This week, we’re sharing reviews of exceptional new records from Andrew Combs, Megan Thee Stallion and Black Thought and Danger Mouse; plus, a joyful and unique Tiny Desk.
Courtesy of the artists
This week we shared reviews of two very different albums that both were written as a response to serious personal tumult: Sundays, a beautiful and pensive album from singer-songwriter Andrew Combs and Traumazine, a confessional (but still characteristically rowdy) new release from rapper Megan Thee Stallion. Since 2012 Combs has released several records of his trademark “quiet, introspective brand of left-of-center country music,” as writer Brittney McKenna puts it, but started work on Sundays after what he described as a “mental breakdown” after the 2020 holidays. In his recovery — aided by medical treatment and transcendental meditation — Combs turned to a songwriting routine, heading into the studio each Sunday to record a song he had written during the week. “Soon, something unlike anything Combs had made to date began to take shape,” McKenna writes. The resulting album has a slightly discordant atmosphere, based around rhythmic thumb-picked guitar, and grapples with “the struggle to live with integrity in a world that demands otherwise,” as McKenna describes it; it’s a moving record that invites us to join Combs in “plumbing the darkness for foundations of a better world.”
Megan Thee Stallion’s Traumazine also reckons with what it means to have agency over your own story, even when society tries to wrestle that away from you. The album makes “space for ruminations and grief, managing the swirling emotions produced by years of acrimony and cathartically letting them rise to the surface,” as writer Shamira Ibrahim explains. Megan Thee Stallion has had a destabilizing past few years, reeling from the death of her mother in 2019, ongoing disputes with her label and being shot in an incident involving rapper and singer Tory Lanez in 2020. The “near-constant refutation of her version of events” of the shooting, “in both the courtroom and the court of public opinion, has been an obvious drain of her energy,” Ibrahim writes. On Traumazine, the rapper digs into her feelings about the trauma of the past few years — and, in the process, reaffirms her skills as one of rap's bar-for-bar heavyweights.
Also this week: My colleague Sheldon Pearce wrote a thoughtful review of Cheat Codes, the new album from Black Thought and Danger Mouse. For years a solo album from the frontman of The Roots “felt like an imaginary object, long rumored yet never revealed,” Sheldon writes. A debut album is a big matter for any artist, but for a rapper in a group, he says, "it is also a chance to establish a fully independent identity." On Cheat Codes, after a long wait, Black Thought delivers on that promise. And it’s not just that the album is excellent — though it is; Sheldon calls it a “classicist album fit for the form's elder statesmen.” It’s filled with beats that Danger Mouse made with the rapper and his skill set specifically in mind, and Black Thought matches his “novelistic charm with attentive storytelling” better than ever before. But as Sheldon explains, this record feels like a culmination of Black Thought’s career up until this point: “Listening now,” he writes, “it can feel like all those years the album went unmade are what made it possible.”
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