The Music of Being Young and Dumb
It’s deep-rooted.
Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d city
A great album about the unending luck of existence, about life as a series of moments when you might’ve died. Some live fuller lives than others, and the one in front of the gun lives forever.
Or that’s the common thread through the album’s three most astonishing moments, anyway:
a. “Sherane”: The distance to the front door decreases, two figures approach, his phone rings, and we find out the bad predictability he’s ditched for chance.
b. “The Art of Peer Pressure”: Two endings, decided by an arbitrary set of lefts and rights.
c. “Sing About Me”: Gunshots. Later, Lamar says he’ll never fade away, and then the song (cruel and forgiving, like the shot in My Life to Live where the camera pans down from a body on the street) fades him out! Latent death briefly forgotten, then triggered by a statement of its impossibility.
Wild Nothing – Nocturne
Jack Tatum now has three of the year’s best songs to his name. The first is “Nowhere,” and the other two are found here: “Counting Days,” which might be called fragile if its success didn’t depend on so many agile micro-adjustments of rhythm and melody; and “Through the Grass,” a major breakthrough, with real movement in its enveloping swarm. Since 2010’s “Chinatown” it’s been obvious that Tatum owns a stronger rhythmic sense than a lot of his contemporaries do, so no surprise that his chief collaborators here are drummers, and that they give the proceedings a toughness that is more than just blindly devoted to Hounds of Love. So I hate to suggest that Tatum has turned in another album that’s the sum of its loveliest parts, because like The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Real Estate, most recently, he’s joined (with drums, and strong songwriting) the disjointed triumphs of his debut and crafted a remarkably consistent second album.
Rufus Wainwright – Out of the Game
A lovely album that recasts youthful prodigy as the world’s most pointless occupation. Not to knock Wainwright’s brilliant 1998 debut, but one day we’ll all be 14 years older and whatever we accomplished in the past won’t be able to help us. “It doesn’t matter how far you’ve come, you’ve always got further to go,” as Grant McClennan once put it. But, despite a bold past that might have thrown endless shadows on the present, Wainwright sounds like he’s back in a good place, especially on the beautiful “Montauk,” in which he juggles the phrases “your dad” and “your other dad,” weaving them so seamlessly into the melody as to make the terminology utterly practical.
Heems – Wild Water Kingdom
Not as dense with great moments as this year’s earlier Nehru Jackets, but there are quite a few, especially the hypnotic things that “Killing Time” does with an extended Echo & The Bunnymen sample. Also, the essential line about putting Wikipedia down on paper. Heems is much raspier than he was even a few months ago (possibly an element of performance; “I need water” is the album’s most repeated line) and his nebulous apocalyptic visions have more weight, at times, being somewhat organized around the concept of water. But not really. On this slack meta-concept album, Heems gets thirsty and holds somewhere in his mind a future water war.
Bat for Lashes – The Haunted Man
Inspired by the album cover, many have said that Natasha Khan strips her songwriting to its core here. I don’t know if I believe that ornamentation wasn’t at the core of 2009’s Two Suns, but either way, the songs here, with the exception of the really stark “Laura,” an astonishing vocal performance, aren’t as strong. Or, as strong, maybe, but not as surprising.
Angel Haze – Classick
She gives her new EP a title that suggests the canon’s irrelevance to the private listener, and then grabs what’s useful and rewrites it or tests herself against it. It’s a bit like Tori Amos’ Strange Little Girls (its biggest moment uses Eminem as a starting point, after all), but Angel Haze doesn’t have to fail or succeed according to her avowed intentions. She has none, except the terrifying, essential one, to show herself. A shift in perspective should always be implicit, if the singer has any claim to the cover.
Le1f – Dark York
Like, to a lesser degree, Azealia Banks, Le1f is positive proof that strange new things are still happening in NYC, and they can’t be told in any certain terms. Which is just my way of saying I have a lot of listening left to do. And yet, here’s art the Internet made possible, partly, and I have no notion that the Internet can bring me closer to it, fill in real life gaps. If I went to New York, a drag ball might seem as much a shot out of the future as Le1f’s decades later mutation (the album’s most outwardly thrilling display, “Wut,” in which Paris burns anew) of old news.
Tamaryn – songs from Tender New Signs
The vapor-speakers at my holiday retreat, the same ones that are making Le1f sound farther away than 2,000 miles, are precisely what the doctor ordered when he prescribed Tamaryn. Recently, my attempts to keep up with shoegaze-type music have mostly involved awaiting news of a new Sleepover Disaster album, so here’s a nice surprise, with all the signs, neither tender nor new, of a big achievement.
Death Grips – NO LOVE DEEP WEB
Epic Records: “Unfortunately, when marketing and publicity stunts trump the actual music, we must remind ourselves of our core values.” Me: “Fortunately, when the actual music trumps all, like it always does, I’m reminded of my core values.”
Adam Lambert – Trespassing
I liked For Your Entertainment, the post-Idol album on which Lambert was forced to try on every songwriter in modern corporate pop (he did admirably well), but Trespassing distinguishes itself by being an actual good album. None of the participants here have any reservations about it being exactly one thing, a full-on disco record, and thus it’s a convincing one. The presence of Nile Rodgers has rubbed off in a very positive way. Frankie Rose’s Interstellar is still the bass album of the year, but there’s some great bass here, more melodic and athletic than pummeling.
