Day 0995 - Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City

Kendrick Lamar "Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City" (2012)

I guess this is one of those ones where the people putting the 1001 albums together had to choose some promising newer items and hope they'd pan out.    Well, many albums, much critical acclaim, a successful soundtrack and even a damned Pulitzer later and they seem to have called it correctly on Kendrick.

Kendrick started off producing mixtapes and doing a few gigs under the name K-Dot.   As things started to pick up, he dropped the K-Dot name and released an EP and his debut.   His star was in ascendancy from early on and he was signed to Interscope Records and Dr Dre's Aftermath Entertainment.

Kendrick grew up around gangs without being involved in them.   That seems to come out in his lyrics here, reporting on the dangers and stress of the streets without revelling in it or bragging about it.   Especially a track like "The Art of Peer Pressure" where he reflects on the need to try and do the drugs and act like a tough guy when he's 'with the homies'.

For "Good Kid, M.A.A.D City" Kendrick said he wanted to return to his Compton roots.   The album is mostly stripped down, focussing largely on snappy beats and low-n-slow basslines.   Something like "Backseat Freestyle" almost sounds dubby at the start and there are some similarities to Dizzee Rascal's grime sound.  Elsewhere a track like "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst" has a nice jazzy guitar backing and more lyrics expressing the unease and sense of danger on the streets.

Day 0808 - Dust

Screaming Trees "Dust" (1996)

Screaming Trees and their dust-throated vocliast Mark Lanegan have always drifted in and out of my orbit.   I first heard the Screaming Tress through their brilliant song "Nearly lost you" from the soundtrack Cameron Crowe's grunge-centric film "Singles".   Even though I loved that song I didn't really think to check out any more of their music.

A few years later a friend was well into the Mark Lanegan band and I listened to a couple of their albums but left it at that again.   Then a few years later, I saw Lanegan perform with the band the Soulsavers and a friend who is very much a Lanegan afficiando helped me discover a lot more of his work (solo, with Belle & Sebastian's Isobel Campbell, with Duke Garwood, Gutter Twins, Twilight Singers...).   Basically, sometimes I'm a slow learner.

Anyway, back to "Dust".   The basic foundation of this album seems to be the Beatles' Revolver and Rubber Soul albums, it has that mix of hard rock with middle-eastern sounds and a wash of psychedelia.   I guess those sounds, mixed with a little more distortion and with Lanegan's gravelly voice somehow manages to sound rock hard, the album is too good to fob off as "just another grunge record".

Great songs with occasional touches of gospel backing vocals that seem to signpost what was to come as far as Lanegan's work with the Soulsavers goes.