Fighting crime in the streets together

We just had a pretty great couple of months, and I sort of can’t believe some of the albums I couldn’t find room for here: Superchunk, Swans, Playboy Tre, Earl Sweatshirt, How to Dress Well, Black Mountain. Also, apologies to Young Jeezy, Gucci Mane, Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, Best Coast, Neil Young.

1. Big Boi: Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty. I came this close to giving Teflon Don the top spot. Teflon Don sounds like right now, whereas the Big Boi album sounds exactly like what it is: An album that’s been snarled, at various stages of development, in major-label hell for the past five years. Putting it at #1 almost feels like voting for one of those Bob Dylan archival reissue things in Pazz & Jop, and I’d feel better about the album if it had a “Kryptonite“-type anthem. But goddam it feels good to see this guy slip-sliding into middle age while staying as gleefully nasty as he’s always been, following his muse down all these funky stylistic pathways because he knows he’s earned it a million times over. He knows he’s not reconquering the pop landscape anytime soon, but he’s having fun, and there’s something inspirational about that. Plus the tracks are beautifully well-chosen, almost all the guests are on their A-game, and even with all the label fuckery that went into this, the whole thing unfolds like it was always supposed to sound like this. Those Dylan archival albums actually are really good, you know?

2. The Walkmen: Lisbon. Nick Sylvester just ran this interview with Chris Zane, the guy who produced Lisbon, and it really gets at how the Walkmen revel in all the little, barely-noticeable intricacies of their whole style. Like: They always record all their shit in a room together, Paul Maroon uses an amp that’s “That One, His” and plays a rare and ridiculously expensive Rickenbacker, they’re willing to use completelyanachronistic and weird recording practices to get the exact sort of echo they want. I have absolutely zero experience recording music, so I only barely know what any of that stuff even means, but these little decisions they make end up making a completelydistinctive final product. If the Walkmen recorded their stuff the same way every other indie rock band records their stuff, they’d still be great; those choruses just slay me. But they’re very, very particular about how they put together their records, and that matters. Lisbon just sounds incredible; it’s got this warm, spacey tone that just fills up your world on headphones. It’s hard to even talk about how an exceptionally recorded trad-rock album can be so great, since there’s not really a great storytelling peg for this sort of thing. They’re just an amazing band cranking out amazing records without being too overblown or ambitious about it. But their records all hit hard, and Lisbon, for me, hits harder than any of the others. “Angela Surf City”, Jesus.

3. Rick Ross: Teflon Don. I can’t really play Teflon Don while I’m working because it’s too distracting; it’s hard to concentrate on reporting, like, the Caribou remix album while Ross is screaming epic ridiculousness at you. And I definitely can’t play it around my daughter, since that line about “if she died on my dick, she would live in my rhymes” is absolutely not the sort of thing I want affecting her developing psyche in any way. So I end up spending a whole lot of time with this one when I’m walking the dog. At this point, I’m pretty sure the dog knows all the words to “MC Hammer” because he’s heard me screaming them in the alley behind our building so many times. Ross is a much better rapper now than he was around Port of Miami. I don’t think that point is even up for debate; he’s become amazing at conveying this absurd, bloated excess. But he’s gotten even better as a rap star, an avatar of everything that’s going on in the music these days. Nearly every track on the album sounds like an event. The lush, glossy songs are a lot of fun, but it’s the Lex Luger tracks that really punch me in the gut. Big respect to any album with the balls to be this viscerally thrilling.

4. Curren$y: Pilot Talk. Somehow, Def Jam just owns this list. Pretty weird coincidence for a label with absolutely no discernible identity or strategy. Anyway, there’s a lot of things I don’t miss about New York: Subway station rat-piss humidity, opportunistic auto mechanics, Eastern European landlords. But I can’t believe I’m missing out on the whole goddam Dame Dash hipster renaissance. Realizing that friends of mine got to see Sleigh Bells in Dame’s basement and I didn’t— well, that’s the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. Silver lining: Dame’s bizarre, unpredictable, possibly pathetic late-career left turn allowed this album to exist. And even if he’s no kingmaker anymore, it takes a certain sharp intelligence to realize that you should put a lush, expansive producer like Ski Beatz together with a presence as sleepy and confident as Curren$y. This is a deeply warm and inviting record, the sort of thing that makes me want to fall asleep on my living room floor on a Saturday afternoon. Curren$y is a super-likable presence, and he just falls effortlessly into these tracks. Worth considering: The guy does know how to make banger. My favorite recent song of his is probably “4 Hours & 20 Minutes”, but I’m glad it didn’t make the album. Those big-ass drums would’ve interrupted the zone-out.

5. Das Racist: Sit Down, Man. Honestly, Shut Up Dude should’ve shown up somewhere on a Quarterly Report too. It just took me a while to listen because a lingering Pizza Hut/Taco Bell annoyance hangover is a tough thing to get over. But no, these guys are actually ridiculously good and fun rappers, and they do the whole deadpan pop-cultural free-association thing ridiculously well. I laughed a whole lot the first few times I heard this, but then the laughs faded away and the whole thing just sort of worked as an actual rap album. There are a couple of legit bangers here in “Rooftop” and “All Tan Everything”, insanely strong hooks everywhere, a rap verse from El-P that I actually no-joke enjoy. I feel like I’m damning this thing with faint praise because I feel a bit defensive about liking it as much as I do, but no, it’s great. Nobody’s been this infectiously drunk on language in a minute, and it helps that they know how to put songs together.

6-10. Arcade Fire: The Suburbs; Jamey Johnson: The Guitar Song; Tyler the Creator: Bastard; Wavves: King of the Beach; Robyn: Body Talk, Part 2.