Run the Jewels 2
Run the Jewels
Mass Appea
Like-minded dissenters with opposite back stories, El-P and Killer Mike are each on, at minimum, their third act in the duo Run the Jewels. In the late ‘90s, El-P was the clarion voice charting independent hip-hop’s anti-capitalist turf and helping keep alive dissonance in a genre largely given over to melody. Killer Mike parlayed proximity to Outkast to become a roughneck firebrand.
No wonder each had a burnout period, and what good fortune that they found each other. Run the Jewels 2 is their second collaborative album (third, if you count Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music album, which El-P produced), and it’s a reconciliation of ideas that might not have been allowed in the same room a decade or so ago. But even though these two spent their spotlight years in different places, they both trace their aesthetic arcs back to Public Enemy’s chaotic bombast, and it’s that urgency that they bring to this album.
These are pummeling cyber-howls, these songs. They’re skeptical of the government, of complacency, of the opiated masses. On Lie, Cheat, Steal, Killer Mike tries to unpack the reality of power relations:
You really made it or just became a prisoner of privilege?
You willing to share that information that you’ve been given?
Like who really run this?
Like who really run that man that say he run this?
Throughout the album, it’s Killer Mike who hits the hardest, with the scathing, wounded indictment of police brutality Early, and the self-lacerating Crown, on which he details the guilt associated with selling drugs. Deep down, and now on the outside, Killer Mike is a righteous humanist. One of the starkest contrasts on this album is how that holds up against El-P’s natural fatalism. Also, how Killer Mike’s rhyme patterns are round like a barrel, while El-P raps in shards (though he does a convincing Southern cadence on Lie, Cheat, Steal).
Musically, this album — full of industrial-strength groans and vibrations, rat-tat-tat snares, and failing-spaceship noise — is a baronial assault, with production largely handled by El-P, who describes himself as “A dirty boy who come down on the side of dissonance/I can’t even relax without sirens off in the distances.” It’s a middle ground between the dustier but still anarchic work he did for Company Flow and his often paranoiac solo work.
In word and in sound, he’s given to imagistic extremism, but now he has a true partner in rhyme. Run the Jewels is two seen-it-all rappers who trust each other not to drop their shared vision. Note the frequency with which the two weave references to the group’s name and gun-and-fist logo into their verses, wanting to etch them in lyrics so as to make sure that they don’t go anywhere.
— Jon Caramanica, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Rock & Roll Time
Jerry Lee Lewis
Vanguard
Jerry Lee Lewis’ Rock & Roll Time sounds like an after-hours session with famous friends, vintage guitars and a half-planned set list. Why not? Jerry Lee Lewis is a rebel, an authentic person; let him make an authentic record. Free him from restrictions!
It isn’t that simple anymore, if it ever was. A lot of great Southern singers from the 1950s and ‘60s have made late-career records like this over the past 20 years, and gradually, authenticity has become artifice like anything else, a direct route to a Grammy Award. This one — timed for simultaneous release with Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story, an authorized biography by Rick Bragg — is roughly in the same line as Lewis’ last two studio albums, Last Man Standing (2006) and Mean Old Man (2010), and some of it comes from the same sessions, with Jim Keltner as the authentic-sounding drummer (and also one of its producers).
Those earlier records set up Lewis in duets with famous people. A few of those same people, including Keith Richards and Neil Young, are here again, but in secondary roles, rougher and more anonymous. You could hear this album’s version of Jimmy Reed’s Bright Lights, Big City and not know that Young played the guitar solo and sang harmony on it — or, for that matter, that Ivan Neville played organ on it. That’s an anti-contrivance and almost a concept, though it isn’t seen through; the lineup changes for each track, and sometimes the famous guests (Derek Trucks, Shelby Lynne) are easily recognizable.
The repertory? A couple of Kris Kristofferson songs, one rebellious and one sentimental; a blues written by Bob Dylan (Stepchild); and several three-chord blues and rock standards, including Chuck Berry’s Little Queenie and Promised Land.
On all of them, Lewis sounds peaceful, steady-rolling; this is as easy for him as falling off a log. What’s missing is the thing he’s great at: creating a feeling of surprise or danger. That comes through on a different record, The Knox Phillips Sessions, taken from unreleased demo tapes recorded in the late ‘70s and released last month by Time-Life Music; on it, Lewis is hoarse-voiced, inventive, powerful. It also comes through when he performs, and you should see him while you can.
— Ben Ratliff, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Flesh and Machine
Daniel Lanois
Anti-
There’s a reason for the word order of Flesh and Machine, which Daniel Lanois chose as the title of his atmospheric, process-driven new album. A collection of sonic assemblages, from clangorous abstraction to catchy, wordless pop, it evokes an oldfangled form of technological mediation: not a DJ running programs on a laptop, so much as the wizard behind the curtain, twisting knobs.
Lanois has, of course, logged many hours behind that curtain, as a trusted producer for the likes of Bob Dylan, U2 and Neil Young. He has also pursued a looser ideal of live performance — in his band, Black Dub, and in his solo guises, drawing from multiple strains of folk music. Flesh and Machine is an attempt to merge those areas of expertise.
Most of these tracks began with electric or steel guitar, drums and piano, morphing in shape by way of electronic sampling and processing. This is hardly a new concept, but Lanois knows how to put an accessible stamp on his more experimental protocols.
Opera, with its low thrum and clattering drum programming, hints at 1990s drum and bass; Iceland, with its reflective, slow-moving melody, suggests the brooding side of indie-rock. On My First Love, a confectionary bite of vintage pop, Lanois uses the same Suzuki Omnichord that he played with Brian Eno more than 30 years ago.
The album’s most bracing moment arrives early, with The End, featuring a heated free improvisation by the drummer Brian Blade, against crashing waves of distorted guitar. It’s one of the handful of moments when you feel the presence of human variability on the album — and a good advertisement for the tour on which Lanois is about to embark.
— Nate Chinen, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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