Still Brazy, YG, Def Jam
In a world where hip-hop’s borders — aesthetic, regional and more — are increasingly porous, making an album as insular as Still Brazy, the second major-label effort by Compton rapper YG, counts as bold.
Still Brazy is an artisanal, proletarian Los Angeles gangster rap record, less tribute to the sound’s golden age than a full-throated and wholly absorbed recitation. YG is a stern rapper but a loyal student above all.
And the city’s history is tattooed on Still Brazy. Almost every song features the gelatinous low end that was a specialty of vintage gangster rap. Twist My Fingaz, the first single, is familiar Compton tough talk, working off an interpolation of Funkadelic’s One Nation Under a Groove, the foundation of Ice Cube’s Bop Gun (One Nation).
The Fatback Band’s Backstrokin’, anchor of so many West Coast rap hits, is used here on the title track. She Wish She Was includes a sample of Mack 10’s Foe Life. The guests — Nipsey Hussle, Joe Moses, Jay 305 and more — skew heavily toward Southern California.
In contrast to Kendrick Lamar, who uses Compton’s rap history as the foundation for fanciful flights of syllabic dexterity and lyrical nerve, YG treats it as destiny. The past is deeply, genetically embedded. (But the chasm between the two isn’t so vast: The team behind Lamar’s sound is here, too, represented by Terrace Martin, who produced a handful of songs, and Derek Ali, who mixed the album.)
But for YG, what’s past is present as well. Last June he was shot at a Los Angeles studio. Throughout this album, that attack is a rich text for him to mine, whether in the form of boasting (“The only one that got hit and was walking the same day”); resignation; or, more often, paranoia, as on Who Shot Me? in which YG mulls over the circumstances of his attack and sees potential enemies everywhere: “Damn, did the homie set me up? ‘Cause we ain’t really been talking much.” Depending on your angle, the song is either a plea issued in fear and anguish, a statement of plausible denial or a call for information.
This immediacy is one of the hallmarks of Still Brazy which is, if anything, more straightforward than YG’s 2014 debut, My Krazy Life, which leaned more heavily on storytelling. It’s there in the palpable fatigue on I Got a Question or the spoken interludes that suggest chaos at every turn.
And it’s also in the album’s explicit politics, a direct response to continuing American racial hostilities. There’s Blacks & Browns, a powerful statement of cross-racial unity featuring Mexican-American rapper Sad Boy, and FDT, a broadside against the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald J Trump, emphasizing his divisiveness and dismissiveness — it’s the first great protest song of this insurgent election season.
The album closes with Police Get Away Wit Murder, in which YG talks about relations with authority as asymmetric warfare and recites the names of unarmed victims of police killings. This is gangster rap as agit-pop and a reminder that it was never anything but.
— JON CARAMANICA, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
The Getaway, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Warner Bros
Flea, the slap-happy bassist in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, recently stirred up a small tempest: “A lot of times, especially recently, I look at rock music as kind of a dead form in a lot of ways.” He was talking with Mike McCready of Pearl Jam on SiriusXM and quickly hedged: “Nothing to take against us or you guys, because you know, we’re obviously — I believe that we’re relevant bands that come with” a real energy. (He used profanity there.)
Flea was talking about punk values, basically: insurgency, impertinence, whatever is the opposite of groomed and packaged. Thirty years ago, the Red Hot Chili Peppers formed an embodiment of that riotous ideal. It lingers mainly as a fond reverberation on The Getaway, their 11th studio album, a back-to-basics record with an asterisk: It doesn’t sound exactly like classic-vintage Chili Peppers, but it might just sound like how you remember them. Rather than regrouping with Rick Rubin, the producer of note throughout the Chili Peppers canon, the band enlisted Danger Mouse, a paladin of pastiche.
Danger Mouse takes a Rubinesque approach, smartly punching up the sinewy cohesion that still sets the Chili Peppers apart. Dark Necessities has all the trademarks: thumb-popping bass, chiming guitar, vocals that oscillate between rhythmic patter and a plaintive chorus. Goodbye Angels forms an even more perfect distillation, with mounting pressure and a hard swerve, after 3 1/2 minutes, into a polyrhythmic mosh-pit jam.
Anthony Kiedis writes lyrics with rhythmic cadence first and foremost, which means there will always be bursts of babble — “Send it off through Delaware just/Make it fair for the legionnaires” — alongside his cosmic or tragicomic musings. Flea is better featured here than he has been for a while, and his hookup with drummer Chad Smith is as fine and rubbery as ever. Guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, who was still finding his footing on the band’s 2011 album, I’m With You, sounds fully vested now: The spidery arpeggios and echoey accents in The Longest Wave reflect the long shadow of his predecessor, John Frusciante, but that’s to be expected.
What’s less expected is a collaboration with Elton John and Bernie Taupin on Sick Love, a sauntering pop tune with a crooked charm. Doesn’t that choice of guests underline Flea’s indictment of rock’s relevance? Your feelings on the issue will probably correlate to your enjoyment of This Ticonderoga, in which Kiedis articulates a worldview: “We are all just soldiers in this battlefield of life/One thing that’s for certain is my burning appetite.”
— NATE CHINEN, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
The Dreaming Room, Laura Mvula, Columbia
English singer Laura Mvula’s exceptional second album seems a feat of self-actualization, full of lyrics about managing psycho-spiritual highs and lows, often both at once: “I feel lost and found/at the same damn time,” she sings in Kiss My Feet.
That is the sort of thing that has become nearly necessary for entry into the pop-music sphere. (She has recently given interviews about turmoil in her life that is not identified per se in the songs: panic attacks and a marriage breakup.) But the album is also a broad feat of traditional and technical musicality, which isn’t so necessary for that sphere and which sets her slightly apart from pop. She plans out her own space and commands it.
The Dreaming Room represents meticulous formal achievement, a nearly symmetrical series of mountains that Mvula builds, through her choral and orchestral and rhythmic arrangements, and then climbs. Many of her songs seem ready-made for some kind of theatrical adaptation. They’re authentically dramatic, built on the swells of brass and strings and percussion, which might suddenly disappear behind some new peak of melody or meaning sung by Mvula — surrounded in harmony by her own voice, multitracked to the vanishing point and enlarged with cathedral echo.
The record draws a little closer to pop’s electronic vernacular, and also to a sense of looseness or play, than her first album, Sing to the Moon. She’s using her voice more flexibly, employing her own intuitive inflections and ornamentations. She’s making her songs land a little harder — such as Overcome, a short work of choral-orchestral funk that packs a houseful of ideas into just over three minutes, including the propulsive and gorgeous rhythm-guitar patterns of Nile Rodgers.
At the record’s center is Show Me Love, its most spacious track, six minutes long. In it, after a piano-and-vocals ballad section, a key change and a hymn-like sequence, the strings play a cycle of chords, quietly at first. For the next three minutes Mvula seems to improvise over it, with bits of the tightly written lyrics she has already sung. “Showed me — showed me love — of the deepest kind,” she sings. A little later: “No no. Nobody. There’s nobody like you. Now I see you. Now I see you, now I see you.” And here she chuckles: a key moment of abandon on a careful record.
— BEN RATLIFF, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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