MWE Week Three: The xx, Danny Brown, Evidence, and Ghost
The natural growth of The xx's sound, the slow descent into madness from Danny Brown, the stormy rise of rap's weatherman Evidence, and Ghost's most skippable album.
The xx: xx and Coexist
One of the first things you’ll know about me when talking about music is that my favorite album of all-time is Jamie xx’s In Colour. I could write a whole essay about what this album means to me, why every moment is so perfectly crafted, and my own personal interpretation of the story hidden throughout the album’s distant, floaty, melancholic loneliness (future article for this newsletter?). So why it’s taken me this long to take the full dive into his band’s discography, I have no idea. I’d listened to I See You at the very start of 2017 and even considered it one of my favorites of that year at the time. But since then, I’ve never really felt the need to explore the rest of their discography, even when their debut has so much love within electropop circles. Guess I should really take a look and see where the artist who made my favorite album’s journey began.
I found myself with an interesting conclusion at the end of these two albums; xx is actually my least favorite of their discography. Which is kind of a hot take because I’ve seen a lot of people hail this as one of the best electropop albums of the 2000s, but I’m honestly not too high on it! It’s definitely good, very good! But I think it also suffers from “first album syndrome” where a lot of the imperfections distract from what could be a way better album with more refinement. And to be honest, a lot of that falls on Romy and especially Oliver Sim. Jamie, while this isn’t his best work, is definitely the album’s strongest suit. I always found it funny that the band’s most popular and ubiquitous song is the intro, but I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. It’s such a simple, yet wonderfully composed song. One with a really great progression and melody that sticks out wherever you hear it. Apparently, that song got popular because of its use in several programs as a sort of bumper or song to set a scene to, and people liked it so much they actually went out and bought the song itself. I don’t think “Intro” is the best song on the album, mostly because I do prefer the more fleshed out songs like “Heart Skipped A Beat”, “Night Time” and “Islands”, but it does at least show what Jamie is capable of as a producer. Romy and Oliver meanwhile… Hrm. You can tell that this is a first venture for them because while they do have pretty solid chemistry from the get-go, their deliveries feel really underweight. It gave me the vibe of someone in their vocal class nervous to sing out of anxiety of being judged or graded harshly. Which is mean, I realize, and it’s not like they do badly or anything. Still, it might be a factor of already being intimately familiar with their voices that it makes me wish that I could hear a more confident and refined version of “Crystalline” or “Stars”. Both great songs that could have been amazing. But that’s really the only major gripe I have with the album. These songs are still very good, and a great foundation for the future of The xx’s sound. It’s just not in its best form.
Coexist is the least popular of their three albums, but I consider it the moment where their music went from really good to outstanding. Romy and Oliver’s vocals definitely improved, now more refined and confident as they let themselves slide into the atmospheres and melodies that Jamie creates. Jamie, by the way, improves a lot on this album! His textures are more ethereal and beautiful, his compositions stick with you more as every instrument blends together beautifully. You feel the emotion in every word as the production takes you into this haze of uncertainty. Jamie is a master of capturing that feeling of distant, melancholic loneliness, and his work on Coexist is no exception. Honestly, I want to get high while listening to this album just to feel the vibrations wash over me, and Romy and Oliver’s vocals act like echoing voices in my mind, getting lost in the color of it all. This is pretty much what grabbed me about The xx as a whole. Being able to capture that feeling of mutual longing in a way that’s as easy to dance to as it is to yearn to.
Both albums are fairly short, so after I listened to Coexist, I decided to revisit I See You on a whim, and honestly, I think it’s my easy favorite of the three. Probably because while Coexist is very consistent, I See You has by far the stronger songs and stickiest hooks. I’d say my favorite song of theirs is probably “Replica” for having such a great instrumental along with Oliver Sim’s terrific voice carrying the burden that his father instilled upon him as he grew into his own. But there’s also Romy’s tragically beautiful “Performance” about putting on a fake image of herself just for one person’s validation and the celebration of love on “Say Something Loving”. It’s pretty much all the best parts of Coexist with more, and it reminded me of why this band is so special in the first place. Every member has a distinct voice, and regardless of what story they tell or what atmosphere they develop, it’s always going to stick with you in your loneliest moments.
Danny Brown: XXX and Old
Here’s the story of how I started listening to Danny Brown: It’s early January 2017, was in a desert place with my mom and grandmother. While they were talking, I was watching the newly uploaded first part of Spectrum Pulse’s Top 50 Songs of the previous year. He immediately starts out the list with a song that sounded like a circus straight from hell. The blast of horns and blaring bass over this cartoonish voice howling about watching the devil maniacally laugh in your voice. I knew as soon as I heard it that I NEED to hear this song in full. Pretty soon I became obsessed with “Ain’t It Funny”, and soon enough it led to me going through the rest of Atrocity Exhibition to see what else this guy had in store. Cut to now and I consider it one of my all-time favorite hip-hop records. An obvious one, sure, but it’s such an inspired album with some of the most unique and insane bangers you’ll hear on any album. It’s a shame to hear about the circumstances that brought it though. It’s a VERY unhealthy album that showed that Danny was going through some deep shit, further destroying his body with drugs and sinking deeper into his depression. It was good to hear him in a healthier and more focused mindset on his follow up uknowwhatimsayin?, but the album kinda suffered as a result. Easily his weakest project lacking in the great moments that made up Atrocity Exhibition. Obviously don’t take that as me saying he should only make music in unhealthy states, but it’s hard to deny that it was a step down from the heights he reached previously.
That’s why I was really hoping to love his previous two albums before Atrocity Exhibition. I knew they’d never capture by heart the same way that album did, but I knew that Danny Brown had a wealth of talent within him, regardless of whatever circumstance he was in. I knew XXX was considered a classic by many people, and while Old wasn’t as popular, it was still very well-liked.
And for the second time this week, I found myself at odds with the popular consensus again. To my surprise, XXX didn’t fully click for me. It’s certainly good, it has plenty of great songs to come back to, but the album really dragged in parts and its best songs just don’t hit the heights of his other albums. By this point, Danny Brown was just starting to get public attention. He appeared on the 2012 XXL Freshman list and was part of the infamous cipher where everyone was shown up by up-and-coming embarrassment Hopsin, but at least didn’t bomb as hard as Future. That guy’s never going to be a star. But because he was only now refining his sound, the album feels a bit unfocused in terms of what it wants to do. It starts out promising, using what would then be Danny’s bread and butter with songs about coping with depression using drugs and strippers. I like how you can hear the hints of things escalating with Danny Brown bragging about being a rockstar, not for the glory of the lifestyle, but for slowly killing himself with drugs. It shows the inner subtext of a lot of Danny’s music really early, and when the songs are as good as “Pac Blood”, “Die Like a Rockstar” and “Bruiser Brigade”, I found myself enjoying the album quite a bit! Though, the beats aren’t nearly as refined as they should be, which is the first issue that kept me from loving this album. Not that they were bad, they just often felt clunky or not really pushing themselves to be as wild or dangerous as they should be. There are stakes in these songs, but the production never lets them peek through. It doesn’t help when midway through the album, the production gets clunkier and harder to get into. Especially when on songs like “Outer Space”, Danny will just lean into hard misogyny in a way that isn’t funny or villainous, just obnoxious. And maybe that’s the point, that the sluggish production is the substances flowing through Danny’s veins and starting to take a toll on him, but then the album starts focusing and even starts delving into more storytelling tracks. Namely the highlights “Nosebleed” and “Party All The Time”, both songs about girls who themselves feel miserable abusing themselves with drugs and sex because they don’t feel the motivation to be human anymore. I think this is the point where the album turned around for me. It’s not really meant to be a party album. In fact, a lot of these songs are pretty fucking depressing. Dying due to substance abuse, feeling numb to pain, coping with the dismal state of your life through bragging and sex, nobody comes out of this album happy. It even ends with a straight mental breakdown as Danny Brown blows up over how fucking miserable he is and being on the verge of suicide via overdose over his fear of losing everything he has. It’s a really potent ending and one that kept me from being harsher on this album than I could have. Because yeah, it’s very well written and its themes are heavy as hell. But I also wish the production did more to sell the stakes, which is why this isn’t my favorite album of his.
The plot twist, however, is that Old is actually insanely close to topping Atrocity Exhibition in my eyes. I LOVE this album. This has all the best parts of XXX while still having as many terrific hooks and songs as Atrocity Exhibition did. It surprises me that I don’t hear as much about it as the other two albums. I mean yeah, it’s a bit more straightforward. There’s a similar loose arc to losing yourself to drugs and the party, but this album is wilder. The beats are more inventive and colorful, Danny’s voice starts really escalating into that nasal braying he’s well known for, the hooks are louder and the lyrics are even more absurd. And there are some CRAZY bangers on this one! I couldn’t get enough of songs like “25 Bucks” or “Dope Fiend Rental”, escalating further with the incredible streak in disc two from “Dip” to “Handstand”. I want to highlight “Drinkin And Smokin” especially. Nothing gets me going more than a song that I fell in love with so instantly that as soon as the album ended I rushed back to the song and smashed the repeat button. Holy shit, what a SONG. The one part that didn’t as hard for me was toward the end of the first disc when he starts talking about his home life and depression in more lowkey, dark songs. Namely “Torture” which is honestly my least favorite song on the album. Not because it’s bad, far from it! It just felt like it slowed the momentum the album had going for it and while the lyrics are moving and powerful, I just don’t quite love Danny Brown in this lane.
That’s what I realized about my feelings on Danny Brown, really. Most of my favorite songs of his are stuff like “Ain’t It Funny”, “Drinkin And Smokin”, “Golddust”, “Dip”, “White Lines”, “Dope Fiend Central”, all of these are songs that let loose their wild energies and allow Danny and his collaborators to go all out. Make the beat as insane and wacky as possible, let Danny Brown go as hard as he wants, and most of all are songs that I can go fucking feral to. When Danny brown slows down and tries to be more focused… honestly, it doesn’t quite work for me. His music is great for his dark exposures of drugs, sex, and depression, but I love those themes in tandem with his unhinged, wacky personality. Something is lost when he does something more straightforward, and obviously, he’s not a bad rapper by any stretch, but I do know what songs I’m going to come back to the most out of all of these.
And hey, if he decides this is the point to settle down and ease up on the unhinged moments, that’s okay! It’s healthier for him in the long run and I still really like his albums, especially Old and Atrocity Exhibition. I just hope we don’t lose the hard bangers along the way.
Evidence: The Weatherman LP & Cats & Dogs
I considered 2018 to be a pretty weak year for hip-hop at the time. I wasn’t really a big fan of the trap that was getting popular in the mainstream and I didn’t find a lot of albums that fully gripped me as much as they did the previous year when 3/5 of my initial Top 5 were hip-hop. That was especially true of the critical favorites of that year, all albums that I liked to an extent, but wasn’t really in love with. And while that year will always have Noname’s Room 25 and especially Quelle Chris and Jean Grae’s Everything’s Fine, Weather Or Not by Evidence became a sleeper hit that not many people championed, but deserved that same praise as a fantastic slice of west coast hip-hop and boom-bap centered around Evidence’s growth as an artist and as a person. “Powder Cocaine” was handily my favorite hip-hop song of that year, and it’s only grown on me with every passing year.
But I came into that album pretty cold, unaware that it was the final installment of a trilogy that had consisted of most of Evidence’s career. I knew I wanted to hear more from this guy and his persona as The Weatherman, so for years I planned to finally take that deep dive and check those first two albums out. But I kept putting it off for one reason or another. Keep forgetting to add them to my MWE roster, insisting I was gonna get to it that month only for plans to fall through, general laziness and focus on other projects, all that stuff. At this point, I’m out of excuses, and if this year my goal was to cover the blind spots of discographies, this HAD to be a priority. If only for proper closure.
To my surprise, I found that this trilogy peaked with its very first entry, The Weatherman LP. Even as someone who listened to Weather Or Not first, this felt like I was being introduced to Evidence all over again. The sly, cocky west-coast rapper whose beats took old-school samples and cut them up to make some trunk-Knockin bangers. Evidence has such an incredible voice, one that really gets across his personality and effortless cool without ever coming off as obnoxious or corny. Realistically, an album where Evidence makes a bunch of songs comparing himself to weather should ring as a little bit ridiculous, but he never overdoes it with the concept, and the swagger he has in his flows and delivery keep you from feeling like this is one big joke. These are some GREAT songs too. A majority of the album is produced by DJ Babu, and his ear for taking unique samples and transforming them into these exciting beats is part of why this album works so spectacularly. Great features all around too, with special mention going to Slug on “Line of Scrimmage”. If there’s anything I took away from these two albums, it’s that I will sacrifice my firstborn child if it meant we got a collab project between Evidence and Slug. Those two are an INCREDIBLE match together!
I guess in keeping with this week’s “hot takes” Cats and Dogs is my least favorite of the trilogy. Not to say it’s bad or anything, far from it. This is where Evidence allows himself to be a bit more focused, more thoughtful in his lyrics as he slips into a more conscious persona rather than the straight flexing that characterized The Weatherman LP. Evidence already had a dexterity in his rapping and songwriting that made this more contemplative shift work, and he’s once again on top of it on this album. The weather metaphors aren’t quite as heavy-handed on this one, but they’re still present enough for you to notice the way weather influences Evidence’s writing. Whether that’d be in his emotions or the turbulence he feels in his life. It doesn’t quite have the hunger that The Weatherman LP had, but it hasn’t fully settled down yet, so we still get some absolutely great moments and guest verses. Slug and Aesop Rock on the same song? Fuck yes, absolutely! When I say this is the weakest of the trilogy, I really mean I just don’t like it as much as The Weatherman LP. I consider it on-par with Weather Or Not, with that album only having the edge because it has stronger songs overall. Still, Cats & Dogs is excellent and deserving of being called a classic rap album of the 2010s.
I’m not sure where Evidence is going next now that his weatherman trilogy is (I think?) at its end. He could adopt a new persona and give a fresh new take on his usual style of rapping. He could also follow my advice and make a collab album with Slug. Who knows? Either way, I’m looking forward to what he does next. In terms of underground rappers, I feel like he doesn’t get enough credit as one of the most consistent great rappers currently working, and seeing his growth from that first LP to the genuine emotion and happiness he experienced at the end of Weather Or Not, I’m more than excited to see how he can grow from here. The weather’s always changing after all. Who knows what we’re getting tomorrow?
Infestissumam by Ghost
I’ve been itching for new Ghost music lately. Last year in October, I made a playlist of Halloween-esque songs in order to hype myself up for spooky season, which of course meant staples like “Dance Macabre” and “From The Pinnacle To The Pit” got a handful of plays that month. Going back to Ghost’s brand of theatrical Satan worship reminded me how much fun this band was. It never took itself too seriously of course, but there was still a level of ominous grandiosity that made Tobias Forge and his nameless demon musicians so fascinating to me ever since I was first introduced to them through “Rats”. I listened to their debut album plus Meliora in preparation for Prequelle later that year, but I ended up skipping out on Infestissumam. Mainly because by everyone’s account, it was their weakest and least essential album of theirs to date.
Which… yeah, it is. I can tell this one is kind of transitional since it experiments with itself a little more than Opus Eponymous did, but it still didn’t have the hooks or power that album had and it’d get outshone by Meliora pretty soon afterward. I don’t think I’d call it a sophomore slump, per se, but it’s missing something. Something that makes Ghost at their best so incredibly memorable. It might mostly be hooks and grooves because this album’s tempo is pretty middling all things considered. It’s a simmering album, one that takes its time to really let its creeping atmosphere swarm all over you (as evidenced by the long song lengths). And yeah, that’s all fine and good, and there are plenty of songs on this album that still work really well, but Ghost’s strengths have never lied in their subtlety or skill in developing tension. They’re an over-the-top band after all. Their best moments are when they go all out on their theatricality and monstrous scale. There are some impressive moments on Infestissumam that still make this a pretty solid album, but it also results in some of their weakest songs. I’m not even sure what I’d pick as a favorite from this album. Maybe “Ghuleh/Zombie Queen”? Even then it doesn’t quite hit me in the same way that songs from all their other albums do.
I guess I wasn’t missing all that much when I skipped out on this album the first time. It gave me my Ghost fix for a day while I await whatever album comes next, but at the same time, I know they can do better than this. And they did! Meliora is a classic and Prequelle has some of their all-time best songs on it! All bands have their minor hurdles I guess.