Also, no more links.* I don't want you get distracted and quit reading my amazing insights into art, existence and the universe. and everything. Hold down the invisible button on your pocket computer and speak the words 'x y', where x equals the name of the song you want to hear and y equals the artist who hath recorded said, literally, song. IOW, GIB.
Also, I'll be going full gonzo, both for the fun of it and for the sake of time. These are generally my thoughts live as I'm listening, with little editing afterwards.
Boosie BadAzz - In My Feelings (Going Thru it)
Feature Track: Call of Duty
Rating: 5 respects!
First release of 2016. Listening to every hip-hop record on the list really slowed down the process last year, so I was not surprised to see a hip-hop release at the top of the list, but the first track Rain was hard not too listen to and feels quite cathartic. I'm going to like this one.
Track 2, Cancer features the artist laying bare his fears and anxiety over being diagnosed with cancer. Real.
His style is full of 'mangs' and 'gurrr' (for girls), and at first listen sounds lazy, but it's clear that Boosie is putting himself out there in a serious way. Although he hails form Louisiana, the feeling reminds me of the early westcoast, story-telling confessional vibe.
Warning Signs and Bad Guy hold up and start to hint at a sound more like Kid Cudi's 2014 Journey. A sound, that I that I hope catches on.
I was certain that Cancer would be the feature track from this album. But now I think it has to be Call of Duty. Boosie is all in, here. Setting the bar high for everyone else this year. This album holds up and pulls itself along. I was ready to skip every track and ended up playing the whole album through. Right to the end. If you don't feel a catch in your throat during the closing track I Know They Gone Miss Me, you ignant.
Thanks Boosie! Be proud of this one, brother!
Rachel Platten - Wildfire
Feature Track: Astronauts
Rating: 3 stars
This was hit and miss but with more hit than miss, I think. The voice is undeniable. The songs are well recorded and production is great but I think this album was a victim of someone's desire to make a '12 song record' and so they did what they had to in order to get content. This is a horrible disservice to most artist, this one especially. There is at least one powerful 5 song EP and a killer 3 song EP in here. Or a really good 8 song album. But it makes for a slightly tedious 12 song hike.
Hey Hey Hallelujah comes in at track 2 and kept me on the line. This is great because it got me to songs like Speechless, Fight Song, and Better Place.
Lone Ranger hit close to home with some of my closest guarded feelings:
Sometimes I get high, sometimes I get low
But I'm calm as can be in a room full of strangers
But oh my, don't try to get close
I'm just gonna leave 'cause baby I'm a lone ranger
The horns in the chorus of You Don't Know My Heart hit just in the right place, even though I'm not digging the song that much.
Astronauts steps into existential prose-pop in a very satisfying way. Overall, an enjoyable experience.
David Bowie
Blackstar
Feature Track: we all have our own favorites
Rating: Infinity
Of course, everyone will be talking about this. There won't be anything else to say by the time I publish this rink. My first impression was Charles Mingus meets AWOL Nation. I loved every second of it. Before he died. And especially after. I didn't even know he had cancer.
Hinds
Leave Me Alone
Feature Track: Bamboo
Rating: 5 DGNF
These songs might be about mass castration, poignant political discourse or nothing at all. Easy to listen to. Exhilarating in spots. Sounds exactly like the cover looks. If you like Polaroids and anxiety, this is your jam.
And you know what? Fuck. Seriously.
This is the record that came out directly after David Bowie. And I like it for it's context and continuity. These girls tune to their own freq which is the best that any of us can ever do. Let my tombstone read, "I thought this was interesting and felt compelled to write something on the internet about it"
KSI
Keep Up
Feature Track: Lambo
Rating: 5 luxury sports cars!
I don't know much about the genre and I couldn't tell you the difference between manufactured tropes and authentic sound. It all sounds good to me. In general, it psyches me up and helps me retain focus and energy.
I like the tone of this record from the start. an 'speech-to-text' female voice that in America might be described as a 'Valley-Girl' opens the record translating what appear to be facebook posts or tweets into a snide remark about how little this group cares about your (or my) criticism.
Kilimanjaro is a driving flow punctuated with epic, angry posturing and a delivery that makes it slightly uncomfortable to listen to in casual company. This is indicative of the genre. Search out music featured on this blog and play it in public at your own risk.
Featuring the track Lambo Refuelled. Check this track out first to familiarize yourself with the focus and technical achievements these musicians are capable of.
All in all, it reminds of DMX for some reason.
Villagers
Where have you been all my life?:
Decline to Rate [Special Case]
One of the best parts of being an obviously clueless music critic is that I have no burden of necessity to frame facts and information that I literally found out seconds before slightly rewording it and putting it in this article or not having disjointed run-on sentences.
I've never heard of this band. A quick google search revealed a Pitchfork review of this album (of course, they beat me to it). I couldn't help but catch a glance at their rating. They say 7.5. This is akin to glancing your neighbor's hand in gin. Now I know that I should at least be "digging it".
The same pitch-fork article informed me that this was a re-recording of some songs from last year. They seemed to think this was acceptable for this particular band. I've never heard any of these songs. They have the sort of vulnerability that's become popular since that band with the bass drum and acoustic instruments got real popular a while ago.
They get really quiet, they get really loud. Not afraid to cry, not afraid to yell. Vulnerable yet Vigorous. I should probably go listen to the originals. I quickly scanned Darling Arithmetic and {Awayland} (where most of these songs seem to come from). This reveals a band with a great sense of momentum and gorgeous harmonies produced with the most minute of subversive mixing & arranging techniques.
On first glance, 2013's {Awayland} seems to be the record I would like the most. I like the songs better on their original releases than this re-recorded release. I look forward to a studio record from this band now that I'm aware of them.
Anderson .Paak
Malibu
Feature Track: The Season
Deep Cut: Silicon Valley
Rating: 5 Please let the whole year be like thises.
So far 2016 has been off to a much more enjoyable start than 2014. I'm a sucker for smoothly delivered, soulful, inspirational shit. This is that honest dank. The grooves feel like Florida looks on the back of a postcard. Not the side with the glossy picture of sunrise or a weird 80's Kodak shot of some supposedly relevant buildings.
This record sounds like the back of a post-card. Where people might write something personal. In this case, it is the kind of postcard that makes one post the writing side of the post-card on the wall instead of the picture side.
It took until track 3 before the explicit rating really kicked in. This track is great, but it brings out one of the things that puzzles me about many artists. This song is packed with not only amazing delivery and chill beats. It also contains well constructed lyrics that feel more like story-telling than bravado.
Whether this is a real story or not, it is riveting. What immediately follows is no less engaging and concludes with a sufficient punch-line. And while reading the following lyrics might seem funny or novel when reading them silently in your head, the delivery makes this decidedly not a work place friendly song.
And I can do anything but move backwards / The hardest thing is to keep from being distracted / My big sister still claim me on them taxes / Tell Uncle Sam I just need a second to add this / Gave my momma ten racks / And she packed and went to Chumash with it / Could triple the worth and give me half of it / Half of it I took in the back of the air mattress / A quarter stash was stashed in a box with the Air Maxs'
The rest got lost in Saks with my wifey, no BM / Whack niggas dropping links in my DM / Bad bitches up and down a nigga TM / I'm glad that you finally made it to the future but you're late / And the price is through the muthafuckin' roof / If you want you could wait outside the building / I ain't takin' no more meetingsThe rest of the song goes on with even more to the story. Music like this is difficult to process because I know it is not geared towards me, but I like it. And the reasons I like it are impossible to explain to anyone else who doesn't like this, which would be many people that I know. So the discussion as to the actual artistic merits of this type of music and art is often left up to only those who are incapable or unwilling to recognize the meanings. This is powerful music.
Daughter
Not To Dissapear
Feature Track: Numbers
Deep Cut: Made of Stone
Rating: 5 Thank-yous!
Started out sounding like a 9 hour youtube video of a chakra tone. Mellow, building music. Pleasant female voices with a lot of ethereal oohing and ahhing going on in the background paired with resonating pad synths.
The vocals are present, naked sounding and crisp. I say "naked sounding" because of the way that they sit on top of the backing tracks which obscures whatever masterful engineering processing is going on to levitate the vocals out.Then I'll take my clothes off
And I'll walk aroundBecause it's so nice outsideAnd I like the way the sun feels
Doing the Right Thing is a great example of why this sound works so well for both meditation and energy/focus listening session. Part of the sound is derived from the crushed "lo-fi" sound of the backing tracks contrasted with the more "hi-fi" presentation of the vocals. The clear mid-range and high sounds (bells/chimes/synth?) also help with "enveloping" effect. This track builds to a great noise/misanthropic/entropic outro highlighting all the glories of the instrumental bed mentioned above.
Daz-n-Snoop
CUZZNZ
Feature Track:
3 Marijuana Blounts!
I've always been a big fan of snoop. He is almost 70 years old and he still sounds like the same bad ass dog-pounder from when I was 10. Which means he was 50 when he released Doggystyle. I had no idea.
Someone just walked in the room that would not find Snoop Dogg ironic or enjoyable, so I turned it off. I probably won't listen to the rest of it. It sounds just like Snoop Dogg got with another capable rapper (Daz Dilly) and made a pretty smooth record. If you like Snoop, this will not disappoint. It sounds a bit out of time in that the flows are largely absent of the tricks and styles seen in a lot of popular hip-hop today. This gives it an archaic, stilted feel... with anyone except for the D-O-double-G.
Hank Williams Jr.
It's About Time
Feature Track: Born To Boogie (ft. Brantley Gilbert, Justin Moore, Brad Paisley, Michael J. Fox, Gnarls Barkley and The Rock)
New Rule: re-recordings get a pass unless I am familiar enough with the originals to care, and then I probably won't like it, so I doubt anything will get written anyway. That being said. This was one of my favorite songs when I was a kid. I remember the first time I heard it was directly after Casey Kasum's voice as it premiered on the Top 40. I think it might have come on Sundays. I remember hearing it every week and this song was one of the first songs on the radio that got my attention. I was 7 or 8. By this point I had figured out the format of the show and liked following the path of the different songs. I listened and waited to hear where that song was going to go. Each show, the anticipation built as it's place in the chart last week passed. It made it all the way to Number 1! I don't remember if I shared my excitement with anyone else in the car, but I was elated. He won! And then the song stayed there for awhile. This album also helped him become one of only a few artists to be charted for 6 decades straight. At this point, he is clearly leaning on CeeLo though.
Panic! At The Disco
Death Of A Bachelor
Featured track: Crazy=Genius
Rating: 4 Stars
Out of the gate, this album carries itself through your mind. Driving pop, of course, that sounds great in almost any environment but also contains enough sonic risks to appeal to not-too-cynical-yet music fans. I'm not familiar with the rest of this really famous band's discography, but this could, very well be one of their best albums.
While it loses some steam at the very end, the whole album holds together and plays through very nicely. In a time where many artist are filling out what should be 3 song EPs into 10 songs shit-albums, it is nice to see 11 songs that are, for the most part fun and engaging to listen to.
The preponderance of blatant pop production/arrangement tropes is the only thing that kept this from a a top rating.
Show of Hands
The Long Way Home
Feature Track: Hallow's Eve
Deep Cut: Virginia
Rating: 3.5 Old Fiddles
It's a Irishey folk-ballad album called The Long Way Home. The cover features an HDR cinematic shot of what I assume are the two musicians that comprise this band. It looks like it could be a screen cap from Australia. The music, gratefully, is not polished at all. It sound just like these guys sat down and recorded a few songs and drank some beers.
If you like how it sounds at the beginning, you will like the whole thing. I know what you're thinking, 43 minutes is too long to listen to calming folk music. But surprisingly, this record was over before I realized it. I had to double check to make sure spottily wasn't on shuffle. Very well done Gentlemen, very well done!
Editors Note:
Because it doesn't matter if people don't read this once a week or once a year, I'm going to try and post these as I finish a week's worth of listening. Now you can see exactly how far behind I am!
*Except for Easter Eggs.
