#20: The Delfonics - Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics
Due to his prominence as the bandleader of the Roots,
Questlove is in the rare position where he can try to make a record with Bill
Withers and end up with Al Green as a consolation prize. With his work
revitalizing the Delfonics, Adrian Younge deserves to jump up to that level,
allowing him to work with some of the greatest and most prominent artists in
the history of soul. Younge absorbs old music with the ear of a great sampler,
flipping old film soundtracks and obscure break-filled R&B nuggets into his
own compositions. When this instinctive method is paired with an unfairly
forgotten soul legend like William Hart, the resulting album sounds like it was
made in a world where seventies soul and nineties hip-hop somehow developed
simultaneously. Adrian Younge Presents
the Delfonics sounds completely out of time, a record some future crate
digger will be mystified by.
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#19: Inspectah Deck and 7L & Esoteric - Czarface
Insepctah Deck’s verse on Gang Starr’s “Above the Clouds”
remains one of his career best. It was also a tantalizing view into what a
member of the Wu-Tang Clan could sound like over more traditionalist New York
boom bap as opposed to the groundbreaking RZA sound that the Wu generals mostly
stuck to during the group’s best years in the ‘90s. Czarface, Deck’s full length collaboration with 7L & Esoteric,
shows how great it could have been if any of the generals had made a more
straightforward boom bap record back then. Deck sounds revitalized here,
turning in the second best album of his career (for all its detractors and its
couple of weaker songs, his first album Uncontrolled
Substance remains the most underrated Wu album of the ‘90s). Esoteric
remains a very good emcee in spite of his general lack of personality, but the
stars here are Deck and 7L’s head-knocking beats. Czarface manages to be both an enticing alternate history and a
strong revitalization for one of the best rappers who never quite managed to
pull off a satisfying solo career.
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#18: Chance the Rapper - Acid Rap
I didn’t like Acid
Rap when I first heard it. I was one of the few contrarians that argued
that Chance the Rapper’s debut 10Day
was better (not that I even listened to 10Day
all that much). It seemed to me that he had accentuated many of his more
annoying vocal qualities the second time around, and most of the beats didn’t
grab me. I held onto “Good Ass Intro” and “Cocoa Butter Kisses” and mostly
ignored the rest of the album even as Chance’s hype grew and it became clear
that Acid Rap would be one of the
most acclaimed albums of the year. Then one time while walking to the L from
work, “Interlude (That’s Love)” came on shuffle, and I finally got what
everyone was so excited about with this kid. I’m still not 100% sold on the
project, and there are a few songs that I skip more often than not, but it’s still
an exciting, assured project from a young talent. He’s so close to the level
that so many have lifted him up to, and his next project is automatically one
of my most anticipated albums of 2014.
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#17: Dirty Beaches - Drifters/Love is the Devil
In spite of their status as one of the great proto-post-punk
bands (that subgenre tag makes no sense, but bear with me), it’s a shame that
Suicide’s influence isn’t too deeply felt these days. Their first two albums
still hold up, and it’s great to see their torch being held up by one artist:
Alex Zhang Hungtai, better known as Dirty Beaches. His double album Drifters/Love is the Double is a huge
step forward from his great album Badlands,
and finds him moving away from the more sample-based approach of his earlier
work. For Drifters, Hungtai performs
as part of a five-piece band that recorded and looped their own
instrumentation, Portishead-style. Love
is the Devil, the more ambient second disc, is a collection of live in the
studio compositions performed by Hungtai alone on guitar and keyboard. Both
discs are absolutely haunting, and are a great example of an artist working in
an established aesthetic and pushing on the boundaries of that aesthetic until
it’s completely his own.
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#16: Billy Woods & Blockhead - Dour Candy
In an old entry on his Phatfriend blog, Blockhead
mentioned that he isn’t happy with the drums on the beats he gave Aesop Rock on
Float and the landmark Labor Days. Since the latter album, he’s
worked with Aesop Rock only occasionally, and his beats became a rarer sight on
other rappers’ albums, leaving him to focus on his solo instrumental work. That
all changed this year with an album with Ohio rapper Illogic and upcoming
projects with Marq Spekt and Open Mike Eagle. The most surprising and
unexpectedly the most exciting of these was Dour
Candy, his album with Vordul Mega protégé Billy Woods. Billy Woods released
the promising History Will Absolve Me
last year, but working with one producer helped him put together a much more
concise and cohesive work. While he hasn’t gotten the attention that other,
more publicized rappers get, he’s an astonishingly talented and verbose rapper,
and his assured performance forced Blockhead to turn in some of the best beats
of his career. Blockhead made good on his desire for better drums, from the
enticing cymbal work throughout to the handclaps on “Lucre.” I never would have
thought that the middle ground between Cannibal Ox, the Cella Dwellas, and the
Artifacts could be so tremendously fertile for post-Def Jux underground rap.
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#15: Kanye West - Yeezus
Somehow managing to be one of the consensus albums of the
year on most best-of lists and one of the most divisive hip-hop albums in years,
Yeezus’s contradictions are its most
compelling quality. An immaculately crafted industrial background is merged
with mostly half-assed and frequently reprehensible lyrics from an artist who’s
always been a producer first and a rapper second. Yet most of the beats on Yeezus are music-by-committee sounds
that were arguably more the work of Daft Punk, TNGHT, and Rick Rubin than they
were of Yeezy himself, and those same half-assed lyrics can be interpreted as a
purging of Ye’s monstrous id on the verge of the birth of his daughter. I’m
still unpacking and interpreting these ambiguities six months later, and while
I’m still convinced that the conversation surrounding Kanye West as an artist
needs to change, there is no doubt that his sixth solo album is one of the most
compelling of the year.
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#14: Forest Swords - Engravings
Getting Lee “Scratch” Perry to version one of your songs
is a tremendous honor and validation for any dub artist. So when Scratch
deigned to put his stamp on Forest Sword’s excellent “Thor’s Stone” a couple of
months ago, it was a great show of faith for the young artist. Yet Engravings, Forest Swords’ debut album,
isn’t dub reggae, and it isn’t quite dubstep either. It sounds just outside
established genre conventions, forging a new path for dub, placing the guitar
in the foreground of the music along with the bass. Each listen pulls away new
layers of the compositions, allowing the listener to become wholly immersed in
the sounds, a sea of sonic trees that is both comforting and unsettlingly
difficult to escape from.
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#13: Ka - The Night's Gambit
If someone made an avant-garde black and white street
crime movie, a sort of Boyz in the Hood for
the arthouse crowd, then Ka’s third album The
Night’s Gambit could be the soundtrack. It’s more impressionistic than plot
driven, eleven dark vignettes that are all cool menace and minimalist
soundscapes. Ka is one of the most calmly talented emcees out right now, and
his production is a marvel of New York boom bap. That he’s sticking it out in
his day job as a NY firefighter while spending his nights handling every aspect
of writing and recording his albums, directing videos for every one of his
albums’ songs and spending his off days selling his CDs in front of the old Fat
Beats storefront is all the more impressive. Ka released The Night’s Gambit in the middle of summer. I listened to it once,
recognized its greatness, and put it on the shelf until winter. An album this
ice cold just doesn’t sound right if it isn’t grey, cold, and gloomy out.
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#12: Jonwayne - Rap Album One
Aside from a few taps between lines near the end of the
song, there are no drums on “After the Calm,” the opening track on Jonwayne’s Rap Album One. Without the rhythmic base
that has been the bedrock of hip-hop since its foundation forty years ago,
Jonwayne leaves you nothing to focus on but his voice. And what a voice it is,
a meaty baritone that demands attention like few other new rappers. Aside from
one verse by Scoop Deville on “The Come Up, Pt. 1” and a song given entirely to
Zeroh (appropriately titled “Zeroh’s Song”) Wayne’s is the only voice you hear
on Rap Album One, allowing for few
distractions from his astounding and confounding lyrics. Plus he’s got the
funniest album cover of the year once you figure it out.
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#11: The Flaming Lips - The Terror
This is the darkest, most unhappy album that the Lips have
ever made. Goodbye to the soaring melodies and uplifting lyrics and goodbye to
probably about half of the group’s fans too. There are a lot of bleeps and
bloops and misplaced sounds drifting all over this record like cosmic detritus,
and Wayne Coyne’s voice sounds absolutely ragged. Every song on the album gives
the impression that this album was absolute hell to make. It sounds as if the
group is trying to boil the existential terror of the universe and of human
relationships into nine songs, and they were remarkably successful. I hope that
this is the furthest they go down this particular rabbit hole (Embryonic is definitely the better album
from this phase of their career), but this is a great direction for the band to
take for now. Instead of making the personal political on The Terror, they made the personal cosmic.
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