Lurker > Giggsalot

radiohead, the roots, black star, flylo, danny brown, kendrick and laura marling are the only ones there that i'd pay to see.

not a bad line-up, but i wouldn't call it amazing!

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i've enjoyed reading this, so if you still have a space, i guess i'll sign!

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there are still some people who haven't caught up yet

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I think you could probably separate FF8 fans from FF9 fans (people rarely love both, I've noticed) by which of those two things they prefer. They kinda act as microcosms of their respective games; VIII the ever-so-serious, melodramatic one, and IX the light-hearted, childish one.

Comes down to personal preference really, and I'd take frivolousness over overwrought romanticism with ease.

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I wouldn't disagree with that, Leon, but I think that's part of the reason why they feel way more natural than the two couples that preceded them. They are only supposed to be like 16 or some s***, it's hardly fair to hold it against them that they're the first characters in the series to act their age semi-realistically.

I'd take awkward flirting over I WILL CARRY YOU ON MY BACK TO ESTHAR any day.

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Just posting in this topic to show some appreciation, I've been reading through these topics intermittently from the start and they've been really entertaining.

My two favourite games in the series are yet to come, too!

FFVIII was actually the first game in the series that I played (and my first non-Pokemon RPG), and I certainly enjoyed it enough at the time to check out the others. I can't fully embrace it these days, though, mainly because the plot is so scattershot and the characters aren't anywhere near interesting enough to cover for it. Like, people always say that Freya had the potential to be an interesting character until the writers forgot about her, but I think you could say that about everyone in the main FFVIII cast who isn't Squall or Rinoa. And I'm not a huge fan of those guys, either (Laguna best character in the game by miles).

The game does have a lot of good ideas, though, and I'm sure I'll replay it one day and enjoy it a lot. It's just way too unintentionally nonsensical in almost every sense to be up there with the series' best, in my opinion.

Anyway, keep doing what you're doing!

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Yeah, one of my major disappointments with ADWD is that the Oldtown subplots were completely ignored. Like, no Sam obviously cut it down, but I wanted some Dany/Marwyn action too.

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i'll get on that then!

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BBall takes this one.

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hey guys, recommend me some "urban winter" albums

no genre boundaries here, though not "mystical snowy forest" neofolk/black metal, i have tons of that

some stuff i've been listening to a lot recently, for reference:

massive attack - 100th window
a silver mt zion - this is our punk rock
burial - untrue
cannibal ox - the cold vein

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Also, you stole half my coda Menji you bastard!

Anyway, here's the remaining half: a special treat for you guys. Just to show much much I love you and stuff.

Special bonus: The top FIFTY albums of the year!

1. Rome - Die Aesthetik der Herrschaftsfreiheit
2. A Winged Victory for the Sullen - A Winged Victory for the Sullen
3. Danny Brown - XXX
4. Tangled Thoughts of Leaving - Deaden the Fields
5. Matana Roberts - Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens des Couleurs Libres
6. The Weeknd - The Trilogy [House of Balloons/Thursday/Echoes of Silence]
7. Syven - Aikaintaite
8. Tenhi - Saivo
9. James Blake - James Blake
10. Cunninlynguists - Oneirology
11. A$AP Rocky - LiveLoveA$AP
12. Kendrick Lamar - Section.80
13. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
14. Petrychor - Effigies and Epitaphs
15. Action Bronson & Statik Selektah - Well Done
16. Esoteric - Paragon of Dissonance
17. Nicolas Jaar - Space is Only Noise
18. Deaf Center - Owl Splinters
19. This Will Destroy You - Tunnel Blanket
20. Big K.R.I.T. - Return of 4eva
21. Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact
22. Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972
23. Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow
24. Snowman - Absence
25. Tom Waits - Bad As Me
26. Lil B - I'm Gay
27. Elzhi - Elmatic
28. Peaking Lights - 936
29. Ulver - Wars of the Roses
30. Washed Out - Within and Without
31. Vakill - Armor of God
32. Woods of Desolation - Torn Beyond Reason
33. Freddie Gibbs - A Cold Day in Hell
34. Earth - Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I
35. Primordial - Redemption at the Puritan's Hand
36. 40 Watt Sun - The Inside Room
37. The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
38. Main Attrakionz - 808s and Dark Grapes
39. Clams Casino - Instrumentals
40. Dessa - Castor, the Twin
41. Radiohead - The King of Limbs
42. Nils Petter Molvaer - Baboon Moon
43. Random Axe - Random Axe
44. The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble - From the Stairwell
45. Farewell Poetry - Hoping for the Invisible to Ignite
46. Drake - Take Care
47. Jamie Woon - Mirrorwriting
48. Mr Muthaf***in' eXquire - Lost in Translation
49. The Necks - Mindset
50. Deadbeat - Drawn and Quartered

If anyone wants specialized recommendations, or to know my thoughts on anything outside the top 25 then let me know and I'll write something brief up.

Thanks for reading!

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There are slight ambiguities in the scoring system that I didn't notice before, but yeah, Menji won comfortably however you interpret it. Which I quite enjoy.

Name your albums, good sir!

The new Laura Marling album... it really didn't do much for me at all. Even though it progressed her sound just as much as I Speak Because I Can, it felt almost like a transition record to me for some reason. Some of the songs I enjoyed seemed like re-writes of previous material; the only songs I enjoy from A Creature I Don't Know that really feel of the album to me are Salinas and Sophia.

I really hoped she could kick on from ISBIC - about half of that record was stunning - but instead she incorporated a lot of influences I didn't care for (americana, folk rock) and generally took her sound in the wrong direction. It's not a bad record, nor does it derail her development. But I can't imagine it's one I'll listen to often.

6/10 kinda stuff, sadly.

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It's big enough that being a genre leader is still fairly notable.

As opposed to, like, I dunno... witch house.

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The only reason he isn't on pitchfork and the like is because neofolk hasn't yet become one of the arbitrary niche genres they periodically pretend to care about to seem hip and diverse. The only neofolk artist I've ever seen them review is Current 93, and only after he started collaborating with Antony twenty years into his career - it would pretty silly to call every band in the scene but one "obscure" on that basis. Sites like that regularly feature far more niche artists than Rome just because they happen to make atmospheric sludge metal or whatever the cool new electronic genre happens to be at the time. It's all about demographics.

Within the neofolk scene itself (which is hardly a small one), Rome are easily in the top ten best known acts. Which pretty much disqualifies them from "obscurity" out of hand, in my opinion. Obviously the average guy in the street will never have heard of them, but when you listen to as much music as you or I do you kinda need to shift the threshold or the word loses all meaning. It's like if I rated every album I liked at 10/10; if 90% of my iPod is deemed obscure, that gives no indication of the relative popularity of any of it.

tl;dr: I disagree.

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come on guys

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and again

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oh hey cool

bump this

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Not obscure at all! That really surprises me.

In any case I probably wouldn't start with that album, it's a bit too much to handle if you're not already a fan. Check out Flowers from Exile instead.

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Honestly, I could talk about how wonderful an achievement this album is for days. To give some perspective, though, here are the three complaints I have with Die Æsthetik der Herrschaftsfreiheit

1. I'm not as clever as Jerome Reuter

As in all Rome's work, the primary language here is English. Which is nice. His tendency to include all of the languages he speaks in some form remains here too, though, and while I understand some of the French and smatterings of the German I don't quite feel like I'm getting the full experience with my limited linguistic talent, especially given the increased prominence of spoken word interludes here. A Cross of Fire is damn near ten minutes of narrative I don't understand even a bit of! And that's not even going into the Polish folk songs and Spanish war chants he samples.

Poor show, man.

2. Think before you ambient

For the most part here, the ambient interludes work wonderfully. The first real "song" on the album might take nearly eight minutes to arrive, but The Chronicles of Kronstadt and The Angry Brigade is a brilliant way to open an album, and the way The Spanish Drummer finally enters the fold is perfect. The solo violin in the A Cross of Fire opener The Brute Engine is similarly stunning. And the spoken word songs here are better than ever; I'm not sure Reuter has ever presented images as vivid as he does in The Pyre Glade and Families of Eden. It's not all great, though. On song quality alone A Cross of Flowers should be the best single album Reuter has ever made, but it's completely let down by its ambient selection. The Conquest of Violence is seven minutes of oppressive sonic void, and Time and Tide is completely worthless too. That's a fifth of the album right there, doing nothing but waste space. Not every album in the world has to have twelve tracks, Jerome! Jesus.

3. "Petrograd Waltz" is entirely in 4/4

This is just unforgivable.

Other than that, though, it's hard to find fault with Die Æsthetik der Herrschaftsfreiheit whatsoever. Which is utterly ridiculous when you think about it. There are a good fifteen songs here that would represent the pinnacle of most folk musicians' careers, and a number more besides that transcend any sort of folk music altogether. Treat this as three separate records, and Reuter has made three of the best five albums of his career and thrown them all into one package. Treat this as a singular work and it's not only the best thing he's ever done but comes dangerously close to defining neofolk so perfectly that everyone else might as well pack up and go home.

I'm sure he's already written his next four albums by this point, but my mortal mind at least has genuinely no idea where Reuter will go from here. But then I can say about any of the top six placing artists in this list. Æsthetik is, in all honesty, a fairly arbitrary number one; on a different day, any one of them could have landed here. When it comes down to it, though, this just feels like the most timeless; the most impressive; the most deserving. And I'm happy to go with my gut on this one.

Your album of the year, ladies and gentlemen.

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1. Rome - Die Æsthetik der Herrschaftsfreiheit

Genre: Neofolk, Singer-Songwriter

A Cross of Wheat

1. The Chronicles of Kronstadt (5:08)
2. The Angry Brigade (2:31)
3. The Spanish Drummer (3:32)
4. To Teach Obedience (4:09)
5. The Death of Longing (5:27)
6. Our Holy Rue (3:45)
7. The Night-Born (3:35)
8. The Pyre Glade (3:42)
9. In Cruel Fire (4:13)
10. A Pact of Blood (3:14)
11. The Merchant Fleet (4:26)
12. A Cross of Wheat (7:09)

A Cross of Fire

1. The Brute Engine (5:59)
2. Seeds of Liberation (3:58) ()
3. To Each His Storm (3:50)
4. Sons of Aeeth (4:14)
5. August Spies (3:22)
6. To Be Governed (2:18)
7. Families of Eden (3:35)
8. Red Years - Black Years (4:29)
9. Little Rebel Mine (4:27)
10. The Breaking Part (3:54)
11. Eagle and Serpent (2:44)
12. A Cross of Fire (9:16)

A Cross of Flowers

1. The Conquest of Violence (7:12)
2. All for Naught (5:14)
3. You Threw It at Me Like Stones (3:15)
4. Automation (4:38) ()
5. Time and Tide (3:17)
6. Dawn and the Darkest Hour (3:23)
7. Years of Abalone (3:25)
8. Petrograd Waltz (4:44)
9. Disbandment (1:28)
10. Ballots and Bullets (3:12)
11. Appeal to the Slaves (4:31)
12. A Cross of Flowers (4:44)


And you will find we can't be governed...

If icon's slightly off-canon choice for the best songwriter of the last twenty years is Gillian Welch, mine is certainly Jerome Reuter. Prior to the advent of 2011, the man behind Rome had released five albums and two EPs in just five years, and not only were they all good, but they showcased an arc of musical development almost unmatched in modern folk. From the martial, post-punk influenced Nera to the noirish, florid Nos Chants Perdus, Reuter showed himself to be not just a diverse songwriter and modern poet, but one who seemed almost incapable of writing a bad song, regardless of the audacity of its musical style. By this time last year, Rome (ostensibly Reuter's solo project) had ascended to the tier of my very favourite bands.

And then something terrible happened. With no warning or explanation, Rome's myspace vanished, their official website wiped. In its place stood a dull brown backdrop sporting the ominous (yet typically eloquent) message "WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IS GONE FOR GOOD." Suffice to say that I was a little distracted in work the day I found this, inwardly bawling my eyes out.

A few months later Reuter resurfaced, and, presumably after chuckling at the immense emotional distress he had caused his swooning fanbase, revealed that he had some personal stuff to deal with, and Rome was on temporary hiatus but would be back. Fair enough, I thought, and went on enjoying the other 479 bands on my iPod. By June, Rome were rolling once more, and claimed that their new album, the first in a planned trilogy, would be out before the year's end. A few months later, though, Reuter casually announced that he'd accidentally finished the other two albums in the trilogy too (as you do) and they'd all be released together instead.

This, for whatever reason, scared me absolutely s***less.

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People that know my taste, upon seeing Die Æsthetik der Herrschaftsfreiheit atop this list, might be inclined to roll their eyes, proclaim it as an inevitability, and move along. And they might actually be right, but certainly not in the way they think. Because the thought of a Rome triple album didn't fill me with hype and expectation whatsoever. It filled me with complete dread. My expectations were so low I didn't even listen to this until about a week after it came out.

To this day I'm not entirely sure why. Sure, double and triple albums have a deserved reputation for inconsistency and generally being completely unnecessary, but a whole bunch of my favourite artists have put them out before and their careers were hardly derailed by the process. The fact that Reuter framed Die Æsthetik der Herrschaftsfreiheit as a return to the sound of his early work didn't help, though, given that it sounded (as it always does) like a conscious decision to screw his muse and appease the less open-minded part of his fanbase. Especially since his early albums are his weakest anyhow.

In any case, pretty much every fear I had proved completely and utterly unfounded. Far from sounding overstretched at two and a half hours long, Æsthetik somehow feels like the most consistently great Rome record yet. And its sound runs the gamut of Rome's discography in a wonderful way; I don't know if Reuter is even aware how strongly the more subtle influences of his recent work permeate here. If Æsthetik sounds like anything, it's some sort of career retrospective from an alternate-universe Reuter who wrote slightly different songs; he does largely the same things here as he always has, but he's matured so much as a songwriter over the years that he simply does them better this time.

The record's themes, primarily those of anarchism, revolution and overthrowing the state, are easily the most political of Reuter's work thus far. And that plays into his hands lyrically more than might be expected. The way he weaves the occasional love song into the fabric of war and uprising completely transforms the whole picture; the context lends the love songs great poignancy, and they in turn humanize the more political material. Reuter's verbosity definitely gets the better of him at times here (even the ambient interludes are crawling with spoken word manifestos and diatribes), but it's almost funny to see how he manages to carve pop songs out of the most beguiling lyrics. Take the first verse to The Merchant Fleet, for instance:

"Rise and fall in revolt, your plan endoomed, tired of inventing ruses
To be more than a name on some tool, you could not refuse it
All you fearful, navy souls, hiding behind moat walls
You dagger, you noose;
Clenched to desks, nailed to benches, tied to counters
When all around us hell is breaking loose."

It's not as if this all makes sense in the song either. Reuter squeezes every word in as if his life depended on it, with little thought for rhyme or cadence. But as soon as the utterly gorgeous chorus hits, none of that matters any more. You almost have to laugh at the sheer audacity of the man.

Thus far I've been talking of Æsthetik as a single album, but its three constituent parts are very singular. A Cross of Wheat is the "war" album, all industrial drums, shouted vocals and heartbreaking battlefield ballads. A Cross of Fire seems to focus on the revolution aspect, with lots of patriotism, idealist hope and rallying cries being thrown around. And A Cross of Flowers deals with the fallout from all the ambition; people falling in love and becoming disinterested in the cause, people coming to terms with what they've done in its name, and the like. It's not a narrative, by any means, but it flows wonderfully from album to album, and each album is improved by the existence of the others.

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WOOHAH

Giggs howlin' like the wolf, leisurely spit smokestack lightnin'
And you'll end up deader than Heath Ledger with that Brokeback writin'
Ex cut the gay jokes this time but still spills garbage like a trash can
And we've all seen enough to know he's further in the closet than Aslan
See man my pull's olympic-sized, audience waitin' on the votals
My raps'll leave ya sterilized just like i'm wailin on ya scrotals
You got less lines than The Artist, and I think I'm havin' recalls
This like your last match all over again 'cos man your rappin' be balls!

...But now this world has grown colder, and my words alone smoulder
All that hard-earned e-pop don't mean **** to this unknown soldier
So respect the chrome holder, Giggs at the vanguard of eloquence
Done wrecked your Bulgarian journalist standards of excellence

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ha, looks like you got what you wished for!

i'll have this up after work. which, being six hours ahead of you, will be like twelve hours or so

woo timezones

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oh man next verse will be fun

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I'll finish this off tomorrow, probably.

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Requiem for Dying Mothers is pretty untouchable, but I dunno. There's not a thing I would change about that album, whereas I could find fault in any SotL release if I tried to be objective about it.

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Well, now you know!

2. A Winged Victory for the Sullen - A Winged Victory for the Sullen

Genre: Ambient, Drone

1. We Played Some Open Chords and Rejoiced, for the Earth Had Circled the Sun Yet Another Year (6:19)
2. Requiem for the Static King Part One (2:46)
3. Requiem for the Static King Part Two (7:37)
4. Minuet for a Cheap Piano Number Two (3:09)
5. Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears (4:27) ()
6. A Symphony Pathetique (12:42)
7. All Farewells Are Sudden (7:36


If I don't have as much to say about A Winged Victory for the Sullen, the recent collaborative album between Stars of the Lid's Adam Waltzie and minimalist pianist Dustin O'Halloran, as I did for the albums immediately below it, that's probably because it doesn't have as much to say itself. This is an album of impeccable beauty, of stunning fragility, of almost impossible grace... but that's kinda all it is. It doesn't aspire to be any sort of sprawling opus with dramatic twists and turns, or anything so pretentious, gosh darn it. It just wants to be pretty. Which is probably the one reason I couldn't quite call it the best album of the year.

Which is a bit dumb of me, considering it's arguably the single most beautiful forty minutes of music I've ever heard. But whatever.

Sure, it's very deliberate beauty. A recent trip to Vienna confirmed my suspicious that ostentatious, overly deliberate forms of grandeur and spectacle just don't work for me, but that only applies to art lacking subtlety. And while Winged Victory certainly doesn't push many boundaries within ambient music (indeed, it sounds exactly as one might expect it to), it's certainly far from being too forthright. This, like almost all the music the two men involved have created in the past, is an album of gentle cello swells, of string drones, and of gentile piano parts draped over the top so effortlessly it's almost surprising they actually had to make this music rather than pluck it pre-formed out of the ether somehow. Musically, it basically sounds like the perfect Eluvium album that Matthew Cooper isn't quite talented enough to make, but to me it sounds like more like some reclaimed artifact than a set of new compositions; music that already existed somewhere far out at sea, or under lock and key, deep in my soul.

Stars of the Lid are never a band I think of as one of my favourite acts, but in truth that's not fair. Because, alongside possibly Natural Snow Buildings, they are the only band whose music I would genuinely attribute healing qualities to. Tired Sounds has long been my stock listen in my weakest moments, without ever really thinking about it, and I never give it credit for the tremendous power it has simply because it soothes rather than emotes.

And A Winged Victory for the Sullen has the exact same qualities, except in infinitely more digestible form. It simply makes my life ever-so-slightly better for forty minutes, regardless of context. If I'm lying in the sun reading, it turns a pleasant experience into one of ethereal tranquility. If I've had a terrible day at work, it turns my crowded bus journey home from a nightmare to a necessary evil. And if I can't sleep, it'll either change that or make my insomnia a ton more peaceful.

It's the album I've listened to most all year, and it's probably the album on this list I'd recommend most unconditionally too. A Winged Victory for the Sullen might be the best ambient album ever, but to me, at least, it's infinitely more than that.

It's aural medicine.

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i like that liturgy are there

liturgy will play with any selection of bands that make them seem enigmatic or outre

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screw it, this'll do

Seems all work and no play makes ExLax a dull rhymer of a boy
Wack ass small-timer to destroy, talk smack like whiners without ploy
With this topic you'll purge, thanks to my gold cyber-bullion
ExTha 'bout to face the Surge, like he's sayin "goodbye Cerulean"
And he lacks the Grounds for victory, spittin' overrated blatherskite
Some rappers use these battles to negotiate, I'd rather fight
And if words could kill them letters won't be breakin' no bones
Man, I'm just sayin' you could do better, like I'm Drake on the phone
I'm takin the Throne, and b**** I play this Game like a Lannister
Payin' debts and slayin' vets faster than Roger Bannister
I dwarf your rap stature, Giggs look B.I.G. by comparison
Your life's been short since birth but man that **** was straight embarrassin'

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current status: i have about 40 mediocre lines written down and no good ones

damnit

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Was gonna write-up #2 tonight, but I'm tired and slightly ill so I'm just gonna go to bed and listen to it instead.

There's your clue, if you want one.

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the stage is certainly set for the whole "faith vs cersei" showdown but i think it would be cheap and cliche

i really like the subtle redemption he gets in AFFC and would love it to represent the end of his character arc

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i love the guy but i'm probably the only person who doesn't want the hound to show up again

LET THE MAN REPENT AND DIG GRAVES GODDAMNIT

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citizens in their homes

and

missiles in their holes

and

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...

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come on guys, this is the interesting end of the list!

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i just beat him with a few fairly well-known rappers

not impressed

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I can wait.

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30, to be blunt, might be the best hip-hop album closer ever. It's tense, it's harrowing, and it's completely untethered emotion in a way that rap rarely harnesses. In three minutes it narrates everything the final act of Goblin failed to in nearly thirty. The Metronomy-sampling beat is possibly the most intentionally disjointed piece of hip-hop I've ever heard, and the poignancy that builds as the track gradually swells is absolutely huge. By the climax Brown is straight up yelling into the microphone, and I don't think it's ever failed to send a shiver down by spine. It's almost laughable that a song that starts with the sneered line "Sent ya b**** a d*** pic and now she need glasses" turns into the best hip-hop song of the decade so far. But such is the way of Danny Brown.

Over the course of XXX it becomes increasingly clear that there's very little Brown can't do. His punchlines are outrageously funny, his social commentary is clear and incisive, and he details his drug-fueled antics with glee while never forgetting the other side of the equation. He describes himself at one point as a "smart n**** who does dumb s***," and by the end of the album neither half of that statement is at all in doubt. Best of all, his experimentation comes from a genuine innate weirdness that has probably been missing from hip-hop since Kool Keith went completely off the rails. Danny will probably make some bad albums in his time, but none of them will come from lack of authenticity or creative zeal.

His ear for beats is also utterly phenomenal. The beats here buzz, whirr, float and drone at any given moment, and their only collective feature is that they sound like they can't have been made by actual hip-hop producers. They simply sound so massively removed from any scene in hip-hop now or ever.

As I said above, though, not quite everything here works. Radio Song and Bruiser Brigade are such on-the-nose parodies that they begin to have some of the same problems as the commercial crap they mock (though the latter is partially saved by the moment Brown yells "I'M HIGHER THAN SWIZZ BEATZ' HAIRLINE"). And the end result of Danny's choice to write an entire song about cunnilingus over the album's most uneasy beat just kinda makes me queasy. When I'm not laughing, that is.

But yeah. I'm tired at this stage of writing some gushing end statement about how great these albums are. Just take one of the previous ones, and assume XXX is slightly better still.

And then go listen to it. Because it's phenomenal.

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Best hip-hop album of the year by a country mile!

3. Danny Brown - XXX

Genre: Experimental Hip-Hop


1. XXX (1:51)
2. Die Like a Rockstar (2:26)
3. Pac Blood (2:32)
4. Radio Song (2:22)
5. Lie4 (3:12)
6. I Will (3:16)
7. Bruiser Brigade (feat. Dopehead) (3:45)
8. Detroit 187 (feat. Chip$) (3:05)
9. Monopoly (2:45) )
10. Blunt After Blunt (3:26)
11. Outer Space (2:44)
12. Adderall Admiral (1:43)
13. DNA (2:57)
14. Nosebleeds (1:37)
15. Party All the Time (3:28)
16. EWNESW (2:23)
17. Fields (2:33)
18. Scrap or Die (3:56)
19. 30 (3:18)


...Meet the future, face to face!

I don't intend to latch on to solely the most ridiculous figures in hip-hop, but as with Action Bronson, Danny Brown is a man who I can sometimes scarcely believe exists. Everything about him seems more like some kind of comically over-stylized manga interpretation of a rapper by someone who knows very little about the genre than anyone actually of this earth. I could spend all day talking about his absurd physical appearance, from his gap teeth to his skinny jeans to his ludicrous asymmetric haircut ), or his superbly off-center personality. Even putting that aside, though, the talents that his creator imbued him with are straight up unrealistic. Simply put, in this rap game, Danny Brown is broken. And if anyone cared about the competitive aspect of the genre any more, he should probably be banned.

XXX - named in reference to Brown recently having turned thirty - is the most ceaselessly inventive rap album since Madvillainy. It's probably also no coincidence that it follows a similar template; there are nineteen songs on XXX, and not one tops four minutes. Several of my favourites are under two. There are minimal hooks on most songs, but a fair few forgo them completely and never suffer for it. It's the most clearly flawed album in this top ten, and maybe my whole list (there are three or four songs here that I genuinely don't like very much) but the record takes so many risks that it seems unfair to complain that only 80% of them work to absolute perfection.

And miraculously, they do. The diversity of both Danny himself and his chosen beats on XXX is so great that it almost feels like an impossibly cohesive retrospective compilation of a rapper's growth over the course of a twenty year career. Even as that, the development on show would be pretty noteworthy; for it to happen over the case of a single album, released only one year after Brown's debut full-length, is patently ridiculous.

There are genuinely about six mini-albums on XXX, and six Danny Browns to lead us through them. There's the crazed, drug-obsessed maniac (Die Like A Rockstar), the old school battle rap purist (Pac Blood), the impossibly aggressive gangster rap satirist (Bruiser Brigade), the unstoppable wordplay wizard (Outer Space), the moody Weeknd-esque introvert who confronts the pitfalls of his own lifestyle (Nosebleeds) and the nostalgic who solemnly describes the degradation of his hometown (Fields). And the impossible brilliance of XXX is that every single one is clearly Danny Brown. It's not even that none of it is manufactured; none of it could be - each element is too authentic and perfectly formed. In that spirit, the best tracks here totally blur those lines. On Blunt After Blunt, for instance, Brown effectively plays hype man to himself, and on the album closing 30 he casually switches cadence on almost every line to reflect his growing insanity.

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on first listen i thought it was a bit uninspired, but this is really good stuff.

way more lo-fi than usual, but other than that it's just more kollaps tradixionales. and i loved that album.

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HEY SEG

I was just gonna post about how ASMZ is the perfect music for "holy crap it's -14°C" days

then i found this: http://rateyourmusic.com/release/ep/a_silver_mt__zion/the_west_will_rise_again/

limited edition tour only ep of new material, apparently. and it's out there.

thoughts soon.

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I GOT HIM SHOOK GUYS

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damnit dizzy i was gonna link that here yesterday but i completely forgot

fantastic video though

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Any of you guys (icon, Shaggy, Seg seem most likely) listen to The Durutti Column?

Just discovered them by chance and they sound absolutely fascinating.

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maybe not the best battle yet, but i feel like you guys played off one another better than any opponents so far. props.

anyway, 1 > 4 > 3 > 2, so I'm gonna go Alec. Either looks like a daunting match-up for me if I get past ExTha, though.

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NEXT UP: Thirty!

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WHATEVER

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Glad to hear it! Probably just as great a year as 2010 in hindsight.

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giving this one to Seg

I'm on board with Ed's longer flow when it brings about better disses and wordplay, but I'm not sure his were any better than Seg's. And that's kinda a killer.

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