Album Of The Week: Danny Brown Old

For its vision and audacity and pure sonics, Yeezus is a great album. I've been calling it my favorite album of the year for months now, and all of a sudden I'm not so sure anymore. In any case, even if it's the album of the year, it's definitely not the rap album of the year. If you look at rap albums based on their core virtues, on beats and raps and maybe energy and innovation, Danny Brown's Old is easily the best rap album anyone has released in 2013, the best on since Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City. It has peers, and they come from all over the rapscape: Run The Jewels, Acid Rap, Y.R.N. (Young Rich Niggas), Dreamchasers 3, Doris, The Luca Brasi Story, even this week's My Name Is My Name. But in terms of pure achievement, Old vaults past all of them, into legend territory. Its fundamentals are rock-solid, Brown packing his verses with internal rhyme and allusion and sense of place, keeping a sharp eye for details as he sets up scenes and tells stories. Its sonics are adventurous, borrowing from dance and indie and psychedelia while at the same time staying harder and more physical than almost any rap record I've heard this year. It's a classically constructed LP, building a complete arc and making sure each track flows directly into the next. And it's also a work of criticism, taking the piss out of street-rap and party-rap and the way Brown has seen his own image develop. It's just a staggering piece of work altogether, an album we'll be picking through for a while.