#his name reminded me of the song butcher pete at first

[turtlemagnum]

i know this is a really minor thing, but. when barry the chopper was introduced by saying "They called me... The Butcher!!!!" and then immediately said his name was barry i was like OH SHIT??? BARRY THE BUTCHER???? GREAT NAME BRO and then he started calling himself barry the chopper and it's like. c'mon bro. you had that name right there. you literally just called yourself "the butcher", you're telling me you're gonna pass up that perfectly good alliteration right there? for shame.

[sinceileftyoublog]

Live Picks: 11/13

Freddie Gibbs; Photo by Nick Walker

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Fuzzed-out pop and gangsta rap.

Wreckless Eric, Burlington

Eric Goulden’s sure on a hot streak. A mere year after releasing Construction Time & Demolition, a look at a crumbling society, Wreckless Eric released Transience, written in the wake of the passing of his mother and first wife. With contributions from Cheap Trick’s Tom Petersson and Elvis Costello’s Attractions’ Pete Thomas, the album ironically sounds a lot like his fuzzy solo shows, maybe minus the righteous anger. There’s lots of country twang and keyboard pop combined with massive vocal and guitar distortion, from “Strange Locomotion” to “Dead End” and “Creepy People (In The Middle Of The Night)”. There’s also some straight-up noise, like the clanging percussion and machine buzzing outro of “The Half Of It” and krautrock jam intro to “Indelible Stain”. If anything, the instrumental haze brings about a sort of nostalgia that manifests in the album’s best songs like opener “Father To The Man”, about his dad working in a factory. Forty years into his career, Wreckless Eric’s making his best music.

Album score: 8.2/10

Transience by Wreckless Eric

Garage country band Cat Mullins and Them Boys and singer-songwriter Paige Beller open.

Freddie Gibbs, Metro

“This ain’t for soccer mamas, this for the underground.” It’s a fitting disclaimer for Freddie Gibbs, who with Bandana proves he’s unparalleled in his ability to contextualize his hard experiences selling cocaine within the greater police state. Most of his second collaborative album with master producer Madlib was written while Gibbs was in jail for sexual abuse charges of which he was later acquitted. Unlike their first, Pinata, which was essentially an impressive skills showcase for the two of them, Bandana is reflective. Gibbs touches on growing up with his influential Uncle Greg on intro “Obrigado” and “Gat Damn”. On “Fake Names”, he cries, “Every time I sleep, dead faces, they occupy my brain,” out of breath about the violence he’s witnessed. He addresses his infidelity head-on with “Practice”. Politically, he essentially makes a case for reparations without saying the words, illustrating black life in 2019, waxing on cop brutality and the subsequent lack of trust in law enforcement on “Soul Right”. And standout “Flat Tummy Tea” touches on America being built off the free labor black people and how the entertainment industry perpetuates the image of black slaves despite good intentions; a lesser rapper might have left it at, “Crackers came to Africa, ravaged, raffled, and rummaged me / America was the name of they fuckin' company,” but Gibbs is different, adding: “Slave movies every year, yeah, the master gon' remind us.”

None of this is to say that unlike Pinata, Bandana lacks evidence of chemistry between Gibbs and Madlib; in fact, the record doubles down on its predecessor. Madlib’s samples and production are quintessentially varied, laying down everything from Donny Hathaway to Bollywood to Ronnie Gee’s “Raptivity”, for its trademark, “The sounds you are about to hear will always be devastating.” His skills in combining or transitioning disparate elements without you even noticing is on full force. “Half Manne Half Cocaine” seamlessly segues from a trap beat to something more down-tempo. “Crime Pays” combines lilting keyboards with soulful vocals. “Massage Seats” consists almost entirely of firing percussion. Gibbs is on top of it all, his cadence adapting on a dime to whatever Madlib throws at him. It's almost enough to make you look past a couple of Gibbs’ inexplicably outlier damaging views (anti-vax shit and the idea that attending SlutWalk makes a man weak) that are all the more frustrating when they appear alongside socially progressive points on crime and the school-to-prison pipeline. All that said, Madlib’s interpolation of decades of music mostly serves to complement Gibbs’ shit-hot condemnation of institutional racism that also stands the test of time.

Album score: 7.9/10

Rappers Cousin Stizz, Benny The Butcher, and Conway The Machine open.