Sound Off: Our Top 3 Albums This Week

Department of Eagles, 'Archive 2003-2006'
Ok, we know what you're thinking. Our Grizzly Bear fascination has gone a little too far if we're recommending a rarities album from a GB side project. But it's not what it seems. First of all, Department of Eagles is no ordinary side project—their last album, In Ear Park, is as complex and compelling as Grizzly Bear's great albums. The material on this album, while seemingly for completists only, has some of the group's strongest material and four of the best oddball pop songs you've ever heard.

Walter Gibbons, 'Jungle Music: Mixed With Love: Essential & Unreleased Remixes: 1976-1986'
This is a two-disc compendium of what the title says by a '70s weirdo disco DJ/producer a la Arthur Russell (with whom he was a friend/co-conspirator). We recommend the extended mix of 'Doin' the Best That I Can' (one of the best of its kind/genre we've ever come across). The earlier material is great but mostly trad-disco; the later material seems to casually invent or anticipate a half-dozen dance-based micro-genres—Chicago house, dub-step, whatever-you-call the most astringent Neptunes stuff—while the beat goes on. Stunning.

The Feeling Of Love, 'OK Judge Revival'
Here we have some French dumpster divers able to swallow the Velvets, the Fall, Suicide, Spacemen 3, and garage rock all in a gulp and puke it back up in pleasing cubist-into-early-abstract expressionist shapes. The highlight, "God Willing," is basically the Live 1969 version of VU's "The Ocean" with added "Sister Ray" sleaze in sound/subject matter—except funnier (and sleazier actually). A French dude trying to sound like Lou Reed trying to sound like Louis-Ferdinand Celine is way more disturbing for circling back to the source. It's like a French accent alone says: not only is life just one big orgy in a septic tank that no lifetime of church-going, picnic-having, or freedom-fries consuming can make clean—but even the observation itself is banal and I'm bored with it.