Tag: Danielle Balbuena

#1 070 Shake: You Can’t Kill Me (Greatest Album of 2022)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

OK, let’s try and put this in some sort of perspective: I have always considered my three favourite artists of all time to be Prince, Manic Street Preachers and Nick Cave. Between all three of them they have all had a combined thirty records make the Necessary Evil end of year list and out of those thirty, two have been named the year’s best. If I wanted to throw in some faves – both problematic and less so – from the last 15-20 years I might throw in the names of Janelle Monae, The Hotelier, Kanye West, Let’s Eat Grandma, CHVRCHES or Yeasayer. Twenty three entries between them. One winner. Oh, and Radiohead have never finished first, but

Can we get this meme a medal or something?

Thirteen different artists have won Necessary Evil since it first started in 2007. Maybe fourteen, depending on your take on 2013’s infamous Arctic Monkeys/Hjaltalín controversy. No artist has ever finished first twice. Until now. 070 Shake’s ‘Modus Vivendi’ was the greatest album of 2020, and the 2022 follow-up is unquestionably the greatest album released this year, with its only viable contender being a 1982 masterpiece widely regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time. These are the only two albums she has released.

I’M IN YOUR WORLD FOR THE NIGHT, YEAH

#1 070 Shake: Modus Vivendi

~ Lex Leeson ~ 7 Comments

2020 was a pretty incredible year for quality albums. We’ve sailed through ninety eight other examples of this fact in the past few weeks. Yeah, I know, did I do a top 100 this year? No, I did a top ninety nine because I’m freaking gangsta. Hmmm, imagine if I’d remembered to list Ariana Grande’s last album? It might have cleaned it up a bit. Ah well, no harm no foul. If you’re wondering, it would have finished arooooooouuuuuuuund… 74th. Despite the raised competition though, despite a high placing on 2020’s list being more difficult than in most recent years, there was still only ever really one record that I ever really imagined finishing top.

070 Shake is Danielle Balbuena, a 22 year old Brooklyn native of Dominican decent who has stealthily being climbing up the Necessary Evil chart in recent years. Her unmistakable, tranquil voice that seems to have been digitally uploaded from the uncanny valley and wears the scars of the distorted transition, had obviously been used recently to add certain sparkle to hip-hop tracks that nothing else was ever going to be likely to be able to do. She appeared on Pusha T’s Santeria, the 37th best album of 2018, offering a haunting and seemingly otherworldly Spanish language segment that the listener assumed would have taken all the talent of producer Kanye West to make sound quite so idiosyncratic and mystifying, not realising that was just what Shake’s voice sounded like. West was similarly enchanted by Shake as I was- as anyone would be, enough to have her guest on two tracks from his own (unfairly maligned, really freaking good) solo record that year, the twelfth best album of 2018, on album highlight Violent Crimes and of 2018 highlight Ghost Town (the 13th best song of the year).

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