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.

mtlx

[#] Last Summer (2000)

The ashtray says you were up all night.

Reviewed April 1, 2025

You gotta love a good found media story, and Last Summer is a biggie. A surprise hit back when MP3.com was still around, the album disappeared off the face of the Internet, buried on CD-R in someone's attic until it was finally unearthed to the world again in December 2023. Was it worth the wait? Yeah, I'd say so. This is trip-hop as made by people who don't listen to electronica, the grooves gnarled and patient, the mixes loaded up with strange samples of relaxation tapes, self-help goons, preachers speaking in tongues, and NBC's coverage of the aborted Gemini 8 spaceflight. How specific.

Last Summer was patterned after a sleepless, worrisome night, and it hits hardest before dawn. The air of "Siestas" is so moist and waterlogged, the birds shrieking overhead, that nagging synth motif so anxious you forget it originally went to a Lemonheads song, that it's an effective pit in the stomach. Simple CR-78 drums are reintroduced right as the atmosphere truly goes dark and stormy on "Incandescence", with its tales of raging rapids and rabid feedback wails behind scuzzed, stereo delayed drums. The title track sees the storms break, the warm sunlight reflected in puddles of piano and through clouds of live guitar (!) as NASA finally makes it into space. Pretty effective stuff.

(The 2024 anniversary reissue of the album tack on four early demos, including an unrecognizable version of "Postage Stamps" as an outro to "Yellow Bug". Decidedly unfinished, it is nonetheless fascinating to hear the shards of the final songs before they were all put in the right spots.)

Essential:	"Postage Stamps (Kinesthetics)", "Siestas", "Last Summer"
Quintessential:	"Another Deserted Urban Complex"
Non-Essential:	???????????????????????
Rating:
Further listening:	Download from aphrodisiac's Bandcamp