Album: Broke With Expensive Taste- Azealia Banks
Do you miss Lauryn Hill? Of course, we all do. Well, pop on the first track of Azealia Banks’ Broke With Expensive Taste to get a sense of what kind of brilliant Hill tracks the 21st century could have gotten if she hadn’t gone off the deep end. From the very first masterfully crafted track of the record, Idle Delilah, the listener finds themselves almost angry that a debut album can be this good, playing like a fusion of Fugees and St. Vincent. The second track, “Gimme A Chance”’s bass and rhyme heavy rapid fire delivery proves Banks can keep up with her far more popular peers, and its horn infusion proves Janelle Monae isn’t the only one to remember their musical roots. From there, the album shockingly goes bi-lingual and takes a full bossa nova tone, as though to burst open the frame your head has built around the album in terms of its genre, as though to say literally anything can happen now, making the rest of Broke With Expensive Taste the most fascinating, enthralling and enjoyable open playing field in an art form obsessed with labels and conforming to public expectations. It’s like when good kid in a M.A.A.D. city or The ArchAndroid first dropped, hearing a record determined not to be a tailor made hit debut, but hell bent on burning fiercely and bursting forth with a unique and untamed voice, Banks’ can spit rhymes as fast as anybody, set to beats we haven’t heard since the days of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest.
Originally, this review went track by track, analyzing and admiring each new turn this strange a,d brilliant record takes, but half the joy of this inventive album is falling down the rabbit hole and discovering these tracks like the strange new worlds of Swift’s Gulliver, so get on iTunes and by the most enthralling piece of experimental sounds since the last Tuneyards albums dropped.
Single: “Young Gods”- CUTTERS
Many consider the Foo Fighters to be rock’s top band (in terms of major label acts, that may be true, but being the top mainstream rock band in this decade is like being the best quarterback at a performing arts high school: it’s not hard, and it doesn’t mean much), and lament that the grit and overall fun of the genre has been overtaken by grandstanding and corporate sell-outs. Yet if you’re willing to dig a bit deeper than the radio, you’ll find some guys still keeping the spirit alive, like Brooklyn-based band CUTTERS, who recently took to the public access Chris Gethard Show with their single “Young Gods” off their We Are The Quarry EP (available for pay-what-you-want download on their Bandcamp page). Lyrics like “All my brothers have found drugs and God, where is my salvation” can be both biting or sincere, a tone the band blends brilliantly in all their tracks, and easily trumps anything your Spotify station has brought you from the genre in some time.
Music Videos:
Electronic: “Luna”- HEO
South Korean electro-pop act HEO has given us a real head trip of a video that tortures the mind to try and determine what it means, or even that it is (our guess? Two of those creepy mummies from Majora’s Maskgetting it on).
Hip-Hop: “I”- Kendrick Lamar
Perhaps the best rapper in the game today, Kendrick Lamar gives us his catchiest, most radio friendly single, accompanied by a video that demands MTV airplay, infused with his usual social commentary and ingenious lyrical composition.
Pop: “Blank Space”- Taylor Swift
The biggest pop star today puts out an album with an infinitely catchy (and self-deprecating) single, accompanied by her most enjoyable and cinematic video since “You Belong With Me”, how are we not supposed to cover it?
R&B: “LIPS”- Sisqo
So…the “Thong Song” guy is back, and you know what? He’s not half bad. Sure, the video doesn’t do anything unique. In fact, it feels like a typical John Legend video (save the dane moves of its singer), and the song has a similar tone. But that’s what makes the video such an interesting curio: This standard serious R&B video keeps the viewer going “Huh…that’s the ‘Thong Song’ guy”.
Rock: “The Wolfpack”- Angels & Airwaves
So…that band that one girl you dated in high school swore was her favorite has a new single out, and just in time for you to Facebook prowl her page to see if she’s still dating that skinny-jean wearing d-bag she left you for. The track itself is tolerable, and the video borrows heavily from emo-rock cliches and strangely the horror film You’re Next, but its a nice trip back to a time when such whining-voiced vocals were relevant (or perhaps a worrisome sign of aging that such vocals still are but you’ve just outgrown them).
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