Re: Future - EVOL {2016-Album} Crack
Joseph
It's remarkable to think that noise-rappers Death Grips once seemed as unstable as radioactivity: battling record labels, canceling shows and presumptively announcing their breakup via napkin in 2014. Two years later, the Sacramento trio has evolved into a dependably provocative unit that operates at the nexus of punk rock, live electronics and barking energy raps. Fifth album Bottomless Pit offers further refinement: "Giving Bad People Good Ideas" rattles like an old industrial banger, "Hot Head" applies breakcore dynamics like smeared lipstick and "Warping" stutters on a toy piano melody. Then there's MC Stefan Burnett, an animated and muscular presence who splits the difference between DMX and Henry Rollins, and whose vocal performance goes beyond mere war chants. When he quietly shrugs "Eh" over Andy Morin and Zach Hill's whirligig rhythm, he sounds just as devastating as when he's bellowing "My death is money" on "Ring a Bell." M.R.
This L.A. outfit's first four albums faithfully recreated the folksy, confessional vibe of Seventies Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne, but with the band's former guitarist Blake Mills producing, the studio now becomes Dawes' playground. "As If By Design" is overrun with wild barroom piano and mariachi horns, while on several tracks Taylor Goldsmith's vocals are filtered with heavy electronics and the drums and guitars are processed to a digital crunch that recalls the more adventurous side of the Black Keys. Goldsmith's lyrics are still thoughtful and earnest ("I'm asking you for help/How do you fall in love with anything?" he sings on the title track), but he's also looser and more playful on cuts like the lead single, "When the Tequila Runs Out" ("We'll be drinkin' champagne"). With this bold left turn into sonic experimentation, Dawes proves that you can be faithful to your roots and still branch out. K.H.
After a Best New Artist Grammy and the well-received Radio Music Society, bassist-composer Esperanza Spalding could have certainly carved out a perfectly mellow career as America's virtuosic ambassador between contemporary jazz, neo-soul and pop music. Instead, on her first album in four years, she bravely and brilliantly machetes through thornier paths, including math-metal shredding ("Good Lava"), Laurie Anderson-style vocalizing ("Rest In Pleasure," "Ebony and Ivy") and brain-boggling progressive-rock majesty ("Elevate and Operate"). This unclassifiable art-funk-prog-bop concept opus is about identity, an unflinching look at love as theater, simmering rage over dreams deferred and class privilege. "Farewell Dolly" yearns for a piece of the pie, but by album's end she's doing a dissonant yet enthusiastic cover of Veruca Salt's Willy Wonka lament "I Want It All" and taking the whole thing. C.W.
The uncanny 1983 of Netflix series Stranger Things was a communicable virus of national nostalgia; and much of the heavy lifting was done via the vintage synthesizers of composers Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of Austin band Survive. Their warm, pulsating music gave the John Williams era a John Carpenter makeover, tapping playful and romantic melodies with the surging wash of analog keys. Seventy-four brief cues and atmospheres sprawled across four vinyl discs made this the feel-good avant-garde event of the year. More than two hours of vocal-free burbles, drones, gulps and splashes, the albums run the gauntlet from achingly wistful innocence ("Biking to School," "First Kiss") to menacing ambience ("The Upside Down," "No Weapons") to minimalist propulsion ("Gearing Up," "Breaking and Entering") to the absolute panic of 65-second heart-attack "Lights Out." The cassette and CD-R underground has been mining the knob-twiddling era of Tangerine Dream and Vangelis for more than a decade now, but the wildly popular series mixed with Dixon and Stein's diverse emotional palette will likely make this a gateway to the experimental music upside-down for years. C.W.
"If we're all free, why does it seem/We just can't be?" muses Norah Jones in "Flipside," a swinging upbeat anomaly on her first "jazz" album since 2002 breakthrough Come Away With Me. Inspired, in all likelihood, by Roberta Flack's sassy 1969 version of Les McCann's "Compared to What," Jones's tune maintains the emotional and political attitude with more ambiguity. Titled after a bubbling track about deep loneliness, Jones's album feels like an ozone-charged pause before a virulent cloudburst. At 37, her voice has become more nuanced without losing an iota of cool, and her Americana excursions inform a splendid horn-driven cover of Neil Young's "Don't Be Denied." R.G.
The sessions for Iggy Pop's best album in many years were helmed by Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, who created the perfect dark, rangy sound for him to flex in front of. Throughout Post Pop Depression, he's in his finest low-rent punk-poet elder statesman mode. From the rumbling intimation of mortality "Sunday" to the predatory throb of "Gardenia," these songs are sinewy and hard-swinging. Arriving after the passing of his peers David Bowie and Lou Reed, its sense of ravaged anger and survivor's resilience gave the album a mordant urgency. "If I have outlived my use/Please drink my juice," Iggy sings over viscose guitar stabs on "American Valhalla, adding in a harsh grumble, "all I've got is my name." But this reminded us how much raw power he can still summon. J.D.
"I got way, way too many issues," groggy Atlanta rapper Future moans on "Lie to Me," his voice-slurry lacquered with narcotic cough syrup and serrated with Auto-Tune. But that confessional vulnerability, the kind which he's staked his last two years of mixtapes on, is in short supply here. His real statement of purpose is "I'm reppin' for the low life," and he offers a worm's-eye perspective on a world that's both exhilarating and exhausting. Evol's pleasures are in how Future's flow negotiates the spare, skittering beats he's provided by the likes of longtime collaborators Metro Boomin and Southside. Oozing like venom, he escalates a little ahead of the rhythm on "Ain't No Time," lags a little behind on "In Her Mouth," falls out of meter entirely on "Savage Time" and repeats the title of "Fly Shit Only" until it blurs. K.H.
The second installment of an album trilogy Maxwell began in 2008, blackSUMMERS'night is a stunning testament to the Brooklyn-born singer's talents as a vocalist as well as a shrewd yet openhearted observer of romantic tensions. Opening with the simmering "All the Ways Love Can Feel," where Maxwell's feather-light falsetto snakes in between brushed drums and gently blasting horns, SUMMERS shows how being an R&B classicist doesn't necessarily mean that one's hemmed in by a certain type of style: The glimmering "Lake by the Ocean," the percolating synth-jazz of "III" and the squalling guitars of the pleading "Lost" all fit seamlessly into his smooth aesthetic. His deeply felt vocal performances and unparalleled ability to ride a groove for just the right amount of time make for an album that can be luxuriated in. M.J.
Harking back to some of his early Seventies work like Honky Chateau and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Elton John's 32nd album is a bluesy celebration filled with delicious reflections and sweet celebrations of what has made his career so significant. The album's title track kicks things off with lusty nostalgia, as he recalls the "calypso moon" and loose clothes that highlight his memories, while the gorgeous, dreamy "Blue Wonderful" has him surrendering completely to the pull of love. B.S.
On her second album, this Swedish pop singer-songwriter is just as sexed up and drugged up as she was when she was passing out in the tub on "Habits (Stay High)" or promising "we fuck for life" on "Talking Body." On "Influence" she warns you not to trust her when she's loaded; on the title track she whips out her metaphorical gal boner. And whether she's riffing off a monologue from Gone Girl on "Cool Girl" or lunging into yet another doomed relationship on "True Disaster," Lo crafts the sort of messy but consistent three-dimensional character that's in short supply in contemporary pop. The album's spacey electronic production, with beats dropping in and out, offers the sonic equivalent of the carnal and pharmacological pleasures she sings about. K.H.
As America focused its attention on the tangled election morass, New York chamber-pop genius Anohni was clawing at a bigger picture, dancing with tears in her eyes. On the year's most despondent and apocalyptic dance record, Anohni warbles and floats about climate erosion, the surveillance state, the endless death in the Middle East and the basic culpability of humanity itself: "How did I become a virus?" she croons in the title track. The album gets much of its jarring nature from its plainspoken lyrics, a cold, Hemingway-esque twist that updates cold-war dance floor songs like Paul Hardcastle's "19" or Heaven 17's "We Don't Need This Fascist Groove Thang." And no small assist comes from trap producer Hudson Mohawke and avant-garde sound-stretcher Oneohtrix Point Never, who give the entire album the uneasy feeling of Kanye West remixing Ryuichi Sakamoto's 1983 score to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. C.W.
My Woman expands the folk-grunge template that St. Louis native Angel Olsen established on 2014 breakout Burn Your Fire for No Witness. Though the title suggests self-confidence, the central figures in her songs aren't always granted the same clarity. But there's a resolve to keep putting one foot in front of the other: "Still got to wake up and be someone," Olsen sings, as though through clenched teeth. She cautiously glides through the shimmering girl-group pop arrangements of "Never Be Mine," the wailing psych-rock freakout of "Not Gonna Kill You" and the woozy, Mazzy Star-style balladry of "Heart Shaped Face." These elements all come together for the gorgeous, seven-minute epic "Sister," which swells and crashes with cinematic grandeur. J.F.
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