Consumer Guide Album

Speedy Ortiz: Rabbit Rabbit [Carpark, 2023]
Their fourth album in an unrushed career going back to the retrospectively preliminary 2013 Major Arcana, Sadie Dupuis's quartet puts music over lyrics even though she's even more renowned as a well-published poet than as an expansively textured indie-rocker. Guitar effects combust and spill out of the mix without number, so dense and engaging that it hardly matters that you don't know just what she's singing about while of course figuring that it's fairly interesting. It couldn't be, could it, that the secret of the way those riffs and tunelets roll over you as they hurry you along is the production advice of Illuminati Hotties' ever hooky Sarah Tudzin? A