Nicki Minaj, Animal Collective, and Death Cab lead a busy week in new releases
Nicki Minaj reaches for the throne room, Animal Collective unearths an interesting live artifact, Death Cab do more Death Cabbing, and more in this week of new releases.
And in case you missed it, read our featured review of Mitski’s Be The Cowboy, also released today, right here.
Nicki Minaj, Queen
[Young Money]
Grade: B+
After a seemingly endless string of shifted release dates, Nicki Minaj has finally graced her subjects with her fourth studio effort, Queen. Four years removed from 2014’s The Pinkprint, the self-proclaimed hip-hop royalty clearly had a lot to get off her chest, unleashing a barrage of bars on her rivals, suitors, and stans for a full, furious hour. She sounds determined with this album to return as the undisputed head of the class—especially after Cardi B’s critically acclaimed and commercially successful debut earlier this year. She knocks the Bronx rapper twice (for using a ghostwriter and for being a former stripper, which feels like an off-brand insult from the artist behind “Anaconda”), and spares the feelings of no one else. Musically, she avoids flavor-of-the-moment trend-hopping in favor of lusher, more broadly poppy production, and it pays dividends, from the earthy patter of opener “Ganja Burns” to the Beatles-inspired “Majesty” to the dancehall collab “Coco Chanel.” Ultimately, though, Queen is a little longer and more haphazard than it should be, especially for a claim to the throne of hip-hop. It’s a lot of fun, but not quite the instant classic for which Minaj seems to have been aiming.
RIYL: Drake. Rihanna. Lil Wayne. Bawdy shit-talk.
Start here: “Barbie Dreams” is a masterful rework of Notorious B.I.G.’s “Dreams” on which Minaj drags ex Meek Mill, cunnilingus-fearing friend DJ Khaled, and—perhaps the easiest target in the world—Drake. [Nina Hernandez]
Animal Collective, Tangerine Reef
[Domino]
Grade: B (visual album); C- (audio album)
The worst way to engage with Tangerine Reef is by listening to it. A studio re-creation of a film-festival performance by three-fourths of Animal Collective—the group’s most pop-minded member, Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox, sits this one out—the record captures all the noodling self-indulgence that makes the psych-poppers such a maddeningly inconsistent live act. But Tangerine Reef is an incomplete object in this form: It’s accompaniment, not feature presentation, the drowsy soundtrack to the iridescent undersea visuals of Australian filmmakers Coral Morphologic. The aquatic After Dark doesn’t so much complement the indistinct melodies as justify them, as dozens of coral blooms pulse in time with “Hair Cutter,” and spawning sea anemone give shape to the scrapes and squiggles of “Airpipe (To A New Transition).” It’s hard to imagine anyone diving into Tangerine Reef more than once, but its twitching tendrils and abstractly erotic imagery are a smart embodiment to the cutesy/creepy Animal Collective aesthetic, a sensibility that’s always existed at the intersection of the Muppets, Mummenschanz, David Lynch, and David Cronenberg.
RIYL: Desktop media player visualizers. The scenes from Twin Peaks: The Return with The Evolution Of The Arm. Getting stoned and watching Blue Planet.