Member Since: 6/8/2008
Posts: 24,791
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TIME Magazine: Albums of The Year
10. Killer Mike, R.A.P. Music
9. Azealia Banks, 1991 EP
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She doesn’t have an official album out yet, just this four-song taster (admirers are directed to her mixtape Fantasea). But her breakout single “212″ established her as a show-offishly gifted rapper, and the rest of 1991 backs up what it promises. Banks has a taste for club beats, an X-rated sense of humor and a gift for spectacular multisyllable rhymes. On the title track, she rhymes “Louvre in Paris” with “ruin her weave,” “juniper breeze,” “shoe with the bleed,” “Lou to the V” and “do it for free,” scarcely pausing for breath along the way.
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8. The Mountain Goats, Transcendental Youth
7. Various Artists, Listen, Whitey! The Sounds of Black Power 1967–74
6. Swans, The Seer
5. Getatchew Mekuria & the Ex & Friends, Y’Anbessaw Tezeta
4. Dirty Projectors, Swing Lo Magellan
3. Frank Ocean, Channel Orange
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He made waves by coming out shortly before his debut album did, but Frank Ocean’s sexuality isn’t the big story about him. He’s an extraordinary singer-songwriter, an R&B original who made his reputation with a mixtape (last year’s Nostalgia, Ultra), and whose album heralds a unique sound. There are hints of Prince and Elton John here, as well as guest appearances by John Mayer and underground rap collective Odd Future’s Earl Sweatshirt and a 10-minute suite that conflates Cleopatra with a contemporary stripper. Mostly, though, Channel Orange is about Ocean’s singing and narrative voice: both are supple and sly, and never quite say everything they know.
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2. Kendrick Lamar, good kid, m.A.A.d city
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The most promising artist in hip-hop was born in Compton, Calif., in 1987, around the same time as gangsta rap. His first major-label album is as elegiac as it is celebratory — an authoritative memoir of a lifetime spent immersed in the music that has changed the lives of everyone around him, for better and worse. Lamar has absorbed so much from every major MC you can name that he is able to evoke any era or region of rap within a few seconds of his delivery, and his words can resonate powerfully: in “Good Kid,” he calls out gang members who “step on my neck and get blood on your Nike checks.”
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1. Fiona Apple, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do
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A magnificent meltdown from a songwriter who describes herself as “a tulip in a cup”: catastrophic states of mind translated into unnervingly perky tunes and precisely turned phrases, polished until they gleam, then stripped to a skeleton, then polished again. The Idler Wheel is a very, very raw album, musically and emotionally — it’s little more than Apple’s voice and piano and Charley Drayton’s percussion, and it opens with a ditty about panic attacks — but it’s also wry, playful and self-aware, and Apple’s voice sparkles in the unforgiving light of its arrangements.
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http://entertainment.time.com/2012/1...e-r-a-p-music/
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Well deserved.
