Album Review: Nicki Minaj's "Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded"

The best ten songs on Roman Reloaded run about as long as Illmatic, and they are as definitive a statement about music today as Nas’s was back in ’94. Minaj’s louche, hermaphroditic lyrics shit on dichotomous thinking about sex and gender with vigor unimaginable by the epicene girly-boys who’ve approached the issue from the other side since before David Bowie became Lady Stardust.

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Album Review: Himanshu Suri's "Nehru Jackets"

Heems clearly puts a heavy emphasis on community-building in many ways. Like the RZA twenty years ago, Heems is building a small rap empire in New York City. He elicits strong performances from Lakutis, Despot, Big Baby Ghandi, all artists on his own Greedhead record label. There are also appearances by similar-minded blog A-listers Danny Brown, Mr. Muthafuckin Exquire, Action Bronson, and of course Victor Vasquez. Das Racist/Greedhead releases tend to use similar guest artists, evening out their inconsistency with an underlying artistic unity. And throughout the mixtape, there are little melodic and verbal callbacks to older songs that give the crew something like a mythology by simply hewing closely to catchy leitmotifs.

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Album Review: Yelawolf's "Radioactive"

Despite Radioactive’s second-half languor, it’s still a positive addition to Yelawolf’s canon. Based on his previous releases, the man is blessed with the high-velocity constitution befitting workaholics. And unlike other mixtape auteurs like Lil B and Gucci Mane, Yelawolf has benefitted from historically good quality control. It’s too bad that his major label debut is less than an unequivocal success.

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Unraveling The Drake Paradox

Throughout the admittedly hilarious review, Drake and his album get called "Renée Zellweger", "a crime against heterosexuality", "bitchmade", "false Beyoncé female empowerment", "audio vagina injections", and "gay ass music". And the nut is, believe it or not, I think this is a pretty positive review.

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Give A$AP Rocky Another Chance

The point is, ASAP Rocky earned an enormous mindshare in the world of blogs without actually crossing over in any significant way. No "Forever". No "Wonton Soup". No "Yonkers". Not even a "Justin Bieber 'freestyle' over 'Otis' ". Therefore, that Rocky would hardly try to come up with a full set of new songs for his big break really irked me.

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Pretty Good Looking For A Girl

St. Vincent’s project, as it were, is to document one person’s world, and she does so to amazing success. Her self is projected upon the listener in four dimensions, concretely. It cuts through the bullshit idealization of the feminine that’s so long hounded musicians throughout the ostensibly more progressive world of indie music.

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Is "Relax" The Album Of The Decade?

When Das Racist draw on their upper-tier liberal arts education, it seems like they’re writing for educated (read: “historically white”) people, letting in white people. They’re not. If they have a primarily white audience (an assumption I don’t necessarily buy), it’s because of latent racist assumptions that education and cultural literacy are an inherently white thing.

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An Excessive Attempt To Watch The Throne

Like, the album is about wealth. But it's also kind of not about wealth, you know? Seeing a pair of really rich dudes rapping about Margiela jackets and Murciélagos is not actually about wealth. It's about the crushing poverty that basically literally everybody else experiences.

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Words Will Never Hurt B

When B calls himself "based," he's connoting a few concrete concepts: positivity, personal expression, courage. But "based" also connotes some of the more ineluctable aspects of life. Like the word "cool." Or "god." Lil B's aimless, non-judgmental, anti-religion is also a sort-of religion.

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She'll Never Be a Rasta

When she says, "My problem with taking from the cultures that I do is that those cultures are under-represented and under-served," and asks, "Do I think I'm giving back?" it's pretty clear that she still has a liberal arts student's compunctions about running roughshod over a complex post-colonial world.

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Album Review: Beyoncé's "4"

4 has no interest in being a sermon or a manifesto. Trying to parse the meaning of it comes up mostly empty, and that’s probably a good thing.

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Album Review: James Blake's "James Blake"

As an exercise in the deployment of total control, James Blake is a stunning success. Like every terrible partner you’ve ever had, Blake wants the final word in every decision; he’s not afraid to repeat himself, and in fact uses repetition as a philosophical hammer to shape the listener into a pliant accomplice in his endeavor.

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Taylor Swift Doesn't Need A Blog. She Has A Record Deal.

Taylor Swift — more than the over-sharing Kanyes and PSA-authoring Gagas of the music world — seems to be performing a sort of LiveJournal style of music. Actually, Swift is probably too young to have a LiveJournal, but the name is a lot more evocative than the more contemporary Twitter. 

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Album Review: Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs"

There is an album in here, somewhere. But what got pressed onto vinyl/laser etched onto compact disk/encoded into mp3 is emphatically not an album. There are heavy makeout sessions, limbs striking walls and breathing like gasping, that are more of an album than The Suburbs. Clattering pans and chefs pratfalling on spilled olive oil may sound more like an album than The Suburbs. No, The Suburbs sounds like the lifeless reflections of a chastised middle schooler set to a funereal caricature of this band I heard about a few years ago.

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Album Review: Best Coast's "Crazy For You"

Is Bethany Cosentino high? (Hah, yes.) Every song on the album is at the same time a joy to listen to and aural torture. The sound of the album refers to gauzy 60s surf rock and slacker 90s alternative rock. In other words, the album’s bona fides check out. To people our age, Crazy For You is a very appealing record. Unfortunately, it suffers from being made for people our age.

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Album Review: Sleigh Bells's "Treats"

The first thing you should know is that the album is loud. It’s won the so-called loudness wars so convincingly that it seems a little uncouth to ever mention the word “quiet” again—quiet has been soundly defeated and its heart is cooling on a coroner’s scale. Treats sounds like music made to piss off your parents, if you lived with your parents. And in these economic times, you might, so there you go. Put another way, much of the album is like the chorus of “Debaser” and “La La Love You” mashed together (and all the mixing board’s knobs set to “Fuck You”). It’s a contemporary update to the Loveless formula: indiscernible lyrics + a wall of guitar sound = Awesome. In some ways it’s hard not to namecheck bands because what Sleigh Bells has done is to succeed where so many other bands try and fail. They’re Ratatat if the guys could put down the Nintendo controllers and go get girlfriends. They’re Marnie Stern with mass appeal. They’re Merzbow with a sense of (or concern for) fucking melody. And even though it sounds like an insult, I’m tempted to say that they’re Jock Jams for the kickball set.

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Album Review: MGMT's "Congratulations"

(If it were the last album on the earth, I would probably listen to it.)

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Album Review: Shearwater's "Golden Archipelago"

Shearwater’s The Golden Archipelago reminded me of hobbits even before I learned the album was the final part of a three-part series. It doesn’t have have any songs that are specifically redolent of fantastic creatures. There are no pan flutes. But the album feels like a circumscribed epic.

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Album Review: The Knife's "Tomorrow, In A Year"

After more than ten listens, the album remains very difficult to place. Tomorrow, In a Year is a difficult, confrontational piece. The album would actually be fairly dismissible as a performance souvenir if it weren’t being released worldwide. It may serve superlatively as the melos to the performance’s drama, but as a purely aural experience it somewhat fails to meet the high standard set by the Knife’s previous releases. Yet its ambition is abundant, and its intentions–while questionable–are quite clear.

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