• Ryan Adams Black Hole Rar Cover

Ryan AdamsIt's hard to believe that more people don't know or give props to this artist because he's one of the most prolific, hardest working, talented artist in music today! In fact, when I first started listening to him I found him at his rock phase.

Album, 21 Septiembre 2015Ningun label conocida. The whole album is a Taylor Swift's '1989' cover.

After being Alt-Countries front running artist Ryan had the cajones to drop the genre and come out guns blazing with an album of gritty rock anthems. After that c.d., it was listening to the rest of Ryan's catalog that got me to like alt-country for the first time which is a bridge that neither critic darlings Wilco or Son Volt never had me crossing. Ryan knows how to mix elements of folk, country, bluegrass together with a hard rocking delivery and a Punk attitude. He creates more music than most artist do in their lifetime and it always remains at a quality that both fans and critics have been happy with album after album. In 2005 alone he released three full albums (one containing 2 c.d.s) and each one had a different feel.

Ryan bounces between his solo work and his band The Cardinals. By 2007, Ryan had declared himself drug (he did everything from weed to heroin on a regular basis) and alcohol free and it resulted with his most celebrated album in a long time with Easy Tiger. I own every c.d. Ryan has done since 2003 but I'm familiar with and am a fan of his earlier work as well! Here are my music highlights from this amazing artist!Heartbreaker (his debut)Come Pick Me Up w/ bonus cover of Down In A Hole(A note on the cover! Ryan had a heroin addiction just like Layne and I feel like he not only connects with it musically, he also does justice by giving it his own spin)GoldWhen The Stars Go Blue(covered by Tim McGraw but this is the original and real deal)DemolitionDesireThe above c.d.s are albums that I don't own (definitely own all by now!!!!) and can't represent as well as what I'll present in the next post! I just wanted to give a glimmer of his early work because from Rock N Roll on there is a divide I believe!

Re: 'The Official' Ryan Adams ThreadRock N Roll (favorite album as well as my intro)So Alive(single where admittedly he's channeling Bono but still an awesome song)This Is ItAnybody Want To Take Me HomeLove Is Hell EPs(two EPs released as part 1 and Part 2 and later conjoined, Depression at it's most beautiful)Political ScientistWonderwall(deservedly praised Oasis Cover)Cold Roses(Double Album and first with The Cardinals)Let It Ride(love this, has a CCR feel with more of a country element)How Do You Keep Love Alive(one of my favorite Ryan Adams songs. Re: 'The Official' Ryan Adams ThreadThe last batch!Jacksonville City Nights (also w/ The Cardinals)Dear John(may be the only piece of music I ever like that has a contribution from Norah Jones)29Elizabeth, You Were Born to play That PartEasy TigerHalloweenheadI Taught Myself How To Grow OldFollow the Lights EP(also with The Cardinals, this is the c.d.

The Alice In Chains cover was released on)Follow The LightsCardinology(obviously w/ The Cardinals)Fix ItI know it seems like I've posted everything you can hear from this guy but this is only the tip of the iceberg! Feel free to explore for yourself! Click to expand.Not sure how you feel about posting links to music on this board? This is all unreleased so there are no copyright issues that I know of. Let me know if you would rather I not post this kind of stuff and I will remove it.Here you go (they are not torrents, just zipped files).

This should keep you busy for awhileunreleased Ryan Adams sessions:48hrs -B Sides -California -Cold Roses Import Bonus and Jacksonville City Nights B Side -Demolition B Side -Destroyer -Down To The Promised Land Comp -Exile on Frankline Street Sessions -Gold B Sides and Bonus Disk -Heartbreaker Demos -Love is Hell NYC Recording -Love is Hell B Sides -New Songs and Covers -Pinkhearts 1 -Pinkhearts 2 -Rock n Roll B Sides -Songs For Wynonna -Sweden, Wynonna and Me Part 1 -Sweden, Wynonna and Me Part 2 -The Swedish Sessions -The Suicide Handbook Sessions -Unreleased. Not sure how you feel about posting links to music on this board? This is all unreleased so there are no copyright issues that I know of. Let me know if you would rather I not post this kind of stuff and I will remove it.Here you go (they are not torrents, just zipped files). This should keep you busy for awhileunreleased Ryan Adams sessions:48hrs -B Sides -California -Cold Roses Import Bonus and Jacksonville City Nights B Side -Demolition B Side -Destroyer -Down To The Promised Land Comp -Exile on Frankline Street Sessions -Gold B Sides and Bonus Disk -Heartbreaker Demos -Love is Hell NYC Recording -Love is Hell B Sides -New Songs and Covers -Pinkhearts 1 -Pinkhearts 2 -Rock n Roll B Sides -Songs For Wynonna -Sweden, Wynonna and Me Part 1 -Sweden, Wynonna and Me Part 2 -The Swedish Sessions -The Suicide Handbook Sessions -Unreleased.

The Icarus Line Must Die was shot in black and white and feels like an early-90s lost indie. They were never going to find the Big Time, but they were going to leave every stage like a tornado of whips and dynamite had hit. After what starts off as a seemingly straightforward rock band documentary, the narrative shifts to a quietly problematic conversation about money with Cardamone and Charlotte. The film finds its emotional center early.

As the two sit in a cafe, we see the hurt on Cardamone’s face as he hears of the toll his music career is having on his wife. Her patience starting to bend, he knows he needs to make this work. In 1998 the cringing began with Cardamone and the original line-up of Aaron North and Alvin De Guzman on guitar, Lance Arnao on bass and Aaron Austin on drums. Their first two full-length albums, Mono and Penance Soiree, are two of the great releases of the last thirty years. The music can be unforgiving; a knife jacked into your ear drum. Real nightmare shit to play in record label offices and predict sales for. Sadly the group’s career suffered fits and starts and unofficially folded the night Scott Weiland overdosed in 2015.

They were the opening act for the reunited Stone Temple Pilots and dissolved with the tour. Around this time, De Guzman became ill with bone cancer, pushing the future of the band into even murkier terrain. The camera follows Cardamone as he embarks on turning a profit on the studio and finding a distributor for what would become the Icarus Line’s final album, All Things Under Heaven. Cardamone is left to run the studio he built with the last morsels of record label advance money and is hilariously encouraged to record a group of snotty rich kids for their dough. Cardamone squirms in his seat at the thought. When the “band” does come in for a session they treat Joe like room service and he righteously cuts the cord.

The few scenes with De Guzman are heartbreaking as Cardamone offers dry humor to an untenable situation. The old friends share some laughs.

De Guzman seems to have reached some level of contentment with his coming demise as he remarks on the absurdity of church’s holy comfort. He would pass on in 2017. The relationship between Cardamone and Charlotte is most powerful. His every move hinges on her opinion.

She supports him even as his career hits a stagnation point. Utterly patient, with a gleam in her eyes, they slow-dance in the kitchen with the cocker spaniel watching, knowing they’ll get along.

But the big surprise, sauntering from the back shadows of the stage, after the first song, “Disco King” began, was Bernard Fowler. (above) Longtime Rolling Stones fans will recognize him instantly as part of the back-up team to Mick Jagger’s melodies the past few decades. On this night he took on a majority of the vocals. Fowler stepped out and proved his strength and agility as a front man. He moved with the music, rose his hands into the air, shook hips and leaned down into the front row to kiss a girl who’d been standing.Fowler then blasted through “Rebel, Rebel,” “Fame,” and “Moonage Daydream,” during which he leaned far over the stage, pointing to his eye like a manic soothsayer.

“Keep your electric eye on me, babe,” he screeched, “put your ray gun to my head.” He milked the spotlight and performed every lyric. Yeah, Fowler got his Jagger on.It’s telling that it took three accomplished singers to match the vocal range of one man. But, each found their niche in Bowie’s scale.

Sumner had the operatic power of eighties Bowie holding notes for entire sheets of music. Hudson nailed early, very British, coy Bowie on “Starman,” “Changes,” a heart-stopping “Five Years,” and others. Fowler had the power to reach Bowie’s full-throated emotion and lower register and at times sounded eerily like the man himself.At the midway point the group dropped in “Win,” the only track from 1975’s Young Americans. Fowler sang syrupy and charged lurching into the depths of debonair Bowie.

Masterfully representing Bowie’s cocaine era, Slick (below, left) took the lead on “Station to Station” with a crumbling wall of feedback that oozed into the crunching stomp of what was the introduction of a new persona. “The return of the Thin White Duke,” Fowler sang, low in the sound, “throwing darts in lovers’ eyes.”. A real treat was Garson getting candid, adding insight into songs and telling stories, humanizing the icon. For example, the time, 1973, when Bowie fell on stage leaving the band to wonder if it was part of the act, or decades later, when a rare brush with backstage nerves from Bowie saved the show from electrical misfire and sure embarrassment. Pride and sadness weren’t far from each other when Garson spoke these stories of his friend.For “Aladdin Sane,” Garson explained, Bowie wanted something extra out of bounds. He then went into the whirlwind piano that weaves through the song.

This version, played decades later, was spot on and warped into a long batty outro with every other musician winding to a halt to witness Garson pound on the keys in hypnotic isolation. Then came “Ziggy Stardust” with Mr. Hudson (above, center) on vocals and the crowd went to their feet for the rest of the night.Sumner powered a chunk of the crowd to take over the front rows with “All the Young Dudes” to end the set. Then they returned and hit us with an encore of “Andy Warhol,” “Life On Mars,” “Diamond Dogs,” and “Heroes.” The idea for Celebrating David Bowie first sprouted in January 2017 with a one-off show to celebrate Bowie’s 70th birthday and to mark one year of his passing.

The loss of icons doesn't come easy, but at least with David we now know for certain, there's a starman waiting in the sky.' Disco King'Rebel Rebel'Moonage Daydream'Fame'Changes'Space Oddity'Conversation Piece'Starman'Win'Rock and Roll Suicide'Five Years'Let's Dance'Jean Genie'Station to Station'Lady Grinning Soul'Aladdin Sane'Ziggy Stardust'Suffragette City'All the Young Dudes'encore'Andy Warhol'Life on Mars'Diamond Dogs'Heroes'. The musicians, Stuart Bogie, Josh Kaufman and Geoff Mann, have all etched their own spot in the wax of recent records. Bogie fronts the group Superhuman Happiness and has performed with Arcade Fire, TV on the Radio, Wu Tang Clan, and Iron and Wine. Kaufman has produced for and been involved with the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, The National and The War on Drugs. Mann drums for the group Here Lies Man and has done film and TV scoring. Bogie and Mann also perform in Antibalas. 'Hodges,' the opening track, finds a saxophone, some drums and a guitar coming awake for a nine-minute-plus morning stretch that lingers into a yawning pipe flute and sun-rising feedback.

It is the sound of a new beginning, of wormholes opening into new possibilities, the summoning of something undefined. Like the possessed brooms from Disney’s Fantasia cleaning up Mickey Mouse’s mess, the instruments are dealing with a mad hangover, rolling over the studio to reaffirm their stance. “Hodges” quells into a unified crescendo setting Volume 1 in motion. The next song, 'Lawrence,' moves like a single picked leaf in a post-storm breeze with a sleepy guitar moving along. 'Palmer' hops around with sturdy drums, video game keyboards and some munchkins ya-da-da-da-ing over the top with barbecue glee. The pan flute returns on 'Ping,' hovering over picked acoustic guitars in an empty field. 'Taylor' finds a muddy sax milling around drunk talking to the drum beat until falling out into a low wandering street groove.

By the final song, “Zox,” the listener should be wide awake and running out the door to the dirty stomp of the drum beat to start the day. From Long Island, Glassjaw released their debut, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence, in 2000. The only constant members throughout have been singer Daryl Palumbo and guitarist Justin Beck. They continue their discography without a glance at the time passed. Beck brings a screen of antsy staticky guitar that cuts across the speakers. Dillinger Escape Plan’s drummer Billy Rymer tracked most of the drums for the album. He adds the barreling brute force of a wrestler hopped up on steroids and asteroid dust. His rampant double-bass plays like he's chasing down a would-be robber.

'Pompeii' is a relentless beating. Daryl multiplies and comes in hot from all angles. The guitar digs in low and the double-bass anchors the song’s many transitions. The cool-eyed and seductive 'Strange Hours' travels by way of two fingers galloping on the bass string, keeping an even drone. The best song (so far), 'Golgotha,' is a baseball bat to the face. Rymer’s punishing drums land off-time, forever locked in the skull. Over it Palumbo mutters gutturally, 'I'm not a betting man / if I was I'd have my money on the mule,' dragging out “mule” like he’s screaming from the mud. For a few weeks I couldn’t find anything about St.

Vincent’s new album, Masseduction. Her fifth album was to be the follow-up to 2014's self-titled, a perfectly sculpted set of songs that brought new awareness, critically and commercially, to St. Vincent and headmistresses, Annie Clark. How could one of the year’s most anticipated releases not be searchable? Because when I looked at the title I saw, Mass e d u c a t i o n. An art-rock album about the dangers of state-sanctioned curriculum?

Whatever you say. Eventually I squinted and figured it out. Clark has said the confusion of the title was a benefit because she wanted a very fluid meaning. In an instant the first tones of 'New York' sound like it's a beauty. In big orchestral waltzes Clark sings about old times on the NYC grid and how people always seem to be on the move. On “Fear the Future” she seeks answers like she’s standing defiant before the man behind the curtain as a techno-lazered beat drills from start to finish. Rated song most likely to blow the festival crowd up. “Smoking Section” is a dramatic piano ballad where she contemplates suicide as retribution, but submits, hopelessly, to love.

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers debuted with their self-titled album in 1976 just as the counterculture had settled nicely into society. They've owned every decade since and lay claim to the most satisfying end-to-end greatest hits collection. Petty’s song catalogue highlights American life better than any other songwriter before or after.

Tales about being a loser, getting a record deal, road-tripping, fighting for love, rolling joints were dislodged from the everyday American experience and spun into radio gold. Cedric, dressed finely black head-to-toe, has the same presence on stage. But, thicker in the neck, slower on the uptake. No snake-crawling across the stage. He steadies himself before standing on top of the bass drum. Looks before he leaps. But still leaps into the crowd and moves like his feet are shrinking.

He’d let the microphone fall and kick it back up in a perfect half-circle, always retaining it in time for the next lyric. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez wore a skin-tight turtleneck with his hair cut back and glasses firmly up on his nose through all the thrashing.

Rodriguez-Lopez, who pulled double duty opening with Le Butcherettes, played like Jimmy Page with his hair on fire. He made the guitar cry and choke, dropping tears of feedback in a circle around him. The rest of the band, Tony Hajjar on drums, Keely Davis on guitar and Paul Hinojos on bass, stuck to the gig at hand. Prisoner opens up with the just-add-water classic first single, 'Do You Still Love Me?' A song only Ryan Adams could muster with such perfection.

An organ leaks into the track like sunlight across a windshield and leads to a three-hammer jab of disgruntled guitar. The song is jolted each time it hits. The chorus finds Adams pleading desperately with the title’s question. He’s hoping against hope for a positive answer, but knows there are none. There could be no better way to start an album primarily focused on the separation of wife and husband. Adams’ mumble buzz heavy on “Haunted House” as he paces the place where love once lived.

The acoustic guitar strums with kitchen reverberation. “My friends all disappeared / They all got lost,” he sings. On 'Shiver and Shake' Adams starts to regretfully accept his circumstances. His fingers barely drag across the guitar. The organ matches the tremble in his voice as he tries, woefully, to drag himself forward.

“I miss you so much / I shiver and I shake,” he sings. 'I've been waiting here like a dog at the door / You used to throw me scraps / You don't do that anymore.' To introduce “Kathmandu This” Clipman told a story of touring in Morocco and meeting indigenous drummers who played the traditional tar or bendir drum. The head of the drum Clipman had was about two feet in diameter and had an almost electric sound to it, a ringing reverberation and buzzing tones. The drum tumbled loudly with the bass like they were rolling in the mud.

Together they created a drone that filled the auditorium. Then, Dabney dropped in on the saxophone and time bent in half. Each musician circled around each other like alternating wind currents trapped in a valley. The encore brought the party funk.

Dabney got it going with the catchy refrain, “The party ain’t stopping ‘til the speaker’s blown,” and then tried his best to comply. After the band picked up speed he grabbed his sax and let loose on each wing of the stage. He ran over stage right to match the rhythm of a grey-haired lady who was dancing with her shoulders swinging left to right at the tip of the stage.

Then, without showing fatigue, Dabney leapt back to his post to play the saxophone and the bassoon at the same time. His lungs created tones no average human could make and everyone was on their feet letting their applause show their joy. The metal band from Arizona started off the night with a sharp set of songs mostly from their debut album, released last year on Relapse. Singer Chase H. Mason, with the black and white GATECREEPER flag behind him, stalked the stage, crutched by his microphone stand. Something jumps inside him and dies before a performance and the fumes of death rise up and spew from his esophagus. He was flanked by the rest of the band and their drone metal gnashing came like solar bursts to earth.

Their last song, “Patriarchal Grip,” started with its spellbinding lull and ended with a hammer to the head.Youth Code performing at the Nile Theater. Photos by Eli Jace. Iggy Pop ages like the big oak tree that everyone pissed on in college.

He soaks it up and moves forward. For Post Pop Depression, his seventeenth album, he teamed up with Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal, Them Crooked Vultures), Dan Fertita (QOFSTA, The Dead Weather) and Matt Helders (The Arctic Monkeys). The collaboration makes perfect sense. Homme preserves the scuzz of Pop’s early days with the Stooges, but adds to it a tight-lipped air of cool. The guitars are thick like hamburger meat running alongside Pop’s chiseled scowl and the rhythm section provides a steady anchor. While listening to 'Gardenia' the screws in your neck loosen.

The whole song rides on a rollicking bass line that gets the body moving like an inflatable air dancer. The chorus is an act of hypnosis. “All I wanna do is tell Gardenia what to do tonight,” Pop sings in an up and down cascade with Homme’s high-pitched vocals shadowing in the background. 'American Valhalla,' sounds like background music from a lost episode of The Addams Family. “I shot my gun / I used my knife / This hasn’t been an easy life,” Pop sings. When the cavernous maw of Iggy Pop unhinges the grumble of decades past unfurls out.

Emphasis art ninth edition sharon pa. With every word uttered one can visualize the deep creases of his face moving in rhythm. His Adam’s apple vibrates back and forth with each syllable. 'Vulture' starts with a wooden guitar lick that sounds like a throwaway demo. But, then Pop's voice drops into the song like sewer sludge and you're suddenly put on alert. “Fat black vulture white head hung low / Chewing dead meat by the side of the road / His evil breath smells just like death,” he warns dryly. Post Pop Depression ends with “Paraguay” a lacerating beat down with Pop calling bullshit on our world of constant unending information and the phonies that willingly prop it up. The snarling hero of our destructive tendencies still has enough saliva to spit back into the world.

Ri Ri, you make my heart ache. Anti was the most unhealthy addiction of the year. I got fat off of this. The downward cadence on 'Needed Me' alone - 'but baby you-ou-ou-ou-ou needed me' - makes Anti hard to put away.

She gets cold with an ex-lover over a simple beat and an expanding wah-wah. When Rihanna sing, it's in a downward spiral. 'Didn't they tell you that I was a savage? / fuck your white horse and your carriage.' Somewhere an ex is crying in his beer in a dark bar. Every other song could've been radio signals from the ocean and this would still be on the list somewhere. BUT, add in 'Work,' 'Consideration,' 'Kiss It Better,' 'Desperado,' 'Woo,' 'Yeah, I Said It'-come on, Lord please.

On 'Consideration,' Rihanna gives the assist to SZA. Their voices move around each other in an uneven orbit. SZA bellowing beautifully bent notes; Rihanna soaring in an upward swing. The big single, 'Work,' though, I barely know what she's singing, gets catchier as time goes on.

It's one of her best singles. She sings against a coarse electronic tremble that never lets on 'Woo.'

Then, when you think it can't any more vicious, Rihanna screams, 'I don't mean to really luh you / I don't mean to really care about you no more.' Anti i s a near classic from Rihanna. From song-to-song it dips and crashes through different styles, some all her own, some borrowed. H er powerful voice continues to lurk its way towards the outer extensions of R&B. Song structure is rarely straightforward with many little fine twists and turns. If you headbang to this without knowing the song, you’ll fast get off beat. “Prayers/Triangles,” opens the album with a slow, meandering guitar the drums break and the chorus slashes through.

Throw the bottle at the wall when “Doomed User” comes on. Deftones to the core. 'Geometric Headdress' erupts like a tank through a wall. Chino Moreno's scream scorches like a propane tank left to explode. Then ten seconds in it flips to an offbeat rumble with a wily guitar pushing the listener out of rhythm. Midway through 'Hearts/Wires' settles over the album like the final rays of sunlight. A few simple guitar pluckings crawl over each other while Moreno sings of a memory lost.

Ryan Adams Black Hole Rar Cover

“The slit in the sky where you left / is all I see,” he aches. The slow build is hypnotizing. In July of 2015 Arthur fell 60 feet off the Ovingdean Gap cliffs overlooking the English Channel in Brighton.

Reportedly, he had taken LSD with friends and separated after experiencing a bad trip. The event is deeply imprinted in Cave’s trembling baritone, but hidden in the code of his indirect lyrics. You feel it rather than simply hearing about it. The songs move with the rhythm of the chilling wind. Sparse piano notes wash away in the reverb of dark wandering tones.

It sounds like unimaginable hurt. “Rings of Saturn” reads as a powerful ode to his wife’s motherly strength in the face of family tragedy. 'Anthrocene' sounds like it could be a remix from Liars or Thom Yorke. David Bowie was in the top tier of rock and roll superstars, a god on earth, living breathing cultural history. The fact that his surprising death on January 8th surreptitiously worked as promotion for his 25th album, Blackstar, makes it all the more surreal. Was he really beamed to earth at a young age with his rocketing rise to super-stardom already planned out? The album is extravagant, ghostly, teetering on the outskirts of what is considered to be a traditional rock and roll album.

It swivels and sinks into the poorly lit backroom of the musical mansion Bowie built over his fifty-plus-year-career. Blackstar is a seven-song voyage, a trek through the panicked headspace of someone too aware of their mortality. It shifts in moods and tempos, wandering, but never too far. The title track is a ten-minute ride alongside Bowie as he passes through the layers of Heaven. The song wears many faces, turning inside out and evolving with the minutes. Blackstar picks up with “‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore.” A heavyset drum and bass union churns through the song as it progresses into a perpetual Coleman swirl, horns gone akimbo.

Bowie hits the high notes with a twisted sadness, a hidden anarchy while singing the title line. You can see his chiseled grin slowly rise with each word. “Lazarus” is when the listener begins to really ache. The song saunters in with a clean, melancholic guitar scale and steady drums. But, then these soft devious horns slither in slightly offbeat.

When Bowie enters he sings, “Look up here / I’m in heaven,” and your heart skips a beat. In his slow drift outward he’s catching the wind currents like the bluebird without misgiving.

Blackstar is a lasting statement to not only David Bowie’s artistry, but to how he lived his life through that artistry. He worked hard through the end of his days to give us a product he’d be remembered by, a final soundtrack to the epilogue of a life lived in constant creation. There was a lot to be disappointed in from 2016. They took Bowie, Prince, Merle, Leon and Leonard away from us.

Kanye created one of the coolest stage sets - the mid-crowd hovering platform - only to implode a few weeks in as the stage was mechanically reeled in. Macklemore headlined Bonnaroo. Coldplay played the Superbowl.

There was a mountain of notable releases this year (next week see our ) and in that pile were a number of albums that just didn't live up to their heightened hype. Here are the year's 5 most disappointing, though not totally bad, releases.

Okay, I feel shitty putting this here. Radiohead is the greatest running band in the world. Five musical geniuses working in unison to deliver album after album of genre defying and re-conceptualizing-each one rewriting the code of the last.

It's always a big question mark as to what the next Radiohead album will sound like. A Moon Shaped Pool, still a beautiful collection of songs from the band in their purest form, just never feels cohesive.

Fine as it is, the album is in a way the first to not fully pull the carpet from under their sound. Most of the 11 songs were already available in some form for years and they're not so radical from their initial blueprint.

Not that there's anything wrong with reaching back, but it feels a bit like the tying up of lose ends. But, rest assured, it's always a good year when Radiohead is releasing music. Beyonce took ideas and input from all across the music spectrum and threw them in the air like confetti to see where they’d land.

I respect her for casting a large net for collaborators, but, really, how many people does it take to make an album theses days? It’s getting to be like factory work. In the end what you get is a hodgepodge collection of songs bouncing from style to style without ever feeling like a whole piece. She takes a classic John Bonham beat and buries it in the mix.

She does less singing and more yelling and censored swearing. Dips into country with the Dixie Chicks. And I really didn’t think artists were still sticking that obnoxious dancehall horn in their songs. It just can’t be snuffed out. Despite Beyonce's best efforts LEMONADE fails to evolve her sound in any way-her message, maybe, but not her sound. Oh my Drakey Poo. You've gotta cut out the fat.

VIEWS is an unfortunate bloated circumstance. I know 20 tracks is a great way to capitalize on streaming sales, but that's what the mixtapes are for. Don't give us an album where we're skipping every third track. At the very least, they used to be called bonus tracks. Now we're just removing the asterisks. Drake went from someone I abhorred and passed off as something Lil' Wayne pulled out of his jacket pocket to someone who I spent late nights drinking wine with and falling asleep with. Take Care and Nothing Was the Same are back-to-back classics.

VIEWS is an oily mirrored version of the two, trying to set the same mood and hit the same spots. It feels empty. While I still reach for NWTS at least once a week, I think I'll leave VIEWS in the hard-drive. We wait and we wait.

We wade through rumors and false starts. Years since Channel Orange. Years since we've heard Ocean's syrupy sweet croons and high pitched tear-yanking melodies dominate an album. Then, surprised, he comes out unannounced with two bulbous, overstuffed albums as some sort of consolation prize for our time in wait.

Despite a handful of songs that could stand on their own, the two albums are juiced and greased with intro and outro tracks that weigh them down. Wi se man once sang despondently, 'Every single record auto-tuning, zero emotion, muted emotion / pitched corrected computed emotion, uh-huh.' Mostly, though, what stinks this album up to hog heaven are Kanye's lyrics. Lord God they're hideous. A lot of Kanye's best lyrics have sounded corny and nonsensical the first time you hear them, but later they reveal a six-sided meaning connecting pop culture to his inner sadness and the guilt it he feels for it.

Well, it's been months since this album was released and the lyrics still sound corny and nonsensical because mostly they are. A lot of the time he doesn't even finish bars and just gasps and blows into the microphone. Here I will give Kanye the award for worst lyric of the year, from 'Father Stretch My Hands Pt.

1': 'If I fuck this model / and she just bleached her asshole / and I get bleach on my t-shirt / I'mma feel like an asshole.' This is where the Kanye force field finally disintegrated around me.

To make all this worse, the album's greatest line was replaced in later versions. 'She be Puerto Rican Day parade waving,' from 'Famous' was changed to, 'She in school to be a real estate agent.' Just not the same flair. And w hy wasn't 'All Day' on this?