Jay-Z
American Gangster
(Roc-A-Fella/
Island Def Jam)
Jay-Z was the Coolest Mufucka Alive—before he made his
unprecedented ascent to corporate dominance and megawealth and
proceeded to make songs about sandals with Coldplay.
Point-of-no-return-type shit, right? Right. Well, what if after Fonzie
jumped over that shark, he cut the dumb shit and got his fucking
swagger back? ‘Cause that’s exactly what President Carter has
done—and all because of a fucking movie.
A few months ago, my inbox began to gush that Hov was releasing a
brand-new album inspired by American Gangster, a movie
nobody’d even seen yet. I was skeptical, but somehow it didn’t have the
crass reek of Jay’s recent cash-ins (Budweiser, Hewlett-Packard, et
al.), and, frankly, the thought of Jay ditching Bono, returning to
pushing weight (lyrically at least), and bringing back the regal soul
beats of his heyday sounded… fuckin’ awesome!
Gangster is classic Jay, free of the hallmarks of his
turdful last outing, Kingdom Come—bougie namechecks,
shoddy production, and, most unfortunate of all, the dreaded “old-guy
flow,” that careless cadence as unmindful of the beat as a twirling
Deadhead. The music on American Gangster is as masterful as
The Black Album, and for my money, better. Joints like “Say
Hello,” “No Hook,” and the Nas-featuring “Success” remind listeners why
90 percent of rappers today sound like this guy in the first place.
Forget the Fat Elvis we’ve been getting; here we have Jigga’s answer
to his own classic debut, Reasonable Doubt—an epic,
literally cinematic mirror to the documentary grit of his actual days
as a drug pusher. American Gangster is conceptually the life’s
arc of a criminal kingpin—the running theme of Jay-Z’s entire
catalogue. He’s not the first rapper to make it to his 10th album, but
no rapper in history has ever dropped the best hiphop album of the year
in doing so. Hope I die before I get old? Fuck no—hope I
kill shit when I do. LARRY MIZELL JR.
The Cops
Free Electricity
(The Control Group)
1/2
Pick your rock-crit adjective: wiry, punky, angular, danceable.
There’s nothing on the Cops’ second album that hasn’t been done
elsewhere and there are few words to describe it that haven’t been
hacked to cliché. The surprise is that familiarity works in the
Cops’ favor. The Seattle quintet pay their debts to their influences
(the Clash, Gang of Four) early on and proceed to proper rocking out.
Each song on Free Electricity is a stranglehold;
conniption-fit guitars and high-stepping bass lines wrap tight around
skuzzy, harpoon-sized hooks, throttling out the last gasp of life left
within them.
Like other Seattle alpha rockers the Blakes and Sunday Night
Blackout, the Cops’ vocals fall back on attitudinal delivery and
shopworn themes—singer Michael Jaworski’s voice is more an
obligatory instrument properly used than a vehicle for lyrical
revelation. The band’s real action is a triple-pronged guitar vanguard,
a constantly shifting battle for supremacy between lead, rhythm, and
noise. “It’s Epidemic,” the lead track, is a good example, but
“Islands”—lyrically dopey, vocally snotty, instrumentally
massive—is the Cops’ quintessential sound.
The best song here, though, is the anomalous “Cold Crushin’,” an
evil, synth-driven rave-up that explodes out of the garage, Silver
Apples into ZZ Top into Carter USM. These two and a half minutes are
brazen, unexpected, and, once experienced, cast the rest of the album
(especially the title track, up next) in a brighter light. That little
bit of mystery, saved for the end of the record, goes a long way.
JONATHAN ZWICKEL
The Cops play their CD-release show Fri Nov 16 at the
Crocodile, 9 pm, $8, 21+. With Pleasureboaters, the Whore
Moans.
The A-Sides
Silver Storms
(Vagrant)
“Epic” isn’t easy to pull off in indie rock. You’ve got the
slacker-noise-jam school of thought, where bands hammer away endlessly
at out-of-tune guitars to produce a second-rate “Teen Age Riot.” You’ve
got the Sufjan-championed glorious orchestral mode, which too often
collapses under its own ostentatiousness.
So, the fact that the A-Sides’ Silver Storms pulls off
three songs in the six-minute range (plus several others that
sound like they should be)
is impressive.
A Philadelphia band with lapsed British Invasion tendencies, the
five-piece begin their sophomore album with an airy string quartet,
easing into the chimes and thumping rhythm of “Always in Trouble.”
Singer Jon Barthmus wails over key changes and minor sevenths, drifting
in the ebb and flow of his bandmates’ sound until the feisty
double-time coda. It’s a big intro, but the band are hardly spent.
Later, “Sinking with the Ship” dissolves the record into a wash of
cello and cymbals. The A-Sides keep their scope big, but never
self-consciously so. Even when “Diamonds” leans painfully Coldplay in
its slow-burn pacing and lyrical cheese (“let’s just shine, shine,
shine/all day and all of the night”), there’s no delusions of grandeur.
The song’s screaming Ebow-and-feedback crescendo is populist, not
pandering—the sound of five guys playing as loud as they can and
managing to make something transcendent. JOHN VETTESE
The A-Sides play Thurs Nov 15 at the Crocodile, 8 pm, $8,
all ages. With Say Hi, the
Velvet Teen.
Frank Lewis
Bumpy Johnson
Nicky Barnes
Guy Fisher