2019, point 1

navy blue - “deathmask . . .”
I listen to this song sitting in my bed every night. It is meditatively alarming, triggering muffled sirens squealing through the tunnels of my subconscious — it feels like the correct amount of urgency to seal off one day and tear open the next. It is sounds oddly composed for what I can only process as a prescript to the void, meticulously inscribed in cursive and folded into a bottle, a missive from today to yesterday in cassette. And he really really said “I cautiously approach the rather daunting sea/By nightfall I face the man I’m supposed to be” I’m so sick. 

Choker - “Petrol Bliss” (Choker)
I would argue that evoking familiarity is a tool, not an objective, but it appears that Choker feels differently and I you know, I can respect that position. Yes he sounds like damn Frank Ocean but Choker’s music is so single-mindedly dedicated to the act of transportation and diffusing a solid state of being into something transient and no longer time-locked that I sometimes forget that my vision of music is at odds with his. And so my take often ends up being that this is all somewhat aimlessly straightforward, but something about how bipolar “Petrol Bliss” is, with the way the shimmering first verse careens into the sneering opening keys that leave me alone I swear to God are sampled from some A$AP Rocky song that I swear I’d find if I spent twenty more minutes clicking around in my iTunes. Anyway I figure once the sheer emotional sway that Choker holds receives some directionality it’ll all be over because this one feels so stunningly extra wide-screen cinematic I would sift through any number of one-off EPs to try and strike gold like this again. “Petrol Bliss” feels like being enclosed in a bubble, constrained by a shimmering, refracting barrier that’ll pop on contact, or on second nine after minute three.

Solange - “Almeda” feat. Playboi Carti (John Carroll Kirby, Pharrell & Solange)
Music this confidently in reproach of ABAB structure is so important especially when it is this good and especially when Playboi Carti hits the baby talk man diamonds they really really do shine in the dark now. Pharrell breaks out the entire spectrum of Pharrell™ drum rhythms and chords how clearly in service of Solange’s broader vision they are is inspiring, and transfixing. I try and shy away from the dramatic auteur talk but it’s so hard not to here. 

min.a - “nineteen” (min.a)
I usually think of familiar things as being familiar and unfamiliar things as being unfamiliar and broadly that feels like a reasonable position, but the way “nineteen” feels so earnestly dedicated to smashing together those states of being makes me skip a beat, or several. The classic pop textbook is to locate a single emotion, snatch onto it and hold on for dear life, and then disassociate, generalize, abstract, abstract, abstract it out until it can be stenciled onto anyone and anything. The stars are the ones whose smiles you could still pick out of a lineup. “nineteen” definitely starts there, because on paper it is about being nineteen or really just any age at all and that is certainly by definition a Shared Experience, but then it enters a controlled and premeditated spiral, stuttering and scrambling itself up. The glitches in the matrix feel undeniably correct and accurate, not that it is any solace. Even the phrases and words that are most familiar are segmented and sloped (“bet-ter”? Ridiculous and piercing). Listen transcribe the lyrics and I suppose this is about being lost in time and confused and all that, but the fundamental indecisiveness woven into ever measure here elevates. I still can’t decide if this song is being shouted forward into the future or whispered backwards into the past but I guess that is the part that is most nineteen 

Lucki - “More Than Ever” (ChaseTheMoney)
I am used to hearing dark, torn up things in my rap but Freewave 3 is beyond that man. Freewave 3 sounds like what I imagine drowning sounds like because, first, it sounds as empty and hollow and bottomless as death does, and second, out of all the morbid cinematic Categories of Death I can conjure up, I imagine drowning as the only Category where bodily harm is not inflicted on you by some external party; instead, you are enveloped, swallowed. Yes I spent a lot of time learning to swim when I was a kid. “More Than Ever” is psychotically nerve-wracking, likely not the best song on what is (for my money) the best rap album of this year and maybe even last, but certainly the one that I let pound my psyche into submission the most often. The darkest things Future ever said back in 2014 felt like pure id but the darkest things Lucki says feel like all the id (and the rest of the damn psychic apparatus) were wrung out of him years ago. Emotion is not disregarded or lost or suppressed, emotion must be a fallacy,

“Intro” by XanMan is so important and so is “I’m YungManny” by YungManny and so is “3 Headed Snake” by Gunna, Young Thug & Wheezy and so is “Daddi” by Cherry Glazerr and “Closing It” by Uzi and “Squidiculous” by SahBabii and the T-Pain song with Boosie and the Quando Rondo song where he sings his throat out. Dawn Richard got top 5 career trajectories all time and “Hello Good Morning” still goes dumb. I napped on Sada Baby “Cheat Code” last year woops. James Blake incredible it’d be more incredible if he wasn’t 6’5”.