We knew early on that the word “jangly” would be showing up a lot in the most recent review section for Prairie Dog. I’m assuming Whitworth was mostly playing along by putting “jangle” in his Jenny Lewis review, giving us this:

Could we have reviewed these albums without using the words “jangly” or “jangle”? Sure. But listening to Monomyth’s Saturnalia Regalia!, goddamn if there wasn’t some jangle to those guitars. And if Eden and Matthew and Whitworth say there’s jangle happening on their respective records — even if one of them might just be a good sport about the whole jangle-thing — who am I to argue? I guess I’m a contributing editor, a position that would allow me to argue with word choice, but I’m sure I was really tired the day I was reading all these.

So I’m not going to say the problem is the word “jangly”. I’m going to say we needed to review at least one album that didn’t need that word tied to it. Heck, we could’ve done a whole review section sans “jangly”. Here are four albums from around the time of this issue we could’ve run with instead of all these jangly records.

Shabazz Palaces, Lese Majesty You’ve got a short time to go over to NPR and stream this album. I’d recommend it, even though I haven’t yet had the time to dive into this. Shabazz Palaces are Seattle’s greatest hip-hop act whose last album, 2011’s Black Up, earned high marks from me when I reviewed it. (I can’t find that review on line, so you’ll just have to trust me on that one.)

The Muffs, Whoop Dee Doo There’s nothing jangly about the new album from this band, their first all-new collection in a decade. As you can hear on “Up and Down Around”, the Muffs play like the best kinds of grunge relics. (What about the worst kind of grunge relics? Trust me, you don’t want to hear them play anything.)

Woman’s Hour, Conversations I’m a little surprised when a new album from Secretly Canadian comes out and we don’t review, since this label is entirely my jam almost all the time. I’d mostly put this London band into that category after having watched the video for their title track. Their super-light electro-pop works well, and is a nice counterbalance if you’ve been hearing that one Sylvan Esso song everywhere and it’s just too hard hitting for you.

York Factory Complaint, Lost in the Spectacle NPR called their sound a “dystopian cocktail of Tim Hecker and Perfect Pussy”. So, no chance of jangly here.