1. Frank Ocean
Channel Orange
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2. Kendrick Lamar
good kid, m.A.A.d city
Another 25-year-old from L.A., Kendrick Lamar managed with his own major-label debut to “resurrect and reinvent West Coast hip-hop,” said Ken Capobianco in The Boston Globe. A protégé of Dr. Dre, this Compton rapper “leaves the nihilism” of his forerunners behind and instead “spins tales of everyday life” that are rich in telling details. The whole album traces out a single story—about a teenager’s innocence eroding under the pressures of poverty, gangs, and drugs, said Mike Madden in ConsequenceofSound.com. As the album “wades through a myriad of sounds,” Lamar displays such “virtuosic control” of his “impossibly elastic voice” that all feels part of the whole. All in all, it’s a “masterful” performance.
3. Fiona Apple
The Idler Wheel…
Given the rambling, 23-word full title of Fiona Apple’s latest, you might be surprised to hear that it’s her “most focused, refined” album since her 1996 debut, said Randall Roberts in the Los Angeles Times. The ever-inventive, exuberantly confessional singer and pianist has “perfected her craft.” Across these 10 tracks, you can hear musical influences ranging from Fats Waller and Tin Pan Alley to Nina Simone, but she’s also learned to build songs both “delicate enough to be beautiful” and “sturdy enough” to support her potent voice. If you’re “a fan of the human spirit in all its wildly dramatic and emotionally ravaged glory,” this is must listening.
4. Japandroids
Celebration Rock
“If Celebration Rock were much longer than 35 minutes, it might actually be exhausting,” said Ian Cohen in Pitchfork.com. The second album from a couple of 30-year-olds from Vancouver, it’s “a rock record for the ages,” a barrage of drums, guitar, shouted choruses, and live-for-the-moment lyrics that “treat every day like the last day of school.” That intensity will be familiar to fans of the band’s 2009 debut, and yet this effort manages to “completely dwarf its impressive predecessor,” thanks to sheer songwriting craft. And while Celebration Rock is “undoubtedly a fun record,” there’s ample emotional ballast on its “near-perfect Side B”as it builds to its climax—on “The House That Heaven Built” (see box below).
5. Bob Dylan
Tempest
There’s “no place for tears or sentimentality” on Bob Dylan’s latest, said Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune. Throughout this “long, craggy album,” the “masterful” 71-year-old storyteller surveys the wreckage of a world gone mad and resigns himself to it. Dylan’s voice is now a cross between a growl and “a tubercular wheeze,” but it suits these rueful songs. Not everything is bleak. The swinging “Duquesne Whistle” sounds like a “vaudeville-style tune” played to fill the dance floor in a roadside gin joint. The record closes with “two slow-moving dirges,” but that voice—“murderous, mischievous, and tender, sometimes all at once”—will keep you rapt.
SOURCES: American Songwriter, Associated Press, A.V. Club, Chicago Tribune, MTV.com, The New York Times, NPR.org, Paste, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Rolling Stone, The Salt Lake Tribune, Spin, Time, The Washington Post.
