5. Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico DustyIn the year of Kanye West, former OutKast MC Big Boi was one of the few rap stars to appear something more than drab. The brilliant Antwan Andre Patton dropped nothing short of the best in his long-awaited return to the spotlight.
Prior to Sir Lucious, it would have sounded ridiculous to assert that Big Boi would release anything this spectacularly weird, hypnotic, fierce, funny and catchy. After all, we hadn't heard from the South's preeminent hip hop group OutKast in years, and Big Boi wasn't even supposed to be the brains of the bunch. You have to love underdogs who triumph and make it look like they were front-runners from the start.
Big catch: "General Patton": "This s*#t is like breathing to me," Big Boi raps over military cadences. Believe it.
4. Janelle Monae - The ArchAndroidMonae, self-proclaimed "weirdo," is like no one else, but somehow she manages to sound like everyone else.
The metamorphing songstress spins jazz, funk, classical melodrama, hip hop, Stax-era soul, pre-pubescent Michael Jackson and spacey Tommy James rock like the record industry's going to die tomorrow and someone needs to memorialize all of it.
At the same time that Monae champions her roots, she seems intent on pushing toward the future, or at least a future where genres are irrelevant.
Yes, it's a concept album that picks up where a previous EP left off, and concept albums can be tiresome. But Monae, who's dazzled for years without ever releasing a full-length LP until this year, keeps the flow of The ArchAndroid limber and irresistible.
Big catch: "Faster" - Monae turns into 10-year-old Michael Jackson at the end of this frantic, funk number.
3. Arcade Fire - The SuburbsArcade Fire can make anything dramatic, even the crappy neighborhood where you used to set bugs on fire with a magnifying glass and shoot BB guns at your friends to break up the boredom.
Some might scoff at the idea of suburban life as being short of idyllic, but the "little pink houses" business is anything but a dream these days. Pensions are drying up, college costs too much, there are no jobs, your parents are convinced the country is under siege, and your closest friends would rather play scratch and sniff with a bottle of glue than apply for a scholarship.
Arcade Fire, in true Springsteen fashion, believe this is a "suicide trap" and we need to get out. It's a good thing they've cushioned the dramatics with another slew of well-written, explosive songs that make every other rock band look like slackers. This album is a grower, maybe forgettable once but a classic by the fifth listen.
Big catch: "We Used to Wait" - We used to wait for it, but now we're screaming "sing the chorus again." Perfect description of Arcade Fire's slowly unrolling masterpiece.
2. LCD Soundsystem - This Is HappeningA friend of mine once said he would be willing to proclaim LCD's James Murphy a prophet if every song were as good as album opener "Dance Yrself Clean."
Halfway through the drifting, low-fi track, Murphy drops a blitzkrieg of club-heavy beats, rambling keyboards and half-screamed vocals as catharsis. If you can't get your dance on with this track, then you probably don't like dancing.
Either way, This is Happening is filled with epic, danceable numbers that scream for repeat listens.
Big catch: Aside from the aforementioned "Dance Yrself Clean," there are too many to mention. But "All I Want," the classic Heroes-era grandchild that Bowie would have recorded if he and Brian Eno had thought of it, deserves mention.
1. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted FantasyWest made most other hip hop artists look hopelessly uninspired through the course of this 13-track masterwork. It's a testament to his productivity that he had another dozen or so songs that he recorded during the making of this album that would have filled LPs for lesser artists.
Nothing is better for rap stars than for everyone in the world to doubt them. Let's face it, everyone was doubting West after he made a tuneless rant like 808s and Heartbreak and did his best impression of a cokehead jumping on stage to lampoon Taylor Swift.
Somehow, in the middle of it all, West found time to lock himself in the studio and make songs that crackle with creativity and his trademark self-awareness. Meanwhile, the sometimes clumsy rapper also found a way to turn in some of his best verses ever put to tape.
Big catch: "Power" - King Crimson-sample and a fired-up West obliterate just about every other song in their path.
