Album Of The Week: El-P & Killer Mike Run The Jewels

The parallel is both obvious and ludicrous, and I kind of hate myself for making it, but just bear with me for a minute. Two years ago, a ferocious veteran rapper and a boundary-smashing, synth-addicted rapper/producer, two guys who'd been friends and collaborators for a long time, got together, as a duo, to make an album. And when they gave that album its title, they picked a three-word command: Watch The Throne. As commands go, that's a pretty passive one: Behold the faraway magnificence of these two wealthy god-figures, examples to which you can never hope to aspire. This week, it happened again, but this time, the title has a whole different connotation. Run The Jewels is a hard, immediate command: Give me your fucking expensive things right now or die. That's a crucial difference, since no rap album I've heard this year -- Yeezus included -- has the breathless all-crushing urgency that El-P and Killer Mike have worked up on Run The Jewels. It's a 10-song, 40-minute cluster-bomb of an album. There's no fat, no indulgence, barely any outside contribution, precious little in the way of contemplation or introversion. Mike and El aren't worried about their legacies or the current state of rap or the encroaching surveillance state or their own tortured pasts -- all subjects these guys have made great music about before. They just want to make your neck jerk, one way or another.