05: 5-1

5. Jason Isbell - Southeastern

by The Editor

4. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories

by meisenhower

3. Kanye West - Yeezus

“I am standing up and telling you I am Warhol. I am the number one most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.”

Let's get this out of the way: either Kanye West possesses a worrying sense of self-worth (avoiding, for the moment, the "E" word), or he has spent the last several years cultivating a grand facade. (Whichever is true, we can safely conclude that Sway doesn't have the answers).

On Yeezus, Kanye West has positioned himself as a super-villain. He has become untouchable by either law or social propriety. He declares his own deification. He doesn't need to threaten violence -- the threat of violence is implied by his mere blackness. Instead he threatens to have sex with your spouse, and the fear he seeks to provoke is not the fear of rape, the ironically inverted accusations of which have been a bizarre psychosexual manifestation of American racism since the era of slavery, but the fear that she would rather have sex with Kanye West than with you. Mr. West has become rich and influential and dangerous beyond control. So of course he compares himself to Steve Jobs, Andy Warhol, Shakespeare, and God's only begotten -- Lex Luthor wouldn't compare himself to the Joker, after all.

Hubristic bravado is inescapable in rap culture, but rarely has it expressed itself in as bold and brilliant a context as Mr. West and producer Rick Rubin have provided on Yeezus. This is not an album, it's theater. It's a statement of great and terrible purpose and even greater and more terrible ignorance, conceived and crafted and produced such that the rapping is an afterthought. Reportedly, Mr. West wrote and recorded many of the lyrics in a single day. For better and worse, it shows.

In the early press for the album's release, Mr. West cited minimalism as inspiration. Yeezus lives up to this claim, but only in oddly superficial ways. The production is stripped down and raw, except when it's not. The CD packaging seems to eschew cover art, but it doesn't. The album's most widely recognized video ("Bound 2") was an amateurish bit of green screening. But of course, it was really just a chance to stir up controversy by showcasing fiancé Kim's naked form. This is Mr. West's understanding of minimalism: it's not just about deprivation, but depravity.

Take, for example, "Blood on the Leaves." Not a chart-topper, but the most artistically successful single of 2013 by a wide margin. A story lamenting the challenges of extravagant wealth and fame, built upon a sample from Nina Simone's "Strange Fruit," which laments the horrors of lynchings. "Blood on the Leaves" is offensive and ill-conceived and in terrible taste, and it's fucking brilliant.

So yes, it is possible that Kanye West honestly believes he has the genius of Andy Warhol (and Steve Jobs, and Shakespeare). It's just much more likely that he's putting us on. After all, "I Am a God" doesn't end with the golden idol laughing atop his thrown, but with the agonized screams of a soul in terror. The comparison to Shakespeare fails not because of Mr. West's lack of artistry, but simply because the bard penned scores of memorable characters, and thus far Mr. West has been able to create only one -- himself.

Of Andy Kaufman, Michael Stipe once sang that if you weren't in on the act, it wasn't cool. The public's outraged reaction to Yeezus demonstrates that the same is true of this new stage of Kanye West’s career. Perhaps we should conclude that Yeezus is a broken and tortured cry of egotistical bombast from a great talent spiraling out of control. Perhaps we should conclude that Mr. West is merely playing the perfect villain, fractured and flawed and terrible and wonderful beyond all measure. Perhaps the truth lies uncomfortably between the two, in the dark interstice between fame and genius. It almost doesn't matter. And it certainly won't change the fact that Yeezus was the most important piece of popular art this year.

by Mark Uses Parentheses

2. Arcade Fire - Reflektor

When I got this blurb assignment I had this grand plan to make a Venn Diagram and all sorts of other fun, colorful, and wildly inaccurate charts and graphs to express how much each Arcade Fire song on ‘Reflektor’ had been influenced by the album’s producer, James Murphy. But alas, it turns out my mom was correct and I am incredibly lazy after all, so I’m just going to write some nonsense instead, and try to avoid referencing “Shut Up and Play the Hits!” (Other than that one time right there of course)

Put simply, while this experimental type album was a risk for a band coming off a Grammy Award for Best Album, it is exactly what you’d want out of an Arcade Fire record produced by Murphy. It isn’t the Arcade Fire doing LCD Soundsystem, so much as it is Arcade Fire infused with a touch of touch of dance, like sweet tea vodka isn’t so much vodka mixed with tea, as it is a delicious summer afternoon treat that hits all the right spots. Sure it’s different than regular vodka, but you still know it's vodka at its core.

Nobody would have blamed the band if they just made "The Suburbs II" and toured the world for the next decade while lining their pockets with cash made for kings, but that wasn't good enough for them apparently. When you get right down to it with ‘Reflektor’, even though it’s different than its award winning predecessor, the sound just works, and works quite well. And maybe even more so than the sound, this current persona of the band suits Win Butler so well. From the costumes, to the dance parties, to playing shows as the “The Reflektors” you can tell he’s comfortable being Win Butler, and in turn that’s lead to what may end up being some of this band’s most defining songs. “Afterlife” is already a top 5 Arcade Fire tune, with a chorus you can’t help but find yourself mumbling at your desk, it gets better with every play. And “Here Comes the Night Time” and “Reflektor” aren’t far behind in either. There’s no need to reel off the rest of the track listing, again my mom was right with my laziness, but aside from “Porno” there really isn’t a miss on the album. That fact will almost certainly become even clearer as these tunes are played alongside the classics we’ve come to love as the band fills arenas and amphitheaters worldwide this summer.

Who knows where the Arcade Fire goes from here, but at this point, I think it’s more than safe to say they can be trusted to take risks and experiment. We may never see another "Funeral," but if we can keep getting records the quality of “Reflektor” we’ll be old and gray, sipping on some sweet tea vodka and listening to dozens of high quality Arcade Fire recordings while belting out random lyrics, and really, that's all we need.

by Josh

1. The National - Trouble will find me

It’s the fall of 2005 and I’m a first year law student struggling to maintain my sanity while surrounded by hyperactive overachievers mumbling frantically about finals and outlines and asking if I’ve memorized the relevant sections of the Restatement of Contracts and have I done all of the practice Torts hypos they passed out in the study session? They’re inescapable, popping up in obvious places like the law school lounge and the library, but also in more unexpected locales like the grocery store and even the bar. And it doesn’t help that I live with one or two of them. I’m struggling not to succumb to a burgeoning alcohol problem and am teetering on the verge of becoming a pack-a-day smoker. The only place I can go to escape, even just for an hour, is the undergraduate gym, and it’s there where I first discover Mr. November and Abel. In the car on the way home, or just driving around late at night because I’ll do anything to keep from going back into the graduate housing complex, I first encounter Karen. It’s in dark parking lots, my car always idling and warm, where I imagine I’m the birthday candle in a circle of black girls.

A year and a half later and I’m in the eye of a relationship about to come violently apart, sharing with my then-girlfriend a miniature apartment on the upper-upper west side of Manhattan, commuting downtown and across the park every day to my summer job at a stifling white shoe law firm. Wherever I am, I hide inside Boxer: in my beloved white shirt on my way to overpriced, self-congratulatory lunches; in the thirtieth-floor office that overlooks Central Park and that I share with the humblebraggy Harvard girl I’d like to hate fuck but won’t; in cabs as nights give way to dawns, bleary-eyed and already mentally self-mutilating because I can see my future and it’s dark.

Three years on, I now have that Fifth Avenue office to myself, and I spend most of my time imagining the impact of my skull on the pavement below. I am a slave to a giant oil company and I’m taking cigarette breaks every 2 hours and I haven’t left the office before 9:30 PM in about eighteen months. I’m newly married and I see my wife in every single one of High Violet’s many colors -- the blindingly bright and the empty dark. I am able to relax only in the backs of town cars that the firm pays for, most of which are driven by middle-aged men who used to have other, better jobs, but who now drive overworked twenty-somethings back to Brooklyn because they lost their other, better jobs when the economy came undone. I don’t have the drugs to sort it out.

May 2013 and I’m sitting in the lobby of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, laptop on lap, trying desperately to work but unable to even formulate a single coherent thought because my father-in-law is most definitely going to die on the operating table and, if he doesn’t, will certainly not have the strength to recover post-op. And my six month old daughter is now spending most of her days in the waiting room on the ICU floor, instead of in some multicolored daycare. As I carry her through the skyway that connects our subsidized hotel and the hospital, I hum “I Need My Girl” and she falls asleep on my shoulder. In the car on the way to get lunch anywhere but in the hospital cafeteria, we don’t say anything to each other -- we don’t talk about probabilities or risk -- we just listen: I will not spill my guts out. It’s the album I’m playing when I walk to the intensive care wing, and the waiting room, and the coffee shop. It’s what we listen to when we just need to not hear our own thoughts and we wonder, is there a powder to erase this? And when he came through surgery, and when we learned that he’d woken up after two weeks later and would live -- would be OK -- we put it on loud and we scream: I see you rushing now, tell me how to reach you.

by hanihani