The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that 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.

Midwestern Dirt

[#] Twilight at a Burning Hill (2023)

Midwestern's world might be on fire, but it's a very pretty fire.

Reviewed August 18, 2023

Every new record from the Midwestern Dirt camp brings about an email from their frontman inviting me to listen to it early, and no hesitation—Twilight at a Burning Hill is their best yet. I'm actually kicking myself for sitting on it for a month while I was on vacation in Wales. In preparing for this review, I went back and listened to their older stuff again. Down the Stairs has a lot of personal meaning to me, but it does meander in spots. Sayonara never clicked with me like I really wanted it to. This one? It's a stunner. I believe Patrick has a new band backing him on this one, and they're more than happy to lunge at these tracks with an intensity and a purpose that their previous albums could only imply. Case in point? Twilight was tracked nearly entirely live in the studio.

That's not to say this is Midwestern's hardcore punk record or anything, but they do match their trademark grainy-dreamy sonics with blasts of drum fills ("The Opposite of Shadow"), stabbing riffs ("The Aaron Waters Show"), and sudden stops ("Expecting Rain", "Tidus"), and the songs seriously benefit from the loose liveliness. John Golden's drumming gives these tracks propulsion that Midwestern's previous records weren't lucky enough to have, while the increased emphasis on Owen Hemming's keys (like the organ on "Wasteland" or the aching pianos on "Dusk") give much color to the proceedings. It helps that Patrick's brought his best-written and catchiest batch of songs yet, and his lyrics are consistently evocative, bleak, and world-weary, a soundtrack to strange times indeed. I've only got so much space to rave, so I'll put it like this: everyone's troubled these days. Do your part. Share this record with them.

Essential:	"Expecting Rain", "I'm Tired, Robbie", "Dusk"
Quintessential:	"Static"
Non-Essential:	Maybe "Sun's Going Down"? Maybe.
Rating:
Further listening:	Download from Midwestern Dirt's Bandcamp