Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp A Butterfly	Burial - Untrue
2015	2007
10/10	10/10
To Pimp A Butterfly is a jazz Hip-Hop album. Kendrick fits a lot of themes in this album ranging from mental health, alcoholism, fame, and capitalism; however, the main idea is racial oppression. He speaks about his culture and the tyranny he faces as an African American with incredible detail, relating his messages with critical race theory. He takes what he's learnt from writing "Section.80" and "good kid, m.A.A.d city" and applies it to the absolute maximum on this. Every single line is, to an extent, somewhat significant and introspective. His rhyming patterns are stagnant and sporadic; it's unpredictable and creative, similar to MF DOOM, Nas and Rakim. He cleverly fits his complex sentences in not-so straightforward flows and rhythm, bending and bouncing words around like it's nothing. He pieces together a poem that gives context and clarity to the tracks as it glues them into a collective message, also using it as a tool to take the listener on a journey. The instrumentals on this project are fucking insane. Kendrick had the best of the best producers and instrumentalists on this project. The beats are funky, deep, and expressive. The characteristics of the tracks perfectly complement the delivery and messages of their vocals. The flow of the music throughout ultimately climaxes on track thirteen, finally breaking a tension that has been prevalent since track six. Up until track six, TPAB was all laid back, easy to unpack, and mostly happy. The album has the ultimate balance of eeriness, beauty, pride and anger; a lyrical, musical and emotional journey. There isn't a single moment in the entire album that doesn't belong, make sense, fit, or sound remotely bad. "To Pimp A Butterfly" is the perfect album. A testament to the limits of human artistic expression.	Untrue is an instrumental ambient, UK garage, dubstep album. Only taking a week to record, Untrue is an astoundingly well-produced album from start to finish. The syncopation on the drums and percussion gives a lot of swing and naturality. The production's quality and brilliance on this record are on par with Nas's "Illmatic", Madvillain's "Madvillany", Kendrick Lamar's "To Pimp A Butterfly", and The Caretaker's "Everywhere at the end of time". From the creatively sourced and twisted vocals to the calming harmonic pads, Untrue utilises atmosphere more creatively than any other electronic album. The pitched up male and pitched down female vocal samples give the whole album a very androgynous tone; paired with the beats, it provides Untrue with a very dark and eerie environment. The album, being produced in Great Britain, is a perfect representation of its atmosphere, drawing deep from the dull and cold characteristics of the time. Being recorded in the dead of night across only two weeks, Untrue is an extensive, raw, unfiltered expression of Burial. "In McDonalds" and "Shell of Light" is enough to make a grown man cry. Insane, mind-altering, superb. The fifteenth anniversary of this album is this year on November 5th. I usually reserve reviews for close to their original release dates, but I couldn't wait. After some requests and a personal drive to write about this, I've decided to do it now anyway. Untrue is phenomenal in every aspect. Untrue is the best album of the 2010s.
The Caretaker - Everywhere at the end of time
2016-2019
10/10
Everywhere at the end of time is six-part avant-garde, experimental ambient album series. This album is dark, disturbing, and outright insane. It portrays the mind of a dementia patient losing grip on reality. Throughout the six and a half hours, The Caretaker utilises reoccurring samples but in varying distortion levels as each album in the series corresponds to a specific stage of dementia. The more you listen, the more the music falls apart and makes less sense, similar to how dementia patients lose one's self. Static and glitching mimic plaque in the brain and the empty voids represent deteriorated thoughts and memory. Towards the end of the series, you start to try and pick out any familiar sounds from earlier on. This album is unlike anything I've ever experienced. This album is not a work of entertainment; it is a work of art.
Nas - Illmatic	Madvillan - Madvillany
1994	2004
10/10	10/10
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William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops
2002-2003
10/10
The Disintegration Loops is a four-part dark ambient drone album series. William Basinski completed his recording of The Disintegration Loops in his Brooklyn apartment on September 11, 2001, coinciding with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The included DVD with the 2012 reissue boxset contains a video of the Manhattan skyline taken from Basinski's rooftop that day, recording the final moments of daylight. The four album covers are stills from this video. The timing of the album's completion couldn't've been any more perfect. While Basinski converted his 1980s found sound compositions from analog to digital, he noticed that the tape would disintegrate due to oxidisation from being untouched for two decades. Realising the magnetic tapes were decayed, he decided to loop them until they fell off the reel. The result is hours of droney, warped, eerie music loops, totalling almost five hours. The only processing done to the recordings was reverb (and remastering in 2012). The album's melodies fall apart as the reverb fills in the gaps. The music is tirelessly trying to hold on to itself, eventually giving up and falling apart completely. Despite being simple and repetitive, it's an outstanding display of life and death, both in the recordings themself and its immortalisation of 9/11. It's painful, despairing, and wonderful. The Disintegration Loops is a conceptual, atmospheric masterpiece.
Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma	Tyler, The Creator - IGOR
2010	2019
10/10	9.5/10
Cosmogramma is an experimental, psychedelic, IDM, Lo-Fi album. This album is weird but beautiful in every way. The synths throughout are harsh and abrasive yet funky and captivating. His percussion throughout is unique and bizarre, sampling objects like metal and table tennis balls. His drum programming is also super hard-hitting and swingy. All the elements together combine to make a super insane and trippy, funky mess of an album. It's the best psychedelic album I've ever heard. While there are only a few "bangers" in the album, the idea is mainly it all being tied together as one. The conscious choice to have the structuring like this makes it even more effortful and rich. The tracks that aren't in your face are very relaxing and smooth. For example, "Satelllliiiiiiiteee" and "Arkestry" are easy tracks to listen to as they behave almost like a break from the insanity in the album. Track five, "Zodiac Shit", has the best, most insane production I've ever heard, making it my second favourite track of all music. I single this out because the album would be a 9/10 without it. I cannot comprehend or put into words how brilliant this track is. Overall, the production is superb, as any Flylo album. Brilliance.	---
Kendrick Lamar - good kid, m.A.A.d city	Death Grips - The Money Store
2012	2012
9.5/10	9.5/10
good kid, m.A.A.d city is a gangsta rap Hip-Hop album. The storytelling in this album is beyond exceptional. Lamar raps about himself as a teenager in a non-linear fictional setting. With the end of the story revealed in the first track, it leaves a lot of anticipation. Most tracks also feature skits and dialogue to push the narrative. The instrumentals are captivating, slightly psychedelic, and have lots of clarity. While not technically being a trap album, it does feature a lot of aspects of trap music. In a field where there's a lot to hate about trap music, he uses the creative, expressive, and hardcore features that make it great. His lyrical ability is brilliant; twice as good as "Section.80". Exceptional beats, flows, lyrics, structure, storytelling; this album is insane.	The Money Store is an industrial, experimental Hip-Hop album. The instrumentals in this project are profoundly weird. Every sound is stretched, twisted, warped beyond belief, layered multiple times with various synths and hard-hitting drums. It isn't the kind of music you would put on casually to chill out. Every track you listen to surprises you by not giving a shit about traditional song structure, leaving lots of room for criticism from those who don't enjoy that. Arrangement and weirdness aside, the production quality is spectacular. Its mix was surprisingly well, considering the quality of the samples used and their alterations. MC Ride's performance is an important note as well. He raps these obscure lyrics in the flow of traditional rap songs, except he is fucking shouting at you. My only criticism of this project is that Ride's vocals are difficult to understand, which in my opinion, takes a little away. Everything else in this project is spectacular.
Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy	Frank Ocean - Blonde
2010	2016
9.5/10	9.5/10
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Flying Lotus - Los Angeles	J Dilla - Donuts
2008	2006
9.5/10	9.5/10
Los Angeles is an experimental, IDM, Lo-Fi, Hip-Hop album. Flylo is well known for his profound, deeply layered, psychedelic beats. In LA, he takes his production methods to the extreme. His use of naturally swinging percussion and dozens of synthesized melodies and basslines puts the listener in a deep trance. Each composition takes you on a trip and tosses you around in this enveloping tunnel of raw echoey synthesis which is sure to at some point overwhelm the listener. All the sounds make you second guess what you are about to be thrown into next. Each track crosses over one another to avoid breaking the flow of the entire piece and to keep you in the trance. From start to finish, this is an amazing project.	Donuts is an experimental instrumental Hip-Hop album. Dilla's famous un-quantized drumming style humanizes every track on the album, allowing listeners to groove a lot easier and naturally. With his intricate sampling techniques, he can completely transform and repurpose a song as no one else could imagine. What was once a few strums on a guitar is now a constant riff throughout the beat. Each track sounds completely different from another, leaving a constant barrage of confrontation and adaptation. Sometimes, tracks would end unexpectedly and switch from a hard banger to a laid back relaxing beat. Not to mention the brilliant production, but the thing was made while Dilla was in the hospital undergoing treatment for Lupus and TTP, which significantly impacted his ability to work on the album.
Sweet Trip - Velocity: Design: Comfort.	Kanye West - Yeezus
2003	2013
9.5/10	9.5/10
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DJ Shadow - Endtroducing.....	JPEGMAFIA - LP!
1996	2021
9.5/10	9.5/10
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Merzbow - Pulse Demon
1996
9.5/10
Pulse Demon is a harsh noise album. This album sounds like glass in a blender, nails on a chalkboard, and metal plates grinding on each other. Its brilliance comes from the intricacies of its production. All 8 tracks were recorded live without overdubs, which removes all randomness and unexpectedness from Merzbow's view allowing for a raw emotional input into the performance. Why would anyone want to listen to this though? Well, the music is so overwhelming to the senses that your brain will slowly render it as background noise, making it surprisingly effective for doing homework for example. The difference between this and white noise or whale sounds is that its absence of harmony, rhythm, melody, or any other general features in modern music makes it extremely unpredictable, whereas white noise or whale sounds are consistent and calming. This album is downright assault, yet captivating. It's music's ultimate equivalence to expressive painting.