Fighting crime in the streets together

I wrote a GQ piece about Chris “Lionheart” Jericho, maybe my favorite professional wrestler ever, and the fucking strange and awesome things he’s doing right now. The fact that I get to write wrestling shit in GQ is some sort of life validation.

I wrote about the Lana Del Rey album. I Wanted To Believe, but yeah, no, this is trash.

I wrote about Justified again. The show continues to rule.

I wrote a thing on Lord Of The Fly, the dizzy and pretty great new Nacho Picasso/Blue Sky Black Death mixtape.

I wrote a thing for the Classical about the ECW Arena shutting down. I also wanted to write about the Evolve Wrestling show there, but those guys took forever to put the replay of their internet PPV up online, so oh well.

I’m writing about Justified, a television show that I absolutely love, for GQ this season. Here’s my thing on the first episode.

I wrote a piece on Schoolboy Q’s very good new album Habits & Contradictions. (Also, I’m totally going to start posting links to pieces I wrote, so unfollow if necessary.)

Wrestling is so awesome.

Hey, I finally got around to doing another of these! God willing, I’ll keep doing them, but who even knows anymore. As always, this is albums (and mixtapes) released in the past three months, as in between July and September. Apologies to the Weeknd, Youth Lagoon, Danny Brown, the Field, Lil Wayne, the Men, Araabmuzik, Roach Gigz, Young Jeezy, the Horrors, Pistol Annies, and Prurient. You guys all did good.

1. Girls: Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Aliens is one of my favorite movies of all time and basically a perfect sequel because it takes the premise of the original movie, but brings in new ideas, new characters, new situations, new wrinkles, a new setting. It brings that same squirmy we’re-all-gonna-die feeling, that idea of incomprehensible forces hiding in shadows all around us, and uses it on a larger canvas. So what I’m saying, I guess, is that Father, Son, Holy Ghost is the Aliens to Album’s Alien, if that makes any sense at all. I don’t think I’ll ever love it quite as much as Album, which filtered sad, lost feelings through oldies-radio music and power pop and 90s alt-rock in a way that just made perfect sense to me. But this one takes those same feelings and makes them bigger and grander. When I saw Girls at the 9:30 club last week, I was amazed at how loud they are now; they’re tight and confident, and they can just slam us with a big wall-of-riff roar when they feel like it. And they make some ballsy choices here: Following up the Black Sabbath-sounding song with an Everly Brothers-sounding song, that sort of thing. And it all works because Christopher Owens has such a singular voice and vision and such a brilliant grasp of the mechanics of songwriting that he can attempt whatever genre dalliances he feels like and know that it’ll still come out sounding like him

2. Don Trip & Starlito: Step Brothers. There’s no overarching story or attention-grabbing conceit to this mixtape, one of my two or three favorites of the year. It’s just two guys who are very good at rapping, rapping well and picking beats that work with their voices. There’s almost something boring about how good it is, but its boringness doesn’t really matter when the tape is playing. Trip and Lito are fine rappers on their own, but together, trading off lines and pushing each other ever upward, you hear a sense of chemistry and of competition that really makes me wish the idea of the rap group hadn’t fallen out of fashion. Their rap styles are just similar enough and just different enough that they sound good together. And somehow, they’re way better at picking complementary beats— crisp, precise things, mostly— together than they are by themselves. And then there’s the excellent tape-closing 15-minute jacking-for-beats freestyle session “Out Takes,” in which they embarrass just about every rapper alive.

3. Wild Flag: Wild Flag. I had through-the-roof hopes for this shit— hope high enough that they could’ve scrambled all my critical faculties. But I also had high hopes for that Corin Tucker solo record, and I’m not even sure I made it through that one once. A lot of what I like about Wild Flag is stuff that I already liked about Sleater-Kinney, of course: the whooping exuberance, the jagged homemade sideways hooks, the whole idea of righteousness as fun. But Sleater-Kinney was one of my favorite rock bands ever, and the chemistry that made them great is, of course, completely different here. Mary Timony’s got this icy poise that never would’ve flown in that band, and I’m not sure they would’ve allowed Farfisa farts into the fold for an entire album. But it all coheres into this gang-style rockout energy, and it works better than I could’ve ever hoped. Also, my daughter loves dancing to it, which gives the record huge bonus points in my book.

4. Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire: Lost in Translation. For about two weeks, I felt like a total herb for not recognizing any of the El-P beats on Lost in Translation as old El-P beats. Then I saw a bit of Company Flow at ATP and remembered why I never cared about them. Thing is: when that scuzzed-out bell-ringing bass-rumbling skronk-rap style of production goes to a rapper whose rap style I actually like, all bets are off. This is is that guy. Here we have an unreconstructed grimy fuck-shit-up antisocial dirtbag asshole on these beats, and he actually raps on-beat all the time, which makes a huge difference. He’s also got tender and nerdy sides that come out from time to time, which is pretty crucial when his debut runs over an hour. But the real thing I love about eXquire is he’s the type of rapper who namechecks Paul Orndorff when he says that he’s about to “piledrive the pussy.” El-P and Vast Aire and Aesop Rock are all rappers I had to learn to appreciate. With eXquire, I don’t have to do any work; it grabs me right away. And the “Huzzah” remix is the posse-cut call to arms that the new generation of internet-based underground rap types needed. I want more like that.

5. Rwake: Rest. Epic misanthropic spit-churn from guys who sound like they hate everything. I haven’t been paying as much attention to metal as I should this year, so maybe I’ve been missing stuff, but it’s been a while since I heard a band other than Kylesa make sludge quite this righteous. This has 18-minute songs, an indulgence I usually hate, but even broken up into five-minute chunks, this would still all blur together into one roaring slag-heap. And even though the recording texture is all different, this scratches the same itch for me that the we-hate-everyone Amphetamine Reptile bands used to do back when I was in 9th grade. This blazes hard.

6-10. Jay-Z & Kanye West: Watch the Throne; Oddisee: Rock Creek Park; Dum Dum Girls: Only in Dreams; Kendrick Lamar: Section.80; the Rapture: In the Grace of Your Love.

And since I never got around to writing a quarterly report three months ago, here’s what the top 10 would’ve been:

1. EMA: Past Life Martyred Saints
2. Bon Iver: Bon Iver, Bon Iver
3. Fucked Up: David Comes to Life
4. Beyonce: 4
5. Lady Gaga: Born This Way
6. Action Bronson: Dr. Lecter
7. TV on the Radio: Nine Types of Light
8. Curren$y: Covert Coup
9. Austra: Feel It Break
10. Gang Gang Dance: Eye Contact

Singles when I get to them.

And another one. Absolutely no apologies for including Tyga and Ace Hood songs in my top five.

1. Adele: “Someone Like You”. I am a person who voluntarily watches American Idol every week. I get paid to make jokes about it, sure, but I’d probably do it anyway. And so when someone roll through and does one of those gut-busting, heart-stomping piano-ballads to absolute perfection, it hits me hard in a very deep place. And “Someone Like You” is a rare and powerful example of the form. It renders some pretty nuanced and volatile emotions in grand cinematic style without losing the trickiness of it all: Adele is the girl who got left behind, who still painfully misses the person she’s singing to. But she’s also a grown woman, and she understands that this guy has a life after her. She wishes him well. She wishes both of them well. But she can’t let it go, and she has to tell him. That’s not an easy position to capture in a song, but she does it with these simple conversational verses and then this huge lung-wrecking chorus, all over a simple piano line that, when I wrote about this song for Pitchfork, I compared to that skeletal backing guitar line in “Maggot Brain”. That’s probably a few steps too far, but as I said, I’m a sucker for this stuff when it’s done right. Side note #1: Adele’s performance of this song at the Brit Awards was a serious star-crowning moment, the kind of thing we don’t get to see often enough. Side note #2: The guy from Semisonic is the fucking man for helping this song happen.

2. Jamie Woon: “Night Air”. I’m cheating a bit here, since this was a late 2010 single, but I never got around to doing one of these for fourth quarter 2010, and sometimes you have to bend the rules to rep for a perfect pop song. For me, this is immediately the best thing Burial has ever done, though the Burial co-production credit is a bit of a red herring since there’s not a damn thing dubstep about this. Instead, it’s dark, slick synthpop, resting somewhere on a continuum that stretches between late-80s Depeche Mode and mid-00s Justin Timberlake. The track is a rainy, insinuating thump, and Woon’s delivery is this bell-clear tenor that somehow communicates the state of being trapped inside your own head. “Night Air” beautifully conjures the feeling of walking by yourself through a city in the middle of the night, when that weird sort of peaceful purpose surrounds you: “Night air has the strangest flavor / Space to breathe it, time to savor.” And more relevant to my life now, it’s a great fit for the feeling of being up in the middle of the night and trying to lull your kid back to sleep, happily resigned to the fact that it’ll probably take a while. I don’t remember ever hearing another song address that particular feeling, and certainly not this well. Woon probably isn’t going to be the pop star I want him to be; thus far, he hasn’t proven himself very good at performing or making videos. But there are about four songs almost as good as this one on his album Mirrorwriting, and that is a thing worth noticing.

3. Tyga: “Really Raw [ft. Pharrell, Snoop Dogg & the Game]”. A very encouraging sign that the Neptunes could recapture whatever it was that they had in the late 90s and early 00s. It’s hard to say quite why the “Really Raw” beat kicks so hard. It’s all simple stuff: bendy guitar note, well-placed horn stabs, slow-roll bassline, live-sounding brush-snares that skitter through the beat rather than punching through it. And none of these rappers has set the universe on fire lately. But good lord does this thing come together. It’s simple, alchemical rap menace, the same atmospheric dread that makes something like O.C.’s “Time’s Up” sound so perfect. None of the rappers let off any great quotes, but they all sound tough and stick to the beat, and that’s all they need to do for this to work. Even the dumbest lines come out sounding awesome: “I got the blueberry on deck, but not muffins”. And on that hook, Pharrell just gets it: “Gargling with champagne, that’s really raw / Classic millionaire frames, that’s really raw”. He’d know better than me. I could probably sit for an hour and listen to him list off things that are really raw.

4. Ace Hood: “Hustle Hard Remix [ft. Rick Ross & Lil Wayne]”. Lex Luger strikes again. I am still nowhere near sick of this current wave of eerie minor-key bangers, and I’m not sure I ever will be. But “Hustle Hard” stands out even further because it uses those Lex sonics for something other than Ross’s kingpin grandeur or Waka’s wild-out energy. Instead, “Hustle Hard” is a song about hungry desperation, something that comes across way more on the chorus than on any of the verses. But for one verse and that great chorus, I am absolutely on board with Ace Hood; he seems entirely convincing as someone who needs recognition so badly that he’s near the edge of his sanity. Of course, Ross and Wayne both completely throw the song’s central idea in the garbage, but that’s fine with me as long as they’re delivering Rick Ross and Lil Wayne verses. I love the way Wayne delivers that final chorus; everything sounds better in that dude’s voice. So far, this has been a great year for random-ass three-rapper tracks. See also: The Chris Brown song below.

5. Lady Gaga: “Born This Way”. She’s about the least subtle pop figure imaginable; I’ll grant you that. But nothing about this track moves you, I don’t know what to say. It’s a euphorically ridiculous and blatant Madonna bite with at least five gigantic hooks, an annihilating whump-whump-whump beat, and lyrics that deliver that inclusive message in the most transcendently goofy language imaginable. And that’s it. That’s pop music in 2011. It doesn’t get a whole lot better. One thing about this song: In the past three years or so, almost every massive crossover hit has been built on the same pitched-up Europop-house foundation, but there’s been something bloodless and controlled about most of them. When you look at the pop-house of the early 90s— Ultra Nate, say— there’s this gospel-informed reaching-for-transcendence emotional force that doesn’t exist in something like Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite”. Lady Gaga brought that back for this one. You can’t just sing along with “Born This Way”; you have to yell along.

6-10. Cut Copy: “Need You Now”; Chris Brown: “Look at Me Now [ft. Busta Rhymes & Lil Wayne]”; Tyler, the Creator: “Yonkers”; EMA: “California”; Glasser: “Mirrorage (Lindstrom Remix)”