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.
