1. Tha Carter IIIby Lil Wayne
Tha Carter III is beyond sprawling, but its lack of discipline is also its point. It's a pop showcase for Dwayne Carter, the very peculiar cough syrup-swilling New Orleans rapper who swears he improvises all of his rhymes. Whether he really does is anybody's guess, but amid all the Auto-Tuned vocals and effects — no rapper enjoys hearing his own voice distorted more — are shrewd commercial choices (the No. 1 hit "Lollipop," the Jay-Z duet "Mr. Carter") and extended periods of verse that take rap back to its essence: talking. On "DontGetIt," over a sample of Nina Simone's "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," Wayne tells a 10-minute life story that meanders into an indictment of drug laws and an out-of-nowhere slam of Al Sharpton. The words are smart, but the delivery — just behind the beat, in a voice that sounds like Miles Davis lecturing on Robitussin — is hypnotic.
2. Dear Scienceby TV on the Radio
This Brooklyn band spent most of its first three albums emptying out the tool shed in pursuit of weird things to make noise with. This time they haul out all their usual unusual props — out-of-time drums, jazz horn squawks, power tools — but in the service of great tunes. With its Beach Boys '"ba-ba-bas" and killer lo-fi guitar, "Halfway Home" is all propulsion and energy, the best album opener of the year. "Family Tree" is a rock ballad sung with great tenderness by Tunde Adebimpe while "Red Dress" is the smartest thing about race this year not written by Barack Obama. Hopefully the merging of their cerebral side with melodies you can actually hum will finally get TVotR an audience outside their borough.
3. Death Magneticby Metallica
You can be forgiven for thinking they were washed up after three mediocre albums — they thought as much themselves. But a few months with Rick Rubin and a return to their thrash roots produced the best album in Metallica's catalog. What brought them back is simple: speed and length. Metallica has never played as fast or made songs that last as long. Case in point: Death Magnetic's best track, "Broken, Beat & Scarred," which has a chaotic, minute-long intro and a melody-line that bobs and weaves until the 3:30 mark, when, just after James Hetfield barks the career-defining Metallica lyric, "What don't kill ya make ya more strong," all four band members start playing as hard and as fast as they can — without sacrificing a single note — for another two minutes. After all these years, Metallica still has the capacity to make you bang your head. Now they just make you do it faster and longer.
4. Feed the Animalsby Girl Talk
Sure, Girl Talk (ex-engineering student Greg Gillis) uses shards of hundreds of already well-known songs to make his secondhand hits. But bolstered by the most liberal interpretation of the fair use statute known to man, he's made the rare album on which every track is a party-starter. Like all DJs, Gillis has a great set of ears and a hell of a laptop, and it's a must to listen with his Wikipedia page open just to keep track of all the wild collisions, like K7 into The Carpenters into Metallica on "Like This," or Ice Cube's "AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted" into Hot Chocolate's "Every 1's a Winner" on "Give Me a Beat." Gillis slips in the odd social message — pairing Temple of the Dog's "Hunger Strike" with Ludacris' money loving "What's Your Fantasy," for instance — but his most powerful statement is cribbed from David Bowie: let's dance!
5. Vampire Weekendby Vampire Weekend
Dubbed the "whitest band" by the experts over at Stuff White People Like, these recent Columbia University alums do indeed sing about such pressing subjects as Oxford commas, albeit with the proper disdain ("Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?") But their whiteness has less to do with their familiarity with the MLA Handbook than an unrestrained admiration for blackness. From the Afro-pop guitars and soukous rhythms to name-checking Lil Jon ("First the window, then it's to the wall/ Lil' Jon, he always tells the truth"), it's clear this band knows its melanin. If that sounds a tad anthropological, the joy of this debut is that it never feels it. The Afro-pop and indie rock fusion is seamless, particularly on "A-Punk" and "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa," which includes the lyrical deprecation "This feels so unnatural/ Peter Gabriel too." More than most new bands, Vampire Weekend knows how to find a song's soul without compromising its wit. Peter Gabriel would be proud. Paul Simon would be prouder.
6. 808s & Heartbreakby Kanye West
Imagine if you took an album's worth of blues lyrics and removed all the blues. That's what West does on this hastily produced record about the death of his mother and the dissolution of his recent engagement. The words are brutally introspective ("Chased the good-life, all my life long/ Look back on my life, all my life gone") but they're sung through the anonymity of Auto-Tune over beats generated mostly by the ancient Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer, one of the first drum machines, so you'd expect their power to be muted. Instead, West turns his gimmick into an innovation; the effects make him sound ghostly and sad (and better, since he can't actually sing). Not everything on 808s & Heartbreak works, but what does is fascinating — and haunting.
7. Santogoldby Santogold
Santi White spent years as an A&R executive before making her solo debut, and her seasoning, as well as her taste, shows. Mining poses from Gwen Stefani, Bjork and Grace Jones, and melodies from New Wave, pop and whatever else her laptop spits out, she creates a new persona — "a black girl who's not singing R&B," is how she puts it, tongue firmly in cheek. She's also a fusionist who knows influences don't mean a thing if you ain't learned to sing. And sing she can, with a voice flexible enough to sound like her friend M.I.A. on "Shove It" and Blondie on "L.E.S. Artistes." "Creep up and suddenly/ I found myself/ An innovator," she rasps on the latter; for now her innovation is pastiche, but you get the sense there's more, and even better, coming.
8. Thirdby Portishead
After a 10-year hiatus, Bristol's once famous trip-hop trio returned with an album that was less accessible — and far prettier — than their previous work. Packed with a Portuguese soliloquy, austere Krautrock rhythms and muscular synthesizer melodies, the first half-hour is more impressive than lovable. Then the ukuleles begin. It sounds like a joke at first, but "Deep Water" gives Beth Gibbons the chance to sing her wounded heart out and create a little island of prettiness that blooms into more prettiness the rest of the way. Third takes multiple listens to crack, but it rewards patience with a textured majesty.
9. Little Honeyby Lucinda Williams
After years in misery's ditch, Williams finally put out a happy album, but it's a little more nuanced than its publicity. Songs like "Tears of Joy" and the grinding guitar-rocker "Real Love," show off a singer no longer ill at ease with easy pleasures (although, uncharacteristically, she's suddenly at ease with lyrical cliché) while the Elvis Costello duet "Jailhouse Tears" proves she can even be funny. For all the smiles, there's also plenty of material where the mood darkens. "Circles and X's" and the glorious "Wishes Were Horses" ("If wishes were horses/ I'd have a ranch") get Williams back to longing, territory where she's unrivaled as a writer and unbeatable as a singer. The balance, though, makes this Williams' sweetest album.
10. Rockferryby Duffy
Because Aimee Ann Duffy is young, British and has a rocket-powered voice that seems to find its natural expression in '60s soul music, the Amy Winehouse comparisons are inevitable. For the record, Winehouse is better. But on "Rockferry" and the delicately sweet "Warwick Avenue," Duffy proves she's at least in the game with an impressive display of vocal and emotional range. The album sags a bit toward the end, but its best songs have a captivating innocence that seems born of 24-year-old Duffy herself. On that front, she's got Winehouse beat by miles.
[via TIME]
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