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Year End Wrap Ups - Mount Eerie - A Crow Looked at Me

Albums about death are nothing new.  Albums about grief are nothing new.  Albums about loss are nothing new.  In the past few years especially, it seems there has been a steady stream of raw, grief-stricken records, whether it be the heartbreaking stories of Sun Kil Moon’s Benji or Sufjan Stevens grappling with the life and death of his mother on Carrie & Lowell .  However, nothing prepared me for Mount Eerie’s masterpiece A Crow Looked at Me , in which Phil Elverum works through the death of his wife (artist and musician Geneviève Castrée), which left him not only a man missing his partner, but also a single father to an infant daughter.   Much of Phil Elverum’s work, both as Mount Eerie and with his previous project The Microphones, has been hard to easily compare to other music around it, frequently seeming to exist in its own world.  Even next to his previous work, however, A Crow Looked at Me exists in a world all its own, one entirely surr...

Year End Wrap Ups - Chief Keef - Thot Breaker

“She say she love me whatever that is / Do me a favor save that shit.”  For many, that was one of their first introductions to Chief Keef, and summarized a part of his world view in a perfectly succinct manner.  Back in 2012, riding on the heels of his breakthrough mixtape Back from the Dead and its single “I Don’t Like”, a clear image of Keef, the emotionless gangster with no time for anything besides drugs, guns, and women (or, more specifically, the parts of women he can use), was defined.  So five years later, and long after he could be considered to be at the top of the cultural conversation, what is there still to learn about Keith Cozart?  Well, that he might have a heart after all. Thot Breaker , despite it’s ridiculous title, is almost single-mindedly dedicated to Keef’s new muse.  While he still falls back to pot, his favorite vice and perhaps the only thing he loves as much as this mystery woman, Keef is at least a partially changed man, and i...