Danny Brown – uknowhatimsayin? [Warp 2019]
Brown never left his darkness behind, it’s just toned down here, which if memory serves correctly is where the transcendentalists said one wants to be (about) when they set out on an emotional journey. Like “Belly of the Best” doesn’t have a David Lynch feel with that backwards moaning? Please. He cut his hair and fixed his teeth for a fresh start but trauma doesn’t go away that easily and Danny Brown knows that. The production is classicist, beats 4 barz provided by JPEG Mafia, Q-Tip, and his close collaborator Paul White among others. Some in the hip hop circles still say they find his voice, that cartoonish high pitch, annoying because they refuse to give it time for its nuances to show. I recommend the ever hilarious sex positive “Dirty Laundry” to start with. 4.1/5
Chance the Rapper – Coloring Book [Self Released 2016]
Fuller and richer musically than Acid Rap due in no small part to getting off of most of the drugs he was doing, finding his place among his family in Chicago, becoming a father to a daughter, and finding God because of it – he’s reached new level of maturity that he’s so joyous about it pours over anyone even slightly open to it. Around all of it is production spacey, brassy, and godly enough to make it fit within the city’s respective lineages of each clearly here from an alt angle. His voice has changed too, it’s less whiny – he’s less of a smartass – and somewhere along the way a sect of fans decided that the changes made him less authentic because they don’t trust religion and refuse to give up their own drugs. Their loss. I’m no subscriber to a higher power myself but even on the quiet and slow ones there’s too much detail and sentiment to be so cold hearted about what’s ultimately self-actualization. 4.5/5
Bon Iver – i,i, [Jagjaguwar 2019]
The last one was cool because the vocals got corrupted by robotics, this one offers a fat slice of nothing in terms of depth no matter how pleasurable his baritone-falsetto trick is nor how many friends he says no to when they ask him to mix the songs they participated in properly. 2.4/5
Lana del Ray – Norman Fucking Rockwell [Polydor/Interscope 2019]
Admittedly this didn’t do it for me like it did for the others who stacked the meta score so tall. Fully respecting the skills that Elizabeth Grant has been projecting through her persona’s vulnerabilities as well as the scale of the cataclysm she gives to the one named after her home state, the low energy in between seems to suggest stagnation as opposed to panic. She wants to get high and fuck so that’s what she writes about and honestly that’s a real mood, it was one in her beloved Americana 50s/60s, one before 2016, and definitely one after. But, it doesn’t get the same things that outrage does done. 3.6/5
Frances Quinlan – Likewise [Saddle Creek 2020]
Lyrically harmless but so indirect and clunky – “whether or not I have or was given a little more time” reads and sounds like a sentence a sophomore English major would use to take up space and then defend as boundary pushing when called out – that it, coupled with her unwieldy vocal melodies can leave a bad taste. Musically soft and bookish – the antithesis of what her main band makes save for the explosion at the end of “Went to LA” which I wish had more detail for investment but makes due with “oh the humiliation of having been perfectly understood”. Boiling it down, does it work? Not really. There’s no stakes, at least not well developed ones. 2.0/5
Cosmic Hero 