4 out of 5

Label: Sounds Are Active / Sounds Familyre

Producer: Glen Galaxy

Snap, this is the one.  No Junk album is perfect, I don’t think, and 1958 still wanders a bit too much to keep you in your seat the whole time, but this is noise-hop, an explosion of weirdness and hiphop and distortions and kitchen sink, wound pretty tightly together to get your foot tapping.  Everyone is on point for this album and it just feels comfortable in its own skin, Galaxy and Slo-ro both spittin’ and slipping sloppily over their lyrics but okay with it this time, not trying to talk it up like it’s the second coming of anything.  It’s just music, it’s just noise.  What would make these things A plus maximum five stars is if they connected in some way.  The 1942 EP has a sense of immediacy to it, and perhaps the short runtime allows everything that’s going on on it to sink in more, I dunno.  Here, it’s really just good music.  It doesn’t strike at my core, I’m not moved by it, but it’s absolutely original in execution and takes brainwaves that are outta sight to string it together in a such a listenable fashion.  Now music doesn’t have to do anything beyond entertain, for sure, but I tend to evaluate that based on whatever I feel like the artist’s goal is – so the previous SJ album was a blast, musically, but it seemed like the point was to build hiphop cred, at least in part, and so that didn’t quite work for it.  Throughout his history, Glen Galaxy’s music has had a sort of slacker, surreal vibe to it, as evidenced by the random, bubbling nature of the lyrics.  But some of 1958’s songs have a heavier vibe to them that seems like we ARE supposed to connect with it… and I just never really get there with this group.