5 new releases we love: A pop revolutionary returns, an L.A. rapper bounces back, and more
Schoolboy Q, Crash Talk
[Top Dawg Entertainment, April 26]
It’s been three years since Schoolboy Q released his beloved, sprawling Blank Face LP—so what’s he been up to? To hear him tell it, descending into an abyss of downers and weed, recording and discarding some three albums in a Calabasas myopia. But Crash Talk’s not about the fall; it’s about the bounce-back. Q’s still an oddball MC, his delivery rounding into phlegmatic leers and unexpected yips, but here it’s channeled into sober ruminations (“Black Folk”) and gliding, night-on-the-town largesse (“Lies”) as much as, you know, songs about fucking (“Chopstix”). Aside from Pusha T, no other rapper has benefited as much from hip-hop’s newfound obsession with concision; at under 40 minutes, this is Q’s shortest effort by a mile. Some will miss his traditional late-album, acid-fried wanderlust, but its absence signals a trimmer, more focused MC: both hands on the wheel and barreling down the highway. [Clayton Purdom]
Mountain Goats, In League With Dragons
[Merge, April 26]
The Mountain Goats earned some nerd cred when they announced In League With Dragons at a Wizards Of The Coast event, the D&D makers’ headquarters serving as the perfect setting for an album that began as “a rock opera about a besieged seaside community called Riversend ruled by a benevolent wizard.” That narrative, though, only threads through about half of the finished product, and some of In League With Dragons’ best songs are either entirely divorced from the fantasy elements or only tangentially related—“Passaic 1975,” for example, is a lovely, heart-swelling ode to a young Ozzy Osborne, while baroque Seven For Australia sequel “Going Invisible 2” finds transcendence in fire that could very well have spilled from a dragon’s mouth. In League With Dragons remains a vibrant listen, though, with the squealing saxophone of “Younger” and the gnarly riffage of “Cadaver Sniffing Dog” giving a serrated edge to the album’s stately base of piano and percussion. And, as he’s proven in songs about Beowulf’s Grendel and, believe it or not, Super Mario’s Toad, songwriter John Darnielle knows how to mine genuine resonance from even the most ridiculous characters, his troubled wizard exuding pastel shades of hope at the “huge wings blotting out the sun” of the melancholic title track. [Randall Colburn]