Friday, December 20, 2013

Top Five Albums of 2013

 I didn't do an album list for 2012. The truth is, that one of the albums on my 2011 list made such an impression on me, it's practically all I listened to in 2012. Yes, Use Your Illusion I & II made an indelible mark on my 2012, and I chose to skip my list and listen to more music in 2013. That I did, but like the previous entries, I choose to profile albums that I got into in 2013, not just albums released in 2013.
 As always, this list is in no particular order.


10. Drive By Truckers, Southern Rock Opera:

  I listen to DBT probably more than any other band, I generally put my iPod on shuffle at work.  The luck of the draw for a band with 47 albums out is that they will come on rotation more often than most. I picked up Southern Rock Opera a few months ago when I was at the record store and noticed there was another one I didn't have.
 It's a double album, and somewhat of a concept album to boot. The themes deal mostly with the duality of a modern southern personality, and they also have a lot to do with Lynryd Skynyrd  and Neil Young's interpersonal hookum. It's a damned good ride, and educational too, with songs like The Three Great Alabama Icons coming off as a mix of Wikipedia page/great spoken word. This is the band at their strongest iteration too, with Jason Isbell filling the slot of third guitarist/songwriter/singer. There is one thing about this album that chills me though, and I can't quite put my finger on the why exactly... Zip City. 
 Patterson Hood is the primary songwriter for the Truckers' and his songs fill most every album, and I love the dude, I do. But there is something about Mike Cooley that really touches my soul. I have a huge literary crush on Mike Cooley. The way he says things, the words he chooses to express himself... Sometimes they don't sit right at first, then you let it settle and you realize it's perfect.
 I know most DBT fans give accolades to Women Without Whiskey, another Cooley song off this album. I think that song is brave as hell for what it address', and I'd be lying if I tried to say it might technically be a better crafted tune. Zip City fucking kills me though. It has replaced When the Pin Hits the Shell as the Cooley song I listen to 5 times a day. Everyday. Zip City.
 People make their musics in their bedrooms these days. Everything is digital... A true analog journeyman band like the Drive By Truckers makes me happy because it's what I like the most. They're the closest to The Band that we're ever going to get from here on out. Cooley reminds me of Danko, and besides "Granted" is such a big word for a country girl like you.


9. Pentagram, First Daze Here:

 I had to stop smoking weed because it breaks my brain. I get stuck in riffs. It might be fine for you, and I'm happy for you baby. I know myself pretty well, and I know how to traverse this territory. That just don't work for me if I have to come anywhere close to anything that could be construed as work for about 15 hours. That being said, I spent a lot of stoned hours wondering where a few bands came from that seemed to influence everyone in their genre after them. The first of these bands is Van Halen. The second is Black Sabbath.
 If we're being honest, there are about 50%  of us that were familiar with Pentagram, but never listened to them until Netflix put Last Days Here on streaming. I know I'm one. It blew me away seeing the early footage, so I had to suss it out.
 Sabbath in stride, or Sabbath in parallel. At least another link between Blue Cheer and where we ended up getting. But then there's 20 Buck Spin and a whole other slew of songs that ain't trying to ape Ozzy. My whole stoned thinking at the time was "Ahh man, my band just put out an album with a song about a blue light, and now it's gonna seem like we were ripping Pentagram off."
Us musicians and artists... We are a bunch of fucking pussies.

8. Kendrick Lamar, Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City:

  I was so pissed off when I finally copped this record. I was so angry that I asked the people who recommended it to me, to please reimburse me. I wanted my 12 bucks back bad.
 My argument at the time was that it sounded like all of the boring Outkast songs on Stankonia that I stopped listening to them for in the first place.
 I am so glad I kept listening to this record. This record makes sense in a whole sense that hip hop albums these days especially, rarely do. There were the obvious cuts I liked from the start like Backseat Freestyle(which is not a freestyle) & the ubiquitous Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe... I hated the rest of the album, and I wanted to take friends to task for telling me I'd dig it.
 I remember the "Aha!" moment too. I was hungover as a frat room bedsheet soaked with piss on the balcony to dry. I had just got my cup of coffee and lit my only cigarette on the first rainy day of summer being over and M.A.A.D. City(feat. MC Eiht) came on shuffle in my earphones.
I had to look down at my iPod to see who this banging track was from. Then I hated myself for liking it a little... Damn, I'm a hip hop hipster after all.
"Seems like the whole city going against me... Every time I'm in the streets I hear YAQ YAQ YAQ!"

7. Roky Erickson & the Aliens, The Evil One:

 This album is not new to me. My old friends and I have traded third rate tape transfer copies of tracks from this record for years. If you ever wondered what paranoid schizophrenia would sound like if you plugged it straight into a Marshall stack, then this is it.
 Thankfully, Seattle based record label Light in the Attic has released all of Roky's material with the Aliens this year.
 It sounds great, and to hear it clearly for once, is a blessing.

6. Kanye West, Yeezus:

 
 Grand Guginol is a descriptor I almost always use for Kanye. It was the birth of the splatter film, a theater of the absurd that operated in Paris from 1860-1960. It was, for the adventure seeking of the times, a place to see their most horrible fantasies become flesh on the stage.
-From Mr. Wests' Brilliant 2011 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy:
"Fuck SNL and they whole cast, you can tell 'em Yeezy said they can kiss my whole ass, or more specifically they can kiss my asshole. Oh, I'm an asshole? Ya'll niggas actors."

 You gotta give the boy one? Nope. You're not going to... I already knew that.
I knew that already because every single person that I know on any personal level has taken an aside
to ask me if I really like Yeezus as much as I claim to. I ain't even kidding.

Telling, or daring. Depending on your point of view, judging from the quoted line above, that Kanye chose to debut 2 songs off of Yeezus on SNL. Premiere stuff. You can youtube it, Ben Affleck was the host and he sounds like he's about to cry when he announces Black Skinhead. While that song isn't my favorite on the disc, it was a hell of an intro to the new album for me. Hell, even Kanye sounds like he's about to cry. His trademark swag a little saturated with insecurity.
 And if you can't see Kanye's insecurities stitched onto his designer sleeves, you are the one that is missing out on the joke here. When being a pariah is what pays the bills, you'd better be ready to kill.
The music game is full of motherfuckers who's name fell out of someones mouth, then completely off their minds.
Completely off the radar with a Kardashian to pay for.
  Truth is, I don't know what a Kardashian is. People come at me all the time telling me shit from Kanye's personal life like I'm guilty of the same for liking his records. I don't know, nor care.

Of actors and assholes... I wouldn't be stowing too many stones.

The record is brilliant.
I remember Nick from Dark Hip Falls and I calling each other as we picked it up on release day. I was mouth agape on the first play through. I couldn't believe he was upping his own ante that far. Yet I listened to him do it over and over again.
 How he twisted civil rights nomenclature into sex rhymes, and how he is happy to be the most hated motherfucker on the planet is fine with me. As long as it don't taint the music.
And it hasn't tainted his music, he took hip hop somewhere else. More akin to spoken word backed by synth tracks. And I find it funny how all his detractors turn right around and sound like him on their next release. The hip hop community might be a climate of braggadocio and hate, yet no one can admit that they have been bested by a pop motherfucker that wasn't even playing their game?
People get heated when he compares himself to Nas
People get heated when he compares himself to Michael Jackson
People get heated when he compares himself to God
people that get heated are really taking themselves way too seriously.
Don't you see the god damned pattern yet?