Tag: danny brown

32 yeule: Evangelic Girl is a Gun

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

OK, let me get this out of the way first: ‘Evangelic Girl is a Gun’ (scream at the sun, cry when you come) is an absolutely fantastic album. Look, up there, ☝️, it’s the 32nd best album of the year. The whole year! Do you appreciate how impressive that is?? Do you know how many records were released in 2025?? More than a hundred!! To finish number 32?? Wow, great work, yeule, what a great album you done produced!

I’m just making all this very clear, as I’m going to spend a large part of this post slagging the record off a bit. Have you ever heard of a concept called ‘context’? Am I going to have to explain that to you as well? Yes?? Listen, I don’t really have time… Here’s a video on A Level Context Analysis, maybe that will help? I’ll wait for you to finish.

This is MY match!

33 Danny Brown: Stardust

~ Lex Leeson ~ 1 Comment

There are few artists as unduly unappreciated, with a back catalogue that’s so ridiculously unappreciated for its consistent experimentation, than Mr Daniel Dewan Sewell. Better known as… yeah, OK, you probably got that…

“Dad, you said we’d go to Alton Towers this weekend…”

His career has been pretty spectacular, even simply going off his entries onto Necessary Evil. 2011’s ‘XXX’ was an intensely arresting bloc party that wittily both celebrated immense substance abuse while nudging the person beside it and joking with a wink “Lol, we’ll be regretting this in the morning! And for the rest of our lives! YOLO!!” It was 2011, ‘YOLO’ was still a thing, don’t blame Danny Brown for that. His hair happened to be on fleek at the time. Don’t hate the player, hate the game. 2016’s ‘Atrocity Exhibition‘, though, delved deeper into the morning afters and came up gasping for air with one of the greatest albums in Necessary Evil’s history (that was unlucky enough to be released in the greatest year in Necessary Evil’s history so didn’t even make the top 5). An absolutely jaw-dropping achievement, incredibly evocative yet bumping music set to perhaps the funniest yet darkly poignant lyrics exposing the slow suicide of substance abuse since peak Shaun Ryder…

I’ma just do what I have to do

Legit Bosses: The 143 Best Songs of 2024

~ Lex Leeson ~ 5 Comments

Hey, look, I’m getting better at this. Recently, I went on a massive cull of the 2024’s greatest songs to make this list as tight and as concise as possible, so that it would be sure to represent the absolute best of the best and would be as brief and easy to write as possible. And look! There are only one hundred and forty three tracks this year!! That’s a whole seventeen less tracks than last year! This post is going to be a breeze!

spoiler: this song is going top five. It INVENTED GAY POP, show some respect

OK, three weeks laternow, and I’m almost done! This post will be longer than most books you read, but to be fair most of the ‘books’ you read are Dr Who fanfic.

So, yeah, these songs are really good. And they get better as the list goes on. That’s how these lists work.

Here’s the YouTube playlist, which I know is the only thing most of you care about.

How much of an intro do you need, seriously?

A/79/232

An Apology to Chappell Roan

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

Listen, I messed up.

‘The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess‘ was one of the biggest and most talked about albums of 2024, even if it was originally released back in September 2023 and had songs on it that originally came out in early 2022. I was on it no earlier than The Normies, unfortunately, with their NPR Tiny Desk Concert in early 2024 probably being the first I’d heard of them (and initially, probably intentionally on their part, assuming that they were a man in drag). I was all ready to throw my hands up, admit to how lamely out of touch I was (on occasion!) and include it amongst the best albums of 2024 like I was some lamestream media mark like Time Out. I had initially placed it around 23rd, and it was only when I was planning my next piece after the Danny Brown review and listening to the album again that I realised “Shit, this album’s way better than this!”. I moved it to #15, but then I relistened to it again after writing my Magdalena Bay post that I realised “Shit, this album’s way better than even this!” I finally settled on it being number 6. However, I’m here to tell you that it’s now been removed from the list.

Maria Maher Yahya Al-Sikk

#20 Tapir!: The Pilgrim, Their God and The King Of My Decrepit Mountain

~ Lex Leeson ~ 2 Comments

It’s cold, it’s dark
Throw your bones in the ancient water
It’s cold, it’s dark
Throw your bones in the ancient water

The Nether

Top twenty bitches! Ain’t no more fucking around now, we are – as a great poet once said – about to enter pound town, this list about to dick a bitch down. This list’s coochie pink but its bootyhole brown. And we enter the top twenty with another concept album!

“Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!”

As concepts go, it’s definitely more apparent than Dua Saleh’s vague allusions, but a lot less more batshit insane that Lupe Fiasco’s Amy Winehouse fanfic, so I can’t really place it higher than second in the list of 2024’s best concept albums at time of writing. At time of writing because there’s a shitload more of these things to come further down the list. I might seriously be able to do a top ten, and that’s without including borderline examples like ‘Cowboy Carter’ (CONCEPT: Billionaire Celebrity Makes a Quasi-Country Album to Impress People Nobody Else Cares About’), Danny Brown (CONCEPT: ‘Rapper Gets Old’) or Hinds (CONCEPT: ‘WE’RE MOTHERFUCKING HINDS!!!!!’). Moor Mother though? Yeah, might count that if I’m desperate. Break instead of emergency.

Aisha Mohamed Ibrahim Abu-Matw

#24 Danny Brown: Quaranta

~ Lex Leeson ~ 4 Comments

This rap shit done saved my life
And fucked it up at the same time
That pain in my heart
I can’t hide
Lot of trauma inside
You can see it in my eyes

Nigga, you 40, still doing this shit?
When you gon’ stop? But God gon’ make you quit
Came from hardships, but changed perceptions
A blessing

A lot changed since triple X came out
Bought a few cars and a house
Almost had a spouse
Got caught up, she was out
Now I’m sitting here, questioning what life is about
Can you separate the life from the music?
I was clueless, now a nigga foolish
On my own, gotta get to it
Came too far to right now just lose it

Quaranta

Waad Waleed Sameer Sabah

26 JPEGMAFIA x Danny Brown: SCARING THE HOES

~ Lex Leeson ~ 3 Comments

Yeah, that’s right, ALL CAPS. Because it’s been RAISED RIGHT. Can we please have a collaboration with awakebutstillinbed? Actually, I know I meant to clean up the capitalisation of ‘chaos take the wheel and i am the passenger‘, but can we just have that?? Honestly, use whatever grammar you want, call is ‘@wa[£b()$tIlInPEG’ for all I care. Can Peggy just produce?? JPEGMAFIA producing an emo album?? Nomnomnomnomnom! Give it to me now!!

Oh and apparently there was a different cover of this record?

Nah, Bandcamp one better lol

I DON’T TRUST ANY OF THESE BITCHES I’M WITH

Necessary Evil 2020 pt.6 (50-46)

~ Lex Leeson ~ 10 Comments

#50 Banoffee: Look At Us Now Dad

Banoffee’s debut album should act as an important reference point for Halsey. The subjects she covers here- from painful reconciliations to painful intergenerational trauma to, Jesus, why didn’t I just leave it as a one night stand with that prick??- are at least as weighty as those covered on Ms Frangipane’s latest. Banoffee simply covers them often more explicitly, with far more humour and raw openness. And, more importantly, does so with no shame about this being a pop album and with the mature knowledge that really shouldn’t take away from its artistic legitimacy. She’s not openly complaining about Band of Horses not being considered pop despite starting with the same three letters, she’s not arguing that her album being considered ‘pop’ and the Javier Muñoz Spanish language production The Occupant being considered a ‘movie’ is just more evidence of the suffocating patriarchy, she’s not pointing to the barbed wire around her wrist on the album cover as poof of how freaking metal she is. She has no qualms about being a pop artist and is confident in the utter magnificence she can still produce, how being a ‘pop’ artist doesn’t act as a barrier to producing such weird, challenging and effective music such as this.

Continue reading “Necessary Evil 2020 pt.6 (50-46)” →

Legit Bosses: The 112 Best Songs of 2019

~ Lex Leeson ~ 10 Comments

OK OK OK! There were 112 amazing songs released in 2019 (or, erm, released earlier but I just listened to them a lot this year), and here is the definitive, objective and scientifically proven ranking. You can disagree all you want, just remember your disagreement is merely an opinion and this list is fact.

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Or maybe not. I made a big change of tablet and therefore music player this year, and I might not have remembered all of the songs I deemed to be Legit Bosses earlier in the year. But whatever, here are 112 amazing songs, here’s the YouTube list and here’s the Spotify playlist, now please leave me alone, yeah?

Starting at number 112 wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiith…

Continue reading “Legit Bosses: The 112 Best Songs of 2019” →

7 FKA Twigs: Magdalene

~ Lex Leeson ~ 7 Comments

“Didn’t I do it for you?”

‘Magdalene’, despite it often raising both the tempo and intensity, sounds like one, thirty nine minute cry of exasperation. Isn’t this enough? Do you all somehow want more? Didn’t I, as it were, do it, if you will, for, one could argue, you?

20160722T0954-0425-CNS-SARAH-MAGDALENE-FEAST
“Fuuuuuuuuuuck thiiiiiiiiiiiiis….”

 

FKA Twigs is looking at the consequences of her labour, both emotional and physical (something something fibroid tumours something something “fruit bowl of pain“), and is at once incensed and dejected that it’s seemingly all been for nothing. Her sacrifices in the past mean nothing now and she’s not the one who gets to decide how she’s perceived. No matter how much she learns to love herself, her body, and whomever else decides to share that love at certain points, they can all turn against her at whim and make all of this adoration seem wasted. “Sure, Alex”, I hear you craw, not deigning the situation important enough to stop shoving food into your fat mouth as you speak to me so that with every vowel sound I can see disgusting mushes of Tangy Cheese Doritos swirling around your decaying teeth, “you’re an amazing, Pulitzer-Prize level writer and I, for one, am enthralled, but what’s this all got to do with Mary Magdalene, that tart with the heart who washed Jesus’s feet with her hair, the filthy tramp, and who Dan Brown tells me painted The Last Supper, or something?”

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell…

Continue reading “7 FKA Twigs: Magdalene” →