1. Erykah Badu – New Amerykah, Pt 1: 4th World War (Universal Motown, 2008). Downplayed and practically disregarded as it was, 2003’s Worldwide Underground was an excellent and brave follow-up to 2000’s Mama’s Gun. Erykah Badu concedes she had nothing to say at the time — the loose 50-minute “EP” was more about sounds than statements — but she evidently holds herself to a high standard. Perhaps that streak was a factor in her protracted silence from its release to New Amerykah, Pt. 1: 4th World War; she even thought she might be through with making music. Her creative energy returned at some point, and then some, with this set apparently just the first in a series of releases. Varied and layered, New Amerykah, Pt. 1 has Badu collaborating principally with the members of Sa-Ra (who are present in almost half of the tracks), Madlib, 9th Wonder, and Baduizm/Mama’s Gun vets Karriem Riggins, James Poyser, and Ahmir Thompson. Read more >>
2. The-Dream – Love/Hate (Def Jam, 2007). When Terius “The-Dream” Nash released his first album, during the third-to-last week of 2007, the Top 30 of the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart contained five songs he co-wrote, only one of which was credited to him as a performer. Four of these singles — Mary J. Blige’s “Just Fine,” J. Holiday’s “Suffocate” and “Bed,” and his own “Shawty Is da Sh*!” — were on their way to the Top Five. Six months earlier, another song involving his input, Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” hit number one on the Hot 100. For Love/Hate’s duration, Nash sticks with close associates Christopher “Tricky” Stewart and Carlos “L.O.S.” McKinney. Not only does it lend the album a unified sound unlike most modern R&B albums, but it has the effect of a suite, with common elements shared between tracks; some of the transitions would make any album sequencing assistant deeply envious. Read more >>
3. Michael Mayer – Immer (Kompakt, 2002). Whenever something arrives in the shops with the name Michael Mayer affixed to it — whether it’s in the form of a remix, a 12″, or a mix album like this one — it’s an event. It doesn’t happen often enough, but when it does, disciples of the warm flavors of tech-house, click-house, micro-house, whatchamacallit-house, and experimental techno dealt out and curated by Mayer pay immediate perked-ear attention. It’s with very good reason. Following four years after his mix for the Neuhouse label, Immer finds Mayer smoothly fashioning tracks from labels like Ladomat, Ultra, Trapez, Force Inc., and his own Kompakt into a luxuriant digital bubble bath of envelopingly rounded beats, misty, atmospheric smears, and the odd tug at the heartstrings. Read more >>
4. Metro Area – Metro Area (Environ, 2002). The right amount of exposure and the right number of open minds would turn this record into the dance-music equivalent of Pulp Fiction. That film and this record are mindbending syntheses of undervalued styles and scenes of the past — both slyly referential and humbly reverential — with mad-scientist approaches that are dead set on being both current and translatable to the future. The men behind Metro Area, Morgan Geist and Darshan Jesrani, take six tracks from four 12″ releases that left immediate impressions on the dance underground, edit them as needed, and weave them into four new productions for a painstakingly sequenced album that flows constantly and smoothly with colorful, melodic, and deep feeling and simplistic yet full-sounding grooves. Read more >>
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