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.

aphrodisiac

[#] Various Murky Basements (2016)

Sackfuls of rats and mangy attack dogs.

Reviewed April 1, 2025

Either searingly repetitive or charmingly hypnotic, depending on your viewpoint, aphrodisiac's 2016 EP debut Various Murky Basements is exactly the kind of album that gets made by a 16-year-old with a cheap MIDI keyboard and two months of piano classes. There's actually a surprising amount of interesting sonic ideas here—you'll catch low-bit influences with all the gnarly MP3 compression, the layering of the sequenced drums and "live" drums is fun, and there's no shortage of bizarre samples from Internet weirdos nestled into Basements' 21 minutes. Don't expect songs though. There are no songs. Maybe one song.

Murky is an appropriate word here. aphrodisiac is driven around by the low bass and thumping, ambient drum machine kicks that reverberate off the walls of the titular moldy basement, weirdly suitable when the tracks are so unfinished. It's what makes "A Membrane's Virtuous Sky" so grubby, "Caleb" so rumbling. The melodies are basically an afterthought to all the strange percussion, the fanciful fills on "Mind Left for Seattle" far more intricate than the "riff", the drums on "Floaroma"'s interlude flighty but the synths out of tune. Light on substance but heavy on style, it's nothing yet, but something might still come of it. We'll see.

Essential:	"Various Murky Basements", "Mind Left for Seattle", "Lauren"
Quintessential:	"A Membrane's Virtuous Sky"
Non-Essential:	"Caleb"
Rating:
Further listening:	Download from aphrodisiac's Bandcamp