A little over a year ago, I saw James Blake live with Moses Sumney opening. It was a great show, and I remember both sets very clearly, but I imagine that over time the memory will blur into something like LIMBO. It's neat stuff, retaining the trademark Blake-ian fragility of voice and production but considerably more upbeat in terms of both tempo and mood.

Midtown 120 Blues is a seminal Deep House album, and is comprised mostly of delightful long-form warehouse excursions. It's also a forthrightly political work, and on two occasions features voiceovers in which the album's context is set. Given the content, it'd be a bit tone-deaf to excerpt them, and so here they are.

Jam City is a fella who made a record called Classical Curves which is widely heralded as very good and one of the decade's most influential pieces of electronic music. I've always found it pretty boring, and no one seems interested in explaining its importance in even remotely legible terms. A few years later, Jam City made Dream a Garden, a highly-anticipated and quickly forgotten left turn of a follow-up that saw him veer away from club bangers for nerds and plunge headlong into, like, funky guitar-based dream pop shit with vocals best described as ill-advised.

Truth be told, I don't often give album art the consideration that it deserves. Sometimes it seems pretty half-assed, or sometimes it leans heavily on an overused aesthetic, as is the case here; rarely, however, does indulging in that aesthetic render all other attempts to do so obsolete. The cover of Restless Idylls is an utterly perfect encapsulation of the album's sound - baroque, of a time that you're happy not to be in, and more than a little spooky.

Rhythmically, there's a lot to diagram here - your calypsos, your dembows, and all manner of stuff that the trained listener could point out like when you get a beer that was brewed with honey and berries or something dumb and then go down the list announcing that oh, you're tasting berries and definitely picking up a note of honey.

*Sniffs, takes a sip*.

Because I started out writing with an LA-focused rap blog, it takes me a little longer than it should to give up-and-coming LA acts a chance due to the overwhelming and sometimes undeserved hyperbole that my, uh, colleagues lay on them day in and day out. I'll likely keep this policy in place for the foreseeable future, but the late-2017 emergence of 03 Greedo and the newly-free Drakeo the Ruler has made me think twice. In form, there's nothing about Cold Devil that's particularly revolutionary - except, of course, Drakeo himself.

This is, to put it bluntly, that shit. Of the entire history of music that has attempted to position itself as post-DJ Screw (most hilariously and memorably, Parquet Courts; second place, A$AP Rocky), this is the only thing that's ever backed it up. I think it's a slowed-down DJ mix of some very rare old dancehall records, but honestly I have no idea - there's no tracklist, I missed out on the 50 cassettes (though Christmas, my friends, is merely 350-odd days away), and the label description (exercise of style, focusing on a counter-factual historical approach of dub music) is unintelligible.