154. Ghostface Killah - The Pretty Toney Album (2004)

Ghostface is without a doubt in my mind the greatest rapper of the 00s (perhaps the greatest rapper of all time) and this album, while it's considered a "minor" album in his canon, is just as good as Supreme Clientele. What helps here are the relatively short lengths of each track; most of them are done in just over three minutes, and each one is accompanied by an ass-kicking soul beat. Nobody is better than Ghostface at re-appropriating these soul beats in hip-hop, and an instrumental version of a Ghostface album would work just as well as a modern funk record. The relatively low-key quality of this album allows Ghostface to loosen up and just do whatever the hell he pleases, which gives the album the relatively rare feeling of sounding both casual and intense--or maybe it's just that Ghost is so good at what he does that he makes it look easy. Both the uptempo tracks ("Beat the Clock") and more balladesque material ("It's Over") are expertly performed and produced, and there's hardly a slow point from beginning to end, aside from a few ill-chosen skits (but thankfully, they're short--nowhere near the 3+ minute skits that were a major liability on Supreme Clientele). It's not as serious as an album like The W, nor does it try to be--it's just a fun, professional record, well-suited for the over-the-top Vegas font of the album cover. It's not nearly as weird as Ghostface's other stuff (he never would have let an obvious dumb pop track like "Tush" on Fishscale) but for what it is, it's great.

MY RATING: 8.7

Ghostface Killah - "Beat the Clock"

155. Clipse - Lord Willin' (2002)

As good as this is it still seems like a dry run for the masterful Hell Hath No Fury four years later; there's little this one does that the other one doesn't do better, and what few things this does that the other doesn't (uptempo party stuff), probably didn't need to be done at all. Generally the more uptempo the beat is, the worse Clipse do with it. They're masters of creepy, disturbing rap music, telling tales of utter amorality, and the best of this stuff follows that pattern. Still, this is vintage Neptunes, and Pusha T and Malice are so well-matched that they seem to be split from the same consciousness; their rapping is top-level the whole way through, completely unmatched in its violent realism, and it's only when the album tries to be "fun" that it fails. The Neptunes' presence is obvious right away: simple, live-sounding beats and minimal samples, and while they would become far more adventurous on the followup record, this one still has some amazing moments ("Virginia" and "Comedy Central" seem to me to be the standouts here). The famous "Grindin'" is worth the price of admission all by itself, a rap track that uses syncopated sound effects (doors slamming) as the beats, creating an astonishing atmosphere. There are no skits, and the album flows very well, but again it's one of those unlucky albums that lives in the shadow of a superior one.

MY RATING: 7.8

Clipse - "Virginia"

156. Bloc Party - Silent Alarm (2005)

Bloc Party resemble Gang of Four both in their sound and in the fact that a brilliant first album was followed up by two albums of meandering crap. Granted, Gang of  Four's meandering crap wasn't nearly as bad as Bloc Party's would end up being, but the point still stands. But luckily this album is before the rot set in, and it's still as great as I thought it was five years ago--super-energetic guitar rock in the vein of 80s U2 (but with a funkier low end), masterfully written and played. It's one of those albums where every song is a potential single, which is all the more impressive because of its variety--there's catchy singles ("Banquet"; "Pioneers") funky dance tracks ("Positive Tension"; "She's Hearing Voices") tearjerkers ("Blue Light"; "This Modern Love") and creepy, Joy Division-y stuff ("Luno"; "Compliments"). It's such a near-masterpiece of 00s guitar rock that in retrospect it seems like the band was blowing its load here; everything since has been awful. It's just fantastic guitar pop, in the old style--setting sad words to pretty music. If the album has a problem it might be that it's entirely too serious and poker-faced--there is not a hint of humor or irony on this thing, and every single track is attempting to be a GLORIOUS NEW ANTHEM for the YOUTH OF TODAY. It's a testament to the band's skills that they didn't fall on their face, and while they didn't exactly become the new Radiohead at least they made one great record, which is more than what most groups of this type can say (remember Maximo Park?)

MY RATING: 9.0

Bloc Party - "Positive Tension"

157. Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow (2003)

Lightning Bolt most resemble Deerhoof and Clinic in that their first album outlined a totally original style and subsequent albums did nothing to change it. Frankly, it doesn't matter what Lightning Bolt album you pick up--they're all the same thing, and all comparable in quality. What do Lightning Bolt do? Lightning Bolt, more than any other group, make a racket. Their purpose is the production of noise. Their music doesn't "rock" in the conventional sense; the guitar riffs are too fast to really hold onto and the absence of comprehensible vocals immediately renders their music useless to sing along to. But their music is loud and it is fast. It's basically the Platonic ideal of a marriage between the most extreme elements of both metal and punk--metal's volume, punk's speed. Their music is noisy, but interestingly it's not the kind of noise that makes you plug your ears in distaste, like a car alarm or something: it's noise deployed with a purpose, noise designed to pummel you into submission. There's no point here in discussing differences between tracks because there aren't any. Lightning Bolt are Lightning Bolt, and you're going to have to (sunglasses descend from sky) deal with it.

MY RATING (although ratings hardly seem to matter for a group like this): 7.9

Lightning Bolt - "On Fire"

158. Destroyer - Destroyer's Rubies (2006)

Destroyer is the vehicle of Dan Bejar, he of the bizarre, affected voice and cryptic lyrics, perhaps better known as the guy who writes the three less good songs on every New Pornographers album. Those songs are certainly nothing like what appears on this record, a dense, confusing work--the album it most evokes for me is the Fiery Furnaces' Blueberry Boat, and while it is neither as poppy or as complex as that one it shares the ambition to create multipart, 6+ minute pop songs. The pop song format is not naturally conducive to extended track lengths, and so what both of these bands did was either stick several songs together in one or go the Hey Jude route and turn it into a campfire singalong. The problem here is while the melodies themselves are attractive and inviting they get lost in the overambitious arrangements and the whole thing starts to feel a bit clinical and cold. Bejar also has the annoying tendency to start scatting in every single song, pumping out "la la la"s and "na na na"s so often you want to reach into your computer and strangle him. He uses this technique so often it seems to be a function of writer's block--that he's just tossing in na-na-nas every single time he can't think of anything else to say. So this is less a case of an album being bad than being unstrung by its ambition--while it's certainly preferable to something boring and safe, it doesn't really work, and I can't imagine anyone really listening to this kind of thing for pleasure. Impressive and cold.

MY RATING: 6.3

Destroyer - "Looters' Follies"

159. Girl Talk - Night Ripper (2006)

The issue here is not whether this is done well (it certainly is) but whether or not it should have been done at all. What Girl Talk does isn't new, at least in the macro view: he's a sampler, a plunderphonics guy. His music is constructed entirely from samples of other music. This isn't original: it had been going on for a good decade before this record came out. But what GT did to differentiate himself was simple: when he chose music to sample, he didn't do what most other samplers did, i.e. find obscure samples that gain interest when placed in a new context. He just took the best parts, the stuff that everyone recognizes. While this adds up to an incredibly fun album, it also produces the inevitable question: does this mean anything? does it have any lasting value? The fact is that as fun as this is, it's fun like eating at McDonalds can sometimes be fun. It isn't bad, exactly (it is, after all, scientifically designed to be good) and you know what you're getting, but nobody would mistake it for the best you could get, or in fact anything with any lasting value at all. A huge problem with this album is there is no tonal variety: on far superior sample records like Endtroducing or Since I Left You or As Heard On Radio Soulwax there is actual ebb and flow in the music, slow parts and fast parts, reflective and excitable. Here it's all coming at the same pace with no variation. Familiar rap verse over familiar rock backing--repeat. Over and over.  Basically, the interest lies in the quality of the original samples, not in what GT does with them, which is pretty much nothing. It's its own thing, but it's its own thing like a six-legged dog: there's a reason there aren't very many.

MY RATING: 4.8

Girl Talk - "Once Again"

 

160. Deerhunter - Cryptograms (2007)

Disclosure: Deerhunter are, IMO, the best new American band to come along in the last five years, so take into consideration that this review is written by someone who loves the band, loves their sound, and would likely love anything they do. So. Deerhunter's second album is a head-on collision between ambient feedback tones and poppy shoegaze music, and what makes it work as well as it does is the band's unerring sense of how to sequence a record. Nobody today puts albums together as well as Deerhunter does; each song expertly gains power by its placement in the whole, and I do not envy the task of whoever, ten years from now, is given the job of extracting tracks from their albums to put together a compilation. I suppose one reference point is Sonic Youth, but I feel like Deerhunter are even better at combining their pop influences and their avantgarde influences; the band, through amazing production and the aforementioned sequencing, makes a straight-up pop track like "Spring Hall Convert" fit in perfectly with a weird piece of avantgarde disco like "Octet". The band would get even more poppy and outsized than this later, with the compressed masterpiece Microcastle and the gorgeous pop record Halcyon Digest, but this is easily the equal of those.

MY RATING: 9.2

Deerhunter - "Spring Hall Convert"