Juicy J: 100% Juice

We’re often told rap is a young person’s game, but one of the year’s most noteworthy rap albums was helmed by a fifty-year-old. Jay Z is comfortably in his forties; Kanye will be forty in two years. And somehow Juicy J is forty but he seems particularly ageless—there’s When the Smoke Clears-era Three 6 Mafia, there’s Juicy J accepting an Oscar and appearing on his own show on MTV, then there’s 2011 Juicy J, attached to Wiz Khalifa’s Taylor Gang troupe, rapping with Kreayshawn, spawning catchphrases ("you say no to drugs—Juicy J can’t!"), and releasing free music at a furious clip, keeping up with the Lil B's of the world and rappers half his age.

Juicy J didn’t have to come back, but he did, and his career reached a logical conclusion with his third solo record, 2013’s Stay Trippy, which was surprisingly great then, and holds up now. At the time, it wasn’t hard to see some cynicism in Juicy J’s late-career moves—he appeared to be angling for the blog-space that spent so much time covering guys who directly bit his original style (somewhere SpaceGhostPurrp is sighing). But Juicy J is from blue-collar Memphis, all he does is work.

On the heels of the largely forgettable Blue Dream & Lean 2, 100% Juice drops all pretense and opens with the clearest mission statement possible: "There’s too much stupid-ass shit happening right now, it’s time to turn up." From there, it’s business as usual: dense, booming dark beats, hooks that mostly consist of a phrase shouted like a salutation, cataloging of various drugs taken and sexual escapades, then an occasional guest to break it up.

While Juicy J’s re-emergence came on the heels of Lex Luger, Mike WiLL, and Young Chop beats, now he’s playing in a contemporary field consisting of 808 Mafia, Sonny Digital, and Metro Boomin. Juicy J’s greatest asset has been his ability to make his surroundings his own. The same way he ran through those 2011 Lex Luger beats, he slides right into the spacey, trap-noir of 808 Mafia—"Still" runs a piano loop sounding straight out of Halloween as Juicy J sticks the landing on a vivid line like "she got my wife-beater on as a nightgown" and the punchline "you just looking for a quick come-up, I can feel it in the air like Phil Collins." How Juicy J rattles off these lines, in a way not unlike the now-infamous Migos triplet flow, but with an ascending and descending cadence that emphasizes the right syllables, is indicative of how effortless this comes to him. He never sounds tired, never phones it in. He’s the consummate pro.

Juicy J is funnier than most rappers and capable of getting the most ludicrous hooks stuck in your head ("I drop them beans in my lean" will haunt you for days) and he’s the rare rapper who commands respect from the people around him. Boosie’s vicious, borderline-disgusting verse on the "Film" remix is impossible to not run back a dozen times, demonstrating the intensity with which artists approach a Juicy J feature. Same goes for Lil Herb, who pops on "Ain’t No Rapper"; the change of scenery breathes new, vibrant life into the Chicago emcee’s scratchy, traditional gangster tropes. 100% Juice, while not a revelation, is sturdy and solid. A great artist can endlessly remake the same sounds and make it work, and the self-contained good time of 100% Juice adds a few new wrinkles.

The Underachievers: Evermore: The Art of Duality

"I know my soul was born to do some cool things," testifies AK over the wood flute-and-maracas loop of "Rain Dance (Phase One Intro)". The Underachievers, his duo with Issa Gold, practice the kind of esoteric mysticism that once flourished in some far-flung corners of '90s rap, from the feverish jabberwocky of Leaders of the New School’s T.I.M.E.: The Inner Mind’s Eye to the pan-African zealotry of X-Clan’s To the East, Blackwards, and the backpacker bohemianism of Zion I’s Mind Over Matter, Mystik Journeymen’s The Black Sands Ov Eternia and Abstract Tribe Unique’s Mood Pieces. It’s an ethos that largely dissipated by the end of that decade as rap moved on. But the Underachievers have not only revived it, they’ve stuck with their spiritual bent through four projects, including 2013’s revelatory Indigoism, last year’s uneven but satisfying Cellar Door: Terminus Ut Exordium, and now Evermore: The Art of Duality.

At first, Evermore appears to offer more of the same, as they rap about being miseducated in school, dabbling in street hustles, and feeling alienated from society. "We lost in this world, but it’s hard to relate," says AK on "Chasing Faith". They strive to use their experiences to educate others through hip-hop music, celebrating the use of "natural" herbs such as marijuana and ‘shrooms, but acknowledging that they’ve struggled with harder substances. They underline the importance of their metaphysical lessons by acknowledging in "The Dualist" that "We all sin."

AK and Issa Gold complement each other. Vocally, AK has a more sour tone and a barking delivery that sounds like he’s dispensing real talk. Issa Gold has a mid-range baritone that lightens when he gets excited, as if he can’t wait to finish rapping one line and start the next. Both are strong lyricists, but for much of Evermore, they repeat the same themes again and again. The perils of mental illness are frequently noted; mainstream religious dogma, school indoctrination, and the banality of social media and Western pop culture are repetitively disparaged.

These observations are delivered over serene production. "Shine All Gold" matches an acoustic guitar loop to a bass drum bounce, then closes with an ambient techno beat. The next two tracks, "Chasing Faith" and "Star Signs", pick up that downtempo thread and build backgrounds full of melancholy and yearning. "The Dualist" breaks the holistic spell with the kind of mid-'90s boom-bap classicism on which the Underachievers and other Beast Coast artists built their reputation. The warm electric keyboards and synthesizers of "The Brooklyn Way" make for a particularly glorious peak. "Hands up if you live for love," chants Issa Gold.

For much of Evermore, the Underachievers spin in their spiritual axis, until a series of tracks near the end break the heavenly trance with jarring abruptness. Trap orchestration creeps in on "Take Your Place" as Issa Gold warns, "Don’t fuck with the snakes," and AK adds, "Really pop up on a nigga blocka/ If he think he hotta ‘cause a nigga conscious/ Got to keep a chopper just to cease the nonsense." The duo descends into a hellish inferno until they reach the ninth circle of "Allusions". "Got a bitch in the Bay that loves the ‘shrooms/ She be screamin’ AK when I shove the broom," brags AK. Issa Gold adds, "Smoking fuego with your dame/ Been like a whole 20 minutes, can’t front, nigga still don’t know her name /30 minutes later, had my pinky in her brain/ She like, I thought you was different, all of you rappers just the same/ She ain’t complain."

The latter songs throw everything that precedes it into doubt. Are the Underachievers just rap dudes lusting for weed, bitches, and cash like everyone else? They’re obviously aware of the contradictions, but Evermore: The Art of Duality places these adventures in a present-tense context. Perhaps they’re simply acknowledging their flawed humanity. Just as likely, they don’t yet realize that their perspectives on sex and violence can be as tough to break as the mental prisons that damaged their troubled youth.

The Evermore journey is an engaging one, but it would have slid into a new age torpor if not for the spate of ugliness near the album’s end. The coarse "Generation Z" shenanigans give the earlier "Chasing Faith" added urgency. We now know why the Underachievers strain to ascend their earthly selves. "I done came far, still got a lot further to go," raps Issa Gold on the final track, "Unconscious Monsters (Evermore Outro)". "Trying to leave a mark by giving everything that I know."

Mariah: Utakata no Hibi

Throughout its long, slow journey west, Mariah’s Utakata no Hibi has been an album without context. After a dormant period at home among Japan’s vinyl geek underground, the 1983 record began to spread farther in 2008, when the tastemaking Scottish DJ duo Optimo shared a cut online. That song, "Shinzo no Tobira", which they first heard in a Tokyo record store, has since earned a cult following worldwide for the ethereal lines it traces between Asian and Middle Eastern tonalities, folklorish Armenian lyrics, and futuristic Japanese synthpop leads. Its soundscapes are like those once dreamt by Brians Eno and Wilson. But for all the love "Shinzo" and its parent album have found in tiny nightclubs and Internet testimonials, surprisingly little has been asked or answered about its origins. It's almost as though Utakata—now reissued by Palto Flats—has at last arrived on our shores not simply through a crate digger’s time warp, but from some other world altogether.

Or maybe a few of them: As befits an album that owes its broader discovery to a Shinjuku record store called Eurasia, Utakata’s plainspoken lyrics are sung in alternating Armenian and Japanese. In this regard—and most others—the record bears no resemblance to Mariah’s previous five, wherein a revolving door of popular Tokyo session men dabbled in everything from prog rock to jazz funk. By 1983, the project was being led by Yasuaki Shimizu, a relentlessly exploratory musician best known for the saxophone takes on Bach’s Cello Suites he would later record in both Japanese mines and Italian palazzos. His brilliant solo outing from the previous year, Kakashi, is Utakata’s only obvious relative. But that earlier work’s East-meets-West patchwork of genres, moods, and scales feels much more cut and dry than the seamless marvel Shimizu would soon create. Given how difficult it remains to find a fair comparison for any of Utakata’s seven songs, let alone synthesize the picture they form together, it’s an album that has well earned its reputation as an elusive classic.

The long tally of pleasant surprises begins with opener "Sokokara…" ("From Here…"), in which slash-and-burn no wave guitar and a frantically overloaded player piano somehow only add to the springtime optimism suggested by the song’s marching beat, blossoming synths, and Shimizu’s skyward warble. "Hana Ga Saitara" ("Were Flowers to Bloom") is a more eloquent draft of the dubbed out, sax-led post-punk that was then beginning to bubble up in England rock clubs, here powered by brass skronk and proto-techno synths. And "Fujiyu Na Nezumi" takes the British nursery rhyme "Three Blind Mice" and translates it into Japanese, Armenian, and a poetic syntax of spare bass, sustained synths, and simple percussion—indicating not so much the album’s sense of humor as the childlike wonder animating its every move. Mixer and engineer Seigen Ono would later work the boards for artists like John Zorn, Arto Lindsay, and King Crimson, but the way he focuses Shimizu’s playtime ruckus of international instrumentation and production techniques remains the accomplishment of his career.

Utakata’s most impressive feat of synthesis, however, lies in its coupling of East Asian and Middle Eastern sounds. The most explicit instance occurs in early highlight "Shisen" ("A Vision"), which weds gorgeous piano pentatonics and koto court music with Armenian vocalist Julie Fowell’s mesmerizing mantra, "Our eyes as one." When the lone, cavernous drum and piercing sine waves enter, the effect is devastating. The twinning effect is at its subtle best on the famously DJ-friendly "Shinzo no Tobira" ("My Life Is Big") that first got Optimo’s attention, where unforgettable melody walks the fine line it all but invents between its authors’ musical heritages.

In 2015, it remains a rare and enchanting thing to hear a piece of convergence culture this effortless—which, after all, may be one reason Utakata still sounds so otherworldly. Another could be the fact that the album owes its existence to a creative moment in Japanese pop that remains virtually unknown to the English-speaking world. Thanks to '80s electronic pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra’s continued chart success and the glory days of the Japanese economy, the mainstream entered a renaissance of open-mindedness and ludicrous recording budgets, producing an abundance of records that answer Shimizu’s sonic adventures with ones every bit as bold and compelling. Maybe Utakata belongs, then, not to some wondrous alternate history, but a real one we’re just beginning to uncover.

Ryan Adams: 1989

Ryan Adams' cover of Taylor Swift's 1989 is a lot of fun to think about and talk about, but not much fun to listen to. It is, in other words, a pure product of the Internet—a robust, cross-platform, thinkpiece-generating app that testifies mostly to Adams' ability to get attention. You have to hand it to him for knowing what he's doing: His album choice churns up some nice, irony-rich soil for culture and music critics to wriggle around in. Even though Taylor Swift has been a songwriter first and foremost throughout her career, 1989 was where she collaborated more intensely with superstar producers like Max Martin and Shellback to help her cross over from Queen of Pop Country to the center of the pop world proper. The move worked spectacularly: 1989 is among the best-selling albums of the post-Napster era. And now Ryan Adams has transformed it again, into... a run-of-the-mill Ryan Adams album.

It's an odd object to engage with. Adams is entertaining, always has been, and he's carved out what is by now a fascinating career, filled with a few widely beloved heartland rock albums and a great many weird one-offs that have won him a devoted cult. 1989 is on the one hand an example of the latter, but it's presented in the style of the former. He throws himself into the album completely—the arrangements are fully realized and he sings with care and precision, revealing his admiration. But he also reveals some fairly crucial points about how good songs are put together. 

Every recorded song is the end point of a long road with many possible forks in it—a series of small decisions about chord changes, melody lines, lyrics, and arrangements. Swift's 1989 songs are written for a specific kind of production—the melodies are clipped, percussive, and designed to hit with force at very specific times. They are written to be electro-pop songs, which rely more on big dynamic changes and repeating cells of melody. 

At its best, Swift's 1989 crackles with life, and highlights what it feels like to be young and looking at the world from a very specific moment; Adams transforms those feelings into a wistful and generic feeling of weariness. To put it in the context of an artist to whom Adams is often compared, 1989 shows why Springsteen went synth-pop on Born in the U.S.A. in 1984—the songs demanded it. The songs that sound like anthems were meant to be anthems; Springsteen's stark demos of the songs are instructive but they weren't the finished product. Remember, too, that he tried to turn his dark folk masterpiece Nebraska into a full band album but realized it needed to come out as an acoustic demo. Which is to say that "Out of the Woods" is "Dancing in the Dark", not "Atlantic City".

Swift knows this about her own material, and the demos of 1989's songs she included on the album show how dramatic the transformation can be. In Adams' hands, they are flat, flavorless rockers, and when the music isn't simply boring it crosses the line into actively grating. He wants "Blank Space" to be a Big Star-style heartfelt ballad, but the melody feels thin, rushed, and monochrome in this setting. He delivers "Shake It Off" in a grim and determined tone that would be appropriate if he were singing about how conservative politics have decimated rural families at the inaugural Farm Aid—but when paired with a repeated refrain of “haters gonna hate," it sounds ridiculous. And Adams' "Style" is downright garish, coming off like Bono fronting Survivor, the dark side of the album's titular year.

Adams' 1989, for all its sincerity and technical execution, is ultimately hollow because it's nothing but context. There's everything surrounding it (the unexpected match of singer and song, the details of the release) and there's what you bring to it (your relationship to the music of Swift and Adams, your demographic profile, your feelings on rock and pop and covers in general) but there's no essential reason for it to exist. This is why Father John Misty's rush-released version of "Blank Space", wherein he remade Swift's song in the style of the Velvet Underground, was such a brilliant example of a recorded song as music criticism. His track was a hilarious (and, importantly, still musically enjoyable) reminder that Adams' entire album is a gesture. It's a formal exercise. You listen and think, "Ah, I see what he did there" and then you forget about it.

Disclosure: Caracal

Looking back, the intro to Disclosure’s Settle almost reads like a warning to their future selves: "As much as you like to control your environment, the reality is, everything changes." Sure enough, Guy and Howard Lawrence’s sophomore full-length Caracal arrives just two years later but in a markedly different pop landscape—thanks in no small part to the brothers' own influence. Their pristine syntheses of UK garage, Midwestern vocal house, and hook-happy pop structures re-oriented the British pop charts and trickled into the American ones, opening the doors for pop-adjacent neo-house acts like Duke Dumont, Years & Years, and Rudimental (not to mention for Sam Smith). Disclosure have never really been the types to throw curveballs: they do what they do, and they do it impeccably. But it’s understandable they’d start feeling restless, especially as the scope of their influence rendered their own tunes increasingly indistinct. "That sound is everywhere now," Guy, now 24, admitted in an L.A. Times profile this summer. "The same old bass lines, the same old samples. We’re a bit bored by it."

Scrubbed of much of its predecessor's overt 2-step and house homage, Caracal suggests the duo's also grown bored of the conversation that's surrounded them from the start: how dance and pop music can and "should" relate. On one hand, here were two young men making wide-reaching dance tracks that weren’t reliant on drops, builds, or any of festival EDM’s creatine-crazed trappings. These guys scanned as "tasteful," for better or worse. But on the flip side were classicists and underground dance fans who pegged the duo as milquetoast gentrifiers of scenes they were too young to fully appreciate, repackaging history with the context and kinks ironed out. There is some sting in the charge, but it's not entirely fair: Disclosure’s work has always made the most sense within the framework of pop, in terms of both form and demographic. In that sense, calling Disclosure contrived or formulaic misunderstands how pop works. Their music may be one-size-fits-all, but it’s also immaculately crafted and catchy as fuck, smudging the divide between the universal and the personal to the point where "Latch" somehow seemed to grow more poignant the more ubiquitous it became.

Those dance classicists will likely be less territorial with Caracal: the brothers have dialed down the BPMs significantly and turned toward slow-burning, R&B-inspired grooves. But as they’ve edged away from giddy neo-nostalgia toward a sound with less identifiable anchor points, they’ve begun to blend into the background. On "Omen", the brothers reunite with Sam Smith for a single presumably meant to reprise the massive success of "Latch". And it’s fine—plodding along at a stately downtempo strut with a hint of a 2-step hitch, Smith’s voice a bit mired in that familiar elastic bassline. But it’s nowhere near as immediate, or as gripping; here, when Smith sings of missed opportunities for emotional connection, "Latch"’s obsessive I-will-never-leave-your-side-god-dammit conviction feels like a distant memory. Much of Caracal is vaguely pleasant music you can put on in the background while you’re working—but is that really what we look to Disclosure for?

Meanwhile, where Settle set the tone for years of pop hits to come, Caracal seems content to fall back amidst the pack. Opening track "Nocturnal" is a showcase for R&B’s man-of-the-moment the Weeknd, and it wouldn’t sound out of place on Beauty Behind the Madness. Its synth arpeggios seem to aim for Frankie Knuckles and Jamie Principles’ "Your Love", but the vibe is closer to late-'00s Hype Machine dance tracks (halfway through, the track practically breaks into its own Classixx remix). This makes sense, in a way: much of the Billboard pop and R&B charts over the last year have embraced this sound, from Nick Jonas’ "Jealous" to Jason Derulo to the current bumper crop of vaguely Balearic "tropical house" singles and remixes. But for Disclosure, the move feels like a step backward, an aim at broader relevance that’s only watered down what once made them feel thrilling.

There are bright spots: lead single "Holding On" retains their signature bounce and features stunning vocals from jazz songwriter Gregory Porter, and "Good Intentions", with its understated Miguel appearance, is the best example of their smoothed-out new direction, keeping a brisk pace but leaving more open space. Still, it’s getting harder to shake the sense that these redemptive guest spots have become a crutch for a lack of ideas. Both of the album’s two featureless tracks feel instantly forgettable—particularly "Jaded", a beige wash of cheeseball lyrics that chastise a dishonest companion with all the depth of the "Why You Lyin" Vine.

When Disclosure’s hype was at its peak circa Settle, they were often compared to turn-of-the-century acts like Basement Jaxx and Daft Punk—acts who successfully recontextualized older house and disco influences into something reverent and contemporary. But a significant part of both groups’ appeal—and, crucially, part of the outright critical revulsion at the time, too—was their lack of self-seriousness, their willingness to get a little cheesy. Those guys’ nostalgia embraced the kitsch along with the classicism; they had fun. The Lawrence brothers have good taste, sharp instincts, and pristine craftsmanship: playfulness, not so much. Even the album’s most unbuttoned track falls flat: "Bang That", a (relatively) raunchy promotional single now relegated to the bonus tracks with a gratuitous sample of 313 Bass Mechanics’ "Pass Out", feels a bit cringey, like Kidz Bop does ghetto house. Ultimately, Caracal just doesn’t feel much fun, and even its highs are nowhere near Settle’s polished bliss. Once trendsetters, here the Lawrence brothers too often fade noncommittally into white noise.

Consequence of Sound

Consequence of Sound