Sometimes I think I love Coco Rosie in spite of a whole bunch of stuff (weird signifiers, scene politics, schmooze tendencies) and sometimes I just love them wholesale. Their new album tilts the balance almost entirely toward the latter half of the proposition. It's just so good: the living-on-a-microscope-slide groove that marked La Maison de Mon Reve refines itself further here, ensuring that in one hundred years some of this stuff will sound like it came from its own planet, while the cosmic ghost story atmospherics that made Metallic Falcons' abysmally-titled Desert Doughnuts my 2nd-favorite album of last year float in and out all drafty-atticlike. If you hated them already, you'll hate this, too; Bianca sings like she sings, which is to say like Shirley Temple in a grown-up's body, and that's bound to put some people off, though she's grown a lot as a singer - "Raphael" here is practically drowning in nuance, and she's everywhere more confident and assured than she was just one album ago. Sierra sings like an unnamed vocalist on an old 78 with no label, which is to say, beautifully. OK, yes: there are still a few things that inspire lots of yes-but reactions. The verse about Jamaica on "Japan," say, what the fucking fuck you guys. And I have a lot of residual angst about the Yankees caps I'm pretty sure I saw these wearing in some party pictures a couple of years back. It'd be one thing if I thought they were Yankees fans but these are non-team-colors caps I'm talking about here. Gotta do better than that, Hi.

Still. Objections constitute dialogue; Lou Reed used to know this & it's why he owned the seventies. The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn is my favorite album of the year so far. At its lyrical best, it inhabits its own country, unashamed of real poetry and willing to put in the hard work necessary to inhabit a space unlike anybody else's. The Perm & the Skullet have a track here; it's the first song on the album, which is another thing I like about this band: they always lead strong. Sing it while walking without umbrellas down rainy city streets and see how it works for you.