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Kendrick Lamar – Overly Dedicated, Section.80
From "music keeps me alive" to "I keep music alive."
Daft Punk – Human After All, Alive 2007
The buildup of anticipation for Random Access Memories, wherein everyone waits for Daft Punk's timeless pop instincts to rescue them from recent trends in electronic music, is heartening but pretty strange, considering that since Discovery they've released a sour, unloved disappointment of those instincts (no, not that, but an album about that, as necessary and seductive, for a time, as anything else they've done) and a live set of bozo nirvana.
Ash – Intergalactic Sonic 7“s
Call them a singles band if you want. I don't have much to offer in rebuttal, since I still can't get past this, the greatest album ever assembled.
Mobb Deep – The Infamous
An anti-melodic record, I've read, but still it lays me out (as someone I knew once said about Kind of Blue) with the major weight of its melodic parts, five minutes at a time.
Gang Starr – Hard To Earn
This too, melodies huge and barely expressed, expressing the problem of what to do when you have more talent than most people. Guru is unusually realistic, and therefore cruel (deal with it, it's all over now anyway), when he talks about his.
Pet Shop Boys – Actually, Introspective, Behavior
I never spent much time with their early albums (prior to Very, one of the best ever made), but would suffer no one calling them a singles band, even if it was meant only as an endorsement of the guide for living called Discography. Now here's my evidence.
Ready For The World – Ready For The World
Sexy, patient and ready reinterpretations of the melody of "Lady Cab Driver" from the best-named group ever.
The Time – What Time Is It?
But the writer of that song gets no credit for this, separate evidence that Minneapolis defined the sound of the 80s, which I always knew, but have been having more gut feelings about recently than ever before.
Patti Smith Group – Wave
Once cited by our fearless leader as his favorite Smith album, and it's an excellent prelude to the first full decade of music he covered.
Harry Nilsson – Son Of Schmilsson
In the times of new spaceman John Grant, Nilsson's getting a career retrospective, and somewhere in its borders Son Of Schmilsson will live, still looking for someone to blame.
