Shellac – At Action Park (1994)
Despite the advanced stages of tinnitus, you’ll never not hear an opportunity to present a stern-yet-blasé defense of pocket protectors.
* * * * *
Whores. – Clean (2013)
A stainless steel bulldozer that runs on grumpiness wrecks your apartment building because you won’t stop telling people you’re an Instagram model.
* * * * *
The Move – Message From the Country (1971)
Soldiers from all over the USA describing what they hear after starting in giant hemp fire in Vietnam.
* * * * *
Solstice – Solstice (1992)
You carved out a big chunk of the middle of your Civics textbook so you could hide a knife in there.
* * * * *
Swervedriver – Raise (1991)
Riding your hoverboard through a lens flare on the first and last day of summer simultaneously.
* * * * *
Dillinger Escape Plan – Calculating Infinity (1999)
New medical advancements have made feet sentient and unable to agree on how to walk together aside from knowing they should do it really fast.
* * * * *
Dianogah – As Seen From Above (1997)
The good kind of mind control where you remember to call everyone you know and remind them that their self-doubt is an illusion.
* * * * *
Mitski – Be the Cowboy (2018)
There’s a new kind of perfume that, if applied in the correct dose, will smell just like your high school gymnasium during a school dance but, if applied in an incorrect dose, will kill you.
* * * * *
OutKast – ATliens (1996)
The old Adam West and Burt Ward version of Batman and Robin, except the Batmobile is a Cadillac and nobody’s in any real hurry to get anywhere.
* * * * *
Drop Nineteens – Your Aquarium (1992)
Your buddies have an inside joke about food poisoning and you laugh when they laugh even though you don’t know why.
* * * * *
Drop Nineteens – Delaware (1992)
A slow zoom in and then out and then in again on shag carpeting.
* * * * *
Warpaint – Exquisite Corpse (2008)
You wake up from a dream where the lion bit the clown’s head off at the circus and you can’t remember which one was you.
* * * * *
The Pretenders – The Pretenders (1980)
The crossed-out, tattooed names of exes you’ve had has reached the end of one arm and started to crawl up the other with no interest in slowing down.
* * * * *
Air – Premiers Symptômes (1999)
Some French guys with synths trying to tell you how teenage blonde girl in a beach-front California town torn apart by the class system tries to find out who murdered her friend.
* * * * *
The Menzingers – Rented World (2014)
You’re unexpectedly sad as everyone happily signs the joke yearbook you had made in and about your mid-20s.
* * * * *
Tim Buckley – Lorca (1970)
The house band at the jazz club breaks in after hours to talk over each other about what they think infinity is actually like.
* * * * *
Steve Reich / Collin Currie Group – Pulses/Quartet (2018)
We’ll never know if our footsteps reverberate through the entire world until they reach the foot of another person landing at that exact moment in the earth, but knowing it’s a possibility is enough.