Splicetoday

Music
Jan 19, 2011, 09:09AM

The Expendables, 2011 Edition: Part 3

Avey Tare, D. Boi.

Avey tare 58632591 5bf08e3c88.jpg?ixlib=rails 2.1

Here are two more discs that charmed and beguiled, but didn’t quite achieve personal immortality.

1. Avey Tare, Down There (Paw Tracks)

By now, everybody knows Down There is a divorce album, but it’s a divorce album that doesn’t telegraph its divorce-album-ness: to the uninformed and uninitiated, it’s just a suite of electronic zigzag zaps and downer tape-loop experiments that, miraculously, doesn’t leave the listener wanting to check out. It’s a soundtrack that meanders around one’s own cluttered consciousness, peeking beneath rocks and behind curtains and gazing fixedly at unspeakably bizarre things you might or might not be surprised to uncover, a travelogue to a personal “The Farmer’s Hotel,” so to speak (cf. the Silver Jews). I’m going to wander out on a limb and a) tag it the most introspective and affecting Animal Collective-associated fugue in a good half-decade or so and b) suggest that maybe Panda Bear’s not the only Animal with a post-millennial lucrative/critically-valid solo career ahead of him.

2. D. Boi, Paid In Full (Varsity Entertainment)

There’s nothing especially forward-thinking or tradition-shattering about Paid In Full. It basically compounds a million small-change regional rap mixtape and played-out national rap album clichés: run-on samples from gangster movies, cheeseball gimmicks (“Trap Phone” would have even 50 Cent rolling his eyes), gratuitous cornball ad-libs, retreads of hip-hop classics (“Boyz In Da Hood”) and overexposed new jawns (Drake’s “Over”, Rick Ross’ “B.M.F.”), abysmal production values, botched edits, hordes of marginally gifted homies and hangers-on with laughably improbable stage names, all convinced that they’re going to be the next Lloyd, T.I., or Nicki Minaj, punchlines along the lines of “time piece lookin’ like a Yellowstone grizzly,” whatever the fuck that means. Amusingly, D.Boi and his cohort are Baltimoreans who make a point of coming across like they’re living further below the Mason/Dixon.

So why am I so smitten with Paid In Full? Maybe it’s the studied, just-the-facts to boasts about unparalleled hustling prowess that’s probably total bullshit, the sheer, baldface nonchalance of it all; maybe it’s the sense that everybody involved here knows full well that there’s no future for them in the larger world of rap, but they’re going for it anyway; maybe I’m drawn to the fact that listening to this thing is like stumbling into some friend of a friend’s weeded out basement and getting the bum’s rush from an onslaught of stoned, hungry wannabes who aren’t certain what they’re hungry for, exactly. Waffles? An Interscope deal? A dime bag? A ride out to The Alameda? What?

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