1. Lee Ranaldo And The Dust - Last Night On Earth
Ranaldo's first solo album since the maybe-permanent hiatus of Sonic Youth, last year's Between The Times And The Tides, was about what anybody could've expected, nothing more and nothing less. Which is to say that I enjoyed it, but it was a bit anticlimactic after decades of one or two Ranaldo-sung tracks per Sonic Youth album giving you an inflated impression of what it would sound like if he cut loose with an album of his own songs. So it helps that this album lets it all hang out more; it's got one fewer songs than Between, but it's a full 16 minutes longer. I was a big fan of the jammy, expansive 21st century Sonic Youth records, so it's fun to hear this band, which features Steve Shelley drums, do some glorious churning Murray Street-style jams while Ranaldo continues to refine his songwriting voice. Almost all of these albums are in my big fat 2013 albums Spotify playlist, by the way. 

2. The Dismemberment Plan - Uncanney Valley
In some ways, this album resembles Travis Morrison's much-maligned solo debut as much as any Dismemberment Plan album, which goes some of the way to explaining the muted critical response to Uncanney Valley (although, as something of a Travistan stan, that doesn't bother me too much). But it also seems like most of the negative reviews are written by people who only acknowledge Emergency & I and Change as the band's great works, which is not to say that this album sounds much of anything like the spiky, frenetic Is Terrified. But it maintains a lot of the playful spirit of the band's first two albums, and the dozen-plus live shows I saw back when I was a fanatical follower of this band that lived near Washington, D.C. And I think that might be lost on some people who associate this band with moping while listening to "The City" and "Face of the Earth" on headphones. This album doesn't sound as good as I hoped it was when I heard a lot of the songs live for the first time last year, and there's something unflattering about the mix, which puts Travis's voice seemingly further upfront than before, and doesn't flex the power of the rhythm section as much even when they're kicking some ass on here. "White Collar White Trash," my favorite of the new songs in concert, doesn't quite work here, although I still think it really nails something about northern Virginia that only people have lived in this part of the country would really get. But even the songs that sounded a little odd or off-putting at first, like "No One's Saying Nothing," are starting to gel and the album clicked with me more than ever just this week. The interesting thing about this album sounding like a Travis Morrison solo record with his vocals and goofy sense of humor way in the forefront, is that his new band The Burlies recently release a single that basically sounds like the kind of loud, jagged post-punk people kinda with the Plan were still doing, which suggests that it's not just Morrison leading the musical direction on Uncanney Valley.

3. Pearl Jam - Lightning Bolt
Doing my little Pearl Jam 'box set' of the best of each drummer's era was a fun little exercise that allowed me to cherrypick from the spotty last few albums with Matt Cameron and come up with something that made me feel better about the band's gradual creative decline. The later albums are just kind of dry, even compared to earlier albums like No Code that were undeniably flawed but had this charged energy that had more to do with the band's restless, adventurous spirit than that they were the biggest band in the world for a while there. This one is pretty good, though -- doesn't entirely follow up on the promise of "Mind Your Manners," which just gets better every time I hear it, but there's nothing outright bad or boring to kill the momentum like on Backspacer or Riot Act. And "Infallible" is just awesome and unexpected, best use of Boom Gaspar on one of the studio albums since "Love Boat Captain. I'm so bummed I missed the band's show in Baltimore this week, the setlist looked amazing. 

4. Fall Out Boy - PAX•AM Days EP
It's funny to hear Fall Out Boy do kind of a 'back-to-basics' hardcore EP where they run through 8 fast loud songs in 13 minutes, because while those guys probably all played a lot of this stuff in earlier bands, Fall Out Boy started out pretty much fully formed as this pretty polished band with lots of quirks and pop instincts that made them not very 'proper punk.' And instead of having Pete Wentz scream all over the songs, Patrick Stump just belts out all the vocals without holding back or trying to hide how good of a singer he actually is -- there's almost kind of a Danzig-era Misfits vibe to this stuff. Save Rock And Roll was a mixed bag for me in part because it was pretty overproduced even by Fall Out Boy standards, but instead of being an overcorrection or defensive swing in the opposite direction, this just feels like a fun, unexpected tangent from a band who doesn't really need to prove anything to punk traditionalists (and wouldn't be able to even if they tried). It was pretty weird to have Pearl Jam, The Dismemberment Plan and Fall Out Boy all drop records on the same day (and a week after half of Sonic Youth), like 20 years of my modern rock listening habits summed up in a few representative favorite bands.

5. True God - Soul Revival II
True God is a Baltimore dude from the same crew as the Speed On The Beat guy whose record I wrote about in this space a couple months ago, I don't really know their work outside these two projects but they're pretty good, and I like shooting the shit with these guys on Twitter. This isn't as stylized or noisy as Speed's stuff, a little more direct and writerly, my favorite tracks so far are "Crown The Champion" and "No Money Down." The whole thing is 70 minutes long, though, and I dunno, albums that run that long tend to wear out my patience, sometimes less is more. 

6. Pusha T - My Name Is My Name
I've always felt a pretty big disconnect between press coverage of Pusha T/Clipse's music and the actual sound of the records -- the drug trade monomania that's such a critical liability for most anyone from further south than Virginia is somehow supposed to be this exciting angle with them where Push is actually saying something interesting or clever, when it's mostly kinda rote "KEYS, GET IT!?" wordplay. Plus, there was all this hype about this not being a mainstream record angling for radio play, when 10 out of 12 tracks have guests, 9 of which are with people who objectively make it more 'radio-friendly.' I'm not even sure this is better than the last Ace Hood album, which had some of the same guests, but far fewer guests in total. "No Regrets" and "Nosestalgia" are pretty dope, though (even if the latter's title is pretty cringe-inducing and Kendrick steals the track).

7. Young Dro - High Times
Dro is a good counterexample to what I was just saying about Pusha T -- he's in roughly the same wheelhouse of wordplay heavy rap about drug dealing and materialism, but he's got a thick southern drawl and a fraction of the same kind of respect as a lyricist. Of course, I'm not suggesting there's a level playing field without other variables at work -- Young Dro's never seemed in total control of his career, his visibility fluctuating depending on whether T.I. was a free man at the time and was making the Grand Hustle roster a priority. But he recently had his biggest radio hit in a long time in "F.D.B." (and I still have no idea how Young Dro going "fuck dat bitch" became radio fodder in 2013) and released the long-awaited follow-up to the 2006 minor classic Best Thang Smokin'. This album is on E1 (formerly Koch) and feels kinda slapped together, but there are a few songs where he spazzes out, and I like how one of the magazine-style headlines on the album cover is "Is Lyrical Rap Back?" like he's really throwing down the gauntlet and identifying himself as such.

8. Nipsey Hussle - Crenshaw
I was kind of involved in a mild internet furor over the last few weeks involving this record, it was a weird experience. In August, Complex asked me to write a list of 10 "underachieving rappers" -- actually, they asked me to write a list of 20, but it was such a thorny topic that I suggested we cut it down to 10. There was a lot of back-and-forth discussion of just how to do execute the idea in a way that wasn't overly reckless or obnoxious -- these are some actual things I wrote in an e-mail: "I definitely don’t wanna go forward with this unless we absolutely know what we’re saying and what the criteria is...There’s the risk of just unjustifiably dissing the accomplishments of people who’ve actually done a lot and made some classic songs but maybe not a classic album, or on the other end picking on someone who’s perfectly good but hit a pretty low commercial peak or whatever and got kicked to the side by the industry." One of people I would say falls in the latter category that we ended up putting in the list was Nipsey Hussle -- nothing negative was said about his music in the piece, just that he had a lot of buzz for a minute, and then he kinda fell off the radar and didn't achieve what it seemed like he was going to. Fast forward a few weeks later, Nipsey makes headlines selling a new CD for $100 a pop, and when someone else from Complex asks to interview him about it, he kirks out on Twitter about how much the placement on that list pissed him off and the interview ends up being primarily about that and inspiring more thinkpieces and so on and so on. Through all this, I stayed pretty much on the periphery of the whole overblown 'controversy,' not really jumping in aside from joking about it on Twitter (oh, and one of my joking tweets wound up in a "Twitter haters" montage in a YouTube documentary about Nipsey). But I listened to the mixtape a bit, and again, I don't really have anything negative to say about his music, "4 In The Mornin'" is a jam, the whole record feels a little generic or anonymous to be at the center of a whole conversation about the monetary value or music or whatever. But hey, people are talking about him, that's an achievement I guess. 

9. Kelly Clarkson - Wrapped In Red
Is it weird if I say I think this is the sexiest album of the year? I just love the sound of Kelly Clarkson's voice and she's got a fat ass and this whole record just sounds like you're under the blankets with her in the middle of the winter. And this thing just sounds great, Greg Kurstin getting his Phil Spector on with all these lush arrangements. "Winter Dreams (Brandon's Song)" and "4 Carats" sound especially great. I don't even wanna hear a Christmas record in October at all but I listened to this one because that's when she dropped it. 

10. Katy Perry - Prism
If I'll gladly listen to anything Kelly Clarkson puts out, I'll only listen to Katy Perry under a sense of obligation -- this album will probably be spinning off giant hits for the next year or two, so I might as well get a little acquainted now. "Roar" is low key kind of a jam, if more for the production than for the song itself, and "Birthday" and "Walking On Air" and "Dark Horse" are all songs I'd be happy to hear on the radio all the time, but with my luck I will have to hear goddamn "This Is How We Do" or "International Smile" around the clock for a few months next year. 

Worst Album of the Month: Miley Cyrus - Bangerz
This album really highlights the difference between the bland, corny professionalism of a Katy Perry album and something that is genuinely, actively awful. The one tolerable song, "Adore You," is track 1, and it's all downhill from there. She's got such a weird, unnatural-sounding singing style, not as inherently annoying as Katy's, but so rarely deployed in a way that isn't awful on this album. I don't even really fuck with "Wrecking Ball," it's like the 2013 version of "Battlefield" by Jordin Sparks. And the bulk of the album is just these dickhead anthems to soundtrack the "Entourage" movie or something. "Love Money Party," "SMS (Bangerz)," what the fucking fuck are these songs.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 02, 2013 at 12:59 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.