Run the Jewels (2013)

(Fool's Gold)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The world's changed. This is an official studio album that was released for free onto the web; if you like it enough, you can buy a physical copy. With its slapdash artwork and casual attitude to its own importance, Run the Jewels is hardly devoted to impressing you or instilling bloghype in its built-in audience. The two performers involved, El-P and Killer Mike, are already established and successful, and seem to have created this primarily because they enjoy working together, as discovered when El produced Killer Mike's excellent R.A.P. Music in 2012. So this strange artifact slips out like some kind of afterthought, until people hear it -- if said people have ears, they're impressed.

But there are side projects -- generally the creatively less-than-stellar product of musicians who don't necessarily have chemistry enjoying one another, or a solo artist having fun doing something that isn't a particularly good idea -- and then there is serendipity. Run the Jewels requires none of the standard apologies for either a stopgap release or an underground freebie. The album is like a lightning bolt, blazing through thirty-three ferocious minutes before you have much time to register it. That feeling remains the more you listen to the thing and try to discover its subtleties. They exist, sure (that apocalyptic opening on "A Christmas Fucking Mistake," the wall of sound on "Sea Legs"), but the blunt force of this record is what makes one want to return to it immediately after it's over; how often does one really listen to a new album and immediately feel they want more, right then?

In contrast to so much of what's labeled "alternative" rap -- a classification secured by the presence of Brooklyn noisemaker El-P, though even Mike can hardly be called a mainstream player at the moment -- RTJ comes on truly hard: badass, brutal and quick. The pair spits out imaginative, playful, often angry and aggressive rhymes over El's booming, crunching, minimal but impossibly heavy backbeats -- building brilliantly on his work with Mike last year. It runs through its ideas and changes so rapidly -- every single time, I look up and I'm surprised it's halfway over -- it's hard to pick out individual tracks or moments.

It's cruel to even separate specific cuts -- this is one of the scarce modern albums, like good kid, M.A.A.D city, that demands to be heard complete and in sequence every time. The guest spot by Big Boi is bang-on and it's delightful to hear Prince Paul's cameo, but this is completely the show of the two stars. They bounce off one another like old masters, each playing up the other's best points and reining in their indulgences, though both are thankfully as unafraid of addressing politics as ever. Best of all, they almost never stop rapping -- this is true hardcore hip hop, not an elaborate production flavored by occasional rap music elements, and if your favorite thing about this music is hearing a beat enhanced or even entirely provided by an MC's emotional and nonstop delivery, an immediate download is advisable. This isn't the best hip hop LP I heard this year but it's for sure the heaviest moment-to-moment, and possibly the smartest.

It all goes to show that one rapper I don't like all that much (usually find El-P's rapping too busy and lightweight, though I've got mad respect for him and I enjoyed his last release, and obviously he's a great producer) and one I love but was once ambivalent about (think R.A.P. was the first record to really harness Mike's personality) working together when they're completely on their fucking game is preferable to two rappers I practically worship (Jay-Z and Kanye West) only half-interested in their own collaboration, the technically superior rapper (Jay) on an off-day and the more eccentric and playful Yeezy not fully able to pick up the slack or find the right context to be his real self. And take a look at the release pattern for these two records. How much money was spent promoting -- not even recording -- Watch the Throne? And this instantly appealing, lean, dross-free stunner just showed up suddenly and is available to you for free. Its artists unmistakably cared about the product, even though most people hearing it will never even be expected to pay a dime for it. I don't know what it means, but it's provocative.