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.
15. oddisee - tangible dream
It’s like Oddisee’s career has been crafted to leave him just floating above the underground’s depths but tantalizingly close to bigger success. He’s one of the most talented rappers on the East Coast, although he’s part of one of the coast’s weaker scenes in DC, and he’s been quietly releasing phenomenal albums for the past few years without much recognition. I’m willing to say, though, that Tangible Dream is his first album that puts it all perfectly together. His street-smart, working-9-to-5-eight-days-a-week-with-studio-sessions-sandwiched-between aesthetic couldn’t be a better match for his music. It’s a difficult thing for any hip-hop artist to rattle off heavy-handed hooks like the one on “Own Appeal" ("Excited by the risk and the chances I’m taking/Not sure what I’m putting my faith in but I'mma be alright”): you’ll see rappers slowing down the delivery to a storytelling pace, hitting you over the head with the moral in one hand and the lines in the other, or they’ll just speed past it and let the meaning slip past. Oddisee’s just genuine enough to pass it off without being headshaking material. In any case, Tangible Dream’s like if Mayer Hawthorne was a talented black rapper/producer. If there’s a better jazzy, heartfelt, down-to-earth hip-hop album from this year, please let me know.
15. drake - “5am in toronto (prod. boi-1da & vinylz)”
Earlier on this list, I mentioned that Drake proved that he’s an actually talented rapper this year: “5AM in Toronto" was the first step in that transition. He’s not stringing together syllable after syllable of namedrops and comparisons and boasts like Kendrick on "Control”, nor is he dropping actual rapper names – but this might be even more brutal. Here, Drake’s stripping away more layers from his already bared music; there’s no heartstring playing, and he keeps the OVO shout outs reserved to the perfect point. Instead, it’s just Drake playing on words and firing verbal shots into the crowd at random (it’d admittedly be a lot less interesting if it was a rapper less high-profile who dropped this one in the dead of night). But even if Drake’s only fooling around with lower-tier wordplay, who gives a fuck as long as it’s this clever? The threats aren’t exactly pack-it-all-up-it’s-over game-enders, but they’re slick, confident, and a lot more menacing than you’d expect from the guy who’s still lamenting Courtney from Hooter’s on Peachtree. He’s wryly noting that if “I could load every gun with bullets that fired backward/you probably wouldn’t lose a single rapper,” while snickering that “every song sound like Drake featuring Drake.” It’s even better considering that every uppity comment really is true – Drake’s capable of hijacking an entire artist’s hypes with a single remix (see: Migos, “Versace”), and when he raps about “some nobody [who] started feeling himself” and flopped, well, he’s looking right at you, The Weeknd. Especially just a month after putting up big numbers at the Grammys, at the time, this was just the biggest star in the genre stunting over hyper psychedelic keys at the top of his game, the whole industry waiting on his next album. Ultimately, this probably wasn’t the biggest “fuck all y'all” verse of the year – but we’ll get to that in a few days.