For each year's first three quarters, we celebrate by sharing a list of our favorite music releases. Unlike our year-end lists, these quarter features are casually compiled, with an aim to spotlight the underdogs and the lesser-heard among the more popular picks. More from this series
Rabit & Chino Amobi
The Great Game: Freedom From Mental Poisoning
[Halcyon Veil]
Not that it’s strictly possible, but as a sort of game, go ahead and try to imagine the sounds on Rabit and Chino Amobi’s The Great Game: Freedom From Mental Poisoning as this thing scraping this thing, over and over. The swelling stabs that open the mix are here to clear the gunk you’ve collected. Imagine bubbling chirps in the background space acting as one-to-one representatives of you guzzling gallons of this stuff, the carbonated beverage that sponsors your soul on every lunch break you’ve ever taken. Challenge yourself to feel the fizz well up and pulse your nervous system as it funnels out this stuff, all the while filling the spaces behind these things ever faster with what used to be this stuff. And imagine all of that making its way again through veins and arteries toward, again, this thing, which is, don’t forget, repeatedly being cleaned up by this thing under the watchful eye of this thing. It’s not a sport because, in the end, none of us will win or lose. It’s a game.
Galcher Lustwerk
I Neva Seen / Parlay
[Lustwerk]
One of the great tragedies of 2013 is that TMT did not give 100% Galcher a five-star review. Hell, the mix’s confident effervescence, sublime charm, and undeniably hypnotic vocal delivery should soundtrack only the most transcendent night drives and party comedowns well into the next decade, as only the best deep house cuts can (e.g., Aly-Us’s “Follow Me,” Theo’s Parallel Dimensions). As far as I’m concerned, the work is one of the great mixes of our time, a piece so confident in its delivery that it seems by mere chance that it propped its feet up on the hell-bar of early tween 2010s, sleepy-eyed and best-dressed in the troublesome context of contemporary electronic music — as if to say, “calm. the fuck. down.” So, naturally, many of the mix’s best cuts are getting released on vinyl by Lustwerk himself on his own imprint. He’s been laying down the lax synths and steadily blithe rhythms onto wax, undoubtedly the sexiest of formats, primed for our bedrooms rather than the aux-cable-and-soundcloud format that’s preferred by sloppy car DJs (me) who wear down the “grooves” of the stream-feed into the 100,000 play count on drunken nights. “Parlay” is a triumph — if you don’t know it yet, maybe you never will. I was invited to go check out Galcher spin his new discs in the MoMa sculpture garden a few weeks back; dude’s vibe was making De Kooning, Björk, and really all of MoMa look like they had no chill.
Chief Keef
Bang 3
[FilmOn Music/Glo Gang]
Since its original release date of Christmas 2013, the enigma that was Chief Keef’s follow-up to Finally Rich pushed Bang 3’s speculation to near Yeezy levels. Will it ever come out? Did Keef scrap the whole album again? Did Interscope mess with the album? Even the Glohive here at TMT was stretching thin in ways to describe our uncertainty. Then BANG BANG: August 1 hits and Bang 3 comes out three weeks earlier than its latest proposed release date. Pessimism gone – Bang 3 was finally here. The heavily auto-tuned, syrup-soaked turn Keef took after Finally Rich – a span that had more ups (Nobody, Almighty So, Back From The Dead 2, Almighty DP) than downs (Big Gucci Sosa, Sorry For The Weight) – is buffered to a minimal in Bang 3, putting it closest to his studio debut in Keef’s discography. But his mixture of newfound introspection and past street domineerings separates itself from the rest. The Mac Miller-featuring “I Just Wanna” has Keef listing what he wants, which is nothing exuberant: to get by, live his life, to shine. Over an incredible flip of “Every Breath You Take”/”I’ll Be Missing You” by The Animaniacs, Keef, with the help of Jenn Em, is as direct as he’s ever been, detailing the death of his cousin Big Glo and reflecting on life back in Chicago – a now-distant world from his new life in Southern California. These songs are plugged between weed-loving, gun-toting, money-getting monologues, with drill-esque beats that make Bang 3 worth the weight.
Destroyer
Poison Season
[Merge]
It’s almost every day that something Dan Bejar has sung comes to mind unprompted, always sort of smug, clever, usually brilliant. “It’s hell down here, it’s hell.” Down here? Probably anywhere mortal. “Girl, I know what you’re going through/ I’m going there too.” A new Destroyer album feels like a new used car, someone else’s familiarity translating slowly into your own. Maybe you decide to keep that politically unclear, faded bumper sticker left caked on by a previous owner, out of some dedication to a vaguely objective sense of history. Similarly, Poison Season develops its sound out of Kaputt, without trying to subvert that album’s many successes. Bejar dives deeper into the soul of that nocturnal sound he revived a few years back, finds down there chaos and cocktails too sweet to finish. Messier and more prone to diversion, Poison Season still works with a Bejarian logic, organizing itself around and between several chapters of “Times Square” songs, like snakes at work on a caduceus. Destroyer sounds triumphant on “Dream Lover,” desperate on “Hell,” teary and poignant on “Bangkok,” a little funky and gnomic on the new, dubby recording of “Archer on The Beach.” Poison Season is another Destroyer album, another map/treasure dyad for us to wrap ourselves absolutely around.
Eyeliner
Buy Now
[Beer on the Rug]
Luke Rowell’s online hub, or “Internet Resort,” features a back-catalog of his projects as both Disasteradio and Eyeliner. It’s a brightly-colored collage of anti-sleek paraphernalia that introduces his approach to the production and musical styles he holds dear — a broken mirror of cheesy pop, funk, and New Age jams that might fit nicely alongside a 90s in-house, team-building presentation. Indeed, the New Zealand-based artist latches on to those clichéd and corny aesthetics, and fuses them with moments of boogie and trance to create his own superficial, corporate vibe. But whereas Eyeliner has previously been about negotiating tacky, throwaway commercial samples and repackaging them, Buy Now has been pumped full of soul to give it an almost frightening feeling of sincerity. Each track is slick and refined, breathing new life into a musical era that grossly misread its own potential; the album’s tangy overlap into modern dance music results in some wonderfully catchy melodies and heady buildups. When taking into account the foundation of this project and the styles that form its unique qualities, that’s a pretty staggering feat. No other album on this list will have been birthed from a musical style that sounds so “bad,” and for that, Buy Now deserves a place as one of our unrivaled favorites.
For each year's first three quarters, we celebrate by sharing a list of our favorite music releases. Unlike our year-end lists, these quarter features are casually compiled, with an aim to spotlight the underdogs and the lesser-heard among the more popular picks. More from this series
