hostmigrate

Sam Shepherd lets rip on Cascade. If on Crush he was wringing humanity out of machines and documenting their pain, here he drives them like sledding dogs, too rapid to show any exhaustion, letting the inner sear propel blistering forward motion. Every inch of this record is built to last, hardy, functional, powerful music full of surprises and with an ear to floors full of shuffling feet. Pacing is not as good as other FP records, but this is album as collection rather than journey.

Adrianne Lenker is the best songwriter in the world. Nobody else has the power to turn such vivid vocabulary into the most colloquial lyrics you've ever heard. Most of the songs here will survive decades of cultural tidal erosion, but anything and not a lot are true all-timers. Anthemic and soft, layered like filo pastry, natural, aware, adult, spectacular and small. songs is as perfect as a musician or listener can hope for.

Joyous and groovy disco from an underrated scene. In the 70s, Cameroon was definitively where it was at.

Charli XCX gets her overdue flowers with brat, like Leo getting Best Actor for The Revenant. Unlike that film, this record is so eclipsed by an attendent cultural tsunami that it's genuinely hard to appraise it in a vacuum. That's probably worked to its advantage, occluding questions of the album's long-term strength. How's the mixing? Is the arrangement strong enough? Is it as gorgeous and forward-thinking as past records? Who cares, we just wanna hear those club classics.

Had the true privelege of hearing this on an absolutely incredible sound system at 180 Strand's current Vinyl Factory exhibition. This is a morphing, lovely, and mature record that gives back what you put in. A spring for new and treasured memories.

Talk about quintessential. Hebden put the wax seal on his career so far with New Energy, a statement piece that combines his past influences into something precise and amphibious. Some of his best and most iconic tunes are here, properly timeless songs that stick in the ear like moss to bark, growing over time. A really great listen.

Really picks up towards the end. A bit too blurry to be memorable on first listen.

That midsection on the Mayfield mix is out of this world. So simple but so gripping, visceral club music to heal the distracted mind.

Coorabell is pure schadenfreude. A complete mire of dissonance and bass and groove until the prettiest chords come through, teasing a brighter world, forcing us to confront our relationship between euphoria and darkness as the beat drops again

Crush sees Sam Shepherd wring awful, liquid humanity out of his machines. The beauty of Floating Points' ambient electronics clashes violently with the suffering of his tools becoming conscious; there's writhing anxiety through Anasickmodular, a nastiness and jealousy in Bias, and a knife-sharp hyperfocus on LesAlpx. I love the way these sounds wrestle with eachother, coughing and tensing and barking and crying and chirping, deep in the disease of ill-gotten life. Floating Points orchestrates metamorphosis on this record, as many contemporaries do, but the difference is his music not only works in the club but dominates it. As some have pointed out it loses some steam in the back half, save for an oasis of hope provided by Birth, the… More