Anticon - Anticon Giga Single

Is this the same group? They must have gone home and did their homework or something. The production is tighter and less murky, the song structures have started to exist, some of the mc's have decided to throw rhymes in every once in awhile, and in general it sounds a lot more coherent and thought-out than the worst-titled album ever, "Music for the Advancement of Hip Hop." I think the biggest difference is that Anticon found their niche here. They're not really hip hop, they're more of poets with music. So get rid of Slug, someone said, and replace him with more poets! So they found a way to take lyric poetry and release it on CD. And the way to do that, lo and behold, is to structure it like songs. Sole and Dose One, two of the most annoying mc's ever on that other album, do a dual/duel rapping workout on "A.D.D.", and it actually sounds sorta good! Sage Francis, who actually is a hip hop artist, appears on this album and his beats and rhymes are lightyears beyond anything I expected to find when I popped it in. I'm still not big on Buck 65, whose "Pen Thief" sounds like whatever the take before the first take is called, and I could also do without the annoying "Postmodern Pat Boones" or the inane skit that follows, but overall this is an improvement to a degree I would never have thought possible.

Roy Ayers Ubiquity - Vibrations

Funny how the 70s turned some jazzcats into suave funkateers. The Roy Ayers Ubiquity was a group formed expressly for this purpose when it comes to vibes-man Roy Ayers, and woe unto those purists who avoided it like the plague, because this shit is excellent. Smooth vibes, intensive grooves, quasi-falsetto singing, catchy start-and-stop choruses, I lidove it. My only regret is the Ubiquity is not more Ubiquitous in my collection.

Laurie Anderson - Big Science

The cover of this album looks like some sort of new-wave synth pop, and though there are some shades of that, this is a lot darker and weirder. Often it's just a kooky drumbeat with maybe a little bit of background atmospherics, while Laurie Anderson performs spoken-word poetry that ranges from mundane to disturbing. I don't listen to it a lot but there are bits that are cool. Overall there is definitely a sense that something is missing, and a little research showed me that something indeed is missing: apparently this "album" is in fact a partial soundtrack to a several-hours-long performance art piece.

Anticon - Music For The Advancement of Hip Hop

"Music for the Advancement of Hip Hop"? Really? With a title that pretentious it had better be the dopest shit ever heard. It starts off promising (if not revolutionarily) with Slug (who I never knew was involved with these guys) throwing back to Rakim's seven mc's and then dropping a pretty tight verse. Unfortunately it's downhill from there. Lofty song titles like "Martyr Theme Song", "Human Races the Tortoise" and "Untitled" can't save the fact that everything done here has been done long before, and with a lot more power and soul, by Ultramagnetic MC's, Organized Konfusion, Divine Styler, Wu-Tang, and plenty of others. Most of the rappers' styles are somewhere between rhythmless and annoying, with a few actually managing to climb both those peaks at once. Dose One obviously thinks he's the most original person to ever "rock the mic", with his wavery delivery and pseudo-English accent whenever he says something "deep", but he's really just the biggest Rammelzee rip-off to ever suck. Sole is inaudible, Buck 65 can't decide if he wants to be Kool Keith or Mykah 9, and the production and subject matter throughout sound like some kid read three paragraphs of Eastern philosophy during a bad trip and decided that rhythm is stupid and they should make a rap group to prove it. There are two good mc's on this album, Eyedea and Slug, neither of whom show up often enough to make a difference, and both of whom later went on to much bigger and better things. Slug is a borderline great mc, one who knows his history, makes throwbacks where appropriate, and, in a breath of fresh air for this album, actually seems to realize he's rapping over a beat. His "Nothing But Sunshine" is by far the best track on the album, and if you haven't heard it you should give it a listen.There is one area in which this album really does make a break from the rest of the hip hop world: a complete lack of hip hop slang and urban imagery. I've got nothing against that, but if taking the roots out of hip hop, ignoring its past and pretending to represent its future, is what passes for "advancement", I'll pass. Supposedly this crew cut their hip hop teeth on battles. Who were they battling, Emily Dickinson's corpse?

Caribou - Andorra

I kept accidentally thinking I was listening to the Mamas and the Papas. The sunstained dream melodies on "Andorra" are so similar to 60's flower power songs that you almost feel transported. Except the instrumentation is clearly from the new millenium, with crystal-clear production and bubbly synths flying around in the background. I can't really get into the indie-rock rhythm section that demands bass and guitar be played by metronomes instead of musicians, but the drums and singing come close to saving it for me. For my money though I'd rather drop the needle on "Nuggets".

Aphex Twin - Analogue Bubblebath

Get a Flux-equipped Delorean, set your time circuits to somewhere around 1991, and hit up the wee hours of a smallish rave. Before you go in, smoke half a J and put on some earmuffs. That's pretty much what this EP sounds like. The song structures and rhythms are not too far from what rave techno sounds like, but the timbres are parsecs away from cliche. Where others use synthesized Korg pianos for their rhythm tracks, Aphex Twin uses softened drippy synths. Instead of breakbeats and 909s he uses custom synth drums that twist like burnt cans. It's not essential Aphex, especially if you're more into his late-90s rhythmic insanity, but it's worth a listen.

Q-Tip - Amplified

When this album came out, it got pretty much nothing but bad press. The word was that the Abstract had gone pop and it just didn't work. I was naive enough to go on this word and not even get the album to give it a chance. I eventually picked it up about 6 years later in a used bin somewhere. This album has aged a lot better than you might expect. It doesn't sound anything like the popular hip hop of the time, nor does it sound like Quest minus Phife. If anything the closest thing to it in sound is The Love Movement, but the production on Amplified is a lot sparer.Q-Tip does very little message rapping on this, very little narrative, etc. and those of us like myself who are used to his verses being perfect examples of easily-memorizable, impeccable simplicity, will find a different Q-Tip here. In part I would think that being freed from the reins of Tribe allowed him to just stretch out and have fun; at the same time, the cover art and his fur coat, bare-chest look suggest that the label was pressuring him to dumb down his sound and vision. The middle of the album is strongest, from the sing-song "Let's Ride" and "Things U Do" to the crunchy "Go Hard," the Moroder-y "Go Hard"and the *almost* anthemic "Do It." What it comes down to is that this is a good Q-Tip album. It's only a disappointment when you compare it to the huge shelf of classics that have his name on them. The album does a sonic and conceptual U-Turn with the last track, "End of Time." After 11 tracks of having a great time and enjoying life, all of a sudden we're on the brink of apocalypse. Not too convincing. Then there's a not-too-hidden bonus track where Tip raps his autobiography, which is by far the most honest and heartfelt track on the album. All in all, I have to say that if this were a debut album by an unknown artist, it would have been lost in the sands of time. This is the only project Q-Tip has ever been involved in that is not essential.