Trying to finish up this little series of year-end posts before we get too far into 2015...
Looking over the music I listened to in 2014, it's clear that I didn't do a very good job keeping up with the latest releases of even just my preferred narrow subgenre of underground hip hop. Thus, reviewing the albums of 2014 for me is as much about what I did listen to as what I didn't and still need to seek out.
Firstly, I already wrote a more in-depth piece about the two albums that were my favorites from the first half of 2014, The Living Daylights and Life Outside the Frame, so be sure to go give that a read.
Musically it was a great year as most of my favorite artists released long-awaited new material, including Bronze Nazareth, Madlib, Cormega, and the Wu-Tang Clan. In fact, looking back on it I spent most of the year listening almost exclusively to these new projects (while dabbling in their past catalogues plus exploring the old blind sage composer Moondog).
Rock Konducta (Parts 1 & 2) by Madlib
Was pining for this for a while. The vinyl dropped last January but those of us without phonographs had to wait until July for the mp3/CD version. Madlib, the legendary producer/sonic-trip-extraordinaire, added onto his mammoth catalogue with this newest edition of the "Beat Konducta" instrumental series, featuring a potpourri of obscure samples from the farthest reaches of 60s-70s psychedelic rock, prog rock, Zamrock, Krautrock, and every other eclectic rock, twisted, tweaked and chopped up into hip hop beats. Totaling more than 80 minutes over 50 tracks, most of them less than 2 minutes long, Rock Konducta is an enclosed universe in and of itself. There's an endless array of miscellaneous snippets, cacophonous blurts of speech, screams, Bill Murray disc jockey riffs, jangling-metal hi-hats, crunching drum lines, badass loops, synth-heavy snoozers, odd offputting tirades, the most random yelps you've ever heard (this tape has a recurrent motif featuring what sounds like a mentally disabled woman bleating "Gimme a dollar!"), ringing alarm clocks or phones, stand-up routines, and every other sonic microcomponent Madlib could cobble together to line this collage of treasures from his rock vinyl collection. There's certainly plenty of skippable material here, but you can easily distill this vast assemblage into a playlist of 30 tracks that are excellent (which is exactly what I did). Or you can listen to the full thing and drift away into the far reaches of Madlib's weird mind.
Favorite tracks: First of all, where the hell does he come up with all these track names? There are 52 tracks in all, none of which have a generic name. Among my favorites are the thumping, mildly melancholy "Motorik Matching", the rugged pysch rock jam "Black Widow", the woodwind orchestral head-bopper "Giant Okra", and the drum-heavy up-tempo controlled chaos known as "Soap Guillotine" on Part 1; deep into the more lackluster Part 2 is my favorite loop on the whole project "Dies Irae" (it's become one of my favorite Madlib beats ever), the rest of Part 2 is unspectacular aside from the rugged fiddle symphony "Teapot", the penultimate percussion showcase "Soon Over" and, of course, the beat tape's closing 30 seconds into which Madlib enigmatically inserts one of the finest, most grave-sounding beats. You'll first need to sit through a 90-second satirical skit of a botched plane hijacking because it's only after that, and a transitional distorted sample singing "though I call from far awayyyy/ you don't listen...," when the Beat Konducta decides to flip on the serious switch.
