Opinz

The xx – xx

20-year-old Londoners The xx seem poised as the next big, stylish act to come out of nowhere and catch everybody’s ear: their simple but highly original sound is composed of basic, New Order style drum machine beats slowed down to a crawl and mixed with dark guitars, deep bass, and hooky, smokey, sexy boy/gir vocals reminiscent of modern R&B (the album’s iTunes bonus track is a cover of an Aaliyah song); history would caution us against putting too much hype into such a band lest they collapse under it’s weight, but xx is a very strong album and one of the most promising debuts of the year.
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Girls – Album

Girls’ lead singer has a voice that ranges somewhere between Elvis Costello and Elvis Costello parody, but despite how they might try, Girls don’t have quite the same ability to process and reappropriate pop’s past the way the venerable Mr. Costello does: while songs like “Lust for Life” and “Hellhole Ratrace” are brimming with sunshine and energy, much of the album strikes one as self-consciously derivative – you’ll want to run through Endless Summer afterwards to pick out exactly which Beach Boys melodies they were lifting – resulting in an album that’s inoffensive, enjoyable, and even brilliant at times, but not quite original enough to be truly impressive.

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Raekwon – Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II

The long awaited sequel to what is easily one of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II delivers about as completely as one could hope for, as evidenced only a few minutes in with the ferocious “House of Flying Daggers” and continually reaffirmed with each track, as Raekwon and a host of Wu-Tang cohorts and guest stars tear through high tension drug narratives atop sweet but undistracting production from the likes of J Dilla, RZA, and many others; while Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II doesn’t sound like a complete throwback, it has the classic energy of Wu-Tang’s best releases, the kind of energy that seems sorely lacking in most hip-hop today.

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HEALTH – GET COLOR

One would not be surprised to learn that noise rock band HEALTH is currently opening for Nine Inch Nails on their farewell tour – with their second album GET COLOR, they have supplemented their thunderous, Boredoms-style drums with an array of grinding, buzzsaw guitars and synths, somehow darkly industrial but highlighted with an electro-pop sheen, providing both surprisingly danceable numbers like “Die Slow” and noisier but strangely appealing tracks like “Eat Flesh”, which appears to be an ominous but incomprehensible threat from a broken fax machine. More »

Jay-Z – The Blueprint 3

On The Blueprint 3’s first single “D.O.A. (Death of Autotune)”, Jay-Z complains about the state of rap and brags about getting back to real hip-hop, but he spends the rest of the album completely contradicting himself: this sounds like Jay-Z trying his hand at a more pop-oriented album – à la collaborator Kanye West – but Jigga isn’t Kanye and his attempts (aside from most of the album’s first third, particularly second single “Run This Town”) generally fall flat and become immediately forgettable, before the album gets downright terrible with the cheese-tastic closer “Young Forever” and the muddled, disgracefully bad “Hate” (possibly one of the worst songs of the year); The Blueprint 3 is clearly the sound of Jay-Z trying to be something he isn’t.
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