Will's Six Albums

Here are six of my favorite albums that I thought would make an interesting read. I hope you give them a listen!

Will Burke

February 9, 2021

1. WILLOW (self-titled)

Favorite Track: Overthinking IT

I whip my hair back and forth! I whip my hair back and forth! I whip my hair back and forth!

Remember that?

If you've stayed away from Willow Smith because memories of that awful single plague you, I understand. I was there once too.

It was on a road trip through the Midwest two summers ago that I first listened to this album. I was scrolling through new releases on Spotify as infinite corn fields zipped by the window, and one album cover caught my eye. A simple image of a woman looking directly at the camera, only infrared and inverted to contain vibrant purples, blues, whites, and orangey yellows. I saw the name WILLOW, and drew the conclusion that this was "Will Smith's daughter, the girl who did that I whip my hair back forth! song." The combination of the fascinating album cover and the bizarre recall of this celebrity who had completely fallen off my radar convinced me that it was worth a listen. In the first few seconds of "Like A Bird", a song in which WILLOW explores themes of transcendence and yearning for spiritual freedom, I was entranced. The cloudless sky outside my window and the fields stretching out to nowhere emulated perfectly the drifty and spacious sounds of the album. She purposely ditches vocal perfection for a haunting tone, conveying such emotion with every word that it overwhelms the body with chills. The subject matter is tender and humble, WILLOW's voice simultaneously soothing and heart-wrenching. If you've been stagnant on your perception of Willow Smith, listen to this album and break your preconceptions.

2. TABOO by Denzel Curry

Favorite Track: Quite honestly, all of them equally.

TABOO (TA13OO if we're staying true) is a no-skip, shamelessly edgy, psychedelically innovative project from Florida rapper Denzel Curry. Many people only know his name from his 2015 single Ultimate, which was used in countless memes and imitated by middle schoolers (remember, "I am the one, the one, don't need a gun to get respect up on the street" being yelled through the halls?) And though I didn't exactly have WILLOW's awful single to overcome, that definitely invalidated him as a rapper in my head. That is, until my friend Julian recommended TABOO, and one day I threw it on as my hype music for a summer run. My mind was blown. It has those gloriously blockheaded bars that are essential to any great braggadocio rap album, but it's careful to balance these, and intertwine them, with exploration of deeply philosophical themes. The white, gray, and black palette in the cover art acts as a representation of how the album is divided thematically - slowly descending from the light to the dark, winding deeper into more harshly egotistical and threatening territory - finally culminating in the last track, Black Metal Terrorist, which is as raggedly hostile as it sounds. The last seconds of the track and the album are an ear-curdling techno crackle, devoid of emotion or melody. Clearly, the album is anything but calm - it's a collection of 13 bangers showcasing the best of modern trap stylings.

3. WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? by Billie Eilish

Favorite Track: ilomilo

This album was basically all I listened to last summer. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what made me fall in love with it. I think it's the fact that before I listened, I was expecting safe, uncreative bedroom pop tracks created solely to make people cry about relationships. What I found instead was a brilliantly minimalistic record that is equal parts menacing, introspective, teasing, mournful, and shy. The homegrown background of the project - Billie made this record with her brother Finneas in their childhood home, crossing songs off of a list on a whiteboard over the course of years - only drew me in more. There are moments in which the only thing you hear is Billie's beautifully full yet fragile voice, and there are gaps of silence several seconds long, products of the duo's affinity for giving instrumentals and vocals space to breathe and flourish in the listener's ears. As soon as I heard the jazz-influenced drums and harmonies of the second track, "xanny", accompanied by its gloriously hollow and revolting subject matter, I ditched my shallow preconceptions of the album. Certain songs follow a story - some from the perspective of murderous best friends and others from the Devil herself - while others are personal ballads taken straight from Billie's own life. Regardless, they're all reflections of the desires, affirmations, and sorrows of a girl from Los Angeles.

4. Modus Vivendi by 070 Shake

Favorite Track: Morrow

070 Shake has previously appeared for vocals on tracks from heavy-hitting rap artists like Kanye West and Pusha T, but other than that, she's kept a remarkably low profile considering how amazing Modus Vivendi is. Granted, Kanye produced the album, but that's not to steal the spotlight from 070. Her creative force is clearly infused into every lyric, beat, and melody. When I first listened, I assumed that she chose to have unlisted features of several different male rappers - but it's all her voice. She effortlessly snakes between masculine and feminine vocal registers throughout her songs, and the result is a voice that emulates the bionic character on the album cover - a product of a future where biological limits are no longer a barrier between an artist and their self-expression. This album evokes the nuances of love in a world that has renounced its natural beauty, and ruminates on the strained search for meaning and clarity within a synthetic matrix. Carefully-mixed beats accompany 070's perfectly lazy voice and underlying expensive synths. The Kanye-ness of record comes through in its emotionally complex melodies and the panicky progression of the songs. It's like nothing I've ever heard, and that's due to 070 Shake's freely shapeshifting swagger.

5. Low by David Bowie

Favorite Track: Sound and Vision

Let me start by saying this album is not for everyone. David Bowie is certainly not going for radio hits on this project, except maybe for "Sound and Vision", a thoughtfully euphoric song that was actually the first thing I ever heard from Bowie. Many of the tracks are quite frantic and tough on the ears, and others are melancholic ambient projects straight out of the mind of the album's legendary producer Brian Eno. The album is one of the "Berlin Trio" in Bowie's discography, made during his three-year sober escape to the German city from the drug ridden culture of Los Angeles. Despite its title, Low feels like a natural high in Bowie's life, a time in which his body flushed itself of cocaine and his mind of the hollow grit that was draining his creativity. I can't begin to imagine the production process for this record, because it often sounds like you happened to tune into an alien race's radio station; the instrumentals are like a cross between a buzzing arcade and a trippy jazz club, and Bowie's voice is as deep and convincing as ever. Later in the ambient component of the album, elements are derived from the minimalist European electronic scene at the time, spun by Eno into an atmospheric landscape that would prove incredibly influential to later works in the same vein. Bowie was an artist that never stopped evolving, who tried on many different personas accompanied by copious makeup and eccentric clothing. The Berlin Trio, and especially Low, feels like the moment when he decided that he was at his best in his natural form.

6. In Rainbows by Radiohead

Favorite Track: Reckoner

Radiohead’s In Rainbows is a glorious instance of a band proving that they haven’t left their prime - by essentially creating themselves a new one.

The way I see it, Radiohead has followed a strikingly prophetic arc of changes in their music over the years. Their first album, released in 1993 - Pablo Honey - feels like an embodiment of the innocent angst of growing up in the early 90's, evoked by the baby-flower head adorning the rather ugly cover. With 1995's The Bends, a more sinister turn: the plastic mannequin on the cover seems to revel in the experience of its newfound artificiality, and song titles like "Fake Plastic Trees" and "My Iron Lung" evoke a bleakly synthetic tone even before the first listen. OK Computer, released three years before the turn of the century, is a full departure from the partially human Bends aesthetic, and contains only ghosts of the spontaneously human energy of Honey. The title is a like a call to a great robotic mind that has been gestating in the roots of society - its growth manifesting itself in the increasingly plastic tone of each album - and now it's finally being awoken to claim its rule in the 21st century. And rule it does in 2000 and 2001's Kid A and Amnesiac, where Radiohead becomes less of a band and more of a think tank expressing their ideas through electronically-driven music. Now that they had spent their discography so far building up to the digital angst of the new century, Kid A and its creative-spillover counterpart use monotonous synth loops and nonsensical lyrics to say, "Here we are." A slightly more hopeful turn is found in their 2003 release Hail to the Thief, in which Radiohead combines their original alt rock sound with the prowess they gained in electronic instruments to make a statement about the war on terror and other political happenings at the time. The 21st century is no longer looms as a sterile dystopia, but rather poses itself as a colorfully dangerous realm where nothing is certain and uncertainty is everything.

And finally, In Rainbows. Radiohead's testament not to glittering childhood, creeping artificiality, absolutist supercomputers, or the full-throttle cluelessness of the new century, but to love. The album concerns itself with the most monumental ideas of the human experience in its own tenderly small way. For me, it's hard to believe it even exists, because of how deeply it expresses everything I never knew I could feel. Entire emotional landscapes have been constructed in my brain during my time with this album - on late drives back from grandparents' houses, walks home in the evening light, bike rides to beaches under the stars. The imperfection of Yorke's falsetto, the dreamy guitars and the tight yet distant drumming pulls you into a world that is both Radiohead's and yours, commanding you to indulge in its explosive heartbreak.

However, if you're expecting a quietly melancholic feel as a mainstay throughout the album, be warned. The first track, "15 Step", immediately assaults the ears with a burst of a techno-distorted 5/4 drum beat. In most music, a 4/4 tempo is used; this is what western ears are most attuned to. In pieces such as waltzes, the count is 3/4, less common but still conventionally appealing. In 5/4, though, the listener must account for an extra quarter note, leaving our 4-centric musical sensibilities confused. True to the genius of this album, the song somehow still maintains a sentimental and lovesick tone with this beat playing throughout. It's a skill that the band will demonstrate for the rest of the album: blending a lush forest of noise with initially upbeat drum lines, and thereby blurring the rules as to how slow or fast a song needs to be to pack an emotional punch. This is displayed too in "Weird Fishes/ Arpeggi", which opens with a crystal-clear acoustic beat fit for a pop rock ballad. As the song develops, though, it becomes one of the most beautifully hypnotic songs on the album, proving to be far more melancholic than the opening seconds would suggest.

If you get super into this album, I recommend this "Live From the Basement" video, which is a rougher and more spontaneous take on some of the songs from In Rainbows as well as a couple of their more obscure tracks from other works. Also check out Lianne La Havas's cover of "Weird Fishes", which takes the song to a whole different dimension while staying loyal to it. I think I probably would have died of chills if I had been in this recording room.

I'll spare you from the rest of my rant on the album. Listen to it and build your own experience with its beauty.