April 2017 Review

It's finally happened. I listened to a stone-cold, balls-to-the-wall classic album this month, and was able to give it my first non-retrospective A* rating. You know that feeling when you listen to an album on release, and you just know it's a god-tier release from the first listen? That happened this month. Take a bow, King Kenny. No one came anywhere near you in April.


The Rest:


Alvarez Kings - Somewhere Between - D

Czarface - First Weapon Drawn - B

J Dilla - Motor City - C

Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - Killing Tingle Lifted Retreats - B

Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - Solid State Mercenaries - C

OR-L's long list of releases on the Ipecac label is coming to a close, with only a few albums left to go. I'm gonna have to be honest, even as a big Omar/Mars Volta fan, I'm quite happy about that. I really don't think it's been worth it, on the whole. As a fan and a completist, I like listening to everything he puts out, even with this hugely prolific period. But aside from a clutch of genuinely great albums (Sworn Virgins, Arañas en la Sombra, A Lovejoy, Cell Phone Bikini) the series has been fairly average. There's only so many songs with him mumbling unintelligible lyrics that I can hear without it getting samey.

You know how your favourite artists often say they have a vault full of ideas, sketches and unreleased projects? Those off the cuff comments under their breath in interviews that leave tantalising images of albums not yet realised? You think about the great possibilities of what lies waiting to be discovered - What if it's the best thing they've ever done, what if it's like OK Computer or SGT Peppers, just sitting there, ready to be found. Yeah, well there's a reason why they don't get released. Omar seems to be fully clearing out his garage, and we get to watch the whole yard sale. Solid State Mercenaries is another formless, dull record from the box at the back of the room. Apart from Lightning Round. That's a nice song.


The King Blues - The Gospel Truth - D


The Best:

 
01: Kendrick Lamar - DAMN - A* 


This is something very special. Kendrick Lamar has been one of the biggest stars of this current generation of bright prospects in the rap game, his 2015 release To Pimp A Butterfly was an ambitious, sprawling project that stormed the charts and topped many end-of-year lists. Following up on such a roaring success would usually be beyond most artists, but with DAMN, Lamar has surpassed the high water mark from any of his previous work. This is his best album yet.

Lamar's narrative string on DAMN is the best it's ever been. He weaves a highly detailed lyrical soundscape that takes in references from the bible, politics, music, racial tension and his own experience, forming an hour-long statement using a loose theme of the end of days to describe the socio-political turmoil in the USA. DAMN has those harsh vocal hooks and long, winding verses that Lamar has built his brand on. It's got the prophetic edge he touched on in earlier releases, but now it's right at the forefront. It's a dark, direct album that takes no prisoners.

There are catchy singles like Humble, Element and Loyalty that will be counted as huge hits from 2017 mixing with more progressive pieces like Yah, Lust and Fear. While there are several forms of music and style on the album, DAMN is different to Butterfly in that it's concentrated. Lamar has trimmed off the fat on his style to make a leaner, more effective record. I always thought that was a sticking point with Butterfly - Far too many ideas that didn't work. DAMN is different to that. It's short with no filler. It's far too consistent from front to back for me to begin listing any highlights, but the peak moments on DAMN are hair-tinglingly intense. It's a snapshot of a great artist at his zenith.

Lamar's style is hard to pin down, he's not strictly a mainstream Hip-hop artist other than by virtue of his success, but it would also be wrong to call him simply cult or cerebral. He has that righteousness and pomp that assists the finest rappers in delivering their message. His ability to mould pop-rap hooks with minutes-long introspective verses is the key to his ascendancy. His style evokes images of some of  the greatest names in rap history - That direct, urgent flow you hear from rappers like Tupac, Kanye West, RZA and Nas.

DAMN will be remembered for years to come as the point Kendrick Lamar officially elevated from Crown Prince to the undisputed king of Hip-hop. DAMN will be ranked alongside the great classics of the genre, alongside the platinum standard releases from the legends Kendrick will have spent his childhood lip-syncing to in the mirror. More mature that Good Kid..., More accessible than Butterfly, More polished than untitled unmastered, and more angry, more vital and more relevant than any other rap record you'll hear for a long time. This is album of the year. We might as well pack up and go home, because it doesn't get any better than this.

02: Animal Collective - Meeting Of The Waters - B


Animal Collective is a fluid ensemble, with members interchanging and evolving with each release. It's a lottery of artistic vision - You'll never know what they're going to come up with from one release to the next. I was quietly disappointed with last year's mushy Painting With, and while I skipped its companion release The Painters, I was still well up for giving Meeting Of The Waters a few spins.

Animal Collective released Meeting for Record Store Day, after recording it live in a rainforest, of course. That's a canny summation of the album's sound. You can hear rain showers and wind rustling through the trees. The album is peaceful and calm on the surface, underpinned with an isolated psychological edge. Meeting is a solitary walk into the forest, it's about being totally alone and trapped with your thoughts. Merely 2 members of the collective are credited on this album, which underlines the disparate feel throughout.

I'm a total sucker for noise and drone on albums. When it's piqued by small islands of song structure, it's all the better. After the 13+ minute journey of the opening track, Meeting turns a corner into Man Of Oil, an acidy acoustic piece, and it's like you've wandered through the forest and stumbled across someone sat playing guitar. Meeting has a subtle playability, It's such a compact record, barely breaching past 30 minutes, but it feels long and involved. It's trippy, broody, dark and reflective. Its weirdness and bohemian sensuality define the sound of a band that repeatedly refuse to conform to categorisation.

The Collective don't have any kind of official video on Youtube for this release, but it's only 30 minutes long, so listen to the whole thing, why dontcha.


03: Feist - Pleasure - B

04: Gorillaz - Humanz - B

One of the bigger anticipated releases for 2017, Humanz was dropped as the usual art-and-music double whammy from Gorillaz, one of the finest and most unique pop bands of the last 25 years. With Blur being on recording hiatus for most of the last decade, Gorillaz is arguably Damon Albarn's most important project - Certainly the most popular, and since the post-Britpop era was heralded with one of it's biggest stars forming a virtual Pop/Hip-hop/Electronica/etc, group, we've enjoyed a swathe of high quality albums, with image, art and animation just as important as the galaxy of guest stars that feature on each one. Their self-titled 2001 debut was verging on revolutionary in terms of execution and ambition, and they've steadily improved since.

Humanz is a bit of a damp squib for me, though. It's too disjointed to stand up to the better Gorillaz albums like Demon Days and Plastic Beach. It's a collection of songs which all sound fairly good together, but they could be played in any order and still achieve the same effect. Most of the guest appearances don't uplift the album, and there's no real direction or point to any of it. There's an identity to Gorillaz that fails to come out properly on Humanz. They concede too much creative licence to their guest stars, rendering the album devoid of a cohesive theme. However while this is nowhere near their finest moment, Humanz is worth a few spins and the inevitable world tour that will follow. Gorillaz is a project that still has plenty of mileage left, and if one of their lesser releases is this good, that just goes to show how special Gorillaz is.

05: Talib Kweli - The Seven - B

November 2016 Review

It was hard to listen to a full crop of albums in December, what with Christmas and New Year and drinking my body weight in Prosecco every weekend. In between the cheeseboard binges, endless travel and general festive fun I actually ended up listening to 9 albums. That's more than some people managed all year, so I'm happy with that.

The Progressive Metal fans amongst you will have spotted May's Protest The Hero EP sitting there, sticking out like spotty ginger child. I don't know why, but I had it in my head that it had been released in November, so I stuck it on the list with these albums and listened through. It's too good to not list to be fair, it only just missed the top 5, so it's going in!


The Rest:


Justice - Woman - B

Electro House/Nu-Disco


Protest The Hero - Pacific Myth - B

Progressive Metal


Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - Weekly Mansions - B

Electronic Pop


Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - Zapopan - C

Experimental Rock


The Best:


01: A Tribe Called Quest - We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service - A

Alternative Hip-hop


With the tragic death of legendary MC and all-round decent dude Phife Dawg coming earlier in 2016, the Hip-hop world breathed a heavy sigh of resignation - It meant no more new material from A Tribe Called Quest, the cerebral superstars that have rang against the walls at any given 4am after party throughout the past 25 years. When the group announced the release of We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service mere months after Phife's passing, it signalled a surprise resurrection. Quest were back in the game, for the final round.

Q-Tip's voice is the smoothest in the business, the velvet-toned counterpoint to Phife's more rugged delivery. When they mix in with the idiosyncratic quirkiness and warm Jazz tones that comprise the Quest sound, it's hard to think of a Hip-hop group that can match them for sheer likeability. The tunes roll off the tracklist one-by-one and all add their own spice to the eclectic blend of sounds. We The People..., a short, downbeat statement on the oppression of minority groups, Melatonin, a chilled vocal-hooked instant Quest classic, Black Spasmodic, an off-kilter guitar skank, Movin' Backwards, featuring a top-notch turn from Anderson .Paak, all these songs are undeniably brilliant, pushing through with Quest's righteous Afro-centrism just as well as any of their 90's output did.

Phife is tributed on this record perfectly. It would be too easy to turn Thank You into a memorial project, overshadowing the fine work put into the album before he died. Instead, Quest dedicate only 2 songs to their fallen comrade, the easy-soul cut Lost Somebody and The Donald, which is a buoyant closing number, Phife Dawg's name being repeated affectionately over and over until the end of the record. That's fitting for Phife - From what I've heard of him, he'd never want it to be all about him.

Thank You holds on to the basic tenets the group gained fame for in their earlier years. They've not lost the magic after nearly 3 decades. It's wonderful that Phife ended up with a few verses on record for this project, their presence is a grand tribute for the man, it's good that he was able to put his imprint on the last ever Quest album. If this is the final chapter of A Tribe Called Quest's journey, it's a brilliant way to end such a distinguished group's time in the game.

02: Metallica - Hardwired... to Self-Destruct - A

Heavy Metal


The Hetfield/Hammett partnership is one of my favourites in all music. The great thing about the boys is that they are nowhere near the most technical or creative players in the world, but something happens when they get together that is teeth-clenchingly monolithic. Together, they've written some of the most ubiquitous and celebrated pieces of heavy guitar music, and along with one of  the worst drummers ever and a revolving cast of bassists, they've ruled the goddamn universe for about 30 years. They released a double album of Thrash Metal in November, and it's rock solid.

Hardwired... to Self-Destruct pulses with thrash and flex, calling back to their 80's material with chugging guitars, Hetfield's signature rallying calls, and complex song structure. They've always been anti-war, but this one feels like a specific statement against the rising tide of conflict across the globe. There's a lot of hard grooves on the album, with some softer tracks - The guitar work on Dream No More, Halo On Fire and Here Comes Revenge echoes Superunknown-era Soundgarden, ManUNkind is a wandering elaborate piece with many different moods. Songs like that give a break from the long thrash sections that reverberate throughout pieces like Atlas, Rise!, Moth Into Flame, Spit Out The Bone and the like. It's well-balanced, and just about worth the double album status.

Hardwired's got that Metallica imprint all over it - the barely controlled rage, the speaker-melting guitar solos, the sombre ballad sections, the distraught desperation at the insanity of man. The production is thick, it's a perfectly constructed brick wall. The guitars sit crisply above the drums, and the vocals only take prominence when they absolutely have to. Because that's why we're here, right? We want riffs. Perhaps that's what's so attractive about Hardwired, it's not Metallica doing covers, or stripping themselves back, or being clever. It's Metallica being Metallica.

This is Metallica's 10th studio effort, and the causal observer can be forgiven for thinking that there is little ground left to cover in their creative sphere, Metal being the intensely dense, nuanced genre it is. What you've got to remember here is that Hardwired is their first album since the complex and demanding Death Magnetic, now 8 years in the past, and is quite a switch-up from that album's style. It represents a sound they haven't explored on a record cover-to-cover for a quarter of a century. For that alone, it deserves its spot. While much of the latter half of 'Tallica's back catalogue has been routinely slung onto the "Yeah, it's alright" pile, I'd like to think that this one has a little more staying power. The best one they've done since The Black Album.

03: Animals As Leaders - The Madness Of Many - A

Progressive Metal/Jazz

04: Czarface - A Fistful Of Peril - B

Hip-hop


Rap's superhero obsession has permeated the genre's DNA since records began, with some of the most stoic personalities indulging in their own pseudonym-based villainy at some point in their career. Czarface is the latest iteration of Wu-Tang visionary Inspectah Deck and 90's beatsmiths 7L & Esoteric's coalition, and represents their own tribute to the cartoon heroes of their childhood. A Fistful Of Peril offers up an unapologetic slice of old-skool beats, pumping with the fresh production of the modern era.

Peril doesn't push the boundaries any further than last year's Every Hero Needs A Villain, but that's the point. Czarface is it's collective member's folly, their unfettered sandpit project, a reward for the big rap records of 20 years ago. The boys revel thoroughly in the flat-out, driven-through simplistic beats. Repetitive guitar chops and nerdy vocal samples abound. It's easy, smooth stuff. The age of Boom-Bap has passed, but its fans are still around, and there's plenty of room for this head-bopping gem in today's Hip-hop landscape.

05: The Weeknd - Starboy - B

Pop/RnB


Solo songsmith and Millenial Wail-milking The Weeknd drops his latest smooth cut of silk, with a smattering of impressive guest appearances. This album has surprised me in how little attention it's got from the mainstream music press - his sound is rhetorically zeitgeist. The melodic, pitch-shifted warblings sometimes morph into full-on rap verses, channelling the likes of Drake and Kanye, with whom Mr Weeknd could (and should) be granted contemporary status. Starboy is the kind of stuff that could only be made in the mid-10's; we will look back on music like this in 20 years and say it was the sound of the decade.

Sadly, Starboy is a good example of a trope I find completely distasteful in music - Too many songs on an album. I'm no minimalist by any stretch, (the 2nd album on this top 5 is a double) but there's an art to knowing when it's time to fade out the dying embers of the closing number, and on this album, that's around about the 12th track. Unfortunately, it just keeps going. When you stuff 18 songs on to the same disc, inevitably it will suffer from the inclusion of a lot of filler, which is such a shame, because there is absolutely no need to pad this record out. There are over half a dozen wonderfully catchy downtempo tunes lost in the swamp. It's worth finding them if you wanna dive in and have a swim.

That's November's choices. As always, I'm very happy with the top 5, there's just simply been loads of brilliant releases in 2016. The top list will be hard to compile, mainly 'cos I'm gonna have to leave some incredible records out of the top 20. It's gonna be good though, There are several albums I've loved this year that haven't had nearly enough recognition. So I'll recognise them. Happy New year, everyone.