is. like a lot of children's performers, they take influence from broadway and showtunes, but i think it's second hand and not direct. these are not kids that actually spent much time at the theatre. rather, the real influences here range from julie andrews to hannah montana, and i would suggest taylor swift is a major influence in the lyrics. examples of the erudite, wordy, bookish lyrics: "a song i wrote about a pharoah on a boat", "whoops, here comes the chorus". heady, challenging stuff. really. is that first one a dr seuss quote? if i were to give this an E, it would be based on the idea that they spent a lot of time arranging and harmonizing it. it would be a statement about the vertical complexity of the record, about the voice leading, about the production or some other characteristic that they put a lot of time into. however, the point i'm getting across is that, from what i can hear, they didn't put a lot of effort into it at all. a lot of these songs likely sound a little familiar, and there's a reason for that - they lift a lot of melodies. there's often a couple of things going on but there's, what, 7 people in the band? with that many people, you'd expect a few things going on just by the number of people there are on stage. everything here is done by the book, to the point that it sounds like a project written for a second year composition course. everything is where it's expected to be. see, and you might not know that if you spend most of your time listening to old radiohead records. the word pretentious is the right description; this is in many ways the worst kind of prog. however, it isn't even that. it's not trying to be that. it's trying to be a musical for a kids show on tv and maybe it even succeeds at that, but it fails as art. brutally. that said, i'm going to list it with this review for this reason, so people that find my list aren't wondering where it is or if i heard it.
yau hei	vessel	2025	bristol, uk/ hong kong, china	E	industrial music has always had a distinctively german characteristic to it. even when it was from the uk or canada or japan or somewhere else, it was always germanic and atheistic in scope and feel and that dour germanicism is what made it what it was. the idea of taoist or buddhist industrial music with chinese characteristics is a little different and something i've yet to hear in my many years, let's say 23 years (it's more than that), of industrial-music-listening. however, i'm not sure this stands up beyond the novelty of the fusion, and i'm not convinced the artist would identify it as industrial, or if the i-word is even a little taboo nowadays. objectively speaking, the auto-tune is really an evolution on what dwayne goettel was doing to ogre's voice 35+ years ago, through rack mounted quadraverbs and sequencer-based vocoders, and is probably the biggest deviation from germanic industrial, and yet isn't really much of one at all. the subtle j-pop or k-pop influence is pretty subtle. so, i'm going to call this chinese industrial music a proof of concept and give it an E, aware that the person that created this is likely only vaguely aware of what it is that i'm describing it as and probably just thinks she's making world fusion electronica with a slightly experimental vibe, and on that level it's nothing spectacular and not really worth taking note of. i'm taking note of something that is likely only interesting to me by accident.
dj galen	the death of music	2025	portland, usa	E	the record has a lot of percussion, but not much melody or harmony. it is more for dancing and less for listening. however, it's good enough as club music to get an E for effort rather than the C or C- i'd give it as a piece of music.
death's dynamic shroud	the lunar curtain II	2025	los angeles, usa	E	an overly pretentious attempt at some of the worst elevator music i've ever heard. the vocal tracks suck. however, the record improves slightly if you just completely delete the first five insufferably pretentious tracks and start it at track 6, which is the most interesting track on the record. this hatchet work still results in a failing attempt at art music, and the vocal tracks are still loaded with cheese, but it cuts out the worst of the stench. the hesitation i'm having with just throwing this in the dung heap is that, despite the fact that it's repeatedly objectively terrible in it's repeated use of tired genre cliches and it's cringing application of the worst kind of cheese in the vocal work, there are a handful of interesting moments that largely come up in the sequencing structures. they just constantly ruin the sporadically novel sequencer work by burying it in these layers of cliches and cheese and these awful vocals. this is a characteristic of gen y music more generally - even when they are trying as hard as they can, it still sucks. i guess that's a characteristic of gen y more generally, though; even when they try their hardest, they still fail. life's tough, kids.
agriculture	the spiritual sound	2025	los angeles, usa	E	rock music has slowly become more and more retarded over time; you always had to be a little bit daft to do this well, but by the time corporate emo was taking over, i was done with it, and just listening to jazz. it had become utterly stupid. then, corporate emo inverted on itself in a way nobody predicted, and became the era's progressive rock, and i realized i was going to have to find a way to deal with my disdain for the incredibly stupid cliches in the genre if i wanted to listen to anything calling itself rock at any time in the near future, because the fuckers had taken over the genre, and that was how it was, whether i liked it or not. i never really came around to it, but just as i was finding ways to stomach it, it evolved into something even worse. somebody will yell at me for deriving black metal from screamo, and i know that skips a few steps, but i'm talking about the mainstream rock culture, not the development of the style. if i thought corporate screamo was stupid, black metal was a massive step into full retard, but the same thing was beginning to happen, and there just wasn't a way around dealing with the ubiquity of this new style of rock music if you wanted to find things that were new, as anything at all was going to go through both the screamo bottleneck and then the black metal bottleneck. art rock wasn't going to sound like it used to anymore and you'd have to deal with this, no matter how much you hated it, or you'd have to give up and stick to jazz. one very weird thing that happened is that this genre that was about killing fags (is that guy still in jail?) got taken over by women, gays and transgendered people, but that didn't make me more interested in it, it just took away a good way to make fun of it. now, in 2025, it's usurped the core structural norms in progressive rock music, so there's no way around dealing with it, but i'm not convinced that i can. when they just shut up and play, it's not that bad, but i haven't found a way to process this screeching and yelling, yet. i was able to solve this problem during the ubiquitous period of screamo by finding more hardcore or punk sounding vocalists, and waiting until the genre matured to the point where the lyricism was more developed. i haven't really found that path with black metal, yet, and it doesn't make as much sense to look for punk singers in black metal bands, as the history is oppositional. i have only been able to enjoy it when it's instrumental, when it's essentially loud shoegaze or when it features virtuoso guitar playing, like indricothere. i have no interest in the genre cliches: satan is stupid, heavy metal guitar solos are boring and these lyrics are never going to be intelligible in the genre because the point is that they aren't, which makes me disinterested in them. i'm not going to find a small group of evolved, progressive black metal bands that i'm able to appreciate as new art rock, i'm going to continue to cringe at this until the next thing replaces it. the form is fundamentally less redeemable than screamo was, and that makes it pretty awful, as everybody thought screamo must be the absolute bottoming out of western culture. we were wrong. i have listened to this a few times, and i'll give them an E for effort in terms of trying to be a little bit unpredictable regarding form, but it sucks, as art, and i'm not going to ease up on this the way i eventually forced myself to ease up on screamo. i'm going to have to wait this out. but, i fear the next thing is even worse, like using thoughts to generate pink noise with diodes, and running it through a high gain feedback loop, forcing the listener to decode it with a special fourier transform algorithm that you have to download with the album.
lost crowns	the heart is in the body	2025	london, uk	E	being a trained musician in 2025 is extremely frustrating, as your choices are total obscurity or doing covers of bloated cliches, if you're lucky enough to get a job in the local orchestra. opportunities for creative music production are very meagre. so, you get projects like this. it's not enough to call this pretentious or even to say it has no commercial potential. this really doesn't go anywhere or do anything. it's complex on it's face (it's less complex than it sounds), but it isn't abstract or creative, it's just purposefully obtuse. it's difficult without being rewarding, as you don't gain anything by being patient with it, or suffering through it. there are reasons that medieval music is so ugly sounding - they had the mathematics of tonality all wrong and were always out of tune - and mimicking that in the era of supercomputers doesn't sound sophisticated, it just sounds out of tune. you want the record to develop at some point, but it doesn't. the drumming is the best part of the record. there's a subset of people that will think they're smart for "understanding" this and call you stupid for rejecting it, but you should not listen to them and take their self-righteousness as irony. when the primary selling point of your record is that somebody could write a phd thesis about it, it's not compelling, by definition. so, you could spend a lot of time with this, but you won't get much out of it in the end - it's awkward, ugly, empty and rotting in it's own filth. like the dark ages.
geese	getting killed	2025	nyc, usa	E	i didn't make it through this one. the singer's not my thing. seems really phony and plastic and fake. the first song would be better if it was a reaction to finding a bum (that is, a homeless person) in his car than a bomb in his car.

scuba	getuppp	2025	london, uk	C+	this is very basic techno. it's actually pretty good for what it is, but it's for dancing, not listening. i'd enjoy this at a club, but less so as music.
beau mahadev	subterra	2025	nyc, usa	C+	low key contemporary pop. it's a little generic, but i like the general style.
chat pile	in the earth again	2025	okc, usa	C+	i've found this band to be overrated for years. this is also overrated.
jo passed	weekend	2025	vancouver, canada	C+	pop musicians need to shift with the pop form. bit of a weezer vibe.
sierra veins	in the name of blood	2025	paris, france	B-	stripped down modern techno update on a 90s industrial sound. it's enjoyable, but a little primitive.
north sea radio orchestra	special powers	2025	salisbury, uk	B-	this has several of the same people as lost crowns but is a far more listenable record. however, the middle part of the record drags it down a little. it's built like an early 70s pink floyd record in that sense.
tortoise	touch	2025	chicago, usa	B	i hitchhiked from detroit to ann arbor to see tortoise about ten years ago, without hearing their most recent record first. out in the smoking section, somebody told me they were there on a rec from a friend and had never heard tortoise before at all. the rec said tortoise sounded like king crimson. i was a little taken aback; i insisted that tortoise do not sound like king crimson, and i was very familiar with both bands. i had to eat my cigarette butt after because the record they were touring actually did sound a lot like king crimson, to my surprise, and particularly crimson of the larks' tongues in aspic period. i bring this up because something that's happened to tortoise over the last 25 years, since standards, is that they've become increasingly calculated and written sounding and it hasn't been an asset to their overall sound. they've lost the dub influence, that kind of open and freeform part of their sound, that empty space, that subtle abstraction. i think that what's happened is that tortoise has become everybody's side project and they've lost the charisma because they don't see each other much anymore. it's less that they stopped trying and more that they stopped connecting. if anything, they're maybe actually trying too hard to keep going, when most bands in similar life circumstances would have split up and moved on. tortoise has the curse of trying to follow up on several of modern music's best and almost flawless records and their run of classic records really ended after standards. it's been constant disappointment since, but there's almost no other possible outcome. the difficult part is trying to rank this objectively, instead of comparing it to the previous classic records, which were now all released quite a long time ago, and which nothing at all is going to compare favourably to. there's a few, just, like, practical questions i want to ask tortoise. given that your band contains multiple drummers, including several capable percussionists, why is so much of the record done with simplistic drum machines, to the point that it could have been a radiohead record? how much of this was recorded directly into ableton, rather than performed live first? the development of vst synthesizer technology over the last 15 years opens up limitless sonic possibilities, but it doesn't negate the need to write music. tortoise is no stranger to using the studio creatively, but it sounds like far more effort was put into getting sounds and textures than it was into writing songs and that the the return on that investment of time was minimal. i'm a studio nerd. i can appreciate that envelope. really. but it's just so overwhelmingly subtle, it's not this compositional decision. composers like jarre and autechre (to name two of many) have utilized unusual technology to devlop new styles and genres and all of that fidgeting and twiddling got them something novel and profound. there's 10x as much twiddling and fiddling here, but 80% of people won't notice at all (they're listening to it on their phones, guys), and it doesn't save the songwriting, which is really ableton-y. what does that mean? it means there's these snaps and loops and it makes everything perfectly orthogonal, with no space to breathe. tortoise's defining characteristic in it's best years was those points where they breathed, because they were live. i'm being critical because i'm annoyed, and i'm annoyed because you'd expect these guys to fucking know better than to make this set of errors. these are old men. they're jazz-punk luminaries. they're legit pros. so why does the record have the kind of mistakes you'd expect from a rookie record producer lost in the ableton templates and the arturia sound library? the morricone riffs keep it together, but it's a tired trick, at this point. the reality is that you're not likely to get much out of this after the tenth listen. approach with caution.
s8jfou	dognip/dognip+	2025	france	B	extremely autechre sounding, enough that i had to check to see who it actually was. it's probably the heavy use of max. however, the record makes more of an attempt to make dance music than autechre ever has, or certainly has since it picked up max, and the absence of traditional instrumentation consequently opens up a gulf. it's arguably neither abstract enough nor conventional enough to excel at either, but that inverted intersection opens up it's own space. i'm not aware of anybody else using the tools of abstract electronic music to try to make marketable dance music except, maybe, radiohead, or rdj for five minutes a long time ago. but this doesn't sound like radiohead. on the third listen, i'm actually thinking they're outright sampling amber and rdj album, even if the composition is more like lp5 or ep7. so, i'm slightly baffled. it's too good for an E, though. my only hesitation in marking this up to a B+ and suggesting it to young edm fans interested in the warp records sound is that too much of it sounds too derivative and i have to direct you back to the source instead. but if you're a young person looking for new electronic music in an old but storied style that nonetheless has structural characteristics of the type of electronic music you're more familiar with, you'll probably really enjoy this. the shorter verson is the better record. i'm not name dropping grothendieck.
julek ploski	nullcycle (reawoken)	2025	warsaw, poland	B	this is apparently a remix album with remixes by other artists of julek ploski originals from 2024, which i haven't heard. it's glitchier and less constructed than the previously reviewed record, which is not in it's benefit.
jessica moss	unfolding	2025	montreal, canada	B	jessica moss is one of a number of musicians that i have followed for a length of time and that has recently made the issue in gaza central to her messaging in a way that i don't agree with, but i wouldn't consider it to be catastrophic. i don't consider jessica moss to be a supporter of hamas or an advocate of genocide against israel, but i recognize that she's uncomfortable with not criticizing an israeli government that she sees as acting in her name in what she thinks is a drastic overreaction. she would appear to be reacting out of embarrassment. she may accuse israel of overreacting to hamas, but i may rather suggest she's underreacting to the threat. i think a lot of people had difficulty grasping the immense level of hatred unleashed on oct 7th and don't want to engage in the difficult discourse attached to weighing realistic policy options available to the state of israel today in confronting 30 years of failed containment policies and consequently getting your head around the fundamental nature of what the existing population of gaza is. it's easier to adopt a humanitarian posture, without acknowledging or accepting that these are people that would cut your arm off for trying to feed them; you would hand them bread, and they would eat your arm. the state of israel bears responsibility in generating the situation, but that doesn't make the set of options available to it any easier. if you leave a dog alone in a cage for months at a time and it grows mean and attacks you when you enter the room, what choice do you have but to euthanize it? but these are not themes that would play out well in jessica moss' group of friends, or help her market her art to the audience she wants to market it to, which wants to talk about resisting state power and is in the process identifying itself as a collection of useful idiots to foreign fascist groups that would gleefully slaughter them for show, she would be the first to go, and in the most gruesome manner imaginable, where it was once a soundtrack for internalizing defiance of the here and now that directly confronts us. but she composes instrumental classical music. she generates a lot of sound, and some if it has more thought put into it than some of it that doesn't. this would be more on the jam/improvised side, and you can hear that she's working a lot with reverb and loop pedals to create drone-based soundscapes without doing much with them when she does. it's like building a foundation without constructing a house. it's passively enjoyable for what it is, but it doesnt command much attention; it's missing a lead, melodic instrument, which coud be anything she wants it to be, but which is currently absent. that is not always true of her solo work, but it is frequently true.

mifu	i love music	2025	warsaw, poland	B+	this record combines electric and classical guitar work with fairly freeform laptop generated noise collages. it is at times fairly sparse and unwritten and at times more dense and written up. i've listened to it enough to let it sort itself out a little and while i like the general sound and idea and approach, i have to point out that it requires a little more work, too. it's only the length of an ep and feels like one song rather than a record. i'm going to recommend this, but with the clarification that it's a tease rather than an lp.
adebisi shank	this is the second ep of a band called adebisi shank	2025	ireland	B+	this is the skipped review of a band called adebisi shank, which is possibly the most hyperactive and cracked out band the math rock era produced. they don't change much from release to release, which i appreciate, as it means you can just fill up the 5 disc changer, or set up a five hour playlist at this point. if you like the other releases, you'll like this too.
lingouf	cintamini	2025	normandy, france	B+	lingouf, who has been a well known (in certain circles) underground dj for decades, released this brilliant lp in 2008 that is very different than what he's known for, and i've kept checking back periodically to see if he's tried to expand his sound a little from the very harsh and guttural, distorted beats he is mostly known for, generally without positive results. this record is actually a little more mainstream and contemporary techno, which is neither going to appeal to his core fanbase (who are no doubt too old for that shit now anyways) or the art-techno audience that identified doeme as what it is. this is by no means bad, but it isn't brilliant, either. it's a little generic.
squarepusher	stereotype	1994/ 2025	uk	B+	i can't say i'd heard this before. squarepusher has developed a reputation as the brainiest of the 90s braindance artists, which is just a way to get around the embarrassing term idm, while nonetheless continuing to try to point out that this isn't ebm. the kids came up with this idea of edm which looks like a cross between the two and sort of is, but there was a time when people felt it was worthwhile to say "look, this is music. it's not just boom boom boom.", and it led to people calling it jazz as a way out, but to an extent you'd might as well just give up and call it progressive rock because it's so fucking british anyways, which nobody dares to do. what i'm getting at is that you hope an early squarepusher record is abstract, even if you expect it to be more rave and acid house than his later work, and that's actually more or less what this is. it's dated; it's from 1994, and you can tell. it's not helpful to analyze it as new music. but if you want some more very early squarepusher, well, here it is, and it's really everything you'd hope it is, too.
guerilla toss	you're weird now	2025	nyc, usa	B+	guerilla toss wants you to think they're punk, and there was something punk about them in 2015ish, but this record draws from mainstream pop, nu metal and progressive rock, with little to no discernible punk influence. that's not a criticism, it's a description. i wouldn't normally listen to vocals of this type, and citing paramore nowadays would not be current, but it is the last thing i heard with this type of vocals, which is a good distance from the barking of yester year. it's still popular. i think. i dunno. the odd time signatures, prominent synth work and capable guitar narratives keep it flowing in a manner that seems intended for mtv, but they don't have mtv anymore. i'm not that old, i was a kid in the 90s, but i don't think this has that much in common with pavement or phish. rather, the very popular band (at it's peak) that this record reminds me of is late 70s or early 80s genesis, albeit not in exact style but in aesthetic and approach. these are relatively short, musically interesting, anthemic, arena-ready synth-rock pieces that would make phil and tony smile. that gives the record a pretty broad level of appeal. contemporary pop music of this sort is generally intentionally extremely facile, and while this isn't particularly complex either, it's developed enough to be interesting. at my age, i feel like i'm looking in on something, although i know i'm not; that said, if the intent here is to market a polished pop record to young people, and you know a few, maybe help these big kids out.
cardiacs	lsd	2025	salisbury, uk	B+	this is not really cardiacs. the key composer had been functionally dead for years before he died and it's clear enough that he didn't leave enough for a record, so some of his friends and proteges took over and the result is passable but not very impressive. they do the same pop song something like ten times. i initially described it as a parody and i think that's correct. i never thought i'd suggest they should cut a cardiacs record in half, but this multitide of identical pop songs is redundant and gets tiresome and if jim thought he was going to fool everybody, i think i'm on to him. his brother hated him for a reason; he's a sonofabitch. the lengthier and more disparate pieces hold their interest (it's ok if some of the instrumental interludes sound like they were written by somebody with mild brain damage, because it's true, and it adds to their quirky charm), but we only needed one of these interchangeable pop songs over an hour, and it's hard to imagine going back to the record when you realize it's the same song over and over again. maybe your average cardiacs fan in 2025 can't remember ten minutes ago, anyway.
aya	hexed!	2025	london, uk	A-	hip-hop is not a genre of music that i have very much interest in and i don't tend to have very much respect for hip-hop "musicians" as artists, as they generally aren't artists, but are more of a kind of opportunist, capitalist thug. hip-hop has struggled to assert itself as a form of art instead of a form of income generation and a form of vacuous, specious, empty, mind-numbing entertainment. you'll note that this does not market itself as hip-hop, but prefers to use marketing terms like punk and hardcore, despite clearly being a hip-hop record. it's not the hardcore influences that i find interesting, as they are primarily only aesthetic, and more the industrial/experimental bent. this is hip-hop, but it's some of the weirdest and noisiest and dirtiest hip-hop i've ever heard. as i sort through what i can find of interesting music released this year, i'm learning it was a good year for industrial music, even if it's no longer calling itself that, and even if it seems to have mostly been happening across the atlantic.
wulffluw xciv	index_0	2025	russia	A-	described as a russian producer in media, he also seems to have been displaced by the ukraine-russia war and may be from the warzone. there's not a lot of details. however, this is quite well constructed. it again has an industrial bent, but i don't know if he'd use that word. atari teenage riot is a likely influence, but it's also conteporary "edm" in instrumentation and scope, albeit more developed than you tend to hear in the new club music. if you used to like electronic music and your main criticism of current edm is that it's repetitive and generic and boring, this will be interesting to you.
julek ploski	give up channel	2025	warsaw, poland	A-	i prefer my electronic music to be both melodic and abstract in order to be interesting. this record doesn't accomplish anything in terms of production or composition, but it's extremely well put together and a more enjoyable listen than the generic pop i've been trudging through. there's a playfulness underlying the more difficult presentation that is key to having it succeed as music and not just being a pretentious exercise in difficult sound art. i have to spend the time sorting through the shit to find the interesting records or i won't find them. this could be filed under experimental/electronic or under 20th century classical, which i suppose ought to be the definiton for 21st century classical. there are some goofy samples, but they don't drag the record down the way the cheese does in the previously reviewed album. this is well done and recommended.
foetus	succulence	2025	nyc (usa), australia	A+	jim. the legendary jim. jim is checking out, he says. i'll wait. this track is a gabrielesque epic, which is something jim did more of in the latter part of his career, with an idiosyncratic big band bombast. because if this is the apocalyse, you should dance down your death march.
swans	birthing	2025	nyc, usa	A+	i still remember when swans were dead. the last few swans releases have really taken gira to a different level and, after having listened to this a few times, i think his sanity is an open question. this record is bizarre. there are certain crutches in his contributors that he relies upon, and he has a tendency to exaggerate bad cliches, but, for what it is, this might be the best record released so far this century. the problem is that it's almost impossible to listen to, and that's before you try to understand it, which i don't suggest doing.

i've taken a subset of the year-end analysis as the records i'm considering worth noting, for whatever reason. this is sort of a best-of after all.

the full list is a few posts down, or you could check out the np: list on the side.

green means go, B+, A-, A, A+. these are releases i truly recommend checking out.
yellow means proceed carefully, C+, B-, B. these are not quite there, but almost.
orange means proceed only with extreme caution, X, E. sometimes, a lot of effort is put into something and it still sucks anyways, especially if it's made by millennials, who have a reputation for trying as hard as they can and still miserably failing. i am isolating these into their own category. i admit that some people may find something worthwhile in these records, despite the reality that they objectively suck.

however, note that only new releases from 2025 receive a colour code. notable re-releases may appear in this list withot a colour.

scuba	getuppp	2025	uk	C+	this is very basic techno. it's actually pretty good for what it is, but it's for dancing, not listening. i'd enjoy this at a club, but less so as music.
black country, new road	forever howlong	2025	uk+ire	F-	the most pretentiously cheesy soundtrack for the worst children's movie never made. recommended age range: 7-13. i hope their ten minutes are up, now. listen. if you're somebody's too conservative mom and you don't want them listening to sluts on youtube, maybe there's something valuable to you here in the wholesomeness of the music. i don't have kids. if i did, i wouldn't share your thought processes. but it's not my job to find music for your kids to listen to that's wholesome and decent. i'm just pointing out that this is artistically equivalent to a julie andrews movie and not to a brilliant progressive rock record. that's my job, here. your kids can sing along if they like, but you should be checking your head if you're an adult that's into this. that's my point. but, i bet jk rowling loves them. update: i just want to add that, due to the fact that i'm typing after a chromebook crash right now, i have spent extra time listening to this record. i also wanted to make sure my slam was informed, and i think it is. i have an E category and i'm explicitly not putting it in there. i'm purposefully snubbing it. i want to suggest bjork as a far more likely influence than joanna newsome, which seems to be the general consensus and would appear to both be completely wrong and a mischaracterization of the quality of the music. i am not a joanna newsome fan, and i don't like country or folk music very often, but i realize she's relatively abstract, in her genre. this is not abstract music. i actually really want to double down on the idea that this is primarily influenced by children's music, and that's what this in truth really is. like a lot of children's performers, they take influence from broadway and showtunes, but i think it's second hand and not direct. these are not kids that actually spent much time at the theatre. rather, the real influences here range from julie andrews to hannah montana, and i would suggest taylor swift is a major influence in the lyrics. examples of the erudite, wordy, bookish lyrics: "a song i wrote about a pharoah on a boat", "whoops, here comes the chorus". heady, challenging stuff. really. is that first one a dr seuss quote? if i were to give this an E, it would be based on the idea that they spent a lot of time arranging and harmonizing it. it would be a statement about the vertical complexity of the record, about the voice leading, about the production or some other characteristic that they put a lot of time into. however, the point i'm getting across is that, from what i can hear, they didn't put a lot of effort into it at all. a lot of these songs likely sound a little familiar, and there's a reason for that - they lift a lot of melodies. there's often a couple of things going on but there's, what, 7 people in the band? with that many people, you'd expect a few things going on just by the number of people there are on stage. everything here is done by the book, to the point that it sounds like a project written for a second year composition course. everything is where it's expected to be. see, and you might not know that if you spend most of your time listening to old radiohead records. the word pretentious is the right description; this is in many ways the worst kind of prog. however, it isn't even that. it's not trying to be that. it's trying to be a musical for a kids show on tv and maybe it even succeeds at that, but it fails as art. brutally. that said, i'm going to list it with this review for this reason, so people that find my list aren't wondering where it is or if i heard it.
tortoise	touch	2025	chicago, usa	B	i hitchhiked from detroit to ann arbor to see tortoise about ten years ago, without hearing their most recent record first. out in the smoking section, somebody told me they were there on a rec from a friend and had never heard tortoise before at all. the rec said tortoise sounded like king crimson. i was a little taken aback; i insisted that tortoise do not sound like king crimson, and i was very familiar with both bands. i had to eat my cigarette butt after because the record they were touring actually did sound a lot like king crimson, to my surprise, and particularly crimson of the larks' tongues in aspic period. i bring this up because something that's happened to tortoise over the last 25 years, since standards, is that they've become increasingly calculated and written sounding and it hasn't been an asset to their overall sound. they've lost the dub influence, that kind of open and freeform part of their sound, that empty space, that subtle abstraction. i think that what's happened is that tortoise has become everybody's side project and they've lost the charisma because they don't see each other much anymore. it's less that they stopped trying and more that they stopped connecting. if anything, they're maybe actually trying too hard to keep going, when most bands in similar life circumstances would have split up and moved on. tortoise has the curse of trying to follow up on several of modern music's best and almost flawless records and their run of classic records really ended after standards. it's been constant disappointment since, but there's almost no other possible outcome. the difficult part is trying to rank this objectively, instead of comparing it to the previous classic records, which were now all released quite a long time ago, and which nothing at all is going to compare favourably to. there's a few, just, like, practical questions i want to ask tortoise. given that your band contains multiple drummers, including several capable percussionists, why is so much of the record done with simplistic drum machines, to the point that it could have been a radiohead record? how much of this was recorded directly into ableton, rather than performed live first? the development of vst synthesizer technology over the last 15 years opens up limitless sonic possibilities, but it doesn't negate the need to write music. tortoise is no stranger to using the studio creatively, but it sounds like far more effort was put into getting sounds and textures than it was into writing songs and that the the return on that investment of time was minimal. i'm a studio nerd. i can appreciate that envelope. really. but it's just so overwhelmingly subtle, it's not this compositional decision. composers like jarre and autechre (to name two of many) have utilized unusual technology to devlop new styles and genres and all of that fidgeting and twiddling got them something novel and profound. there's 10x as much twiddling and fiddling here, but 80% of people won't notice at all (they're listening to it on their phones, guys), and it doesn't save the songwriting, which is really ableton-y. what does that mean? it means there's these snaps and loops and it makes everything perfectly orthogonal, with no space to breathe. tortoise's defining characteristic in it's best years was those points where they breathed, because they were live. i'm being critical because i'm annoyed, and i'm annoyed because you'd expect these guys to fucking know better than to make this set of errors. these are old men. they're jazz-punk luminaries. they're legit pros. so why does the record have the kind of mistakes you'd expect from a rookie record producer lost in the ableton templates and the arturia sound library? the morricone riffs keep it together, but it's a tired trick, at this point. the reality is that you're not likely to get much out of this after the tenth listen. approach with caution.
aya	hexed!	2025	london, uk	A-	hip-hop is not a genre of music that i have very much interest in and i don't tend to have very much respect for hip-hop "musicians" as artists, as they generally aren't artists, but are more of a kind of opportunist, capitalist thug. hip-hop has struggled to assert itself as a form of art instead of a form of income generation and a form of vacuous, specious, empty, mind-numbing entertainment. you'll note that this does not market itself as hip-hop, but prefers to use marketing terms like punk and hardcore, despite clearly being a hip-hop record. it's not the hardcore influences that i find interesting, as they are primarily only aesthetic, and more the industrial/experimental bent. this is hip-hop, but it's some of the weirdest and noisiest and dirtiest hip-hop i've ever heard. as i sort through what i can find of interesting music released this year, i'm learning it was a good year for industrial music, even if it's no longer calling itself that, and even if it seems to have mostly been happening across the atlantic.
wulffluw xciv	index_0	2025	russia	A-	described as a russian producer in media, he also seems to have been displaced by the ukraine-russia war and may be from the warzone. there's not a lot of details. however, this is quite well constructed. it again has an industrial bent, but i don't know if he'd use that word. atari teenage riot is a likely influence, but it's also conteporary "edm" in instrumentation and scope, albeit more developed than you tend to hear in the new club music. if you used to like electronic music and your main criticism of current edm is that it's repetitive and generic and boring, this will be interesting to you.
yau hei	vessel	2025	bristol, uk/ hong kong, china	E	industrial music has always had a distinctively german characteristic to it. even when it was from the uk or canada or japan or somewhere else, it was always germanic and atheistic in scope and feel and that dour germanicism is what made it what it was. the idea of taoist or buddhist industrial music with chinese characteristics is a little different and something i've yet to hear in my many years, let's say 23 years (it's more than that), of industrial-music-listening. however, i'm not sure this stands up beyond the novelty of the fusion, and i'm not convinced the artist would identify it as industrial, or if the i-word is even a little taboo nowadays. objectively speaking, the auto-tune is really an evolution on what dwayne goettel was doing to ogre's voice 35+ years ago, through rack mounted quadraverbs and sequencer-based vocoders, and is probably the biggest deviation from germanic industrial, and yet isn't really much of one at all. the subtle j-pop or k-pop influence is pretty subtle. so, i'm going to call this chinese industrial music a proof of concept and give it an E, aware that the person that created this is likely only vaguely aware of what it is that i'm describing it as and probably just thinks she's making world fusion electronica with a slightly experimental vibe, and on that level it's nothing spectacular and not really worth taking note of. i'm taking note of something that is likely only interesting to me by accident.
dj galen	the death of music	2025	portland, usa	E	the record has a lot of percussion, but not much melody or harmony. it is more for dancing and less for listening. however, it's good enough as club music to get an E for effort rather than the C or C- i'd give it as a piece of music.
s8jfou	dognip/dognip+	2025	france	B	extremely autechre sounding, enough that i had to check to see who it actually was. it's probably the heavy use of max. however, the record makes more of an attempt to make dance music than autechre ever has, or certainly has since it picked up max, and the absence of traditional instrumentation consequently opens up a gulf. it's arguably neither abstract enough nor conventional enough to excel at either, but that inverted intersection opens up it's own space. i'm not aware of anybody else using the tools of abstract electronic music to try to make marketable dance music except, maybe, radiohead, or rdj for five minutes a long time ago. but this doesn't sound like radiohead. on the third listen, i'm actually thinking they're outright sampling amber and rdj album, even if the composition is more like lp5 or ep7. so, i'm slightly baffled. it's too good for an E, though. my only hesitation in marking this up to a B+ and suggesting it to young edm fans interested in the warp records sound is that too much of it sounds too derivative and i have to direct you back to the source instead. but if you're a young person looking for new electronic music in an old but storied style that nonetheless has structural characteristics of the type of electronic music you're more familiar with, you'll probably really enjoy this. the shorter verson is the better record. i'm not name dropping grothendieck.
beau mahadev	subterra	2025	nyc, usa	C+	low key contemporary pop. it's a little generic, but i like the general style.
mifu	i love music	2025	warsaw, poland	B+	this record combines electric and classical guitar work with fairly freeform laptop generated noise collages. it is at times fairly sparse and unwritten and at times more dense and written up. i've listened to it enough to let it sort itself out a little and while i like the general sound and idea and approach, i have to point out that it requires a little more work, too. it's only the length of an ep and feels like one song rather than a record. i'm going to recommend this, but with the clarification that it's a tease rather than an lp.
julek ploski	nullcycle (reawoken)	2025	warsaw, poland	B	this is apparently a remix album with remixes by other artists of julek ploski originals from 2024, which i haven't heard. it's glitchier and less constructed than the previously reviewed record, which is not in it's benefit.
julek ploski	give up channel	2025	warsaw, poland	A-	i prefer my electronic music to be both melodic and abstract in order to be interesting. this record doesn't accomplish anything in terms of production or composition, but it's extremely well put together and a more enjoyable listen than the generic pop i've been trudging through. there's a playfulness underlying the more difficult presentation that is key to having it succeed as music and not just being a pretentious exercise in difficult sound art. i have to spend the time sorting through the shit to find the interesting records or i won't find them. this could be filed under experimental/electronic or under 20th century classical, which i suppose ought to be the definiton for 21st century classical. there are some goofy samples, but they don't drag the record down the way the cheese does in the previously reviewed album. this is well done and recommended.
death's dynamic shroud	the lunar curtain II	2025	los angeles, usa	E	an overly pretentious attempt at some of the worst elevator music i've ever heard. the vocal tracks suck. however, the record improves slightly if you just completely delete the first five insufferably pretentious tracks and start it at track 6, which is the most interesting track on the record. this hatchet work still results in a failing attempt at art music, and the vocal tracks are still loaded with cheese, but it cuts out the worst of the stench. the hesitation i'm having with just throwing this in the dung heap is that, despite the fact that it's repeatedly objectively terrible in it's repeated use of tired genre cliches and it's cringing application of the worst kind of cheese in the vocal work, there are a handful of interesting moments that largely come up in the sequencing structures. they just constantly ruin the sporadically novel sequencer work by burying it in these layers of cliches and cheese and these awful vocals. this is a characteristic of gen y music more generally - even when they are trying as hard as they can, it still sucks. i guess that's a characteristic of gen y more generally, though; even when they try their hardest, they still fail. life's tough, kids.
gumdrop	gumdrop	2025	los angeles, usa	X	this is a curious combination, and i prioritize novelty and creativity above almost everything else in music....except composition. you still gotta write the songs. sometimes, something like this is necessary to get to something else, and sometimes it just rots in obscurity. i don't know how seriously to take this, and i don't know if it intends to be taken seriously, but i can point out that i heard this this year and took note of it. i'm reminded a little bit of an album from 2019 called 1000 gecs that i liked a little bit in terms of being novel but likewise wasn't certain if i should take seriously. that record did very well, over time. this particular combination of chiptune production and screamo-rap vocals may hit me as beyond goofy and difficult to interpret as art, but the kids really like it, and i guess that reflects their decision not to take life seriously. when life gives you lemons, throw them at the cops. yet, it's not vacuous pop music, either; there is some thought put into making this impossible to take seriously and i have to take note of that as performance art, even if i wonder about the songs, themselves. that's the question, here: this is fun and silly, sure, but can you listen to this? i don't know. however, if you've succeeded in perplexing and confusing me, you're doing something right, even if i'm not sure whether you've succeeded in making substantive art, yet. i'm going to grade this as X, for now.
sierra veins	in the name of blood	2025	paris, france	B-	stripped down modern techno update on a 90s industrial sound. it's enjoyable, but a little primitive.
agriculture	the spiritual sound	2025	los angeles, usa	E	rock music has slowly become more and more retarded over time; you always had to be a little bit daft to do this well, but by the time corporate emo was taking over, i was done with it, and just listening to jazz. it had become utterly stupid. then, corporate emo inverted on itself in a way nobody predicted, and became the era's progressive rock, and i realized i was going to have to find a way to deal with my disdain for the incredibly stupid cliches in the genre if i wanted to listen to anything calling itself rock at any time in the near future, because the fuckers had taken over the genre, and that was how it was, whether i liked it or not. i never really came around to it, but just as i was finding ways to stomach it, it evolved into something even worse. somebody will yell at me for deriving black metal from screamo, and i know that skips a few steps, but i'm talking about the mainstream rock culture, not the development of the style. if i thought corporate screamo was stupid, black metal was a massive step into full retard, but the same thing was beginning to happen, and there just wasn't a way around dealing with the ubiquity of this new style of rock music if you wanted to find things that were new, as anything at all was going to go through both the screamo bottleneck and then the black metal bottleneck. art rock wasn't going to sound like it used to anymore and you'd have to deal with this, no matter how much you hated it, or you'd have to give up and stick to jazz. one very weird thing that happened is that this genre that was about killing fags (is that guy still in jail?) got taken over by women, gays and transgendered people, but that didn't make me more interested in it, it just took away a good way to make fun of it. now, in 2025, it's usurped the core structural norms in progressive rock music, so there's no way around dealing with it, but i'm not convinced that i can. when they just shut up and play, it's not that bad, but i haven't found a way to process this screeching and yelling, yet. i was able to solve this problem during the ubiquitous period of screamo by finding more hardcore or punk sounding vocalists, and waiting until the genre matured to the point where the lyricism was more developed. i haven't really found that path with black metal, yet, and it doesn't make as much sense to look for punk singers in black metal bands, as the history is oppositional. i have only been able to enjoy it when it's instrumental, when it's essentially loud shoegaze or when it features virtuoso guitar playing, like indricothere. i have no interest in the genre cliches: satan is stupid, heavy metal guitar solos are boring and these lyrics are never going to be intelligible in the genre because the point is that they aren't, which makes me disinterested in them. i'm not going to find a small group of evolved, progressive black metal bands that i'm able to appreciate as new art rock, i'm going to continue to cringe at this until the next thing replaces it. the form is fundamentally less redeemable than screamo was, and that makes it pretty awful, as everybody thought screamo must be the absolute bottoming out of western culture. we were wrong. i have listened to this a few times, and i'll give them an E for effort in terms of trying to be a little bit unpredictable regarding form, but it sucks, as art, and i'm not going to ease up on this the way i eventually forced myself to ease up on screamo. i'm going to have to wait this out. but, i fear the next thing is even worse, like using thoughts to generate pink noise with diodes, and running it through a high gain feedback loop, forcing the listener to decode it with a special fourier transform algorithm that you have to download with the album.
chat pile	in the earth again	2025	okc, usa	C+	i've found this band to be overrated for years. this is also overrated.
jo passed	weekend	2025	vancouver, canada	C+	pop musicians need to shift with the pop form. bit of a weezer vibe.
north sea radio orchestra	special powers	2025	salisbury, uk	B-	this has several of the same people as lost crowns but is a far more listenable record. however, the middle part of the record drags it down a little. it's built like an early 70s pink floyd record in that sense.
lost crowns	the heart is in the body	2025	london, uk	E	being a trained musician in 2025 is extremely frustrating, as your choices are total obscurity or doing covers of bloated cliches, if you're lucky enough to get a job in the local orchestra. opportunities for creative music production are very meagre. so, you get projects like this. it's not enough to call this pretentious or even to say it has no commercial potential. this really doesn't go anywhere or do anything. it's complex on it's face (it's less complex than it sounds), but it isn't abstract or creative, it's just purposefully obtuse. it's difficult without being rewarding, as you don't gain anything by being patient with it, or suffering through it. there are reasons that medieval music is so ugly sounding - they had the mathematics of tonality all wrong and were always out of tune - and mimicking that in the era of supercomputers doesn't sound sophisticated, it just sounds out of tune. you want the record to develop at some point, but it doesn't. the drumming is the best part of the record. there's a subset of people that will think they're smart for "understanding" this and call you stupid for rejecting it, but you should not listen to them and take their self-righteousness as irony. when the primary selling point of your record is that somebody could write a phd thesis about it, it's not compelling, by definition. so, you could spend a lot of time with this, but you won't get much out of it in the end - it's awkward, ugly, empty and rotting in it's own filth. like the dark ages.
adebisi shank	this is the second ep of a band called adebisi shank	2025	ireland	B+	this is the skipped review of a band called adebisi shank, which is possibly the most hyperactive and cracked out band the math rock era produced. they don't change much from release to release, which i appreciate, as it means you can just fill up the 5 disc changer, or set up a five hour playlist at this point. if you like the other releases, you'll like this too.
foetus	succulence	2025	nyc (usa), australia	A+	jim. the legendary jim. jim is checking out, he says. i'll wait. this track is a gabrielesque epic, which is something jim did more of in the latter part of his career, with an idiosyncratic big band bombast. because if this is the apocalyse, you should dance down your death march.
jessica moss	unfolding	2025	montreal, canada	B	jessica moss is one of a number of musicians that i have followed for a length of time and that has recently made the issue in gaza central to her messaging in a way that i don't agree with, but i wouldn't consider it to be catastrophic. i don't consider jessica moss to be a supporter of hamas or an advocate of genocide against israel, but i recognize that she's uncomfortable with not criticizing an israeli government that she sees as acting in her name in what she thinks is a drastic overreaction. she would appear to be reacting out of embarrassment. she may accuse israel of overreacting to hamas, but i may rather suggest she's underreacting to the threat. i think a lot of people had difficulty grasping the immense level of hatred unleashed on oct 7th and don't want to engage in the difficult discourse attached to weighing realistic policy options available to the state of israel today in confronting 30 years of failed containment policies and consequently getting your head around the fundamental nature of what the existing population of gaza is. it's easier to adopt a humanitarian posture, without acknowledging or accepting that these are people that would cut your arm off for trying to feed them; you would hand them bread, and they would eat your arm. the state of israel bears responsibility in generating the situation, but that doesn't make the set of options available to it any easier. if you leave a dog alone in a cage for months at a time and it grows mean and attacks you when you enter the room, what choice do you have but to euthanize it? but these are not themes that would play out well in jessica moss' group of friends, or help her market her art to the audience she wants to market it to, which wants to talk about resisting state power and is in the process identifying itself as a collection of useful idiots to foreign fascist groups that would gleefully slaughter them for show, she would be the first to go, and in the most gruesome manner imaginable, where it was once a soundtrack for internalizing defiance of the here and now that directly confronts us. but she composes instrumental classical music. she generates a lot of sound, and some if it has more thought put into it than some of it that doesn't. this would be more on the jam/improvised side, and you can hear that she's working a lot with reverb and loop pedals to create drone-based soundscapes without doing much with them when she does. it's like building a foundation without constructing a house. it's passively enjoyable for what it is, but it doesnt command much attention; it's missing a lead, melodic instrument, which coud be anything she wants it to be, but which is currently absent. that is not always true of her solo work, but it is frequently true.
lingouf	cintamini	2025	normandy, france	B+	lingouf, who has been a well known (in certain circles) underground dj for decades, released this brilliant lp in 2008 that is very different than what he's known for, and i've kept checking back periodically to see if he's tried to expand his sound a little from the very harsh and guttural, distorted beats he is mostly known for, generally without positive results. this record is actually a little more mainstream and contemporary techno, which is neither going to appeal to his core fanbase (who are no doubt too old for that shit now anyways) or the art-techno audience that identified doeme as what it is. this is by no means bad, but it isn't brilliant, either. it's a little generic.
squarepusher	stereotype	1994/ 2025	uk	B+	i can't say i'd heard this before. squarepusher has developed a reputation as the brainiest of the 90s braindance artists, which is just a way to get around the embarrassing term idm, while nonetheless continuing to try to point out that this isn't ebm. the kids came up with this idea of edm which looks like a cross between the two and sort of is, but there was a time when people felt it was worthwhile to say "look, this is music. it's not just boom boom boom.", and it led to people calling it jazz as a way out, but to an extent you'd might as well just give up and call it progressive rock because it's so fucking british anyways, which nobody dares to do. what i'm getting at is that you hope an early squarepusher record is abstract, even if you expect it to be more rave and acid house than his later work, and that's actually more or less what this is. it's dated; it's from 1994, and you can tell. it's not helpful to analyze it as new music. but if you want some more very early squarepusher, well, here it is, and it's really everything you'd hope it is, too.
swans	birthing	2025	nyc, usa	A+	i still remember when swans were dead. the last few swans releases have really taken gira to a different level and, after having listened to this a few times, i think his sanity is an open question. this record is bizarre. there are certain crutches in his contributors that he relies upon, and he has a tendency to exaggerate bad cliches, but, for what it is, this might be the best record released so far this century. the problem is that it's almost impossible to listen to, and that's before you try to understand it, which i don't suggest doing.
geese	getting killed	2025	nyc, usa	E	i didn't make it through this one. the singer's not my thing. seems really phony and plastic and fake. the first song would be better if it was a reaction to finding a bum (that is, a homeless person) in his car than a bomb in his car.
guerilla toss	you're weird now	2025	nyc, usa	B+	guerilla toss wants you to think they're punk, and there was something punk about them in 2015ish, but this record draws from mainstream pop, nu metal and progressive rock, with little to no discernible punk influence. that's not a criticism, it's a description. i wouldn't normally listen to vocals of this type, and citing paramore nowadays would not be current, but it is the last thing i heard with this type of vocals, which is a good distance from the barking of yester year. it's still popular. i think. i dunno. the odd time signatures, prominent synth work and capable guitar narratives keep it flowing in a manner that seems intended for mtv, but they don't have mtv anymore. i'm not that old, i was a kid in the 90s, but i don't think this has that much in common with pavement or phish. rather, the very popular band (at it's peak) that this record reminds me of is late 70s or early 80s genesis, albeit not in exact style but in aesthetic and approach. these are relatively short, musically interesting, anthemic, arena-ready synth-rock pieces that would make phil and tony smile. that gives the record a pretty broad level of appeal. contemporary pop music of this sort is generally intentionally extremely facile, and while this isn't particularly complex either, it's developed enough to be interesting. at my age, i feel like i'm looking in on something, although i know i'm not; that said, if the intent here is to market a polished pop record to young people, and you know a few, maybe help these big kids out.
cardiacs	lsd	2025	salisbury, uk	B+	this is not really cardiacs. the key composer had been functionally dead for years before he died and it's clear enough that he didn't leave enough for a record, so some of his friends and proteges took over and the result is passable but not very impressive. they do the same pop song something like ten times. i initially described it as a parody and i think that's correct. i never thought i'd suggest they should cut a cardiacs record in half, but this multitide of identical pop songs is redundant and gets tiresome and if jim thought he was going to fool everybody, i think i'm on to him. his brother hated him for a reason; he's a sonofabitch. the lengthier and more disparate pieces hold their interest (it's ok if some of the instrumental interludes sound like they were written by somebody with mild brain damage, because it's true, and it adds to their quirky charm), but we only needed one of these interchangeable pop songs over an hour, and it's hard to imagine going back to the record when you realize it's the same song over and over again. maybe your average cardiacs fan in 2025 can't remember ten minutes ago, anyway.