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.

green means go, B+, A-, A, A+
yellow means proceed carefully, C+, B-, B
orange means proceed only with extreme caution, X, E

otherwise, my suggestion is don't bother with it (F, D-, D, D+, C-, C).

note that only new releases from 2025 receive a colour code.

and i guess we'll get something like a best of out of this after all. i'll reorganize it eventually.

liam mour	all let's swim	2025	germany	C-	cliched 90s "electronica".
braille	triple transit (slow and reverb)	2025	us	D+	not very interesting.
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.
louf	various singles	2025	uk	C	moderately interesting, but not really.
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.
model/actriz	pirouette	2025	usa	D-	i don't listen to music this poppy or this....gay. it's not in my sphere of interest.
manuel mota	1-7	2025	italy	F	boring loop pedal trash.
demdike stare	splinters	2025	uk+ire	D+	well, this is a shame. i enjoyed the demdike stare set that i saw opening for andy stott in detroit at the mocad about ten years ago, and there's bits of what i remember about it in here, but repeated cut up samples of a 1970s philadelphia flyers hockey game is about the last thing i'm interested in. this sounds like it was created by a windows 98 program called sound raider.
church shuttle	esp grifter / junk oracle	2025	usa	F	artless garbage.
ekt	naturalistica / asian symbols	2025	canada	C-	boring ebm-style techno for clubs.
mike casey	the complete public access	2025	us	C-	three piece sax-bass-drums combo with unremarkable sax playing. the rhythm section should seek a more talented front person.
tortoise	touch	2025	us	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.
space traveller's union	new birth	2025	us	D-	this could have been released in the early 70s. even the piano tone is early 70s. why bother?
car	valonia / valonia (remixed)	2025	germany	C-	this has some interesting moments, but it largely drags.
sml	how you been?	2025	us	C-	this is apparently a handful of improvised jams cut up in the studio, afterwards. you can tell. it's not that compelling, really. there's a lot of people playing together at the same time but they aren't really playing songs or doing anything meaningful.
kieren hebden and william tyler	41 longfield street late 80s	2025	uk	D	four-tet is known for long, aimless, ambient noise records that lack melody, harmony or shape and just kind of flounder through their running time. the addition of aimless acoustic guitar parts that lack melody, harmony or shape is perhaps an appropriate approach to the instrument, but the outcome is predictably lacklustre. i would like this if it were good, i'm it's audience, but it's just not.
charles webster	from the hill	2025	uk	C-	some of the instrumental passages were passively enjoyable, but the vocal sections were not in a genre of music i'm interested in listening to.
aya	hexed!	2025	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	uk/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	us	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 version is the better record. i'm not name dropping grothendieck.
four tet	into dust (still falling)	2025	uk+ire	C-	is this what four tet sounds like nowadays?
floating points	corner of my eye	2025	uk+ire	C	not very exciting.
beau mahadev	subterra	2025	us	C+	low key contemporary pop. it's a little generic, but i like the general style.
xenia repair	gambling	2025	uk+ire	F	a trance record that never drops. no joke.
Paolino Canzoneri	Pittura liquida e gocce di lacrime	2025	italy	D	aimless, shapeless sound.
58918012	ordered chaos	2025	ukraine	D	go nowhere jams that demonstrate limited musical talent and ability and are published with minimal editing.
ulla strauss	hometown girl	2025	germany	F	boring.
goo	⊚ ⧂⫯ ☌	2025	us	F	aimless, unlistenable. pretentious schlop.
mifu	i love music	2025	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.
ewa sad	lolopianko	2025	poland	D	these are very short tracks that seem designed for commercial use rather than to be listened to as art. that said, they are mildly interesting as teasers, but they aren't songs and this isn't a record.
p wojtaszek	trik 2--->3	2025	poland	D	i dont speak polish or any other slavic dialect, so i don't understand what they're saying. musically, it bounces around between a few genres, but not very well.
jhl	concertina	2025	poland	F	the bryan adams cover is unforgivably bad. i let her finish, but it didn't matter after that.
blue steel	age of bloom	2025	poland	C-	generic synth music.
koinen	moth, flame and the magic plastic	2025	us	C-	uneventful. generic. goes nowhere. boring.
julek ploski	nullcycle (reawoken)	2025	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	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	us	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.
new gaia	terragaia	2025	us	C	this is a little more eventful, but it's still lacking, and that is intentional - it's the genre. i have no idea what this has to do with science fiction. however, i actually spent quite a while with this genre about 15 years ago, before i got distracted by a developing art-punk scene, and there are sufficient counter-examples, but they are on the margins of a genre that is on the margin. that is what i need to do to find music i like; i constantly seek the deepest cuts in the obscurest genres. this guy seems to want to generate too many songs. he might be well advised to create less total sound and focus more on developing the more abstract side of his sound. for example, i think the second track on this record samples freak out by frank zappa and in the process creates tones and dynamics that you don't often hear in this kind of post-idm elevator music that jazz-focused electronic musicians have championed as fashionable over the last ten years, but then the rest of the record falls into this rut of prodding, slow motion keyboard jazz with almost no variation. if he released ten albums last year and each of them has one or two tracks that are more interesting like the one i pointed out, he might actually have created enough material for a good lp last year, but it's scattered across too much lacklustre material and hard to pull together. this is something i see a lot in this genre, where some amount of the music is being created by template (and maybe increasingly by ai), so it's easy to create a groove and think you're doing something solid that people will like, when you're not, you're just generating the same thing that the last guy that used this program generated and doing something that's going to get skipped by most.
fm skyline & equip	music 2	2025	us	C-	i wasn't the kid that grew up playing video games, i was the kid that read too many books. they aren't necessarily mutually exclusive categories, but they usually were. so, i don't have a connection to these archaic cultural references, even if i mostly know what they're about. rather, i am a fan of jazz fusion music, in it's various forms, going back to miles davis, and before him. as a musician and music lover, i am going to bump into this kind of thing frequently nowadays, and i don't hear much of interest to me, here. sure, this could have been a jazz record released in the late 80s, but it would not have been a memorable one or a very good one. i do, however, have to take note of how far the technology has come over general midi, which i've taken advantage of myself in recent years, but not quite like this. i know that these are midi sequences due to their form, but i couldn't tell strictly based on the sound and that's very unusual. the record is just very slow moving and bland, but that also seems to be intentional.
gumdrop	gumdrop	2025	us	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.
zac traegar	the summer sauron turned pretty	2025	us
bestial mouths	backbone (12")	2024	us	B-	this is a 12" single consisting of a handful of the tracks from the remix record released earlier in the year. i can look at items from very late 2024 in my 2025 list, but this is stretching that a bit, as it is a repackaging of remixes released in early 2024 and songs released in 2023. i'm going to nonetheless pull it out as higher quality, if somewhat generic, industrial music. the presence of rhys fulber in the production team is probably responsible for this. i had run across bestial mouths before, but i hadn't spent much time with them, so i'm going to follow this backwards a little bit, and take a detour out of the year end run through to do it.
bootblacks	paradise	2025	us	C-	they seem to have borrowed bily corgan's post-2005 synth effects rack, but this is more early depeche mode knockoffs, which is essentially everything in the genre. the sax work doesn't make these songs from any sort of big chair. maybe songs from a small chair. or a high chair. i'd rather hear songs from an electric chair. songs from the electric chair could actually get pretty intense if it includes recollections of past atrocities, guilt, defiance, remorse and recipes for dorito spaghetti. everybody wants to troll the world.
replicant	daybreaker	2025	us	C	kind of boring electronic pop music.
sierra veins	in the name of blood	2025	france	B-	stripped down modern techno update on a 90s industrial sound. it's enjoyable, but a little primitive.
the ocean / sierra	boreal / traum (split)	2025	germany /france	C-	go nowhere electronic remixes of bland post-metal.
morke	to carry on	2025	us	C-	this is a bit more mellow and more shoegaze on it's face in tone, but in content it's uninspired prog.
blackbraid	blackbraid III	2025	us	F	this is about as stupid and about as generic and about as cliched as you get. i can almost understand a few of the words. does he get to sleipnir? i want a concept record about the fucking horse.
asunojokei	thinking of you	2025	japan	D	it says it's no joke, but it seems like a joke, to me. i can't even tell if this is in english or japanese. why bother singing at all? musically, it's generic.
teardrinker	killing the flowers will not delay the spring	2025	netherlands	F	generic and boring.
agriculture	the spiritual sound	2025	us	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	this dungeon earth / remove your skin please	2019 / 2025	us	B-	these are repackaged 2019 eps. the thing about this band that confuses me has to do with the accolades it gets for being creative, when it just sounds to me like a rehash of every 90s emo band, and we just went through that a few years ago. this is totally derivative and rehashed 90s rock, it's not this forward thinking music of the future. i dunno. maybe you've never heard any underground screamo from the 90s or something, so maybe this is brand new to you, but it just isn't. therefore, it's overrated. but it's not awful. the other thing that's annoying about it is that it's remarketing 90s hardcore for, like, wifebeater wearing white trash losers, rather than as an outgrowth of punk rock, but that existed at the time, too, and it's more of an effect than a cause; that's real life, and i acknowledge it, i just don't like it. there's worse music out there, but there's better rock bands than this right now, too. the basic point is that the question as to what it might have sounded like if ian curtis lived and joy division went hardcore instead of new wave has already been answered many times.
chat pile	in the earth again	2025	us	C+	i've found this band to be overrated for years. this is also overrated.
bleeth	marionette	2025	us	C	the theme in post-rock has been cliched and prodding for a while now, with few counter-examples. this isn't one of them. 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	C	this is an outtakes disc, granted, but it seems cliched and prodding.
wednesday	bleeds	2025	us	C	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	C	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	C+	pop musicians need to shift with the pop form. bit of a weezer vibe.
north sea radio orchestra	special powers	2025	uk+ire	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	uk+ire	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.
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	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	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	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.
tear garden	astral elevator	2025	canada	C	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	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.
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	D	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	A	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	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	us	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	us	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	us	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	uk+ire	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.

it's very hard to plan around donald trump.

but the problem is clearly that the british don't have any canals anymore. they used to have the suez canal, the strait of gibraltar, the dardanelles. not anymore. 

in order to be a man with a plan, starmer needs to build a canal. then everyone will know he has a plan. clearly.

he could build a canal from london to manchester or london to york. it would probably help divert rising floodwaters. britain has of course been sinking into the ocean since the last ice age separated it from the mainland.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/07/keir-starmer-donald-trump-venezuela-europe

well, look at him. he's fat as fuck.

i applaud the flight attendant for doing something that we need to see more of in our day to day lives. being overweight is endemic, but it's not acceptable. we need to erect a stigma around being fat and we need to enforce it by being rude to fat people, to ensure they know it's not acceptable to be fat and that they have to change how they live.

this fatass is going to cost the public health care system a fortune on preventable health issues. being fat affects everybody else's wallets and everybody else's access to healthcare. a little bit of social coercion can go a long way to preventing that outcome.

if the fatass wants to be an american, he should go to america.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11601944/westjet-passenger-fat-shamed-staff-flight-to-mexico/

it is not likely that denmark or greenland would oppose an american occupation of greenland, and it's an open question as to why the americans pulled out in the first place. greenland, like iran, was occupied by us (and british) troops for most of the second world war. it could have ended up like japan - a sovereign country that can (at least nominally) control it's own affairs in the presence of thousands of us troops.

i don't expect much to really come out of the maduro kidnapping, on the ground in venezuela. the americans will probably get away with that, although if i was pam bondi i'd get out of the country when the democrats eventually take over the presidency.

but unnecessarily invading greenland is on the level of invading grenada, or the faulkland islands. it's the kind of subtle self-inflicted mistake that takes a while to become apparent; less a shot in the foot and more stepping in a pile of slow-moving, flesh-eating toenail fungus. but it's likely to be catastrophic, in the end.

they should do this the easy way, which means getting permission to station large amounts of troops there and occupy it until further notice. they don't have to invade when they can get permission, and they can.

all evidence suggests they're going to do it the dumb way, and it's going to hurt them in the end.