Right, there’s the strutting kiss-off anthem with Andre 3000 that uses the word “pussy”like 200 times, but there’s also plenty more kiddie-electro love-in-this-club Polow da Don jams. If the Portishead cover doesn’t get you, “I Hope She Cheats on You (With a Basketball Player)”will. 2 with this brash bombardment of not-so-quiet storms, desperate and ferocious. Marsha Ambrosius, Late Nights, Early Mornings “Don’t tell me how to live my life / When you never felt the pain,” he begins. Charles Bradley, No Time for Dreamingĭaptone’s latest uncut diamond goes the full James Brown on 13 dusty cratedigger fireballs (plus a killer Nirvana cover!) full of apocalyptic pathos. Sing along: “You’re shaped like an hourglass / But I think your time’s up.” A Doobie Brother out of time.ġ3. Immaculate retro soul for sneaker fetishists, every boisterous horn chart and bright melody and crooning Snoop cameo(!) so catchy, so goofy. The world’s preeminent Afro-German soul goddess (right?) mixes fellow Nigerian Fela Kuti’s confrontational politics with Erykah Badu’s radical chic, moaning and rapping and thundering with equal force. Sound familiar? Primo honeymoon music if you can roll your Rs guests Usher and Lil Wayne sense a new target market. He is accurately named, this absurdly sweet-voiced bachata titan gone solo and crossover-mad, soft but playing at hardness. Other interests include amusing song titles (“It Takes a Couple of People to Hold Us Back”), entropy, fearing his mother’s death, and a half-dozen other genres. You either roll your eyes at this stuff or they’re rolling straight back in your head.Įlectro-soul from Halifax (seriously), vintage but mostly in the 8-bit Castlevania sense. The amniotic Wander/Wonder is like listening to a Maxwell record drown, With U is like watching it evaporate slowly into the chopped-and-screwed electro-pop ether, Just Once is like presiding over an angelic-choir-abetted funeral at Cathedral de Notre Dame. The bedroom deconstructionist wing, stretching the definitions of the “R” and the “B”(maybe even the “&”) in crucial ways on their respective EPs. (Tie) Balam Acab Holy Other How to Dress Well, Wander/Wonder With U Just Once They’re the Can of Stones Throw, if that makes any sense, which of course it doesn’t.ġ8. “La La” is beautiful and deeply unsettling. As with other formally refined, smooth-R&B belters, her dignity doesn’t undercut her intensity “I Miss You Now” boasts Shakespearean fervor and delicacy.īewildering art-funk fantasias from three falsetto-prone gentlemen channeling Sly Stone channeling the macabre cosmos. Like that cute, self-assured little girl from the movie Airplane, she takes her coffee hot and dark, like her men. Endless Bummer: 30 Ways 2011 Was a Drag One Fucked Up Year: SPIN’s Best of 2011 Issue Here are 20 terrific records that could start arguments, and end them. But it turns out that was all just an illusion. For much of 2011, arguing about what is and isn’t R&B appeared to be more fun than actually listening to R&B (however you personally defined it).
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