Well seeing as I was off today and had nothing to do I made a ratemymusic account and added my top 100 albums list. It was actually quite fun and I suggest EVERYONE here make their own “Rate My Music” thread with their top 100.
I couldn’t face doing 500.
Anyway here’s Toot’s top 100…
http://rateyourmusic.com/list/Solly1975/sollys_top_100_albums
This list has been deleted or made private by its owner
This list has been deleted or made private by its owner
ahahahaha!! Well all that work for zip! Oh well…I had fun.
I’ll just make my list my top album ever in that case…infact this album is my number 1 album by a country mile.
I can’t say enough about this album so I’ll let this guy below say it for me![cool]
Aceyalone :: A Book of Human Language :: Project Blowed
As reviewed by Matt Tomer
“Drop the press kits. Forget about that other wack shit I got in the mail. I’ll be right back, I’ma just grab me something to drink - hold up - this is a “Back to the Lab” review?” Nah… Of all the records to sleep on, this couldn’t possibly be one. I mean, could it? Ears have opinions, too, and Lefty’s telling me to track down Steve ‘Flash’ Juon for answers. Righty’s telling me it’s okay; that “Human Language” is an album beyond reviewing; that no one even bothered to save themselves from the hassle. Shut up guys This is bullshit. There’s just no way this hasn’t been covered yet.
Wait…
Sure there is. As lauded as Aceyalone certainly is in the RapReviews archives, it’s but another testament to his sophomoric masterpiece’s criminal overlooking that it’s taken eight good years for its inclusion. If there were ever such a bitter contradiction: that which I’ve always considered hip-hop’s crowning achievement hardly blips on the radars of even established heads. And Ace-One knows a thing or two about establishment. I won’t go in depth, but he’s kind of a big deal; he helped put “smart” left-coast hip-hop on the map, was an integral member of the legendary Freestyle Fellowship, and oh yeah, there’s that handful of classic albums. The first of which, “All Balls Don’t Bounce,” is a landmark hailed by J5 fanboys and rock critics alike, often referred to along with Pharcyde’s early work as the roots of conscious western rap.
Yet, during the prime of his career, when the man could have rapped about cement drying and kept your interest, he was… ignored? Now that makes no sense. But for all these years, none of that mattered to me, and it still doesn’t. Aceyalone’s second LP made me not care. About what? School? Check. Girls? Sure. God’s great interstellar galaxy? All but the headphones - that, too. It’s not like he invents the metaphor, nor do punch lines have you whooping “OHH” 8 Mile-style all alone in your bedroom. He creates an atmosphere it seems nobody else would or could visit even if they wanted to.
The concept is frighteningly brilliant, yet elementary enough to seem childlike. There are, of course, a handful of musicians, outside and in hip-hop, who have also gone with the storybook approach, each track representing a chapter and such trimmings. Only in this case actual “chapters” are never mentioned or even alluded to; by way of each song’s grandiosity, it is assumed. And even within Ace’s tales, he scarcely reflects the famed “story” raps of yore (Big’s “Warning;” Common’s “I Used To Love H.E.R.”). Each song is a gorgeously abstract take on life, death and their composing elements. “The Balance” dissects the ancient yin-yang theory ever so finely, seeming to create its very own center of energy: “Check your balance beam with a feather and rock, yo whether or not you find the answer it’s really not the plot/see it’s like love and hate - the same emotion, different weight/people love to hate, so I know you know just how this all relate.”
Ace asks you to “consider him part of the dust” in “The Guidelines,” implying that he and all of human life are ultimately insignificant. On “The Grandfather Clock” he cautions just how explosive the element of time is, literally taking a word from it: “I control how long you stay alive - I’mma tap you on your shoulder at 11:55 when the time’s arrived.” “The Walls And Windows” would seem a fantastical journey through the surreal, and it is, but it’s also Ace’s standing on unfavorable judgement and the paranoia surrounding it: “see my windowpane got so much pain the glass is bustin’ out the frame/so let the candle kindle in the window as a symbol/I leave my window open hopin’ I might get a breeze, but when the wind comes in, the eyes come in, and the eyes don’t seem to wanna leave.” He notes the unfair advantage of personal appearance on “The Faces,” and stares his taker in the face on “The Thief In The Night:” “I hear it moves swiftly, underneath the nose/'til one day you come face to face, you gonna cross the line, you’re lost for time.” Ace’s phrasing more closely resembles classic poetry than the rhyming of KRS-One, giving the album the storybook feel for which it’s known.
“A Book of Human Language” would be comparable to Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland even without Ace’s rendition of “The Jabberwocky.” A stirring nonsense poem about a mythical creature, it reads like something he probably could have conjured up himself, and is just ridiculous enough to make for one of the album’s many highlights. At this point the pace is already set; only before, turning back might have been an option.
With “Human Language” cinematic as is, of course producer Mumbles is deserving of much credit. His beats are dark, fitting the mood like a warm mitten; somber 50’s jazz playing as prominent a role as sampled clock ticks and earthy growls. Nearly every sound is bleak and just slightly off kilter, but each beat is melodious and, unlike most avant garde rap, even induces head nodding. Throbbing horns and a thumping break give “The March” a lively pulse, and hectic riding cymbals and upright bass turn the title track into a bustling, bumpy ride. Mumbles’ work on “Human Language” may not be THE best of all time, but never has a beatmaker surrounded his emcee with a more appropriate selection. Furthermore, the emcee and his maestro achieve a level of chemistry unmatched by even the greatest of duos; from Premier and Guru to Madlib and Doom.
In the annals of RapReviews.com, there are but few perfect “10’s,” all of which have been carefully and seldom awarded. It might be because of our rating system that there aren’t even fewer; perhaps on a scale of 0 to 1,000, some of our “10’s” might have been “995’s.” Who knows? I do know there is only one album I deem perfect. Flood my inbox with the hate of a pubescent Anakin Skywalker, but it isn’t “36 Chambers.” It’s not “Ready To Die,” it isn’t even “Illmatic.” It’s the furthest thing from the streets hip-hop could get, yet it’s a flight of stairs from the stoop. It has nothing to do with your life at the same instance it is wholly and most certainly applicable. You may put it in your walkman, but it’s hardly even a CD. It’s “A Book of Human Language.”
Music Vibes: 10 of 10 Lyric Vibes: 10 of 10 TOTAL Vibes: 10 of 10"
OK, I’m listening the “The Face” on Blip right now. Really good. I’m going to download the album now.
The album is truly amazing.
It’s something that NEEDS to be listened to from start to finish to appreciate the scope of it.
Just brilliant.
Toot’s number 2,3,4 and 5!
and…6!
Albums 2 and 3 are fucking great, although my preference is for Streetsweeper with regards to Godflesh…
haven’t heard of the others, number 1 sounds very intriguing…
Acey’s “A Book Of Human Language” is some next level some. Lush, dark and genius.
Edan is a don. His two albums are from a different planet. The man is fucking hilarious and a SUPERB producer.
My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts by Byrne & Eno is ESSENTIAL!! A phenomenal fusion of beats & wild samples recorded in 1981 and still sounds just as fresh and deadly today as it did then.
Below are info on the albums…
Edan “Beauty & The Beat”
Edan is quite the character: With him, it’s either “Sing it, shitface” or an exercise in hip-hop erudition, as heard on his Fast Rap mixtape. Which is why one never knows what to expect from his recorded output. His debut LP, Primitive Plus, mixed the retarded with the ingenious; it was an entertaining album in a backpacker era that was more often redundant than refreshing. So, when photos of the newly hirsute Edan emerged and rumors of a “rock” record made the rounds, it became easy to imagine a Derek/Biggie Smalls concept album replete with irony and wankery. This record is no joke. Having established himself as a ruthless wit and tireless scholar of rap, Edan makes the leap to “serious artist” on Beauty and the Beat, exhibiting an auteurism that places him level with his predecessors instead of prostrate before them.
On lead single “I See Colours”, Edan declares, “Prince Paul already used this loop/ But I’ma keep it movin’/ And put you up on the scoop.” The lyric is a synopsis of Edan’s new outlook. Yes, it’s been done before, but not like this. The song is his epiphany over a 60s jangle and mushrooming Moog effects. Like a master mathematician who suddenly sees the pattern in the formula, Edan commences his solution.
One more time before he blows your mind, Edan pays respects to the “true scientists”. “Fumbling Over Words That Rhyme” is a timeline of the forgotten founders. True, many of the names he drops are familiar, but-- as many of the mentioned could tell you-- respect is the only restitution to them. Over a runaway break, Edan pays dues to the Fatback Band on up, providing a syllabus for future pupils.
The nightmarish diptych of “Murder Mystery” and “Torture Chamber”-- the latter featuring Percee P’s lyrical conveyor belt over the churning bass-line from Pink Floyd’s “On the Run”-- bleeds into “Making Planets”, an organ dirge backing Edan’s laidback braggadocio that changes gears into a Crazy Horse-ish Mr. Lif conspiracy theory. Each song transitions to the next through the ever-present Moog noodlings and shared elements, an effort at a hip-hop long-player and not simply a collection of singles.
“Rock and Roll” applies Black Sabbath, Velvet Underground, and Talking Heads to create a psychedelic ode to its titular genre, and “Science of the Two” is a tangled mass of Edan and Insight that rivals Run-DMC for seamless vocal interplay.
On the latter half of the album, “Beauty”, “Smile”, and “Promised Land” are three sample-packed masterpieces that compress the time between '68 and '88. Reversed drum loops, found sounds, droning feedback, Echoplexed vocals, syrupy strings, and truckloads of bubbling Moog intermingle with Edan’s Kane-with-a-cold mic skills to astonishing effect.
The gravity of Edan’s lyrics and voice on Beauty and the Beat is perhaps its most surprising element. He’s gone from a brainiac prankster to the Borges of rap. Even his battle rhymes have a surrealist bent. He doesn’t wear watches by Jacob. He “wears the Time Meridian as a wristband.” He doesn’t grace stages. He “does the show on a fireball.” He doesn’t wear his own clothing line. He “put a nameplate on a asteroid belt.”
Edan satirizes the narcissism of hip-hop by being so out-there narcissistic that someone would basically have to say, “I’m the best MC times infinity” to compete. But it’s more than just his otherworldly assertions. Nearly every bar is a saturated image of his subconscious put on display to ponder its meaning. Some of it may just be nonsense but most if it is resonant. His lyrical inventiveness and idiosyncratic metaphors place him in a category populated by few.
Edan is hip-hop, without a doubt. But he’s the hip-hop that appeared in the suburbs in the late-80’s and shared time with metal and indie rock, when MTV’s weekend line-up was “Yo!MTVRaps”, “120 Minutes”, and “Headbangers Ball”, with Public Enemy likely to find time on all three. Beauty and the Beat sounds like a record made by someone who once devoured the catalog and history of his favorite artists, traced their lineage as far back as he could, and has discovered his place in the genealogy. With that enlightenment, Edan is no longer an impersonation of his idols, but one of their peers.
— Peter Macia, April 18, 2005
Edan “Primitive Plus”
Let’s face it: those retro-back in the days all was better-I got that early King Sun record type purists are geeks. And the journalists are the commanders of the squad. That’s why we like Edan, who’s like our minister of music, him being responsible for some of the best music that should have come out twenty years ago. And today, we’d gladly pick it up as our national anthems. It however took Edan a minute to get his music available for a wider audience, as his music was only available on 12"es (like the ‘try to find it now’ “Sing It Shitface” 12" on Buiscuithead) and CD-R’s. With the good people of Lewis Records now releasing this album, we shall position ourselves in our b-boy stance and get as excited like white trash on a discount night at the one dollar store.
Getting back to our geek discussion though: if Edan really is (attention: a journalistic music genre label coming up) doing Geek Rap or something, then the universe is being flipped over like the magnetic direction on this good old planet in about twenty eight years (and be warned: it will bring turmoil and destruction). Cause this nerdy kid is sounding too damn cool. And he’s blatantly elitist, when he starts talking about the masters on “Syllable Practice (Original)”, or when he’s name dropping on “#1 Hit Record” that also features the memorable line: “the flyest on a 12” / so is a girl and she doesn’t make records". He then goes for the reality show, when he’s mockingly restaging a conversation between two fellow geeks on “Ultra '88 (Tribute)”, to later mimicking Kool Keith rather excellently. Or check out the “Sing It Shitface” 12" cut “Migraine” that reappears on here as the ‘Almighty Dust Mix’, that speeds up things, giving a nod to a “Men At Work” or “Let The Rhythm Hit 'Em”.
Looking for what could be enjoyed by someone who owns the second UMC’s album, as well as by a tolerant rap fan who thinks that hip hop started with Snoop, then there are the more straight forward “Rapperfection” featuring Mr. Lif that’s getting harsh on your arse though. And if that’s not your kind of stimulation, then there’s “Mic Manipulator”, that’s a playful little diddy, with Edan flowing about his skills, skilling about his flows and illing about his hoes, or something. He’s then getting even further regular on “Run That Shit!” as we are transported to the best of the early nineties, with the piano, the KRS sample and all that other stuff that’s happening. The lyrics are giving us Edan at his most ignorant, with him stealing lollypops from small children, to then do something nasty that isn’t for the ears of small children (then again, they wouldn’t get it, so sing it to 'em like a lullaby).
By the way, Edan is not just a funny lyricist, proving his humor on cuts like “Emcees Smoke Crack” or the hidden track, he’s also one incredible producer. And not only the opening “'83 Wildin” is showing and proving that. On each cut he’s doing a little something, something, and that usually with a little surprise, one note that just doesn’t really need to be there, like that one bing sound on “Humble Magnificent”, or like the classical music sample he flips on “Key.Bored”.
What only makes it the more tragic, that we’ve got word that Edan isn’t sure if he’ll be able to do another album. The word is, that all these cuts are some years old and were done during one burst of creativity, with him not being sure, if he can get himself in such a creative state again. But man, that’d be a tragic. Like a real tragedy, like Intelligent Hoodlum flipping his style. Wack. At least as wack as “Phantom Menace”.
But yo, dude is a geek, right? And all geniuses are geeks, right? Hence geeks can be geniuses. Hence Edan better be a genius, that only waits for the next inspirational dog to bite him in the buttocks, and the tracks will again flow out of him, like snot during hay fever season (okay that was disgusting). And if not? Man, first put some black shoe laces in your shell toes, walk around with a lowered head for a week or two, buy this record at least once, and cherish it, like it’s your first sex memory and thank the hip hop geek god that you were allowed to hear this.
review: tadah
David Byrne & Brian Eno “My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts” (this is the review for the reissued album with the bonus tracks)
As David Byrne describes in his liner notes, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts placed its bets on serendipity: “It is assumed that I write lyrics (and the accompanying music) for songs because I have something I need to ‘express.’,” he writes. “I find that more often, on the contrary, it is the music and the lyric that trigger the emotion within me rather than the other way around.” Maybe because it’s so obviously the product of trial-and-error experimentation, Bush of Ghosts sounded like a quirky side project on its release in 1981; heck, it didn’t even have any “songs.” But today, Nonesuch has repackaged it as a near-masterpiece, a milestone of sampled music, and a peace summit in the continual West-meets-rest struggle. So we’re supposed to see Bush of Ghosts as a tick on the timeline of important transgressive records.
It mostly holds up to that scrutiny. An album that’s built on serendipity-- on Brian Eno fooling around with a new type of drum machine, on syncing the hook in a tape loop to a chorus, on finding the right horrors on the radio-- can’t score 100%. But even if you cut it some slack, crucial parts of the album don’t sound as intriguing today as they once did-- namely, all of the voices.
The sampled speech from various, mainly religious, sources ties the album into a long and prestigious history of artists who used found sound, which David Toop capably outlines in the liner notes. It’s still the secret sauce that provokes a reaction from the listener. But what reaction you have lies outside of Byrne’s, Eno’s, or your control. On the first half, where the voices are least chopped up, it’s difficult to divorce them from their origins. A couple of tracks read as satire-- “America Is Waiting” sounds like Negativland with a way better rhythm section-- and others as kitsch. “Help Me Somebody” pulls a neat trick by turning a preacher into an r&b; singer, but the exorcist on “The Jezebel Spirit” doesn’t raise as many hairs on the back of my neck now that taping a crazy evangelist has become the art music equivalent of broadcasting crank phone calls. We can’t just hear them for their sound or cadences without digging into the meanings, and not everyone will find the meanings profound.
On the other hand, the rhythm tracks still kick ass 10 ways to Sunday, thanks both to the fly-by apperances of Bill Laswell, Chris Frantz, Prairie Prince, and a half dozen others, and to the inspired messing about of Eno and Byrne as they turned boxes and food tins into percussion. Tape loops are funkier than laptops, and the modern ear is so aware of the digital “noodging” of a sample to a beat that the refreshingly knocked-together arrangements of Bush of Ghosts are a vast improvement. At one stage of the project, they dreamed about documenting the music of a fake foreign culture. They largely pulled it off, and you can tell a lot about this far-off place from its music: It’s a futuristic yet tribal town made of resonant sheets of metal and amplified plastic containers, that the populace has to bang constantly in perfect time to make the traffic move, and the stoves heat up, and the lights flicker on at night, and to coax mismatched couples into making love and breeding new percussionists.
The seven bonus tracks will provoke more arguments than they settle. The setlist of Bush of Ghosts has changed several times over the years, and the diehard fans will still have to swap left-out cuts that aren’t resurrected here; most famously, “Qu’ran”, an apparently sacreligious recording of Koran verses set to music, doesn’t get anywhere near this reissue. The songs that are here include a few that sound almost finished, including “Pitch to Voltage”, and others that would fit almost as well as anything in the second half of the disc. The last cut, “Solo Guitar with Tin Foil”, features someone, presumably Byrne, playing a haunting tune on a guitar with an impossibly clean tone-- a fitting end to an album that, for all its transcontinental fingerprints, sounds strikingly free of impurities.
Though Bush of Ghosts was a link in the chain between Steve Reich and the Bomb Squad, I’m not convinced that this talking point helps us enjoy the album. However, Nonesuch made an interesting move that could help Bush of Ghosts make history all over again: they launched a “remix” website, at www.bush-of-ghosts.com, where any of us can download multitracked versions of two songs, load them up in the editor of our choice, and under a Creative Commons license, do whatever we want with them.
As I write this, the site hasn’t launched, and even if it were up, I can’t tell how lively its community will be, how edgy the remixers can get, and how many rules will pen them in. Nonesuch copped out by posting only part of the album, instead of every piece of tape they owned, and I suspect that the bush-of-ghosts.com site may just be a corporate sandbox for wannabe remixers. But I could be wrong; I haven’t tried to submit my mash-up of “Qu’ran” and Denmark’s National Anthem yet. What matters is that they started the site and released these tracks, and by doing so, they put a stake in the ground-- not the first one, but an important one-- for Creative Commons licensing, Web 2.0 album releases (“this is an album where you participate!”), and the culture of remixing.
And by handing over their multitracks, Byrne and Eno also make a powerful acknowledgement of their own helplessness. It is a basic but real fact of our time that sampling can work both ways. In the 80s, you could fairly make an argument that Byrne and Eno were the Western white men appropriating all kinds of Others, be they domestic and primitive, or foreign and exotic. Now the world can return the favor: Anyone can rip this work apart and use it any way they please, and you can bet that if some kid in the Third World sends a killer remix to the right blogger, it’ll travel faster and farther than this carefully curated reissue. Byrne and Eno counted on a certain amount of serendipity in their studio; today, they can witness the serendipity of what happens to their killer rhythm tracks-- the ones they released, and all the others that people will use anyway. And the strongest message they could send is not only that they’ve relinquished control, but that they admit they already lost it-- whether they like it or not.
— Chris Dahlen, March 23, 2006
Wait, so there is a website where I can download samples form ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’?
haven’t heard of the others, number 1 sounds very intriguing…
Don’t encourage him.
And where’s yr ‘review’ of my rateyourmusic list?!?!?
Dammit I did that for the likes of you.
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haven’t heard of the others, number 1 sounds very intriguing…
Don’t encourage him.
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“A Book Of Human Language” OWNS.
oh my GOD! I registered on RYM (a site I’ve always considered ugly and formatted in a bizzare way) and tried to do this list…
my goodness is it a pain in the ass to navigate around. it’d be easier if you can just drag and drop fucking links but no, it’s gotta be a 5-7 button click affair to just get one thing.
fuck that noise.