Top Albums of 2013: #20-11

#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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Review: Inspectah Deck and 7L & Esoteric - Czarface

Let me address this before I do anything else. Yes, this album is called Czarface, and yes, that is a terrible, awful name. I’m willing to bet that Deck, Eso, and 7L thought this name sounded cool and no one in their respective circles felt like chiming in to tell them how dumb Czarface actually sounds.[1] Get past the name, however, and there’s a lot about this project that’s worth getting excited about. In spite of the diminishing quality of his solo albums since 1999’s Uncontrolled Substance, Inspectah Deck never fell off as a rapper.[2] Instead, Deck’s weaknesses are in the beat selection and album crafting departments. Deck’s ear for beats is often terrible and his albums have accordingly come out disjointed, repetitive, and generic. When he has an executive producer or someone else guiding the project, as he did on Uncontrolled Substance, he ends up with a much better collection of beats and a more satisfying album than he does otherwise. So in spite of Esoteric’s deficiencies as a rapper—one can only have so much patience for interchangeable verses about how good he is at rapping—Deck choosing to link up with 7L and Esoteric for an album was a shrewd choice. 7L is a very good but occasionally generic producer, and Esoteric is much better at putting together listenable and satisfying albums than Deck is. Deck and 7L & Esoteric balance out each other’s worst qualities.