Fighting crime in the streets together

Hey, I finally got around to doing another one of these! I seriously meant to do one of these three months ago, and then another one six months ago, I swear. I am, however, a busy dude. There’s only been a few truly great albums so far this year, but there’s been a ton of very good ones. Apologies to the Mountain Goats, Mouse, Radiohead, DJ Burn One, Stalley, J Mascis, Cold Cave, Adele, Rittz, Destroyer, Clams Casino, Julianna Barwick, Squadda Bambino, Kurt Vile, Gunplay, and James Blake, in rough order of descending awesomeness.

And also, this bears mentioning: EMA’s Past Life Martyred Saints is, by a fucking landslide, the best album I’ve heard all year. It’s amazing. It blasts everything else to smithereens. I listen to it at least once a day no matter how many reviews I have due. But it doesn’t come out until May, which means it’s not making it onto this list because of self-imposed rules that I decided on back when I still paid for music. So look for that one here in three months, assuming I get around to doing another one of these.

1. Cut Copy: Zonoscope. It’s all pastiche, of course, but holy shit what great pastiche. Cut Copy have always played their lane, doing a very specific combination of fizzy lovestruck indie-pop and various strains of house music and disco. And that’s the lane that New Order already worked so perfectly, so there’s obviously no innovation whatsoever happening here. But with every album, they just get better and better at it. And now we have this record, which gets starry-eyed swirl down to a science and makes room for some truly devastating buildup-breakdown moments. Cut Copy sound bigger here than they’ve ever sounded before, and sunnier, and happier, and those are all serious achievements since they started out sounding bigger and sunnier and happier than all their peers. Even the weaker moments here, like the Men at Work sparkles on “Take Me Over”, are pretty charming. And the great ones, like the endless swoon of “Need You Now” and the endless spectral thump of “Sun God”, are the sorts of things that can cause immediate endorphin-rush brain-chemistry changes as soon as you hear them.

2. Fiend: Tennis Shoes & Tuxedos. Fiend’s story— garbled No Limit flame-spitter becomes wizened stoner-rap elder statesman— is so fun and weird and unlikely that it threatens to overwhelm whatever music he actually makes. But Tennis Shoes & Tuxedos is great enough to be a story unto itself. At this point, I probably like it better than either of Curren$y’s Pilot Talk albums, which pretty well makes it the best full-length of its kind in this great recent wave, bad mp3 tagging and spotty mastering and all. The production here is just masterful: slow swells of orchestral soul, seriously pretty music, over bass that actually rumbles. And Fiend’s tired, grumbling baritone is perfect for this stuff; he sounds like someone who’s been through enough bullshit that his celebratory moments really register as such. I moved apartments this month, which means I spent way too much time hauling furniture, and something about this tape actually made that experience feel pleasant sometimes, a pretty herculean feat.

3. Big K.R.I.T.: Return of 4Eva. As plenty of other critics have already pointed out, there’s something inherently vaguely corny about K.R.I.T.: His undying fealty to Southern rap production traditions, his clumsy sincerity, his inability to develop his own voice or style or point of view as a rapper. And if anything, he takes a slight step back on Return of 4Eva; that snarl I loved on tracks like “Glass House” is just about gone. And yes, his particular brand of soft-spoken humility is a liability in a rap climate where sneery overconfidence is king. But all those drawbacks actually make me like K.R.I.T. more in a weird way. I may have written this somewhere before, but I look at K.R.I.T. as a rap equivalent to, say, Band of Horses. Where that band mines Neil Young’s back catalog and comes up with moments of great beauty and grandeur and empathy, K.R.I.T. reflects the old aesthetic of the Dungeon Family and UGK, drains it of fury and danger and exploratory verve, and still comes across as a very real and likable human being. And it certainly helps that he’s grown as a producer here. The album sounds incredible, guitars and flutes and organs lazily wrapping themselves around each other in some truly pretty ways, while more melodicism creeps into K.R.I.T.’s voice as the record progresses. Every track flows smoothly and naturally into the next, and the whole thing just feels good for the soul, in a security-blanket sort of way. I’ll take that.

4. Nicolas Jaar: Space Is Only Noise. When I interviewed this kid a couple of months ago, I told him that I play his record when I put my daughter to sleep. I wasn’t sure he’d take that as a backhanded compliment or what, but he acted like it was just a super-nice thing to hear. And really, that’s how I meant it. I generally don’t have a whole lot of use for textured, spaced-out electronic music, but Jaar is different. There’s not a whole lot of repetition in his arrangements, and he barely even fusses around with drums. Instead, his music enters this fuzzed-out colors-and-shapes headspace. My friend Ryan Dombal said that it was like an updated version of what a young Air might be making now. But it reminds me more of Spacemen 3’s mostly-drumless album Playing With Fire: A hazy, formless piece of work that touches on deep, ineffable feelings of longing in ways that feel so primal that they’re hard to talk (or write) about. It sounds nice on headphones but better on speakers, where it can change the air of a whole room.

5. Young Dro: Equestrian Dro. “DIAMONDS ON MY NECK BLUER THAN A AVATAR / MY TWITTER CHICK SHOW HER BOOTY ON HER AVATAR / SHE HOT LIKE TAMPA HEAT / YOU NOT GON’ HANDLE ME / THE DROP ALL PHANTOMY / GHOST, I RIDE HALLOWEEN / YOUR BROAD CALL ME BABY BUT I’M GROWN SO HOW CAN I BE? / THAT MUST BE THE REASON WHY SHE ALWAYS CRY FOR ME [crying sound effects].” This thing is too fun.

6-10. The Weeknd: House of Balloons; G-Side: The ONE… Cohesive; M.I.A.: Vicki Leekx; Frank Ocean: Nostalgia, Ultra.; PJ Harvey: This Is England.