Editor's Choice: Album of the Year

MAC DEMARCO -  SALAD DAYS (Captured Tracks, 2014)

The quarter-life crisis. For many, it seeps in during the early 20s, typically in the period immediately after college. Gone is the structure of school and an easy network of friends, replaced by questions of identity, stagnancy, and a daunting amount of imperfect career opportunities. For Mac DeMarco, the cause is a rigorous tour schedule, its consequential partying, and the pressure of a rapid rise in popularity. The average person likely responds to such a crisis by stressing, drinking, crying, and likely a combination of all three. DeMarco responded by recording 2014’s stellar record Salad Days while cooped up in his Bed-Stuy apartment.

Fortunately for the listener,  Salad Days can read as an advice column, with Mac functioning both as Dear Abby and Uncertain from 1990. While his 2012 releases Rock and Roll Night Club and 2, brought us odes to babes in blue jeans, Annies, and Viceroys, “Salad Days” tackles some tougher questions. Can we be past our prime at age 23? Are good times a thing of the past? Is this what I’m going to be doing until I roll over and die? Are these all boring and unoriginal questions?

Advice-giving DeMarco isn't afraid to dish it out. In "Brother",  Mac sings "You're better off dead, when your mind's been set, from nine until five". On the other side,"Goodbye Weekend", Mac responds to the preachers "Don't go telling me how this boy should be leading his own life, sometimes rough, but generally speaking I'm fine."  

Further alleviating any hints of a lecturing tone, Salad Days manages to make this otherwise difficult conversation feel relaxed and easygoing: the guitar is as carefree-as-ever, and the lyrics explicitly encourage calming down, taking it slowly, and going easy.

We don't all have the troubles of indie pop rock stars, but there's a comfort knowing that the patient lessons of Dear Mac can be learned from. As he sings on "Go Easy," "I'll be right there behind you, to pick you up until you come around." To avoid dropping cash on a yellow Camaro, spending hours in the bathroom looking for white hairs, and getting Botox injections, let's hope Mac's still churning out music like Salad Days in 2029. <EC>

 

Editor's Choice: Album of the Year

FREDDIE GIBBS & MADLIB - PIÑATA (Madlib Invasion, 2014)

It is understandable that an album which debuted in March could slip the mind in year-end discussions nine months later. Even more understandable is letting a project slip the mind when its lead single precedes album release by nearly three years. The first taste of collaboration between the prolific Madlib and Gary, Indiana's Gangsta Gibbs was eligible for the year-end discussions of 2011; “Thuggin’” served as a perfect entry theme for the duo to showcase the heights of each man’s skill set. Gibbs twirls first hand accounts of a life lived harder than most, on top of a Madlib beat so characteristically un-Gibbs, with delicate picking strings, warped and accelerated until they became unrecognizable from the source material.

The wait, while extended, allowed for Gibbs to vary the lifetime’s worth of experience he chose to put on the hours of available tape. Instrumental discs issued up front by Madlib meant that Gibbs could take his time living, and then writing the stories for his share. In the years that followed, his apprenticeship under Young Jeezy soured, giving rise to an overt call-out on “Real”. On “Knicks,” he will “shoot (his) trey eight at police” but by the time he hit the studio for “Broken” he was ready to grapple with the fact that his own father was a member of Gary’s corrupt police force.

Any depth of personal exploration Freddie Gibbs exhibited would be lost had he verbalized them over run-of-the-mill beats. It is Otis Jackson’s production that gives Piñata its mood; smooth yet aggressive, timeless while very much not of this particular time. “Scarface” gets us started with sirens and a two note bass loop that feels like the ambulance is hitting successive dips in the road. On “Harolds” he again speeds a lethargic Rose Royce guitar to match the rapid delivery of his counterpart, whose voice doubles for the bass line. Madlib manages even to color in the margins, filling the hellos and goodbyes of his tracks with excellent moments, most notably repurposing Biggie’s “Sky’s The Limit” intro for the similarly upward bound "High".

As a partnership that had limited face-to-face time, the success of the duo once branded MadGibbs was reliant on assistance. Excellent appearances from Gibbs’ peers, protégés, and predecessors give Piñata the strongest and most well rounded cosign of any album in recent years. The album’s victory lap was a “Knicks” remix, worth mentioning both for its guests and for its excellent accompanying imagery. When it comes time to close up shop, Madlib sets the production to snarl, Gibbs takes a deep breath and spits his lines once more, content to let the supporting cast take us out. <PM>

Editor's Choice: Album of the Year

BENJAMIN BOOKER - BENJAMIN BOOKER (ATO Records, 2014)

People regard the blues like they do barbecue, as regions set apart by their technique as much as their mythology. With Benjamin Booker, whose eponymous debut album was released this past August on ATO Records, the blues isn't so distinctly regional as it is an amalgamation of borrowed sounds, cherry-picked from the post-war and 1960s eras alongside infusions of punk, lo-fi, and garage rock. The result of this melting-pot varies with some musicians, but Booker's music is incredibly successful. You could make a meal of heavy riffs, gravel voice lyrics, or even the juke joint rhythms, which make the songs more than enough fun to groove to. 

Booker started out experimenting with his music - inspired by the likes of T. Rex, The Gun Club, and Blind Willie Johnson - as a student in Gainesville, and continued with time in New Orleans and Tampa Bay sharpening his sound. Future fame was evident even before the release of the first record, playing gigs at the Newport Folk Festival, Austin City Limits, and Lollapalooza in 2013.

What's best about Booker's music is both how much, and how little, it resembles the blues genre. Popular imagination's drawing of a bluesman is a grisly sharecropper belting out self-indulgent laments about women and habit. Booker is young and energetic and while singing with an affected tone, speaks with a gentle voice. The trope has almost nothing to do with the themes of his music, which surround politics, religion, and the common existential cries of a twenty-something year old.  

Where we feel the blues are the music's chord progressions and despairing tone. Rather than stale forms, though, we get Booker trying to aggressively run by the anguish or undercutting it with soft melodies. From the first track on the album "Violent Shiver," we're hit with a breathless Chuck Berry guitar riff. Furious chords give in to swelling cadences, swinging notes, and shuffled strums in songs "Always Waiting" and "Have You Seen My Son." We hear Booker's range on "I Thought I Heard You Screaming", a gentle hymn reminiscent of Asie Payton and Junior Kimbrough, as well as Jack White (Booker was pulled in as an opener for White's tour this year). 

These songs were written without millions of Spotify and Youtube followers, and Booker has mentioned that his next endeavors will reflect the reality that people are interested in his music. Regardless of what this means for the direction of the sound he develops, we'll all still be listening. <TM>