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

[#] In Free Fall (2019)

Moldy basement cleanup.

Reviewed April 1, 2025

Imagine you took a 16-year-old with no music training, but a bit of an idea how you play a major scale on piano. Say he listens to too much Big Black, and his one musical trick is to make a drum machine sound like a brick in a washing machine. He makes an EP and then, slightly more grown, decides to pay tribute to the years of dicking around as a teenager by packaging up his best old material into one full-length alongside his true debut of all-new songs. Then those new songs get lost. It's a tragic tale that would derail any music career, and it seems it did aphrodisiac's, but hey—at least In Free Fall came out kinda cool.

"I know the whole Apricot Bay thing is your stupid coping method," goes the fruity incel voicemail on the closer "Kaden" shortly before the whole thing gets buried in a grindy avalanche of ghostly plinks and razor-buzz bass. There's still not much catchy about aphrodisiac's shtick, and "This Nadir" and "Chimerical" are still underwritten missed opportunities, but the extra layers and more direct mixes help these songs to play as well as they possibly could. Better yet is when there is something catchy or atmospheric to it—"Disco Jellyfish" is one of the catchiest thumps aphrodisiac has come up with to date, and you can't argue with that breezy-yet-airless coda on "Ghostgrove Point". Least I can't.

Essential:	"Apologies to the Disco Jellyfish", "At Ghostgrove Point", "Kaden"
Quintessential:	"A Crush of Bodies"
Non-Essential:	"Chimerical"
Rating:
Further listening:	Download from aphrodisiac's Bandcamp

[#] 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