Albums are graded on a five-point scale of "Awful-Eh-Good-Great-Classic". I'm highly biased, so don't take it too seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Silversun Pickups

[#] Carnavas (2006)

As twinkly and cloudy as the cover art.

Reviewed August 11, 2018

Abusing sleep aids to visit dead friends? Par for the course for Carnavas, the 2006 debut full-length from Silver Lake's Silversun Pickups. The aforementioned "Melatonin" is a perfect introduction, laying out a bed of decaying guitar fuzz for guitarist Brian Aubert and bassist Nikki Monninger to harmonize over. Dark and moody, heavy in the mix (even if the master is brickwalled enough to lose the snare at times, sadly) and tightly sequenced, Carnavas knows when to shoot sparks right in your face ("Well Thought Out Twinkles") and when to let the desolation of Silversun's soundscapes speak for themselves ("Rusted Wheel"). It's no surprise "Lazy Eye" took off how it did; it's effectively this entire album in six iconic minutes.

This album is a real electrical storm of guitars, delayed ("Common Reactor"), skipping ("Checkered Floor"), and absolutely frayed ("Future Foe Scenarios"), a surface-level detour off Pikul, but really its sound taken to the logical extreme. The whole band does their part to conjure up that suffocating cloud, though; Joe Lester's samplers are as big a component of the sound as the pedalboard, Nikki's basslines and self-conscious vocals (like on the bridge to the excellent "Little Lover's So Polite") are always a highlight, and Chris Guanlao's drumming is both angular and rudimentary, primal enough for rock but complex enough to drive "Waste it On"'s odd time signatures. This album makes a statement, and at an hour long, it takes all the time it needs to make it. Pop a tablet and say hi.