18. statik selektah - extended play//flatbush zombies - "bliss (prod. erick arc elliot)"

Over the last twenty days of December (and obviously 2013), I’ll be writing about my favorite twenty albums and songs of the year, one a day.  Not best. Not most influential.  Not most likely to land on a Complex slideshow.  Just my favorite, ranked in order.

Today’s a triple post, because unforeseen (and very happy) circumstances prevented me from keeping up on my list. But the hustle never ends.

18. statik selektah - extended play

See, this is the type of project you call flawless.  It’s hard to grab any truly great album and call it flawless, because there’s always just one verse that’s missing or one punchline too much or one dramatic instrumental interlude that should have been trashed.  But Extended Play, the most recent and most accomplished studio album from Bostonian producer Statik Selektah, doesn’t have such artistic concerns.  Statik puts together the ‘90s East Coast boom-bap homages, and turns it over to some of the underground’s most accomplished rappers.  You’ve got Pain in da Ass reprising his Goodfellas-interpolation for the intro to the album, Statik crafting a wailing, crashing scape for Hit-Boy to kick a career-making verse in front of the mic, and Prodigy topping his entire album with one song.  Mac Miller trading bars more than capably with Sean Price, Mike Posner lending his scratchy soul for the hook between Action Bronson and Joey Bada$$, and Reks snagging and recontextualizing Common’s famous lines for “The Light” as the hook for “My Hoe”.  It’s hard to say that stacking rappers this talented is really taking away from anything - would this album really benefit from less guest appearances, when it’s a “fuck it all” maximalist celebration of the East Coast circa 1995?  It’s infectious and impossible not to be engaged in.  How can you not love listening to an eighteen-track barrage of impeccable scratch hooks (Statik might be the producer most poised to take up Premo’s art if he ever hangs up his MPC) and slick verses?  Not a falter.

18. flatbush zombies - “bliss (prod. erick arc elliott)”

I won’t present myself as a huge fan of the Flatbush Zombies – I’m of the opinion that they’re a flawed group that relies too much on hating things as opposed to digging a little deeper into that emotion, and that attitude gets grating over nineteen-track projects.  But in one song doses, like the detached, spacy, unnerving “Bliss”, it’s capable of hitting all the right notes.  What other group would be able to just devolve into a chant of “fuck"s mid-song without it being a gimmick?  Maybe it’s not totally genuine, but the one hundred and thirty-three fucks that Juice, Meechy, and Erick Arc Elliott give us don’t read as weak.  When it’s not in the context of eighteen other tracks devoted to essentially identical topics of hatred, it’s dulled.  But as a standalone mantra, it’s just a collection of furious flip-offs at various aspects of the system – a generic phrase, but it’s hard to group the things in this song together any other way.  It’s just one massive "fuck you”, and it’s a better musical expression of fury than any other song in hip-hop this year.

17. ka - the night's gambit//busta rhymes - "thank you feat. q-tip, kanye west & lil wayne (prod. busta rhymes)"

Over the last twenty days of December (and obviously 2013), I’ll be writing about my favorite twenty albums and songs of the year, one a day.  Not best. Not most influential.  Not most likely to land on a Complex slideshow.  Just my favorite, ranked in order.

Today’s a triple post, because unforeseen (and very happy) circumstances prevented me from keeping up on my list. But the hustle never ends.

17. ka - the night’s gambit

It’s easy to draw lazy comparisons between Brownsville's Ka and Long Island's Roc Marciano – they’re both top-tier word artists, remarkably adept at scrawling lyrical pictures of New York ghettoes, and they’ve clearly got close to zero need for the spotlight.  But while you can practically see Roc spraying his words from side-to-side like one of his song’s AKs, dealing out rapid-fire rhymes like a deck of cards, Ka moves much more deliberately.  Each line’s almost whispered, nearly obscured by the halting guitar loops that he relies on for his production, and while Roc drags you right into the action, Ka’s the one sitting across the table from you in the aftermath, telling you what he saw.  The Night’s Gambit isn’t driven by aggression, but it’s just as cinematic and gripping as the work of his frequent collaborator.  I could go on and on about how haunting Ka’s music is, how his lyrics dig themselves into your brain, how his declarations that “if this ain’t meant for me, nothing is” seem to be vacillating between defiance and resignation.  It’s hard to tell whether Ka’s stories are brags or confessions, and indeed, he seems to flip between the two depending on the song.  But whatever it is, it’s powerful.

17. busta rhymes - “thank you feat. q-tip, kanye west & lil wayne (prod. busta rhymes)”

While Kanye West and Lil Wayne don’t actually kick any lines, instead being relegated to hype man duties, “Thank You" might actually benefit from the lack of 21st century star power.  By letting Busta and Q-Tip take the spotlight, the two get to kick up the charisma and chemistry that made Busta such a frequent collaborator with A Tribe Called Quest.  The jazzy, high-tempo instrumental’s the perfect soundscape for the two rappers to drop a couple decades, flowing like it’s 1993 all over again.  I’m a sucker for any song that discards hooks in favor of eight-bar cypher trade-offs, but it works truly to perfection here.  It really is like they’re having tons of fun – Busta even sinks into his Jamaican accent for his third verse.  Maybe it’s the perfectly-timed usage of Alicia Myers‘ "I Wanna Thank You" as a sample mid-song, but it’s impossible not to let the song’s infectiousness roll you along.  Shake ya hips.

20. roc marciano - marci beaucoup//freddie gibbs - "freddie soprano"

Over the last twenty days of December (and obviously 2013), I’ll be writing about my favorite twenty albums and songs of the year, one a day.  Not best. Not most influential.  Not most likely to land on a Complex slideshow.  Just my favorite, ranked in order.

20. roc marciano - marci beaucoup

I could go on and on about how incredible Roc is about crafting his own universe within his music, or how he might be one of the best technical rappers of all time.  There’s that approach to discussing his third studio album.  But that’s not why it’s one of my favorite projects of the year.  There’s something familiar and comforting about listening to Roc Marciano’s music.  It’s the same collection of grimy, crackling loops and soul samples, glued together by his impeccably strung-together stacks of rhymes.  Even after just a couple listens, there’s something irresistible about Roc’s beats (I’d swear I’ve heard the beats to “456” or “Dollar Bitch” if I didn’t know better): Roc has a remarkable ear for when to let his loops ride out for a measure or two as his filtered sample vocalist lets  out a couple wails, just before jerking it back to the tight rhythm that gives Marci Beaucoup its skeleton.  But Roc didn’t land a spot on this list off of perfecting a formula (Curren$y and Young Roddy just missed this list for that very reason).  Roc knows how to give his style a little nudge, grabbing jarring features (like the excellent turn given to British rapper S.A.S. on “Willie Manchester”) or playing with odd sounds and twisting them to fit into his trademark (It sounds like he sampled an ice cream truck on “Didn’t Know”).  It’s not the best project Roc’s ever released – it’s not even his best of the year (hint hint).  But it’s the very definition of “solid”, and at times it’s just smack-you-in-the-face New York rap at its absolute best.

20. freddie gibbs - “freddie soprano (prod. i.d. labs productions)”

At this point I’m willing to go as far as to say that on a one-verse basis, Freddie Gibbs might be a top five rapper alive.  By his standards, 2013 was hardly his best year: ESGN, his version of Jay-Z‘s The Dynasty: Roc La Familia (“Jay-Z and Friends”) album, was probably his weakest project in years, while his long-awaited collaborative work with Madlib, Pinata, managed to get itself pushed back yet again.  But even in a year jarringly lacking in murderous Gibbs verses, on an album full of chanting trap songs that play down Gibbs’ abilities on the mic, he’s capable of dropping songs like this one.  It’s not just that Gibbs can string together rapid rhymes with the Andre 3000s and Kendrick Lamars of the world – there’s a little more to it than that.  I still can’t put my finger on it exactly, but a lot of it is his rhythm, the subtle voice inflections and tone shifts that transform mundane strings of lyrical threats into breathless, menacing lines.  The barrage here is overwhelming (I’ve listened to this song at least forty times and I’m still hearing new lines).  And it’s all over an airy, flutey beat that’s only brought down to Gibbs’ street level for him to rip by pounding bass and snares.  "I’m the coldest nigga to spit this gangsta shit since Jadakiss,“ indeed.

At some point, Action Bronson is going to have to enter the discussion for most consistent rappers ever.  Given, it’s only been three years since Bam Bam really burst onto the scene, but he’s on a string of six incredible projects stretching from 2011's Dr. Lecter to last week's Blue Chips 2.  There aren’t too many rappers out there capable of stringing together six fantastic projects in a row, especially given how condensed these are - this is Curren$y levels of profilicacy.  And the downpour of obscure athlete references (when’s the last time you heard Zinedine Zidane namedropped?), absurd boasts (“Why the fuck would I have a bodyguard/when I look just like the motherfucking bodyguard?”), and rhymes that sacrifice meaning for the sake of ridiculousness (“My taste in Asics will lead your spaceship into Matrix”) doesn’t look like it’s letting up anytime soon.  Here’s to Bronson fixing games for years to come.  Debut album on Vice/Warner Bros., first quarter 2014.