Because I sure as fuck do. Whenever I open up a music magazine—which is less often than it used to be for myriad of reasons—the album reviews are always the first place I go. When Pitchfork redesigned their site recently, the thing that bummed me out most wasn't the giant ipod ad (whates—music critics, make money) but the fact that the space given to album reviews on the site's front page had been so condensed. When Stylus went under, I was bummed for the loss of their great features and interviews, sure, but most of all because it meant five fewer good, long album reviews to read every day.

I appreciate a good interview (although, jesus, good interviews are rare once you start reading a lot of them) or feature or think piece or whatever, but there's something I just love about album reviews. I love how self-contained they are, how focused—sure, they may contextualize a work in terms of the artist's career, current trends, or even all of rock history, but at the core, an album review is honed in on just a single piece of art, making only maybe one or two Big Ideas about the thing and then going into finer detail about the constituent songs. For some reason, the album review seems so much better suited to a certain kind of mechanical dissection than does, say, a longer band profile. You don't necessarily need a narrative (although some reviews might have one)—you can just jump into the album, swim around, and jump back out. Fun.

And, for what it's worth, I think the writers in the Stranger's music section do some of their best work, and make some of their best arguments, in the album reviews section, to which I'd now like to direct your attention (and commentary):

Regarding the Juan Maclean's fantastic new Human League-meets-classic-house jam, The Future Will Come:

Lyrically, MacLean is still deploying Asimovian existentialism about humans, robots, and their relative frailties and superiorities. (Zomg! Robots can't feel pain or die, but they can't feel love, either!) More interesting, though, is the subtext of the album's awesome bookends, the building synth-and-drum groove of "The Simple Life" and the epic, multipart space odyssey "Happy House," which shifts from DFA disco to early house to a final acid freak-out over the course of 12 and a half minutes. On the former, MacLean moans about the drag of domesticity and the allure of oblivion ("Giving in to a simple life was nothing that I wanted with you/The great unknown is the only place I wanted to see") while Whang mourns losing him to the void; on the latter, Whang is grateful for being brought "home to this happy house," seemingly equating the simple life with the ecstatic refrain, "Launch me into space."

Concerning under-appreciated Northwest band Grails' new DVD, Acid Rain:

The DVD's title track explicitly evokes Pink Floyd's luxuriant, midperiod stratospheric bliss. Like most of the other songs that receive the video treatment here, it emphasizes Grails' mellower, more contemplative side while foregrounding their reliance on Eastern modalities. The majestic, slowly levitating "Predestination Blues" and "Take Refuge" are sterling examples of the latter tendency.

The videos' imagery reveals fascination with religious/pagan icons (especially Buddhist) and rituals, skeletons and skulls, nature, outer space, industrial machinations, yogis, snake charmers, and architecture. "Take Refuge" bears the most seemingly random montages, with Jimi Hendrix and his fiery guitar juxtaposed with a tarantula, a nuclear bomb, and a woman poised to plunge a knife into her neck.

About Art Brut's mildly disappointing (and that's coming from a gushing Art Brut fanboy) and inexplicably Frank Black-produced Art Brut vs. Satan:

Art Brut's architecture is fairly simple: The band play chop-solid though not groundbreaking rock 'n' roll, over which frontman Eddie Argos doesn't so much sing as rant (he's just talking to the kids) about pop music, romance, and various collisions thereof. Because he's just talking, though, his songs stand or fall depending almost entirely on how clever, charming, or affecting he can make his lyrics (unlike "proper" singers, who can sometimes spin a daft lyric into blissful gold via melodic alchemy).

Sadly, Argos's sometimes insular, self-referential record-nerd couplets and choruses on Satan lack his previous sharpness, and his balance of niche digging and broader sentiment is less affecting than on past albums.