#10: Ty Segall - SLEEPER
Throughout his insanely prolific career, Ty Segall had
certainly given the impression that his strengths came from fuzz and noise and
general garage rock abandon. So when word came that his first album after his
trifecta of amazing albums from 2012 would be largely acoustic, it was cause
for some minor concern. Sure, his knack for songwriting could be expected to
remain intact when it was ported into an acoustic setting, but what about that
power? SLEEPER dashed those fears,
finding the power in quietude. Even the most pleasant of dreams often come with
a feeling that something isn’t quite right, and the prettiest songs on here are
the most unsettling. Songs like “She Don’t Care” are gorgeous, but the lyrics
signal the deterioration of an important relationship. It’s a dark, sad, beautiful,
catchy record, and it’s possibly the best of his career so far.
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#9: DJ Rashad - Double Cup
Electronic music has spawned so many distinct subgenres
over the last forty years that it’s hard for a relative outsider such as myself
to find a good place to start with most of them. Outside of the recent L.A.
beat scene which I have listened to a lot of, my explorations of other vibrant
electronic forms, such as house, techno, jungle, drum and bass, dubstep,
minimalist/ambient, and others is unfortunately been very limited. As a Chicago
native, the sound that I am most disappointed in myself for ignoring is
footwork, which was built by local producers from pieces of house, juke,
hip-hop, and R&B. It’s a sound that’s gained increasing traction over the
past few years, and it’s pushed into prominence through the Bangs & Works compilations, exciting
live performances by Traxman and others, and Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap, which counts footwork as an
important influence. DJ Rashad’s debut album Double Cup proves that the community of footwork artists is ready
for and deserving of more attention. It’s about as funky and soulful as
electronic music, even sample-based electronic music, gets, and it makes the
most of footwork’s sonic parameters. Rashad’s canny use of vocal samples and
guest features, which he chops up and uses in the same way he uses the
instrumental, is the best part of this record, which situates him as the man to
beat among footwork producers in Chicago.
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#8: Janelle Monae - The Electric Lady
Janelle Monae doesn’t make small albums. Both of her
records thus far are packed with overtures, skits, enough different sounds to
match Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times,
and an absolutely epic scope, all amounting to long albums that are not at all
slogs to get through. The Electric Lady
actually manages to top her last album The
ArchAndroid in all of these aspects (although the skits, while fun, don’t
really need to be there other than to push the vague sketch of a story along).
The album has rocking burners (the Prince-assisted “Given’ ‘Em What They Love,”
quiet storm love jams (“Primetime” featuring the great Miguel), ‘40s-style pop
balladry (“Look into My Eyes”), and “Q.U.E.E.N.” which is just a jam of the
greatest proportions. If this was a just world, “Q.U.E.E.N.” would have been
one of the biggest hits of the year, but we don’t, so the most exciting pop
song of the year didn’t break through to the mainstream. Prince has made it
clear in interviews that he loves Monae’s music (and who else has ever managed
to get a Prince feature on one of their tunes?), and her comfort with such a
wide range of sounds, her conceptual scope, and most importantly her ability to
write great songs makes her a natural successor to the Purple One.
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#7: Ghostface Killah & Adrian Younge - Twelve Reasons to Die
With the possible exception of his crazy abstract Supreme Clientele style, Ghostface’s
greatest strength has always been his storytelling. So it’s kind of surprising
that it took him eighteen years after his first solo record to make a concept
album. The wait was worth it. Twelve
Reasons to Die channels the best aspects of late ’60s and ‘70s exploitation
and grindhouse flicks: the out-there concepts, the ultraviolence, the rich
details, and the dark atmosphere. Tony Starks breaks away from and declares war
on the DeLuca crime family in Italy, gets betrayed by his lover, and is killed
and boiled down into twelve vinyl records. When these records are played, Tony
Starks, reborn as the Ghostface Killah, rises from the great beyond to take his
gruesome revenge on those who murdered him, along with all of their friends and
family. It’s over the top and ridiculous, but Ghostface and his Wu compatriots
completely sell the concept with their lyrical abilities. Adrian Younge, who is
probably the most effective artist when it comes to channeling the sounds of
old movie soundtracks in his music, served as producer and director of the
project, and his musical contributions, all atmosphere and mood, nearly
overshadow the rapping. Without any raps, Twelve
Reasons to Die would make a great movie soundtrack. With them, the record
sounds like a great movie.
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#6: Danny Brown - Old
Danny Brown’s 2011 album XXX was a masterwork of unrestrained hedonism slowly curdling into
pain and disillusionment as Brown started aging out of that lifestyle. It took
me longer than I would have liked to appreciate Brown’s vocal style and
unconventional beat selection, but I now recognize it as one of the best rap
albums of the last few years. Brown’s follow up is the more difficult album.
Split into two halves that loosely separate the production between boom bap and
more electronic sounds, the album is considerably darker than XXX. Brown goes on four day drug binges
in hotel rooms, ignoring text messages from his daughter because he’s ashamed
to be seen in his condition. Dope fiends rob him of his Wonderbread when he
goes to the store. More and more, he prefers to smoke alone and he needs Xanax
in order to sleep. Even the songs that celebrate drug use and promiscuous sex
seem like they were made to sound increasingly empty as the record progresses
and he finds nothing at the end of his path but more addiction and empty, fleeting
relationships. It’s a haunting record, capturing the ecstatic highs and
crushing lows of drug addiction better than any other rap album I’ve ever
heard.
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#5: 7 Days of Funk - 7 Days of Funk
Snoop Dogg’s career has been disappointing. Doggystyle was so good, but with few
exceptions (“Drop it Like it’s Hot,” about have of Tha Doggfather, his guest verses on 2001) he has failed to live up to his talent since. He had lost his
way, and he needed to get back in touch with his funk roots to get back on the
right track. After a one-off performance with Dam-Funk at SXSW last year, he
reached out to Dam about recording a funk record and releasing it
independently, and Dam, sensing a kindred spirit, happily agreed. Their
resulting collaboration 7 Days of Funk
is the best thing Snoop has done in twenty years and tops everything Dam-Funk
has done since his titanic 5LP 2009 debut Toeachizown.
With the exception of the weak Kurupt verse on “Ride,” I don’t have a single
criticism of this record. Snoop sounds reenergized as a rapper and proves
himself as a more than serviceable singer. Dam-Funk’s music sounds amazing as
always, eliciting joy at every turn. The guests, former Slave frontman and funk
legend Steve Arrington and Snoop’s compatriots in the Dogg Pound, are used
well, but for the most part this is a two man show, as well it should be.
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#4: Savages - Silence Yourself
I read a criticism of
Savages amazing debut album Silence
Yourself somewhere this year that basically wrote off the album as
sounding like 1983. It’s a fair criticism, except Savages sound better
than most of the post-punk bands that were actually recording during that
year. Silence Yourself is, if
you’ll pardon the pun, an absolutely savage first album from the London
quartet. Over 39 relentless minutes, the band rips through eleven tracks
of searing post-industrial doom and gloom. The band’s reputation as one
of the best live acts in recent years (a reputation that is completely
deserved, based on the two times I’ve seen them) set expectations sky
high for their first album, and they surpassed them in every conceivable
way.
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#3: The Underachievers - Indigoism
With the possible exception of my #1 album of the year,
there is nothing I listened to more in 2013 than the Underachievers’ debut
mixtape Indigoism. From the jazzy
boom bap of “Leopard Shepherd” to the bass and negative space of “Herb
Shuttles,” the beats are uniformly incredible, but its emcees AK and Issa Dash
that make it the best mixtape I heard all year. Both started rapping not long
before they started recording the songs from Indigoism (with Issa Dash picking up the mic only a few months
before they came together as a group), but you can’t tell from the way they
twist their nimble flows around the beats that the mostly unknown New York
beatmakers served up for them. In the classic mold of Smif-n-Wessun, the two
are so evenly matched that neither is the star of the tape. Instead, they work
seemingly as one for their shared goal of making the dopest music they can.
Their somewhat limited subject matter started showing some wear on their
follow-up EP The Lords of Flatbush,
everything works here, and their braggadocio and dedication to psychedelic drug
use as the path to enlightenment never wears out its welcome. They signed to
Brainfeeder, home to Flying Lotus, Teebs, Ras G, and tons of other intensely
forward thinking beatmakers. For rappers this skilled and intelligent, it
represents a natural move and a signal that Indigoism
is only the start of a great career.
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#2: Parquet Courts - Light Up Gold
There’s no shortage of self-aware, witty rock coming out
of Williamsburg and the other hipster-infested neighborhoods of New York City
these days, but so much of it is too smug or too soft or too plainly shitty.
Parquet Courts are none of these things. The Brooklyn quartet sticks mostly to
short bursts of clever, literate post-punk, perfectly sequenced so that every
song on the album follows the song it was meant to follow. “Stoned and
Starving” provides a silly break from the witticisms of the other songs, but
it’s no less effective than the songs about how the band couldn’t find bagels
in Texas or careers that are going the way of the buffalo. The emphatically
shouted line (and my vote for one of the best lines of the year) “Socrates died
in the fucking gutter!” comes right in the middle of the terrific first song
“Master of My Craft,” and the top-notch lyrics never stop for 35 minutes. Most
importantly though, these guys fucking rock. The drunk guy who told me after their
July show at Lincoln Hall that they gave him a feeling that he hadn’t gotten
since seeing the Dead Milkmen play in the ‘80s agrees.
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#1: Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels
El-P’s Cancer for
Cure was my favorite album of last year, and the El-P produced R.A.P. Music by Killer Mike wasn’t far
behind. I still listen to the two of them more than I listen to almost anything
else that made my top ten. The news that they were going to put out an album
where they both shared mic duties equally shot the first Run the Jewels album
right to the top of my most anticipated records of the year list. And oh man
did they deliver with this one. Both are at the absolute top of their game
here. Not many artists can make an album that mostly consists of threats to the
listener and everyone around them into the most compelling album of the year,
but few rappers have ever matched the heights these two reached on this album
(check El-P’s verse on the title track and the best description of knocking
someone’s teeth out that’s ever been committed to record, Mike’s verse on “A
Christmas Fucking Miracle”). As far as El-P’s beats are concerned, Killer Mike
puts it better than I ever could: “Producer gave me a beat said it’s the beat
of the year, I said El-P didn’t do it so get the fuck out of here.” By mostly
abandoning the heavy concepts of their monumental 2012 albums and focusing
strictly on straight lyricism, these two made it clear that absolutely no one
is fucking with them right now. They are the best rappers, and El-P is the best
producer. Everyone else needs to step their shit up or continue getting
embarrassed by every song Run the Jewels put out.
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