Destroyer, Kaputt. Dropping the needle on Kaputt is like falling backwards into a sweet cloud of perfume and cocaine. The deep white sofa you land on could not be more comfortable. The spinning record seems to pour into the marble and glass room a palpable and sleek smoothness. You are powerless before this smoothness. Bejar starts softly flowing; his thin full voice melts into the air-music and sticks like coke to a licked fingertip. His poetry is for himself, and that’s obvious, but he is brilliant. I guess that’s the way that things go these days. And his words connect to themselves. His animated scenes and long strands of memorable images momentarily jump from the sweaty haze before beautifully settling into it again. Lines rhyme within themselves. Bejar has style. This is a nightlife record. It’s crystal-clear. It all sounds like a dream to me. GREAT

Kurt Vile, Smoke Ring for My Halo. It’s after dinnertime when I wake up. I sit up; feel the soft and unsupportive couch move beneath me. I’m cold and I move around slowly. I keep yawning and my eyes start to water. Standing, I smile to myself. Rain outside falls fast and hard; I remember it was just a slow soothing drizzle when I fell asleep. I don’t know how long ago that was. I sit back down on the couch and feel its lumpiness again. I put my palms under my thighs and look around my living room. Across from me, eight feet away, is my stereo and maybe 25 records leaning against the wall to its right. The outermost record, the only one I can see fully, is Kurt Vile’s Smoke Ring for My Halo. I walk to the stereo and bend to pick up Smoke Ring for My Halo. It’s still in the plastic. I am relaxed but there is within me a dull nervousness. I bite the corner of the record and tear the plastic and then use my hands to remove the rest. I turn the sleeve in my hands. I slide the record itself out of the sleeve and hold it above my head, examining it for no reason. I hold it like a waiter in a movie holds a tray––I palm it––and take the record that’s currently on the turntable––Peaking Lights’ 936––off. I drop the black disc onto the record player and then drop the needle on its edge. I stand for a long time like that and then walk backwards to the floral-print couch and sit down heavily, cradling my head in my hands. The music plays and I think. Somehow, the chords and loner vibes trigger thoughts of my future. I picture some sort of house, some sort of woman, some sort of dog, some sort of kid. I put my hands under my thighs again. I think I’ll never leave the couch again, because when I’m out I’m on it in my mind. Then again, I suddenly think, I guess it isn’t always that way. I look outside. Grey rain is still falling heavily. I decide to get out of my house. I put on a yellow rain jacket and walk outside. I lock my front door before turning into the rain. The raindrops fall on my head, but I don’t pay them any mind. Then again, I guess it isn’t always that way. I put my hands in my pockets and walk a little faster. GREAT

Radiohead, The King of Limbs. Everything that can be said about the new Radiohead album, The King of Limbs, has already been said. Like, everything. Everyone and his weird Radiohead-obsessed dad have an opinion about it. There have been so many reviews (average verdict: eh, it’s pretty good), tweets (because Radiohead makes albums for people to download and listen to once and then tweet about at nine in the morning), nerdy message board discussions/fights (jessica: “This album is 37:29 long, so it’s also the shortest Radiohead LP to date”; mcbeatzthebopit: “Don’t let the 8 tracks fool you, you can tell they put so much work into it. It’s perfectly layered!”), and “thinkpieces” (“Radiohead Deals a Deathblow to the ‘Album’”) that it’s difficult to actually listen to the record and ignore all of its context/baggage. It’s also difficult to form your own opinions about it and to not crib ideas from other people’s reviews/thoughts. So let’s not worry about it. I have some thoughts about The King of Limbs, and, although a lot of the things I want to say have already probably been said in disparate and somewhat angrily scatterbrained ways all over the Internet, I’m going to say them anyway. Like the record itself, I’m going to do some “recontextualizing.” First, to get this out of the way, I don’t really, really like Radiohead. I like Radiohead a lot, but I find their music often hard to listen to for its almost obnoxious and strangely inhuman-but-human perfection. In other words: it’s good, oh, it’s good, but it’s also kind of boring. The King of Limbs, then, is Radiohead-y. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It’s so Radiohead-y, in fact, that at times it almost feels like parody, or sarcasm, or…a step backward. It’s like when Thom Yorke and his band holed up in a mansion with nothing but the storied Warp Records back catalog to record 2000’s jaw-dropping world-stopping Kid A, only this time Yorke holed everyone up with nothing but Radiohead’s own back catalog––and not even the whole thing! They only brought, like, their last three or four albums. So Radiohead’s just sitting around, listening to their own CDs, being weird, until Thom finally says, “All right, then,” at which point everyone commences to self-consciously throw The King of Limbs together. And that’s really not meant to be as negative as it sounds. By taking the sketch-like and unfinished beauty of 2007’s In Rainbows (sorry to compare The King of Limbs to their other albums, but, like, this is the world we’re living in) and the uneasy perfection of Kid A, Radiohead made a great record that manages to also be kind of just okay. The standout songs mostly succeed because they merge Radiohead’s past with some idea of a future. They sound like Radiohead songs, but maybe not Radiohead songs you’ve already heard. “Morning Mr. Magpie”’s unchanging and tightly-knit drum-and-double-guitar beat chugs and spits along, fast, while Yorke croon-wails cryptic what-does-it-all-meanisms like “You’ve stolen art/ give it back.” It’s a throwback to any number of older Radiohead songs, but the construction of the percussion feels very modern and forward-looking. “Lotus Flower” works in a similar way: propulsive and louder than you’d expect, its thick bleating drum sounds break down and give way to more of this new, tightly-wound beatwork and Yorke’s ethereal vocal shreds. But the end of The King of Limbs is the most important. The last three songs––modern Radiohead ballads––“Codex,” “Give Up the Ghost,” and “Separator,” are more sonically expansive and airy than anything else on the record and they all unfold in satisfyingly simple and repetitive ways. They’re light, held down with nothing more than those great disembodied Yorke vocals and hip/lazy/beautiful instrumentation. “Codex” (that title has to be self-parody, it’s just too much of a “classic Radiohead move” not to be) is driven by muffled piano and hazy-but-epic melodies courtesy of Yorke’s damn voice. It flows. It builds. It’s pretty. “Give Up the Ghost,” the best song on the album, starts off with some vibey bird-sounds and a second or so of that “backwards noise” (first heard at the beginning of The Bends’ “Planet Telex”). From there, shitty, loose guitars strum out a beat and electronics wash over everything. The whole time Yorke sings almost-incomprehensible words, his voice layered on itself, over and over, until all of the layers sort of come at once––loud––perfect. “Separator” may be the most straightforward “love song” Radiohead has ever written, and it works really well. The crisp drums-and-cymbals run along, simply, for about half the song, until it all smooths out with Yorke repeating this sort of optimistic but really sad refrain: “If you think this is over then you’re wrong/ If you think this is over then you’re wrong.” In a way, with that line, he’s addressing both his fans and detractors, reassuring both parties. This isn’t over. Radiohead’s not done. But if they want us to really believe that, they should probably work a little bit harder. Or not. They’re Radiohead. They’ll be fine. GOOD

Gun Outfit, Possession Sound. “Did David Berman start a new band as well as a blog???” If that was your first question after taking “Gun Outfit”’s Possession Sound for a spin, you are not alone. According to a recent study, 100% of all Gun Outfit listeners detect a very distinct “Berman/Silver Jews thing going on”. According to that same study, many listeners also identified Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, and “other like cool 90s noisy stuff” as definite “influences.” Interestingly, a number of respondents opted to forego the required questions and simply fill in the write-in section of the survey. Below, is a sampling of some of these write-ins. “GUN OUTFIT RULES!!!”; ”OLYMPIA!!!”; “<3 UR GRUNGE ROOTS!!!”; “CAPTAIN TRIPPS BALLSINGTON IS A G!!!”; “I THINK I’M DOING FINE BUT IT’S 2009!!!”; and “CUZ UR THE ONLY 10 I SEE!!!” GOOD+

The Angels of Light, How I Loved You. Michael Gira of Swans eminence had/has (?) another group: the Angels of Light. How I Loved You is a brilliant, stoic record of slow, brooding experimental dirges. Opening epic “Evangeline” sounds like Bill Callahan just took some “voice deepener” pills and kicked Gira out of the vocal booth while the rest of the band pilots the whole thing into a metal sky. They do not leave that metal sky. Heroic and (emotionally) heavy. GOOD

Total Control, “Pyre Island” b/w “Mind Shaft” 7″. Fourth single from this Australian superduo (a guy from Eddy Current Suppression Ring and a guy from UV Race) and it is siiiiiiiiiiick. A-side creeps up with a minimalicious thud-pulse and a repeated soft keyboard ffir (riff backwards) before low-mystery vocals bubble up behind and underneath everything. B-side, “Mind Shaft”, is a fucking club banger…only it’s obscured by layers of taste and inferior equipment. Rocks hard. Get it if it’s still avail. GOOD+

(Smog), Supper. Just another really, really good Bill Callahan record. Comforting. Damn comforting. But also…sharp. Check the fuckin-a riffs on “Mortality,” “Butterflies Drowned in Wine,” etc. Also, Bill’s writerly skills seem almost more on display here than on his other equally lyrically adept records. Maybe it’s because I just re-read his book, but little lines all over this record are sticking out to me more than usual, or something. These lines seem so perfect and strange in their image or description, their cleverness or delivery. “Move the tables and the chairs aside and give me some room. I’m going to show you something you won’t soon forget,” he sings on “Butterflies”, “I flip on the headlights and go back inside. The climates controlled while the battery dies” on “Our Anniversary.” Such lines evoke so much (so much what?) and sound nice when heard that the fact that they are so utilitarian is sort of startling. Maybe it’s not. It certainly works. I love an expert, I hate a hack. GOOD+

Ottawa, s/t 12″ EP. Reissue of the Chicago hardcore band’s brutal, bare bones 1994 split LP (with Jihad; this includes only the Ottawa songs, spread over both sides). Really intense, really short, really mean, really pissed off. The songs themselves sound surprisingly big and epic despite their runtime and relatively (these are remasters) shitty recording quality. Just fun to listen to. (If you download this from some blog instead of buying the actual LP, beware of weird/nerdy/not that hardcore Lord of the Rings worship via the song intros, thankfully cut out on the vinyl version.) GOOD