ILM's Top 77 Albums of 2019

Listened to the first few songs a couple of weeks ago and it seemed… ordinary? I'll give it another shot sometime.

I lied btw - it was my #14

It's all about the geniality of the attitude mixed with the sharpness of the flow. Just such a good guy to hang out with - so funny and righteous when he has to be. And the production is great too imo

Extremely cool and intense production. Sneaked onto my ballot and really glad to see it here.

never got round to hearing that, i do love jme though

DJP alert

https://i.imgur.com/FQdjmZ1.jpg
#71 – clipping. – There Existed an Addiction to Blood (188 points, 7 votes, 1 #1 vote)

Clipping - Midcity (noise rap)

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2019/10/clipping-there-existed-an-addiction-to-blood-revie.html

Too goddamn low ffs!

Was hoping for #45 to match Pfork's rating.

looking at my ballot now, it looks like I forgot to vote for this

Probably should have placed it a little higher on mine.

i still don't know what clipping is all about. name just makes me think of toenails

glad it got in! on balance probably their best yet

I feel like I made some sort of copy paste error, because there's another album on my ballot that shouldn't be there. Sorry!

xxp to myself

hopefully it was a good one.

They've reached greatness - well, they already had, but this is a stunning reaffirmation. Some of the best sonics and rapping around, and the concept is always so tight. I mean, I slightly prefer Splendor & Misery if pushed, but that one's on my all-time list and this is a broadening of focus to encompass new and horrific delights

https://i.imgur.com/U7FaZIK.jpg
#70 – Blanck Mass – Animated Violence Mild (189 points, 6 votes)

Fuck Buttons: Pretty/Noisy band on ATP Recordings: Dígame Más Por Favor

https://www.nme.com/reviews/blanck-mass-animated-violence-mild-review-2536310

I very much enjoyed World Eater, but as I've said elsewhere this one was basically the Mortal Kombat soundtrack sans the unsophisticated charm. Then again, my tolerance for maximalist kitsch is quite low.

whoa I expected clipping to place a lot higher wtf

About halfway (? lol how long is this album) through the Matana Roberts and rather enjoying it btw

👍

i still don't know what clipping is all about. name just makes me think of toenails

They are a hip-hop group that uses a ton of industrial/field recordings to put together the beats for their music. For example, on the song "Shooter" (from a previous EP) they went to a rifle range and recorded themselves firing something like 14 different guns, then built the main percussion hits of the beat off of those samples. Their emcee is Daveed Diggs, who was the original Lafayette/Jefferson from the Broadway cast of Hamilton. This album starts out using a horror movie tropes as allegories to stories about police brutality and street crime and slowly segues into straight-up horror stories involving red room parties, werewolves, and more.

Standout songs on the album are "Nothing Is Safe", which turns a drug bust into a Carpenter-scored home invasion story, "Run For Your Life", which tells the story of a junkie being hunted by a drug lord recast as a serial killer where the beat comes out of cars driving down the street as the junkie tries to get away, "The Show" which is an industrial march about torturing people for entertainment, "Story 7", which brings together characters from other "Story" tracks from previous releases as they encounter a werewolf, "He Dead", which uses sparse cathedral organ as a backdrop for how the police hunt poor black people, to pretty much every other song on the album. I strongly, strongly recommend listening not only to it, but their entire discography; Diggs is a lights-out talent in and of himself and the sound palette the group has created for him to show off over is incomparable.

(There Existed An Addiction To Blood was my #1 and I think this group is by far the best musical act of the 2010s after diving back through their work; also check out "The Deep" EP; the title track was nominated for a Hugo Award.)

ha! world eater is the album I accidentally voted for. I like it, but it overdoes it a bit and like I mentioned in the tracks thread, sounds like a caricature of World Eater

I also want to call out "Club Down" for having a backing track made up entirely of synth stabs and screams and the lurching nightmare beat of "All In Your Head" that blossoms into really the only moment of positive catharsis on the album, an a capella hymn-like text that blossoms into a full-on drum n bass celebration.

Daveed Diggs of clipping. also has a snowballing acting career onstage/film/television.

You're gonna see a lot of him this year as Frederick Douglass in the Ethan Hawke HBO show The Good Lord Bird and in the (god help us) TNT adaptation of Bong Joon Ho's dystopian sci-fi movie Snowpiercer.

he's sorta ridiculously talented is what I'm getting at.
I saw him in White Noise last year and, though the play was garbage, he was magnetic.

apologies but clipping always sounds very corny to my ears. it's a combo of diggs' super-wordy and enunciated rapping and the "WE'RE SCARY!" aesthetic

wtf does snowpiercer really need or deserve an english language adaptation

DJP didn't even mention the incredible "Blood of the Fang", which made my singles ballot and almost cracked the 77.

thank you djp, helpful posting!

Surprised that clipping is so low despite not voting for it myself, thought it would have reasonable ilx support.

wtf does snowpiercer really need or deserve an english language adaptation

― ciderpress, Monday, February 3, 2020 12:04 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

not sure if irony, but snowpiercer was definitely in english

None of you have mentioned La Mala Ordina (my #4 track) or the Piano Burning outro yet either, which brings us to virtually the whole album

oh right that's even more perplexing then

(Adding to DJP's excellent write-up, the use of cars playing the beat as they drove by in Run For Your Life was some properly breathtaking stuff. I first listened to it walking alone by a road in the early morning. A good setting for it)

to say something positive though, i love the cate le bon album and am glad it eked its way on here

Most of these albums so far are TOO HIGH. Clipping, Cate le Bon, and Blanck Mass were all overrated.

https://i.imgur.com/NQj4g7U.jpg
#69 – Sampa the Great – The Return (194 points, 7 votes, 1 #1 vote)

Rolling non-US rap thread 2018

https://www.popmatters.com/sampa-the-great-the-return-2640293029.html

Excellent first half, then it completely lost me – and I'm a fan of 90s-style full CD-length overreaching in hip-hop.

oh damnit TOO LOW. My #1

Are you Bandcamp?

Was that their #1? If so they have good taste

nice

Tell us why it's good then!

oh i loved this record, first of all votes to place this fortnite

I was a bit disappointed at first by The Return, it felt a bit too mellow coming after the undeniable energy of, er, "Energy" and "Final Form". But it did grew on me, even the slower jams make sense in the context of it being an introspective concept album on African immigrant experience.

It's gorgeous - Sampa's voice, her words, and the production. Probably the album with the best balance of those three things this year imo. It's super close to my other favs of the year but I had to pick a #1 and it won out

#72 – Jme – Grime MC (187 points, 7 votes)

so happy it made the top. such a great record.

impressive for an album with no digital release whatsoever

And Laurel Halo's DJ-Kicks was my #3, so I'm glad I helped it make it to the the top 77. It really is one of the best DJ mixes of the millennium, and the best record she's ever released. If you buy the Bandcamp version that comes with a free download of full versions of all the tracks, you can see what a great job she did at selecting them and mixing them in a coherent whole.