M83 – Junk

★★★★

Released April 8th, 2016 on Mute Records

My wife and I keep Sirius XMU, the “indie” satellite channel, on in the car pretty much all the time. One consequence of this is that, when the blogger guest DJs come on, things can get pretty random. One day, during what might have been Brooklyn Vegan’s set but was probably Gorilla Vs Bear’s, the subject of vaporwave was brought up. Sort of. Whomever it was referred to what they were playing as “weather-channel-core”, as in “the sort of music that you’d hear played over the weather channel as it flips through various local and regional forecasts.” This is pretty similar to the concept of vaporwave – where the dulcet sounds of late 80s/early 90s training video music (along with every other uncool musical movement of the era) are reconstructed into something bizarrely post-modern. Either way, it’s taking the sound of music that was never really meant to be listened to actively and ensuring that the listener has to do so.

The genre has had some limited success, mainly online. Macintosh Plus (or Vektroid, as she normally goes by) had a lot of people on /mu/ convinced with Floral Shoppe that vaporwave was their life. Saint Pepsi has bubbled around alt-indie radio and Oneohtrix Point Never celebrated his signing to venerable Warp Records with R Plus Seven, a heavily vaporwave-influenced album. Still, in a year where everything sounds like Drake (because everything on the charts has Drake on it, natch), it’s hard to imagine people grooving to adult contemporary saxophones, smooth jazz sounds, factory-preset synth voices, and those hollow, echo-laden drums that scream “cheap Eighties power ballad”. And yet, here is Junk.

Of course, if anyone was going to “go vaporwave”, it was going to be Anthony Gonzalez. His M83 project may have kicked off with a couple of hard-synth albums that appropriated the bombast of Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness for an uncertain new age, but his sound came into its own on Saturdays=Youth, the soundtrack to the dream John Hughes movie that only ever existed in your head. It was unabashedly influenced by the Eighties, to the point where the person inside you that desperately wants to be cool feels uncomfortable listening to it at times. Hurry Up We’re Dreaming followed this up with a sprawling double album of synth-rock heroics, dream pop bliss, and more of that Breakfast Club soundtrack vibe. Junk is not like that. Junk takes Gonzalez’s love of 1987 and dives in full-force. This is the smooth jazz-AOR-proto-diva-power-ballad-hybrid album that has been lurking inside of his head since forever. “Go!” has one of those searing guitar solos that used to anchor pop songs (like Eddie Van Halen’s wailing on “Beat It”); “Walkway Blues” has some texture-treated sax (or synth-sax, possibly); “Moon Crystal” is pure VHS nostalgia – an advertisement for a spa, or some other feature you’d watch on an internal hotel channel. “For The Kids” is the sappiest family movie ballad that was never released in a glut of bad straight-to-video movies, although “Atlantique Sud” comes close. “The Wizard” adds in the thin-tape of cheap commercial grade VHS sounds, like a training video that’s been watched too many times over thirty years. “Sunday Night 1987” closes out the album with exactly what the title promises, a smooth, nearly edgeless bit of calmed-down soulful balladry with those Casio-preset piano noises and reedy late-period Billy Joel saxophones.

Junk has all of the trappings of vaporwave except perhaps for its politics. The artists that originally started piecing together the disparate parts that make up the genre intended to offer a satire or critique of modern consumer culture and the disturbing habit of throwing away everything that is even the slightest bit old. It’s meant to reveal the cracks in the golden facade of capitalism by ironically remixing music that was only intended to be a backdrop to sales tools, or to cynically fill in places in art that was only ever intended to make someone along the chain some money. Does Junk fulfill this? Not particularly. It seems to function instead as an homage to Gonzalez’s youth, much as his previous two albums functioned. It uses nostalgia to make nostalgic art, rather than critique the past and future. It’s done in such a deft and seamless way, however, that I can’t really count that apolitical status as a fault. Instead, it’s a tribute to a time and a sound that most people would rather gloss over or ignore. You can see that reflected in the reaction to the album; most people don’t seem to know what to make of it, thinking that there must be some hidden ironic agenda going on that they’re not in on. The cheese is sincere, however, and celebratory.

AND THE REST…

Deakin

Sleep Cycles

★★★☆

04/08/2016 on My Animal Home Records

That Kickstarter Josh Dibb did initially to crowdfund this album? He donated most of that to charity. Kickstarter is problematic. Sleep Cycles is a good album though, one that approximates the bare essentials of his Animal Collective day job without getting into the high-flying lysergic excesses.

Peter Wolf

A Cure For Loneliness

★★

04/08/2016 on Concord Records

The former singer for the J. Geils Band tries to pretend that thirty years of history hasn’t happened and that he can still get away with lite-rock AOR music. It’s always fun when you can guess exactly where each song is going to go from the minute it starts. Did I say fun? I mean sleep-inducing.

Ben Watt

Fever Dream

★★☆

04/08/2016 on Universal Music

Like an actual fever dream, it goes in many strange directions and there’s very little to grasp onto once you wake up.

Future Of The Left

The Peace and Truce Of The Future Of The Left

★★★

04/08/2016 on Prescriptions Records

I just want an album that’s as rich, over-the-top, and powerful as Travels With Myself And Another. Admittedly, this comes pretty close.

Teleman

Brilliant Sanity

★★★

04/08/2016 on Moshi Moshi Records

One of those indie albums that sounds an awful lot like all the other indie albums. Except for “Dusseldorf” and “Glory Hallelujah”, though: both of those are stellar tracks.

Kendrick Lamar – untitled unmastered

★★★★☆

Released March 4th, 2016 on Top Dawg Records

It is inevitable that an album that set a benchmark as fiercely as To Pimp A Butterfly did would have a collection of b-sides and outtakes left over from its recording sessions.

It is not inevitable that such a collection will stand on its own as a great album in its own right.

Odds n sods collections rarely have the same cache that an artist’s studio work does; they lack in coherence, vary wildly in quality, and you can often tell that there’s a reason that the songs were relegated to one-offs or left on the editing room floor. untitled unmastered does not have that feeling. While it lacks the thematic coherence that K Dot’s opus of corruption and empowerment brought, it continues in the same stylistic pursuits that set that album apart. The jazz influence on untitled unmastered is even more pronounced, leading one to wonder what a fully jazzed-out (and likely Flying Lotus-backed) Kendrick Lamar would sound like. The funk isn’t ignored either, although the primal stomp that fueled magic like “King Kunta” isn’t as prevalent here. Regardless of style and coherence, the quality is top notch on each of the eight tracks. Any one of them could have fit comfortably on To Pimp A Butterfly; in the case of both 7 and 8, it’s almost criminal that they weren’t included. Given that the album was already very long, however, it’s likely that they were cut due to time considerations. Kendrick himself remarks in the liner notes that most of the tracks included here were left out because they weren’t quite finished to his standards, or because there just wasn’t space for them. While that’s a shame, the fact that they’ve achieved release at all is a testament both to Kendrick’s powers as an artist and to the ease of distribution that the internet age has wrought.

It’s telling, I feel, that Kendrick Lamar’s tossed-off album of outtakes feels far more vital and alive than a good half of Kanye’s The Life Of Pablo. The torch of hip hop tastemaker is being passed, and if Dre and The Game’s 2015 output – as well as the success of artists like Anderson .Paak – is any indication, that changeover is occurring sooner rather than later.

AND THE REST…

Wussy

Forever Sounds

★★★☆

03/04/2016 on Shake It Records

The dream of gnarled, dense indie rock is still alive in Cincinnati, and Wussy keeps it going with punch and verve.

Heron Oblivion

★★★★☆

03/04/2016 on Sub Pop Records

Do you fondly remember such mid-00s head-nodder bands like Comets On Fire and Dead Meadow? Excellent, there are members of Comets On Fire in this project. Do you like wispy ambient folk vocals that are reminiscent of a more modern Renaissance? Perfect, Meg Baird is right up your alley. Do you like searing guitar work that marries Boris-level noise to the psychedelic flamboyance of old-school Billy Corgan? You’ve arrived. Seriously, just listen to this album, it’ll haunt you for the rest of your days.

Aurora

All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend

★★☆

03/11/2016 on Glassnote Entertainment Group

An eclectic collection of the darker parts of pop music that largely fails to connect emotionally. Remember the Anchoress album from January? Pretty much my exact same thoughts.

Mmoths

Luneworks

★★★

03/11/2016 on Because Music

Luneworks is a lot like having fitful dreams while sleeping. You can’t quite call them nightmares because they’re only vaguely remembered and you’re left uneasy rather than horrified.

Into It. Over It.

Standards

★★☆

03/11/2016 on Triple Crown Records

Is this Death Cab For Cutie or Taking Back Sunday? Disturbingly, it sounds like equal measures.

Killswitch Engage

Incarnate

★★★

03/11/2016 on Roadrunner Records

For a band I’ve come to increasingly dislike over the past ten years (maybe because I associate them with the regrettable rise of metalcore) their seventh album is surprisingly solid. If only we could convince them to ditch the godawful soaring melodic choruses. This is metal. Stop singing.

Iggy Pop

Post Pop Depression

★★★

03/18/2016 on Loma Vista Records

Largely inessential although still rather interesting for Iggy Pop’s vocal and songwriting debt to his late friend David Bowie. There’s more than a whiff of Berlin-era Iggy-and-Bowie here, minus the Bowie of course.

Latest Reviews

Tortoise – The Catastrophist

★★★

Released January 22nd, 2016 on Thrill Jockey Records

Once upon a time Tortoise were one of the most important bands in popular music. Let’s put scare quotes around “popular”, because let’s face it: post-rock has never, aside from brief Godspeed-induced moments, been popular. Still, arguments about popularity aside, Tortoise gave us two albums – Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT – that helped to shape and define the concept of post-rock as it now exists. That was nearly two decades ago, though; Tortoise circa 2016 is on the tail end of three increasingly mediocre albums, and their major conceits – creaky drum machines, jazz splashes, Krautrock rhythms and trance-inducing funk grooves – are all things that their descendants have spun into cliche. Recognizing this, perhaps, the band has chosen to widen their sound a little, to the point of adding vocals (very few vocals, of course, but something is more than nothing). Unfortunately, the overall effect is one that is too little, too late; the world has passed Tortoise by, and releasing an incrementally different album in January is not going to change that. It’s a decent enough album – stumbling wide-eyed into classic rock tropes to spruce up the surroundings as it does – but it’s not one that will be remembered by the time December rolls around.

David Bowie – Blackstar

Blackstar

★★★★☆

Released January 8th, 2016 on ISO/RCA/Columbia Records

Singles:

“Blackstar“

“Lazarus“

In 2013 David Bowie emerged from ten years of quiet to release The Next Day, an album that recalled his work with the Berlin Trilogy of Low, Heroes, and Lodger without ever actually being as wildly experimental or as unsettling as those three albums. Despite this, it was easily the best album Bowie had released in a long time (personally since Earthlings, for most people since 1980’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)) and gave birth to discussions of a new creative renaissance for him. This idea tends to ignore the fact that, aside from the relatively regrettable period of 1983-1987, Bowie has been in a constant state of reinvention. After his pop period, he became a hard rock dynamo (Tin Machine), a purveyor of sax-soaked New Jack Swing and rave rhythms (Black Tie White Noise), an industrial-etched grunge freak (Outside), and a jungle and drum n bass ingenue (Earthling) before settling into a somewhat more sedate period of more traditional pop/AOR songs.

Still, despite this restless nature, there’s nothing in the Bowie catalog quite like Blackstar.

To say it’s “experimental” is to miss the point. To call it “jazz fusion” is to massively generalize what’s going on here. There’s saxophone all throughout the album, in a way that there hasn’t been since 1993, but it’s not jazz-sax in the sense that one normally considers it. Longtime collaborator Carlos Alomar once likened Bowie’s sax playing to the brushstrokes of an impressionist painter, and this is especially true of the sax usage on Blackstar. Between Bowie and his new lieutenant Donny McCaslin, the saxophone is used in unsettling ways throughout the record, as a tonal voice rather than as the typical flurry of notes or jazzy finger-snapper. In fact, “unsettling” is the best way to describe the album, and in that it’s the first Bowie album to truly evoke unease and contemplation since Scary Monsters. So there. It’s his best since Scary Monsters. People have been using that line to describe Bowie albums since Black Tie White Noise but if we’re really going to examine the man’s discography (and I already have) then it’s more in line with being his best since Heroes. More to the point, it’s not quite like anything else, so comparing it to previous albums is almost a useless exercise. “Blackstar” is nearly ten minutes of atonal noise, thoroughly modern percussion, unsettling lyricism, odd voices, and a clean vocal section that feels like it’s the straight man to the experimentation going on around it. “‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore” is a stellar Bowie song in the tradition of stellar Bowie songs – a more menacing take on something like “Beauty And The Beast”, let’s say – and “Dollar Days” is akin to that, only in the form of a ballad like “Word On A Wing”. “Lazarus” is structured so that every line is punctuated by bursts of sax and distorted guitar, lending it weight and unease; the reworked version of “Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)” makes what was previously an interestingly curious single into a something altogether more gritty, as though the group decided to take the jazzy feel of the original out of the club and into the dark and rainswept streets. “Girl Loves Me” kicks along like the teeth-bared Bowie of the late 1970s and returns to his love of strange languages (Nadsat, from A Clockwork Orange, and Polari, a slang among gay men in Britain in the 1950s) as well as his previous techniques of Burroughs-esque cut and paste. “I Can’t Give Everything Away” is the most straightforward cut on the album, a Bowie crooner like he’d fallen into on Heathen or Reality, although it is far beyond anything that was featured on either (except maybe “Bring Me The Disco King”)

Blackstar does something more than merely prove that Bowie still has it. It presents a worthy addition to the legend that has been created around him. It’s as good as Station To Station, Low, Heroes, or really anything else he’s recorded, and as able to stand on its own.

The 100 Best Albums of 2015, Part 3: 60-41

#60: Waxahatchee – Ivy Tripp

Katie Crutchfield follows up her indie-darling breakthrough with a smokier, more autumn-coloured collection of crunchy rock that would have been called “grunge” twenty years ago. A perfect balance of wistful yearning and fist-in-the-air chording.

#59: Ghost Culture – Ghost Culture

A careful balance between EDM and Depeche Mode-esque synth pop, Ghost Culture manages to give atmosphere to the dance floor, like a thick fog descending onto a crowd of ravers.

#58: Desaparecidos – Payola

Conor Oberst has spent ten years running his Bright Eyes moniker into the ground with increasingly bland and irrelevant releases. So it was a surprise when he announced he was releasing a follow-up to Read Music/Speak Spanish, his 2002 album under the name of his power-punk band Desaparecidos. Despite its out-of-the-blue nature, it hits with genuine fervor, turning politics into heady power-pop with a generous splatter of punk rock bile.

#57: Skyzoo – Music For My Friends

Music For My Friends is the jazz-cat Brooklyn version of Summertime ’06. Both albums feature the artist reminiscing about the year they turned 13 and the way their experiences at that age formed the man they would become. Skyzoo, however, puts together a solid cast of underground producers and creates something lush, dense and sticky. It’s less visceral, but for those with the inclination there’s enough packed in here to keep you satisfied.

#56: John Grant – Grey Tickles, Black Pressure

The former Czars frontman is getting on in years and his wildly hedonistic younger days have left him with a case of HIV. The “Grey Tickles” is an Icelandic phrase playfully describing middle age; the “Black Pressure” is an ominous Turkish phrase describing existential fear and dread. So John Grant is scared about getting old, but he handles it in his usual deeply sarcastic and faintly vicious way.

#55: CHVRCHES – Every Open Eye

Lauren Mayberry and Co. have shifted down from their debut – it’s gone from being “the best synth pop in years” to “really great synth pop” – but here it’s largely a case of not fixing what isn’t broken. There’s big synth movements, throbbing bass, grandiose pop arrangments, and Lauren’s signature voice. It seems to work well for The National.

#54: Florence + The Machine – How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful

After hitting it big with their second album, 2011’s Ceremonials, the English indie group found themselves in the midst of label restructuring, nervous breakdowns, and general chaos. Out of it came a concept album that comes across like a thunderstorm conducted with real thrilling bombast.

#53: A$AP Rocky – At. Long. Last. A$AP

That At. Long. Last. A$AP was actually fairly overlooked this year speaks to how solid a year 2015 was for hip hop. In many other years it would be a real contender: part wicked flow, part smirking absurdity, and a package made out of production that made it all seem so real.

#52: The Wonder Years – No Closer To Heaven

The emo revival continues, but there are few bands that get the mixture of Sunny Day Real Estate and Taking Back Sunday as expertly correct as The Wonder Years.

#51: AFX – orphaned deejay selek, 2006-2008

Another blast from the Richard D James vault brings us a burbling, breakbeat-studded set that could have passed for one of his earlier Analogue Bubblebath EPs. Rarely does retro sound so post-modern.

#50: Wavves & Cloud Nothings – No Life For Me

Forget splitting a 12″ – Dylan Baldi and Nathan Williams are going to blend one. Each of their strengths is on full display here: Baldi brings the switchblade-punk that informs the howling work of his Cloud Nothings and Williams brings the eerie half-cracked beach croon of Wavves. It even manages to distill out the bad parts – the Cloud Nothings tendency to repeat themselves and the regrettable Wavves tendency towards latter day Weezer. Maybe they should just form a band.

#49: Sleaford Mods – Key Markets

At first Sleaford Mods make you think that punk-rap is an actual thing, Death Grips be damned. Then you realize that what Key Markets – and every previous Sleaford Mods album – is: a scuzzy, angrily working class distillation of the best Fall albums.

#48: My Morning Jacket – The Waterfall

My Morning Jacket finally recover their balance after losing themselves up their own asses. Evil Urges and Circuital were out-there elclecticism that did a massive disservice to the sort of blissed-out festival rock they perfected on 2005’s Z. The Waterfall comes stumbling back around to that sound, still bearing the tatters of their more experimental days. There are touches of prog, disco, and some of the more out-there folk stuff they were mainlining since the first Obama election, but at its core it’s a My Morning Jacket album, like they used to make.

#47: Lady Lamb – After

When I added this album to my ongoing list they were called Lady Lamb The Beekeeper; months later they’ve shortened the name down to Lady Lamb, probably because of the success of “Billions Of Eyes”. Under either name, After is an album of twee-minded, wistfully sung alt-rock, crunchy and whimsical in equal measures – as though Camera Obscura had developed a thing for late 90s college rock.

#46: Erase Errata – Lost Weekend

Why do I keep coming back to this album? It more or less slipped through the cracks of the year, and yet…is it the slick mastery of the riffs? The cracked-out bliss of the melodies? The way the album blurs by before I can even notice it, and yet it feels full and satisfying in a way that albums twice as long can barely achieve? All of the above, probably.

#45: BADBADNOTGOOD & Ghostface Killah – Sour Soul

Toronto neo-jazz band BADBADNOTGOOD manages to pull off the same feat as Adrian Younge: they make the atmosphere behind the greatest Wu member sound both comfortable and menacing. They dial down the flair and concentrate on the pure beat, making an analog backing without equal for the cinematic MC’s particular brand of storytelling. The guest work isn’t bad either; that Danny Brown guest spot almost makes the album all on its own.

#44: Panda Bear – Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper

After hearing “Floridada” I can safely say that Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper will be considered the last great Animal Collective album. While “Boys Latin” was played into the ground by the radio, the other tracks on this record are just as good, and very nearly as irritatingly catchy.

#43: Jazmine Sullivan – Reality Show

Jazmine Sullivan had been crawling her way up the R&B ladder since she was 15 when she suddenly made the decision to peace out in 2011. One of the reasons she cited was a lack of belief in herself, and later rumours added on an abusive relationship as a further catalyst. Then in January she returned and the whole “self-doubt” thing was rendered moot: she could sing like a motherfucker, and the songs were a serious cut above, too. Reality Show is R&B with grit and heart, urban pop that is as at home on the streets and in the trap as it is in the club. Call it a comeback, but in a year of competing comebacks, call it a triumph.

#42: Windhand – Grief’s Infernal Flower

Allmusic likes to say that 2015 is the “Year Doom Broke” and while there’s something to that, it’s more of a matter of a lot of high-profile doom metal bands releasing solid albums at the same time. None of them scores higher than Grief’s Infernal Flower, though; it takes the de rigeur Sabbath riffs and cranks up the sinister dial, making an album that threatens to swallow you whole even while it forces your head to bang of its own accord.

#41: Craig Finn – Faith In The Future

Ever since Franz Nicolay ditched out, Brooklyn-by-way-of-Minnesota heroes The Hold Steady have fallen victim to the law of diminishing returns. Craig Finn, however, seems to be in finer form than ever. Freed of the need to pile on the rock n roll hijinks, Finn lets his odd voice and his strong authorial tone do the talking for him.

The 100 Best Albums of 2015: Part 1, 100-81

#100: Sunn O))) – Kannon

The drone-doom-noise band finally follows up 2009’s transcendental Monoliths and Dimensions with a more immediate and visceral trio of noise-soaked dread.

#99: Rose McDowall – Cut With The Cake Knife

If you ever missed spiky, snotty Eighties pop, look no further.

#98: BC Camplight – How To Die In The North

Velvety and yet dangerous, like the upholstery on a late-70s vintage Buick.

#97: Lupe Fiasco – Tetsuo & Youth

He’ll spend the rest of his career living down his ill-fated sophomore album (he recently grudgingly encouraged the destruction of physical copies of it) but Tetsuo & Youth shows where his career should have gone.

#96: Thee Oh Sees – Mutilator Defeated At Last

Six albums, five years, and a couple of big lineup changes finds John Dwyer’s day job band rocking out bigger and harder than ever before.

#95: Destruction Unit – Negative Feedback Resistor

Blown-out industrial noise-punk, like Big Black with a better appreciation for depth.

#94: No Joy – More Faithful

The alternagaze duo returns for a murkier, more complex record that plays directly to their strengths.

#93: Hot Chip – Why Make Sense?

A strong mid-career album for the veteran indie-dance group, with solid grooves and a touch of early 90s UK rave.

#92: Carly Rae Jepsen – E-MO-TION

An 80s banger of a pop record, once you get over the essential Robin Sparkles nature of E-MO-TION it becomes a great soundtrack to an energetic night.

#91: Prurient – Frozen Niagara Falls

A double album of shapeable, moldable pure sound from longtime noise artist Dominick Fernow.

#90: Echo Lake – Era

This record is liquid, in that the sound expands to fill whatever room you play it in. Expansive dream-prog with an ambient touch that is deft and subtle.

#89: Alabama Shakes – Sound And Color

Brittany Howard looks a third grade teacher and sings like the Goddess of Soul. The band is okay too.

#88: Ghostpoet – Shedding Skin

Mercury Prize nominated UK hip hop artist goes full out in an amalgamation of grime, U.S. hip hop, and electronic influences.

#87: Mount Eerie – Sauna

The calmest, quietest sense of dread you may ever experience, and something of a comeback for the former Microphones frontman.

#86: Zun Zun Egui – Shackle’s Gift

A truly world-reaching experience, the Bristol band draws on a number of diverse influences to create hard-hitting, crunchy songs that are close in approximating rock n roll.

#85: Belle & Sebastian – Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance

The band takes a hard skew towards dance pop on their umpteenth album, bringing some much-needed fresh air into their act.

#84: EL VY – Return To The Moon

A meeting of the minds between indie stalwarts The National and Menomena, EL VY is one of the rare side projects that hits all the same pleasure buttons as their respective member’s day jobs.

#83: The Roadside Graves – Acne/Ears

This is a rustic country album, if it were made by a less-crappy Gaslight Anthem, or if The Men took the folk-country side of New Moon and ran with it. Which is to say, it’s as Jersey as anything else you can name.

#82: Wilco – Star Wars

The veteran alt-country band keeps that train a-rollin’, not letting age or maturity get in the way of a good rock n roll hook. It may be “music for dads with receding hairlines” as Shameless put it, but it rocks all the same.

#81: Insect Ark – Portal/Well

Dana Schechter creates a bedroom electronic record that shifts and transforms as much as it makes a serious attempt to claw up your face and wriggle into your ear.

Bilal – In Another Life

★★★★

New York’s Bilal Oliver has been a relatively unknown quantity for the greater part of his career, a time span that stretches back to his debut album in 2001. He had been a hot item back in the early oughts, when his sophomore album, Love For Sale, was slated to be on Interscope and was to feature production work from such luminaries as J. Dilla and Dr. Dre. When Bilal opted to scrap those plans and produce an album built around his own instrumentation, Interscope balked and the album went unreleased. Such a reversal has set back any number of artists in a similar situation, so when 2010 rolled around and Bilal released another album, it was nice just to hear new music from him. Since then, however, he’s put in time working – albums, singles, and appearances on the tracks of much bigger names. He climbed back up the industry ladder rung by rung until he hit a breakthrough this year; Kendrick Lamar’s cultural touchstone To Pimp A Butterfly features quite a bit of work from Bilal, and it’s thrust his name back into the limelight.

All that “comeback from a career-ending event” stuff is heartwarming, to be sure, but it doesn’t mean a damn if it’s not capitalized upon. In Another Life capitalizes. Bilal’s tastes run through a swampy concoction of soul, funk, jazz, and R&B, and the work displayed on the album showcases that perfectly. The singer found exactly the right producer in Adrian Younge, whose gritty soul-sampling work brought Ghostface Killah out of the mid-career doldrums on the two Twelve Reasons To Die albums. The same core beats can be found on In Another Life, but Younge retools it to be lighter, more soulful than street-level. While the synth-and-snare crackle of “Sirens II” could easily have hosted GFK’s cluttered, menacing flow, it’s a more than ample bed for Bilal’s smooth, streetlight voice. It’s this particular formula that provides the best moments of the album: “Sirens II”, “Star Now”, “Satellites”, “Lunatic”, and the Kendrick Lamar “hit ya back” epic “Money Over Love”.

Call it a comeback. This is the apex (so far) of everything Bilal’s been working towards, and if there’s any justice it’ll get him more work in higher profile settings. If you’re a fan at all of any of the kitchen sink of genres that Bilal is bringing to the table, you owe it to yourself to check In Another Life out.

NOW FEATURED ON SEROWORD.COM

Goodnight Ornette Coleman

The music world has lost a true game-changer today. Ornette Coleman has died of cardiac arrest at the age of 85.

Coleman was amongst a handful of similar innovators in the late 1950s and early 1960s – a group that includes Mingus, Coltrane, Parker, and Davis – that changed the rules of jazz. The sharp divide between people who hear the word jazz and think of vocal American Songbook exercises a la Norah Jones and people who hear it and think of angular note-heavy freakouts is due in large part to the early work of Coleman, especially his 1959 masterpiece The Shape Of Jazz To Come.

Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp A Butterfly

★★★★★

Sometime over the past few years, trap music has become the dominant form in hip hop. As a subgenre it owes everything to spare, menacing beats, MIDI-triggered snare rolls that resemble the chatter of assault rifle fire, and a sing-song flow of drug-game braggadocio and ignorance that is infinitely more Soulja Boy than Sista Souljah. It’s a cathartic form, to be sure, but in the wake of several high-profile killings of unarmed black men by the police (and police wannabes) in America, it has little to offer in the way of commentary besides more nihilism. It’s no wonder then, perhaps, that there has been a recent movement towards the past, a retreat that suggests that the inspiration for progress might be better mined from earlier forms of black music. Joey Bada$$ went back to the gritty streets of New York in the 1990s; D’Angelo enlisted The Vanguard and went back to the conscious movement days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, specifically Sly and the Family Stone, hard soul, and quiet storm; Flying Lotus turned back to a kaleidoscope of jazz forms, and even Kanye has reached back (slightly) in his apparent embrace of British grime.

Then there’s King Kendrick, the man who brought Compton back to the limelight with what was easily the best album of 2012, good kid m.A.A.d. city. That was an album of hard beats and hood politics, a grandiose concept album that summed up what was best about pre-trap hip hop. To Pimp A Butterfly is not that album – it’s an entirely different thing altogether.

Right from the beginning you can smell the p-funk – squelchy instruments, stomping basslines, ass-shaking grooves. Lamar isn’t even subtle about where he’s going – he’s got Parliament/Funkadelic madman George Clinton right there, guesting on it. Then there’s what can best be described as a spoken word poetry piece over squalling jazz improvisation. Then “King Kunta” comes on and conquers the world with one groove. This is Kendrick Lamar, 2015: willing to scribble madly outside the lines, not content to simply be a commercialized unit, making a name for himself as an honest-to-god artist.

That’s what the album seems to be about, incidentally: the constant conflict between Kendrick Lamar, the rapper who made it up out of the streets of Compton, shattered expectations, and became widely recognized as the leading light of hip hop, and Kendrick Lamar, the guy from the streets, still caught up in petty beefs and those hood politics from good kid m.A.A.d. city, a man who abandoned his friends and family to live and die in L.A. while he puffed himself up and toured the world. On one side, “u”, which features a second verse where he breaks down and raps while sobbing, screaming at himself in a hotel mirror about how he failed, he let down everyone he knew, how he wasn’t there when the people he cared about bled out and died. On the other side, “i”, which is much better on the album than it ever was as a single: the To Pimp A Butterfly version has a serious dance groove running through it, making the declarations of self-confidence, love, and the world being more than slow suicide all the more powerful. The conflict is given poetic roots at the very end, following the “interview” Kendrick conducts with Tupac Shakur for the last five minutes of “Mortal Man”. He identifies the caterpillar, the hard part of him that scrambles to survive in the “mad city” of L.A., the part that constantly looks for ways to survive. The butterfly, then, is the beautiful, artistic, human part inside of him, the talent that is only looking for an outlet. Being hardened by the struggles of life in the mad city, the caterpillar only looks for ways to pimp the butterfly out, to use it to continue the survival of the caterpillar. Trapped inside the cycle of thoughts that this produces, the only way out is for the caterpillar to use the butterfly to bring new ideas and ways back to the mad city, and to free itself from the stagnancy of the past.

It’s a heavy concept far removed from the surface-level nihilism that has infected hip hop for the past several years, and I think that’s kind of the point. Lamar conjures up the old ideals of race consciousness and unity, taking specific aim at the idea of dividing a people by arbitrary and useless lines: on “Mortal Man”, he says “While my loved ones was fighting the continuous war back in the city, I was entering a new one / A war that was based on apartheid and discrimination / Made me wanna go back to the cities and tell the homies what I’d learned / The word was respect / Just because you wore a different gang colour than mines / Doesn’t mean I can’t respect you as a black man”. On “Complexion” he discusses the ridiculousness inherent in discussing who’s “more black” than the next person, and segregating each other based on the darkness of skin. “Hood Politics” sets out the bigger picture beyond the constant infighting between street gangs: “From Compton to Congress it’s set trippin’ all around / Ain’t nothin’ new but a flow of new DemoCrips and ReBloodLicans / Red state vs. a blue state, which one you governin’? / They give us guns and drugs, call us thugs / Make it they promise to fuck with you / No condom they fuck with you / Obama say “What it do?”. On “The Blacker The Berry” Kendrick turns the finger on himself, calling himself a hypocrite for preaching black politics and mourning the death of those like Trayvon Martin when gangbanging caused him to kill another black man and set back unity just as much as any external enemy.

To Pimp A Butterfly is the most powerful album released in some time, an examination of the state of local and national race politics and an examination of the meaning of the conflict between art and money. Married to mutant funk, jazz, and soul, it uses old music to sound new again, in turn escaping the useless cycle of money and violence between rival sets to embrace a much wider scope of “us vs. them” – the struggle between the downtrodden and those that seek to keep them down. It’s much more than simply a worthy followup to good kid m.A.A.d city – it’s takes a gigantic leap forward to establish a much fuller circle with which to define Kendrick Lamar’s artistry as a whole.

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ThEESatisfaction – EarthEE

★★★☆

ThEESatisfaction are a smoky alternative R&B duo from Seattle who first caught the attention of the venerable Sub Pop label through a guest appearance on Shabazz Palace’s modern classic Black Up. EarthEE, the duo’s second album, brings them out from the shadow of their origins and establishes them as a laid-back amalgamation of 70s jazz, soul, and afro-funk. There aren’t many clear-cut hooks here, just a lot of hand drums and throbbing bass – in some places, courtesy of supreme bass player Meshelle Ndegeocello. Soft synth work abounds, providing a cushion between the insistent grab of the bass and the on-the-edge-of-space vocals of Catherine Harris-White. “No GMO”, “Planet For Sale”, “Blandland”, and “Post Black Anyway” all speak to the politics lurking beneath the chilled-out vibe, marking them out as significantly more interesting than your average alt-R&B project. EarthEE makes a great soundtrack for all sorts of fun activities, although the songs seem to run together after a while.