Boom Bap Before the Rain
It’s Automatic by Zoot Woman is the kind of song that doesn’t announce itself. It just arrives in your ear one afternoon and refuses to leave, lodged permanently in that embarrassing category of tracks you can’t explain to anyone without playing them. Living in a Magazine—the British band’s debut and concept album, structured around a model named Jesse, cars, romance, and a sour look at media culture—is synth-pop executed without vanity. The British have always been better at this than anyone, and Zoot Woman work in a tradition that stretches back to early New Order without sounding like they owe anyone a debt.
Jazzy Jeff—the scratch guru and longtime Will Smith collaborator—shows up this summer with Back for More, a project made with Canadian singer Ayah, and the whole thing is exactly as relaxed as it sounds. Her voice does most of the heavy lifting and earns it. Music for lying still and not thinking too hard.
Lil B titled his album I’m Gay, which is the kind of move only the self-proclaimed BasedGod could pull without anyone being entirely sure whether to laugh, applaud, or both. The title was provocation, yes, but the record underneath is something more considered—the meditative internet-rapper side of a person who, at some point, maintained roughly two hundred MySpace profiles and uploaded five songs to each of them. That Kanye West and Lil Wayne took notice is unsurprising. What’s surprising is that the album is actually good.
CREEP—two New Yorkers who share not only a first name (both Laurens: Flex and Dillard) but apparently excellent taste—put out another installment of their Keep Watch mixtape series. Volume XXVII pulls in Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx, Nosaj Thing, Einstürzende Neubauten. More experimental than the tracklist suggests, and better for it.
Pigeon John’s Dragon Slayer is the Los Angeles MC at his most self-sufficient—he wrote, produced, and played everything himself. The result sounds like someone who knew exactly what record he wanted to make and made it, which is rarer than it should be. The Bomb and So Gangster are the obvious entry points and neither of them will let you stay still.
The Cool Kids’ When Fish Ride Bicycles finally arrived after years of delay and accumulated hype, which is almost always a recipe for disappointment. It isn’t. The 2007 moment is long gone—nobody’s breathlessly discovering Chuck Inglish and Mikey Rocks for the first time anymore—but the boom bap is still there, still fresh, and guests like Ghostface Killah and Bun B aren’t decorative. The record sounds like a warm evening in July. That’s exactly what it’s for.