this is not a year-end, best of 2025 list. i haven't had time in recent years.

but you'll note that i maintain a np: list accessible from the link list on the right hand side of the page, because i am forever stuck in the 90s, and in my mind this page is really just about me arguing with myself over usenet.

this is a collection of short, first impression reviews of music i listened to this year. it's less a best of list and more an.....np: list. it's just a list of albums i've listened to, with first impressions.

i'll update this a few times before the end of the year.

chat pile	in the earth again	2025	us		i've found this band to be overrated for years. this is also overrated.
bleeth	marionette	2025	us		the theme in post-rock has been cliched and prodding for a while now, with few reprieves. this isn't one of them. i guess the problem is that this is fun to play, right? it's loud, it's cathartic. but it's all identical and it's been this way for 20 years, with few musicians looking to transcend it. it's not that this sucks, it's that i've heard this record too many times, already. but i'd probably go see the show if it was down the street.
spotlight	rarities	2025	us		this is an outtakes disc, granted, but it seems cliched and prodding.
wednesday	bleeds	2025	us		in recent decades, as rock music has become more obscure, american rock music has largely settled into a type of country music with power chords, which reflects it's remnant audience base as being rural and white. american rock music now primarily appeals to demographics in republican states, which is weird. this isn't cow punk, but it is sometimes. to enjoy much of what's left of rock music as a genre, you have to have a pre-existing affinity for that strain of country rock as a pre-requisite, and i largely never have. i will need to look a little further underground for noisier, more abrasive forms to get more of what i'm looking for.
gabi gamberg 'daffo'	where the earth bends	2025	us		it's a little light for me, but this person wants to be a singer-songwriter and wants to be taken seriously as one.
jo passed	weekend	2025	canada		pop musicians need to shift with the pop form. bit of a weezer vibe.
north sea radio orchestra	special powers	2025	uk+ire		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	uk+ire		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.
lake of puppies	lake of puppies	1996/ 2024	uk+ire		these are old demos with william d drake and some other people.
adebisi shank	this is the second ep of a band called adebisi shank	2025	uk+ire		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	australia		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	canada		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.
tear garden	astral elevator	2025	canada		i think this might be the first cevin key project with vst synthesizers. it's....odd....that ka-spel sounds 30 years younger all of a sudden, and i don't know whether to take the claim of goettel contributions seriously, as key has admitted to bullshiting it. what i can say about this is that it's fairly stripped down for tear garden, to it's most basic elements, and while i'm not sure who is ultimately writing it, it's focused less on being abstract and more on being marketable. it's not clear why key would embrace this for tear garden and resist it so strenuously for skinny puppy, which appears to be done, as ogre is frustrated with key for not doing.....this. i dunno. this kind of bullshit has constantly frustrated key's projects since dwayne died in 1995. it's been the same thing over and over. i would describe the record as lacklustre, but not disappointing because my expectations were not high. these are pop songs, and are supposed to be pop songs.
lingouf	cintamini	2025	france		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.
photek	call of duty II soundtrack	2023	uk + ire	5	this is the last photek soundtrack release. it's made with stock samples using heavyocity's damage library, which sound like the world music samples peter gabriel collected with a tape recorder and fed into his fairlight cmi in the 80s, put through gated reverbs that he simply didn't have access to, in terms of processing power, but which you can do nowdays on a fancy phone. i think he directly samples reznor's quake soundtrack at one point as well. the entire sampling-for-cinema industry is built on top of the work gabriel did, and in a lot of ways, gabriel did it way better, and has never been eclipsed. i'm sure he got paid for this, and i can't exactly fault the guy, but it's not very interesting as art. that's the point i'm making. which is not to pick on photek exactly but to explain why i'm still listening to squarepusher all of these years later and not listening to photek.
photek	the forge	2025	uk + ire		photek did release a single this year, but it's his first release since 2012, except soundtrack work. the point i'm making should be readily obvious.
squarepusher	dostrotime	2024	uk+ire		this is the most recent squarepusher record, and when you listen to them back to back you can really hear how the artist has retreated from the techno scene and instead decided to embrace art rock traditions, including a pastoral guitar introduction ripped from nursery cryme and an apparent watcher of the skies remix to start the second track. see, i'm a musician. i like this stuff. that's the point; that's why i'm listening to squarepusher in 2025, and not listening to, say, photek. but this is only techno in aesthetic. it's really more like electronic prog. because the only drummer i'm aware of that could play this shit (it's programmed, nobody is playing it) would be a young phil collins. as for the record itself, this is a strong evolution of squarepusher's sound to include a broader tonal pallette, while honing in well on what it is that he's always done. you couldn't ask for more from the guy at this stage in his career.
squarepusher	stereotype	1994/ 2025	uk+ire		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	us		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	us		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	us		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	uk+ire		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.