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2. Childish Gambino - "Camp" (2011)
Pure vitriol. Is this album really worth a 1.6 if Lil B's Basedgodveli mixtape gets a 7.8? Sure, Pitchfork were trying to make a point, but at least try and pretend there's going to be some sort of semblance of fairness.
And it's not just us who thought this article was rather odd, Pitchfork readers themselves voted the album Pitchfork's most underrated of 2011.
If you buy only one hip-hop album this year, I'm guessing it'll be Camp. The album maintains some of the overweening humor of Donald Glover's sitcom "Community", but Glover's exaggerated, cartoonish flow and overblown pop-rap production are enough to make Camp one of the most uniquely unlikable rap records of this year (and most others).
3. Jimi Hendrix - "Axis Bold As Love" (1968)
To Rolling Stone, Jimi Hendrix is not just a burlesque dancer in drag, but a boring one at that! They laugh at your attempts to titillate them with your bland songs, dear Jimi.
Jimi Hendrix sounds like a junk heap (Ben Calder crushed monolithic mobiles bulldozed), very heavy and metallic loud. Rock's first burlesque dancer, superman in drag, his music is schizophrenic. Axis: Bold as Love is the refinement of white noise into psychedelia, and (like Cream) it is not a timid happening; in the vortex of this apocalyptic transcendence stands Hendrix, beating off on his guitar and defiantly proclaiming "if the mountains fell in the sea, let it be, it ain't me." Such cocky pop philosophy shall not go unrewarded...Jimi Hendrix may be the Charlie Mingus of Rock, especially considering his fondness for reciting what might loosely be called poetry. But his songs too often are basically a bore, and the Experience also shares with Cream the problem of vocal ability.
4. Grimes - "Visions" (2012)
So what I'm getting from you is that Grimes is a more annoying version of Zooey Deschanel. Err, okay, got it.
Claire Boucher uses Visions to set ground rules: she is esoteric, quixotic, whimsical — maybe even just regular ol' weird — and you must acknowledge and appreciate this, damnit...All this purposeful quirkiness is far more off-putting than it is alluring, and things don't fare too much better from there. At a base level, Grimes's musical MO is to squeeze elastic pop music and chilly electronica into the same space, but her reasons for concocting this mash-up are frustratingly unclear.
5. Creed - "Weathered" (2002)
If there isn't a Christian Super PAC behind this review, then I just don't know what to say.
On Weathered, Creed's lucid powerhouse of a third album, the Orlando, Florida, trio emerge as masters of hard-rock atmosphere. As Soundgarden proved with Superunknown, there are a million little intricacies to pulling off what sounds like big enormous rock. And Creed are all over them: Weathered is rock of unusual focus and arrest, a beautifully distressed dance of sustained style and unapologetic emotion.
6. Drake - "Nothing Was The Same" (2013)
Guys, you’re going to give Drake an eating disorder with all this body image talk. And seriously, the most noticeable change in Drake between his last two albums has been his physique? Maybe the reviewer should be writing for Men's Health.
The most noticeable change in Drake over the last couple of years has been physical, not musical: suddenly he’s muscled, full of hard angles. The eyes remain soft, but everything around them has been remade. This is the externalization of the bravado that is now an essential part of his music — he’s bragged plenty before, but now it has weight. (It’s probably worth mentioning the New York nightclub altercation between Drake’s crew and Chris Brown’s crew in June 2012; when Drake spoke of it in a recent GQ interview, he had an ominous air, as if anticipating how things could get worse.)
7. Daft Punk - "Discovery" (2001)
Honestly, it probably really was because you didn’t take enough ecstasy and horse tranquilizers. How can you expect Daft Punk to seduce you if you don’t fully commit to them?
It's practically brainwashing, isn't it? Daft Punk seem to be operating under the premise that if you hear something enough times, you'll start to believe it. But after more than 15 listens to Discovery's first single and opening track, "One More Time," vocodered vocalist Romanthony doesn't have me "feeling the need," much less not waiting, celebrating, and dancing so free. This could just be me, of course. Maybe I just haven't taken enough ecstasy and horse tranquilizers to appreciate the tinny, sampled brass ensemble, the too-sincere "chill out" midsection, or the fat drum machine beats that throb in time with my headache.
8. Led Zeppelin - "Led Zeppelin I" (1969)
Rolling Stone should try to write songs and see how it feels! They seem to be setting the bar pretty high. But the “who’s more foppish” contest between Robert Plant and Rod Stewart, let’s get that going right now.
Jimmy Page, around whom the Zeppelin revolves, is, admittedly, an extraordinarily proficient blues guitarist and explorer of his instrument's electronic capabilities. Unfortunately, he is also a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative songs, and the Zeppelin album suffers from his having both produced it and written most of it (alone or in combination with his accomplices in the group)...The album's most representative cut is "How Many More Times." Here a jazzy introduction gives way to a driving (albeit monotonous) guitar-dominated background for Plant's strained and unconvincing shouting (he may be as foppish as Rod Stewart, but he's nowhere near so exciting, especially in the higher registers). A fine Page solo then leads the band into what sounds like a backwards version of the Page-composed "Beck's Bolero," hence to a little snatch of Albert King's "The Hunter," and finally to an avalanche of drums and shouting.
9. 50 Cent - “The Massacre” (2005)
If you’re going to go all the way to Greek mythology for the imagery, you might want to make sure it’s an album that Homer would bump with the windows down.
Starting with "Ski Mask Way", though, the tide shifts. Ghettotech impresario Disco D's production kicks off a three-track oasis of dynamic soul samples and moody rhythm in a tumultuous sea of gunshot-echoing beats; 50's tone softens for a cluster of phenomenal introspective tracks, like the unexpectedly sweet "God Gave Me Style" and "A Baltimore Love Thing". On the excellent, muted "Ryder Music", he's rapping about himself, as ever, but his tone is intimate and, for once, the man sounds vulnerable. In the final verse, he says, "In '99 I had a vision and made a decision/ Being broke is against my religion/ Now I picked up/ What?" Defiant, 50 found his win, and damned if he's giving it up-- but that he's got an Achilles Heel and willing to show it means he's more powerful than we can even fathom. There's your superhero track.
10. Haim - "Days Are Gone" (2013)
Sounds like the the Haim sisters just stepped out of a Disney Channel show written by Bret Easton Ellis. L.A. girls are just so...empty.
The lyrics flirt with turmoil – there are lots of songs about holding on or jumping into the fire, and so forth – but don’t really say much of anything. Nothing more appears to be at stake than sounding innocuously catchy. Only “My Song 5” evinces a personality -- a collage of elephant noises, spastic beats and operatic bombast. It’s the album’s one experiment, an eccentric exception amid the rehashed artifice.
11. Black Sabbath - "Paranoid" (1971)
If they’re undressing a hippie girl and not drinking her blood, that shit is definitely bubble-gum Satanism. Although if you think Sabbath are a bunch of phonies, you’re probably going to struggle in your quest to find authentic Satan spawn.
Although you may not enjoy its "message," although you may not enjoy a lead singer (Kip Treavor), who sounds like Keith Relf whining about the tampons stuck up his nostrils, you owe it to yourself as a person concerned with contemporary society or merely with the artistic underground of the youth movement in general to be aware of the "heavy" sounds of bubble-gum Satanism and if you see them live sometimes they undress a hippie girl.
12. Beach House - "Beach House" (2006)
Beach House: music for sleepy stoners.
The debut from his Baltimore boy-girl duo is all narcotic dreaminess, with enough keyboard drones, sideways effects and well-modulated eeriness to suggest a more ramshackle Slowdive or the Fiery Furnaces on codeine. Stoners of a certain indie-rock disposition might love atmospheric downers like "Childhood," but finding the best bits in these sleepy songs often feels like hard work.
13. Jay-Z - "The Blueprint" (2001)
Wait, do you have some sort of bizarre ritual where you go into hibernation in the suburbs every time you hear a Jay-Z album is coming out? 1996 and then again in 2001? That fucking White Stripes album!
"H to the Izzo" wasn't a summer jam for me. No TV, sadly, means no BET. I'm too far from ATL to get good radio, and the only thing bumping out the trunk at stoplights was that fucking White Stripes album. I was so deprived that when Nas pondered if Jay-Z might be "H to the izzo/ M to the izzo," I didn't even get the damned reference. Approaching a Jay-Z album in a cultural vacuum is a dangerous venture-- something I haven't done since his 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt-- and my hopes were a lot lower for this new one, which was rumored to be short on bigger-than-Jesus superproducers and entirely free of perpetual Roc-a-Fella sidemen Beans and Bleek (both of whom I've come to like far better than Jay himself). Honestly, I was expecting mediocre shit.
14. The Rolling Stones - "Exile On Main Street" (1972)
And cue Rolling Stone naming this album #7 on their "Best Albums of All Time" list.
In the end, Exile on Main Street spends its four sides shading the same song in as many variations as there are Rolling Stone readymades to fill them, and if on the one hand they prove the group's eternal constancy and appeal, it's on the other that you can leave the album and still feel vaguely unsatisfied, not quite brought to the peaks that this band of bands has always held out as a special prize in the past.
15. Led Zeppelin - "Houses Of The Holy" (1973)
Oh Lord, so you think Zeppelin have plunged off an artistic cliff since you called them “weak” and “unimaginative”? I don’t even want to know how far down in music Hell this new watermark is.
The truly original songs on Houses of the Holy again underscore Led Zeppelin's songwriting deficiences. Their earliest successes came when they literally stole blues licks note for note, so I guess it should have been expected that there was something drastically wrong with their own material. So it is that "Dancing Days," "The Rain Song" and "No Quarter" fall flat on their respective faces — the first is filler while the latter two are nothing more than drawn-out vehicles for the further display of Jones' unknowledgeable use of mellotron and synthesizer.
16. Bon Iver - "Bon Iver, Bon Iver" (2011)
Don't ever be tempted to give Bon Iver too much of a chance.
You may be tempted to give Bon Iver, Bon Iver too much of a chance, as odd as that may sound. It’s a pretty-sounding album initially, after all, and the ambiguity of Vernon’s lyrics suggests that there’s something deeper hiding in its confines, something that must be found with listen after listen. Indeed, it has already been deemed a ‘grower’ by many the very second that they realized that there is no “The Wolves (Acts 1 and 2)” or “Skinny Love” to be found here – that is, anthems to connect to and to return to for listeners. But hear and examine over and over again, if you will, that Vernon is not really saying anything at all on Bon Iver, Bon Iver, no matter how much you wish he was.
17. Mos Def - "Black On Both Sides" (1999)
Um, are these trick questions? Is the answer "never"?
When was the last time you heard somebody rap about the global economic and environmental consequences of first-world corporate waste and subsequent aquatic pollution? When was the last time you heard a hip-hopper sing competently over a phat-ass beat about the white appropriation of black art forms?
18. Arcade Fire - "The Suburbs" (2010)
Oh the irony of this dig at Arcade Fire being “unintentionally funny” coming across as decidedly unfunny. I’d imagine somewhere Win Butler has a flippant retort for this right about now.
I wish the new Arcade Fire record were funnier. The Canadian arena-rockers (yes, arena-rockers! Two shows at Madison Square Garden this week! We did it, Internet!) may lack actual jokes, but they're rich in unintentional hilarity—the absurd grandiosity of watching frontman Win Butler howl, "Working for the church while your family dies!" on Saturday Night Live in 2007 before peevishly smashing his guitar (his acoustic guitar!) onstage. Hysterical. "Dick in a Box" just can't compare. You can't help but love them for it: the apocalyptic overemoting, the swooning strings, the Springsteenian thrall, the pulverizing marching-band cacophony, the en masse quasi-militaristic bellowing that made past highlights like "No Cars Go" or "Wake Up" (which used to blare over the PA at the onset of every U2 concert, if that tells you anything) such a hoot.
19. Eminem - "The Marshall Mathers LP 2" (2013)
More intense than the original?!? I don't even know if I can handle more intense!
If anything, the sequel is more intense than the original, as the Detroit rapper explodes like an M-80, radiating anger, humor, and vulnerability often within the space of a single couplet.
20. Ellie Goulding - "Lights" (2010)
The question is, is this reviewer a modern-day Cassandra railing against the onslaught of folk pop, or did he actually imply it doesn't have commercial viability? Can it be both?
The other thing Goulding keeps saying in interviews is that it's her intent to meld folk and pop, via the electronic ministrations of producer Starsmith. It's an announcement that could make a strong man wake up in a cold sweat. There's a wealth of empirical evidence to suggest melding folk and pop is a bad idea. The case for the defence might cite the Byrds' effervescent Turn! Turn! Turn!, but the case for the prosecution could be there all night, showing the jury terrible, disturbing things: men with beards and ingratiating smiles singing If I Had a Hammer, footage of the Strawbs performing their horrible rightwing anthem Part of the Union on Top of the Pops. You hear Goulding banging on about melding folk and pop and think: Jesus, keep your voice down. We've only just got over the swine-flu pandemic: you keep going on like that, and they'll have to set up a government helpline to deal with panicked calls about a potentially lethal outbreak of All Around My Hat.
21. Lupe Fiasco - "Lasers" (2011)
Entertainment Weekly’s offices are still barricaded awaiting the Lasers revolution.
Lupe's much-delayed set is as militant as the picket signs that fans used to force its release months ago. Murky rock cut ''State Run Radio'' ridicules the repetitive nature of the airwaves, while the haunting ''All Black Everything'' creates a fantasy world where negative isms don't even exist. But within the harsh truths lie love and joy — heard on the spacey Trey Songz-assisted ''Out of My Head.'' Simply put, Lasers beams.
22. P&P
Wow, well this is awkward...
Charles (Hamilton) is 20 years old out of Harlem, and mark my words, he’s either gonna be famous or infamous by the end of 2009.
Pigeons & Planes, 2008
Asher Roth has next. Insert your comparison to Eminem here. His mixtape, The Greenhouse Effect has created huge hype. This song was released after that, and is an ode to all things college. Asher comes out of PA and reps for college students and suburbanites everywhere, but he’s got skill, and he’s funny as hell. And by doing a tape with DJ Drama and Cannon, freestyling for Jay-Z, and chilling with Mos Defand Beanie Siegel, he’s got some credibility too.
Pigeons & Planes, 2008
