Poised as hyper-indulgent fellas, Smother is a startlingly controlled album, one that's exactly as smooth and smoldering as its moniker posits.
I like opening tracks like “Over My Dead Body” and “Take Care” a lot, but some six or seven songs in, when Take Care starts to sound like a dismal echo of the preceding thirty minutes, my interest wanes.
Where the album really excels ... is in how it marries slightly absurd melodies to its lyrics to create a portrait of surreality and madness, as was so often rendered by those same Modernist poets Harvey cites as an influence.
Street Halo shows his commitment to his music both by tweaking it and sticking to the formula.
LIVELOVEA$AP absolutely scorches from front-to-back; its author’s ability to command a variety of sounds allows it to sound unified without drifting into monochrome territory.
Deerhood vs. Evil is just simultaneously astounding and utterly familiar, correct, and right.
Kaputt is the sound of an artist released from his back catalogue and his own notions of how a song should be sung, or written. It is a mighty, mighty piece of work and really worth celebrating. In my mind, this is Destroyer's best album yet.
House of Balloons is an album suspended in contradiction—a collection of sex jams tired of sex, or a paean to coke addled irretrievably by the same. It lacks dynamism because it has to; the Weeknd know nothing else, just that in every solid groove lurks the metronomic pulse of something waiting to die.
Perhaps the appeal of this music lies in nothing more or less than how painstakingly moulded it is, and in that respect Hecker will probably always release really impressive records.
w h o k i l l is probably the most inviting album you'll hear this year.
XXX is something much more complex, challenging, and rewarding than a dirty joke.
New History Warfare has enough range that it seems to have opened up a whole new fanbase that might otherwise have no interest in avant-garde music.
The main thrust of Viscera is the cycle of flesh continually transcending into something deeper and universal then being reduced back to pure body. Threatening to dissolve into an undifferentiated mass than gathered, coiled up and collected into something private and mysterious again.
The production on Black Up is meticulous but furtive, always pushing forward, often unwilling simply to loop. And Butler’s rapping sounds perfectly at home in this sometimes chaotic environment, kicking it amidst the kinetic verve of his beats.