Tuesday Reviewsday: Kendrick Lamar and DAMN.

If you love music, but don't have the time to keep up with what's new, you should listen to Tuesday Reviewsday. 

Every week our critics join our hosts in the studio to talk about what you should be listening to in one short segment. This week A Martinez is joined by Oliver Wang -  music writer, scholar, and DJ.

Here are his picks:  

Kendrick teased everyone a few weeks back with a new album, his fourth, and now it’s here. Feels more introspective, more focused than To Pimp a Butterfly but no more ambitious in its scope and, especially, the lyrical craft. 

This is the latest from New York’s Joey Badass and I have to say, I was very pleasantly surprised by it. Joey built his early reputation on being a rapper trying to “bring New York back” to its glory days of the 1990s and while I get the appeal of that, sometimes, you could feel like he doth protesteth too much. But with this new album, there’s a striking maturation or evolution to his style, especially in putting together an effort that is so clearly politically charged in its character.

Listening to parts of this reminded me of Tupac in fact, not because Joey sounds like ‘Pac, but because of the particular social consciousness raising he’s doing here seems like it’s in conversation almost with similar approaches that Pac took back in the day. 

The song features Los Angeles’s own Tyler the Creator and as with his last song, “Chanel,” it’s not clear if these are just a bunch of one-off tracks or if Frank is plotting to drop a new album’s worth of material soon. But I have to say, going back to last year’s Blonde and these random songs he’s been floating in 2017 so far, if he’s got something new under his sleeve, that’d be such a gift. Now how can we get Frank and Kendrick to record an album together?