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I confess that I didn’t become properly acquainted with Gucci Mane until early 2006. I was at the mall, buying work clothes, and during a quick detour to HMV I happened upon the Trap House CD. I further confess that at the time I took little more than momentary interest in what I saw. I did recognize Mane’s gold frames and Andruw Jones jersey from the previous year’s “Icey” video — which I had only half seen only one time, at a friend’s house in Massachusetts (he had MTV Jams; Canada, you understand, has former-East-Bloc-grade rap radio and music-video stations), and which I, along with many others, had blithely assumed was a Jeezy track — and I do remember thinking to myself that Gucci Mane was the best of all possible names for a Southern rapper (probably for any rapper, period). But as for the CD itself, well, the iconography, the song titles, the vibe of the thing seemed to be of a moment that was either passing or already in the past. I remember feeling a vague and fleeting pang of pity for him: “His name is pitch-perfect and he looks totally cool on the cover of his album, but by next year he’ll be as well-remembered as Mystikal.” People remember Mystikal, of course, but mainly in terms of squandered momentum and unrealized potential.

It bears pointing out that I was thinking these thoughts in the immediate aftermath of 2005 – the year of “Mic Check,” of “Draped Up,” of “And Then What“; the year of “Fireman” and Wayne’s verse in Paul Wall’s “March & Step,” of We Got it For Cheap Vol. 2, and of, it has to be said, Late Registration; the year of “Stay Fly” and of good old Pitchfork bending the rules such that December 2004’s Purple Haze could occupy #9 on their year-end top 50. My personal 2005 ended at a New Year’s Eve house party in Toronto at which not one but two of the male guests were clad in Juicy J’s green-ghoul all-over-print T-shirt. It had been a monumental year for a type of rap that hadn’t yet been condescendingly saddled with the putatively affectionate but actually dismissive label of “ignorant.” But from where I stood, on that February morning in that record store, mere weeks before Three 6’s spot-blowing, era-ending Oscar win, I believed, in the sweeping, self-satisfied manner of a dilettante attempting to stake an intellectual claim on something he’s only recently discovered and thus doesn’t understand,¹ that a critical backlash against materialistic bounce music was imminent (it was) and that, ipso facto, I was taking my first and last look at an also-ran, a bit player, a never-was (I was not).

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Patience is a virtue rarely rewarded. Instant fixes and satisfactions come and go. But we’ve been patient with Gucci since the beginning. “So Icey” was the first video I saw when I got off the plane and arrived in the United States for good. His songs would come in and out over the years, improving and fading away. Time passed, and all of a sudden, Gucci came back, and then left again and then came back. But his stream of mixtapes, guest appearances and videos this year was sumptuous, hinting at — indeed, showing — an absolutely ridiculous world of constant fun. It’s been five long years, but The State vs. Radric Davis, Gucci’s proper studio album, dropped Tuesday. Gucci Week is here. There is too much happening on this record to leave it to one reviewer, so we’ve enlisted several. Take it away AJ.

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Gucci Mane La Flare was released from his most recent prison stint sometime in Spring 2009, and from that point on just owned the rest of the year.

Writing On The Wall, Gangsta Grillz: The Movie Part 2 (and then Part 3), guest verses on Mario’s “Break Up,” Mariah Carey’s “Obsessed,” Cold War mixtapes (three of them), and Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow.” Gucci was now signed to a major label (Warner Brothers) and finally, last week, we were blessed with a major label record that had the money invested in it that you would expect from a major label. Polow Da Don (probably not cheap, post-Fergie), Usher (never cheap), Keyshia Cole (I guess that hit with Diddy was a minute ago now?), Lil Wayne, Bun-B.

This is the treatment I hoped Boosie was gonna get this year on SuperBad, but didn’t.

Honestly, the record is about 100% of what you would expect with this much money behind it. Some of what makes Gucci so great has gotten lost a little, but many dudes who aren’t able to wade through D.J. drops and “pass the Grey Poupon” skits will be able to finally get on board.

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Rihanna trots out her latest and greatest album with Rated R, a no-holds barred journey through the past eight months of the blessed and cursed Bajan pop singer’s tumultuous life.

Ri-Ri has never been one to avoid the spotlight. She grew up in the Caribbean with dreams of international fame and did well for herself with “Umbrella,” the most ubiquitous song of the last five years. But the spotlight’s hue changed one night in February 2009, when the lady missed her curtain call to perform at the Grammys. A dust-up with then-boyfriend and R&B star Chris Brown forced our heroine underground, as a frightening LAPD photo surfaced, sparking a frenzy of conjecture and concern. It appears as though the bruises raised that fateful evening ran quite deep, and now manifest as the meat of Rihanna’s new LP.

Rated R begins where Rihanna began her year, at the top of the charts,¹ a literal “Madhouse” where thrills quickly turn to chills and reality is distorted by flash photography and limousine window tint. This ominous, buzzing intro comes from a production team out of London known as Chase & Status, and, along with two other offerings on the album, represents their most visible work to date — an eerie and substantive dive into the depths of Rated R.

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It’s been 11 years — hard to believe — since Merauder, the greatest of the late New York Hardcore bands, recorded a demo with Eddie Sutton of Leeway singing. The four songs that made up the Eddie demo were not a complete departure from Merauder’s proper albums — rhythmic Slayer riffage, double bass drums, very little quiet — but Sutton’s nuanced, high-pitched and often off-key vocals sounded so out of sorts that they might have turned off some less adventurous listeners. So the demo with the dirty recording stayed ignored outside Woodside and environs for a good half-decade, with many wishing the group stuck with either of its first two singers.

Pegasus, a current band of informal status and formal membership, begin their first seven inch EP with the riff from “Seasons in the Abyss” (the song). It might be the only broad reference on the record, which takes its remaining cues from sufficiently more obscure and sharper points — specifically, the Eddie demo. (Full disclosure: I’m friends with some of the band members, but I am not sure who plays what. I will try to focus only on the record.)

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This review came in last year, but the reviewer, band, and label are all good friends of ours so we’re going to post it.

Listening to the self-titled 7″ from Boston’s New Lows (ex-Downhill Fast) reminds me of the time NYC was paid a visit by two of my dearest Boston friends, Houston LaRoue and Pierre McDuck. (Names have been changed to protect the innocent.)

Several hours before they were to arrive by bus, I received a message from Pierre informing me: “This bvs hath tvrned into Ancient Rome” — an epoch not known, it seems, for its austerity, nor for its ovular Us. Pierre then informs me, “Houston has powder all over his face and I’m not telling him. Let’s see what happens…”. And then: “Someone just sniffed loudly and [Houston] said ‘Who’s making fun of me?’” Somewhere in between all this, Houston sniffed loudly and gestured to the passenger behind him, shouting: “He’s so stupid, he probably thinks I have a cold.” Paying homage to the “Lucky Star” bus line, Houston could not resist inquiring of the assembled travelers: “So — who’d like to suck my lucky dick?”

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With its title culled from the Nicene Creed and its song titles Bible verses, The Mountain Goats’ 17th studio full-length effort, The Life Of The World To Come, may strike the listener as single-minded in both title and scope. This is no foreign territory for John Darnielle, the man behind the band: his dense, extensive and self-referencing song cycles have become his calling card. These song cycles have been as documented as the records themselves, and include, among others, the “Going to…” series — 46 songs — and the “Alpha” series, equally expansive in scope, culminating in 2002′s Tallahassee LP.¹ For our purposes, what matters is that the cycles allow Darnielle to not only keep loose the narrative but let him animate interrelated, emotionally-bound sensations through both connected and disparate character arcs.

While I know and celebrate Darnielle’s history of grand aspirations and wide interests, rumors that he and his Goats were releasing a Christian-themed album came to me as a bit of a shock. Upon first listen, however, it became clear that, like the others, this record, the follow up to 2008′s momentous Heretic Pride,² was more art than gospel. In fact, Darnielle intimated that he took a more dispassionate, literary approach in these diaconal studies, though it’s worth noting he became entranced by some of the Bible’s lessons, for lack of a better word, which, from my vantage point, likely made a tricky endeavor. Actually, let’s let John explain it himself:

I guess the obvious question is going to be: “John, have you had some sort of religious awakening?” and while I guess lots of people might want to be coy about answering that, that’s never really been my style, so: no. It’s not like that. It’s not some heavy-narrative-distance deal either, though, and it’s not a screed. It’s twelve new songs: twelve hard lessons the Bible taught me, kind of.³

TMG devotees can correctly assume that TLOTW2C, the sort of loose concept record Darnielle has been making since 2002’s All Hail West Texas LP,⁴ is characterized most by a sort of tonal, thematic and atmospheric unity. Last year’s Heretic Pride, maybe his grandest endeavor, boasted new, loftier production values and more complex compositions, not to mention outright traditional orchestration of his dissonant string section.⁵ Following this course, Darnielle hired the classically-trained Owen Pallet, he with the violin, known to some through Fucked Up’s Hidden World and others through his solo project Final Fantasy, to work on and contribute to the record’s string arrangements.

The result is a sparser, more solemn album with tracks like “Samuel 15:23”⁶ and “Hebrews 11:40”⁷ hearkening back to material off 2006’s Get Lonely.⁸ His references reach even further back: “Romans 10:9”⁹ and “Isaiah 45:23”¹⁰ take the smooth flowing 4/4 backbeat from 2002’s “New Chevrolet In Flames,” with the former also bringing to mind a fleshed-out “The Day The Aliens Came” from Come Come To The Sunset Tree.¹¹ “Genesis 3:23”¹² sounds more in tune with “Letter From Belgium,” “Quito,” and “Against Pollution,” all off We Shall All Be Healed,¹³ and the phrasing shares a chromosome or two with “Autoclave” from Heretic Pride. The piano-led, jaunty “Genesis 30:3”¹⁴ and “Deuteronomy 2:10”¹⁵ invoke two other songs from Darnielle’s catalog: “Memories,” from his side project The Extra Glenns, and The Mountain Goats’ “Michael Myers Resplendent,” a cut from 2008′s Heretic Pride.

Darnielle’s vocal inflections are forceful, even at whisper-level: you can hear his subdued dejection, the low sweet melodies contrasting with the at-the-end-of-my-rope vocal intensity and the crashing, albeit gradual,¹⁶ orchestral crescendos.

The Life Of The World To Come is by no means The Mountain Goats’ magnum opus, and so may fall into obscurity among those just beginning to delve into the canon, but it more than holds its own against releases from other groups this year. It earns a respectable 2 T’s, and a place near the front of the Goats’ extensive back catalogue. Criticisms aside, we should credit Darnielle for making a series of albums and songs with few enough dips and bends that even its newest addition reasonably elicits a blind listen.

This record is the first solo effort from the chick in The Knife, the Swedish electronic duo. And as I understand it, the album was written in a network of catacombs and underground canals, through use of steampunk gadgetry and the presence of chanting spirits during a cipher of synthesized seances. You have to expect cool things from a Swedish woman into wearing masks, pitchshifting, and “Trailer Park Boys.”¹ I recommend supplementing this listening experience with your iTunes Visualizer (⌘T). Into weird films? Check out the videos produced for four of the songs on the album. “If I Had a Heart,” the first one, is about things I hope never to witness first-hand. An empty pool full of dead people behind a mansion prowled by feral canines? This is the type of scenario I would avoid in real life, but one I find rather enticing when portrayed successfully in an artistic medium. Scarily vacant face-painted pagans seem as right as rain in this video, yet I’d be quick to turn and walk in the other direction if they popped up on my way to the bus stop.

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