Raime is at the forefront of a project concerned with exemplifying an appreciation for the musical ancestry they have inherited, and their determination to connect the dots through re-imagining a specific set of aesthetics is unparalleled.
All We Love We Leave Behind entices kinetic release in every possible way, irrational and otherwise, allowing unchecked ventilation as means for escape through a medium that has never sounded so engaging.
The Idler Wheel’s ramshackle, barely-holding-it-together aesthetic can’t be anything but carefully constructed, but in an artistic sense, that’s a virtue, not a vice.
One of the most interesting aspects of this record is how very paranoid it is, how it bites us on the hand when we get too close.
It may not break much new ground, certainly not for instrumentation or other reasons given, but it’s one of the most solid albums all year. To hate it really would be extraordinary.
The cuts on Kindred aren't simply longer than before; they introduce a completely different sense of space and continuity ... this is why Kindred is so strong.
MTDE is the sound of a postmodern nervous breakdown. In being so, paradoxically, it creates its own weird authenticity.
Instrumental Tourist is an attempt to cleanse the listener of "urban discontinuity" and experience the world as a passenger (something that's lost on a generation so used to being in control).
At just barely over 33 minutes, Sinews wastes no space in articulating its demanding and defiant disorder.
Throughout these 12 songs (often bi- or tripartite), Lamar reshapes and improves upon enough modern rap tropes to at least partially justify the “unique” and “forward-thinking” mantles that have been placed upon him.
[Sketch for a short history of the gramophone, to be read repeatedly before bedtime]
Death Grips have managed to situate themselves in a unique and peculiar territory in which they are both peerless and able to appeal to fans of almost everything.
A memorable, impermanent joy, it restores, rather than disturbs, the equilibrium — a feat of engineering in the service of artistry.
The album is wonderfully uneven and mysteriously unfinished, and while we might look forward to its second half for a sense of balance and completion, I’m content enough to dwell amidst its own jagged remains.
It’s an exhausting and maddening document, but one can’t help but emerge from it filled with a renewed radiance.
This very refusal to cohere, to make sense, to play the game of identity and otherness, of harmony and disharmony, makes Bish Bosch this year’s only necessary work of art.