Best New Tracks - Pitchfork: Kendrick Lamar: “The Blacker the Berry”

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Kendrick Lamar: “The Blacker the Berry” Posted: 09 Feb 2015 04:16 PM PST "You hate me don't you? I know you hate me as much as you hate yourself." Kendrick Lamar's first major statement since he released "i" in September is as fierce and discordant as that song was naïve and sweet. But both are flip sides of the same coin—the issue of self-love. It is clearer than ever, as his follow-up to good kid, m.A.A.d city takes shape in public, that Kendrick considers self-love—it's absence, its persistence even in the face of overwhelming societal discouragement—his great subject, the reason he's rapping. "i" was the song that gazed at the clouds, that looked deep within for reasons to love oneself. "The Blacker the Berry" balefully surveys world around him. It begins with a loop, dark and bleary, more Enter The Wu-Tang than Aquemini. His recitation of "blacker the berry, sweeter the juice" instantly brings to mind 2Pac's "Keep Ya Head Up", but just as in 2Pac's song, the line has a wistful, even wishful ring. His voice is angry, ragged, his delivery pitched between near-scream and near-sob, but his words are clear and diamond-cut: "Gangbanging got me killing a nigga blacker than me, hypocrite." It's a performance of abandonment, and part of how it flattens you is with control and discipline: His cadence runs roughshod over the beat, hitting it the way a sprinting foot hints pavement—at angles, irregularly, and with a painful muscle-twisting sense of urgency. His lines cut through everything, abandoning his occasional tendency to fill up lines with melodious filler syllables: "I mean, it's evident that I'm irrelevant to society/ That's what you're telling me, penitentiary would only hire me." It might be his most focused and upsetting performance, evoking not just the Pac of "Keep Ya Head Up" but the righteous firebreather of "Holler If Ya Hear Me". We're listening.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra: "Multi-Love" Posted: 09 Feb 2015 01:30 PM PST The progression of Unknown Mortal Orchestra could work as science fiction—alien entity crashes to earth, progressively exhibits human emotions to fascinated onlookers. By the time the Portland band released their debut in 2011, Ruban Nielson had dropped the anonymity ploy; the lo-fi production was next to go on II. Judging from "Multi-Love", UMO is threatening to do away with the six-string wizardry that often distinguished them but also occasionally bogged down their otherwise taut, psych-funk songwriting. And so there's less than ever standing between the listener and what lay at the core of previous standouts "How Can U Luv Me" and "Swim and Sleep (Like a Shark)"—a very, very bummed guy and his record collection. On "Multi-Love", Nielson sings of the titular entity crashing his heart and trashing it like a hotel room—a common rock'n'roll image that hasn't quite been used this way, and those are the most powerful ones. Whatever "multi-love" might be, they had all the fun knowing Nielson would be responsible for paying the bill. This metaphor fits in a musical sense as well: as a melodicist and an arranger, Nielson is constantly trying to fit odd, cracked parts back together, and this is his most complex display of craftsmanship yet, keeping a falsetto and newfound synth fetish in line with brisk breakbeats, while doing a damage assessment of his broken heart—revealing that UMO have always been a funk band in both senses of the word.