#432 Danny Brown - XXX

Another one getting big props on the '11 lists.

Is it possible to spoil an album? Like the way you spoil a movie? I had read that this album had a particular progression, moving from preposterous bravado and swagger to hungover regret and desolation. It turns out it does one better, starting off in a pit of desperation, dragging itself by its veins and liver and soul to fucked heights, and then landing back where it started, with co-referential thematic bookends XXX/30 tying the whole thing together. It's this structure that gives this album its greatness, making a journey of the listen, providing a more album-oriented other-side to the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy's structure bending prog-rap coin. The comparisons to Kanye's 2010 opus flow readily, with similar paranoia, radiohead-ready production, and self-aggrandizing, self-doubting, self-hating paradoxes.

Brown's biggest strength comes from sounding like he's a guy, an actual guy who's delivering these words. He's strained, just coping, sincere, immediate in this hoarse, yelping delivery, sounding like recording this album was the last thing he did during the last day of his life, and even when he's boasting he sounds like he's convincing himself and doubting himself and trying to shout down those doubts. It is all, again, above all immediate, and exciting for it.

The production helps too, providing plenty of interesting atmosphere and detail, woven into songs that don't overstay their welcome, settling for one repetition of a verse when lesser songs would have overdone it with one more. The resulting experience is restless and alive, rushing through its demons to escapism, and the fact that you actually feel empty and unresolved and conflicted when the album ends, even after a first listen, is a testament to its movie-like narrative achievement.

A surprising album in so many ways. Not something I expected to like, not something that I would normally like on paper, but something that's undeniably more than the sum of its parts 4.5/5

You might like this if: you like narrative hip hop on the order of Slick Rick, reincarnated in the guise of maniacal Kanyesque excess and with Biggie-level pathos.