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10 Records From 2011 That You Probably Didn’t Hear Or Maybe You Heard Them But Didn’t Realize Just How Great They Were?

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  • B L A C K I E, True Spirit And Not Giving A Fuck: So, if Death Grips is “Waka Flocka Flame for grad students,” that makes B L A C K I E “Waka Flocka for angsty idealistic high-schoolers,” which is preferable. Rites Of Spring raps right here. Fuck with it! Thanks to Jawnita and Monique_R for telling me about this one.
  • Dark Castle, Surrender To All Life Beyond Form: Dude/chick metal duo do EyehateGod strangled doom while conjuring up John Carpenter, D&D, and something that could’ve popped up on a Will Oldham record. Despite the mannered metal weirdness, these guys never turn into producer Sanford Parker’s guinea pigs.
  • Dope Body, Nupping: Punk-funk grunting and super dynamic metal-not-metal riffing that boldly enters RHCP and RATM territory, unashamed. For real, like this thing’ll get funky from time to time, shoving some genuine grooves into defiantly sludgy noisy angry stuff. I got yelled at for listening to this loudly on the train once.
  • James Nasty, The Truth About James Nasty: Scrunches up the feeling of a night of rocking off into 30 breathless minutes, culminating in a near-sober, morning light refix of the Temptations’ “My Girl.” Baltimore Club is a missing piece in this whole global dance music turned American pop phenomenon happening right now.
  • Los, Worth The Wait: This Baltimore Dude’s got that Lil Wayne ability to take popular radio hits and rap his ass off over them and make them feel new and vital once again. Original songs are something he’s still figuring out, but freestyling over nearly every relevant hip-hop hit from 2011 makes this one thrilling enough.
  • Mama’s Mustache, Next Level: Dirty South space R&B from the duo of Jeff B. and the great Mr. DJ. Big Rube shows up! Pair this with Nappy Roots’ Nappy Dot Org and you can pretend Cee-Lo doesn’t exist and still observe that the Dungeon Family did really well last year. You didn’t hear this because you had to buy it. Shame on you.
  • Nacho Picasso, For The Glory: When this self-effacing Seattle rapper got to that Beta Ray Bill reference on “Marvel,” it became clear he wasn’t mining entry-level comics references. The Frazetta-esque cover says the same thing. That’s pretty much the story of this entire tape: A whole lot of thought and effort put into a rarefied, regular dude milieu.
  • No Gang Colors, Honorary Cop: Casually collapses subgenres (grindcore, boom-bap, screw music, doom) into one big fast wail and brings back hatred for the pigs months before #OWS did that for all the rest of us. The lyrics on “Helpful Asshole” are screamed-out poetry. And it’s all over in less than seven minutes.
  • Robag Wruhme, Thora Vukk: Tasteful field recordings amplify the warm-hearted emotion throbbing along to these halcyon house beats. Man, who had a better year than this guy? January’s mix Wuppdeckmischmampflow, this one in April, and Donnerkuppel in November. Robag is that dude right now, even if nobody knows it.
  • Zilla, Zilla Shit: Confessional, pissed-off street shit featuring most of Huntsville. Zilla’s got clever, off-to-the-side hooks, can molt into a wizened O.G. type when necessary, and does sad and angry as good as anybody in Brick Squad. Raps over OutKast’s “You May Die” which I’ve wanted someone to do since I first heard ATliens.

Written by Brandon

January 5th, 2012 at 4:33 am

Posted in 2011

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  1. you got No Gang Colors repeated in the list. besides that, except for Nacho Picasso (which underwhelmed me after three complete listens) i’ll have to check these out.

    john

    6 Jan 12 at 12:11 am

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