Call the cacophonic rattle of MOO a return to form, if you like. Kyle Thomas, the rock preservationist known as King Tuff , would call it the same. As he writes in the album’s quasi-liner notes: “after years of confusion I felt like myself again. MOO made the conclusion that I was an elf again.”

Perhaps an odd turn of phrase for somebody who sounded positively besotted with the elvin Marc Bolan on his 2023 release Smalltown Stardust . Yet the fact remains: MOO finds Thomas getting back to where he once belonged, capturing a glorious noise at home on his eight-track. That’s how he made his blissfully fuzzed-out early records, albums that pushed him to the vanguard of the scuzzy garage-punk revivalists. When he left his native Vermont for the cinematic vistas of Los Angeles, he didn’t renounce those songs’ monumental crunch so much as built upon them.…