Untitled unmastered review
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It was a sprawling future masterpiece that saw its creator storm his way up the rap food chain, blowing away the competition and leaving very few to dispute his crown.
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is a living documentation of Lamar’s process, giving the listener a view of him honing his craft and chipping away at a vision that would soon blossom into an epochal full-length.‘ To Pimp A Butterfly’ pushed Kendrick Lamar to the top of the pile. Over eight songs and a brisk 34 minutes, we drop in on Kendrick simply operating as the best hip-hop artist on the planet, as he almost casually tosses off scraps and odds and ends that put many other artists to shame. A propulsive bass figure and free-form trumpet send listeners down the rabbit hole, featuring Anna Wise on a smoky vocal performance, and Lamar focusing again on going hard (“ Once upon a time I used to go to church and talk to God / Now I’m thinkin’ to myself, hollow tips is all I got / Now I’m drinkin’ by myself, at the intersection, parked”), shirking any of the quirky vocal tics that populated a handful of songs of TPAB.Īnd then finally, between the glorious, shapeless funk of “untitled 06,” (featuring Cee-Lo, no less), the druggy incantations and funhouse trap vibes of “untitled 07” and the classic Kendrick storytelling/ Parliament-inspired strut of “untitled 08” (which, mashed up with “untitled 2,” was performed on the Tonight Show in late January), the set ends without a lull or dip in quality. The crackling energy present in that performance dissipates a little on wax, but again, it’s another excellent showcase for completely “in-the-zone” Kendrick: “He put a price on my talent, I hit the bank and withdraw / Hit the bank and withdraw, hit the bank and withdraw / Put myself in the rocket ship and I shot for the stars.” “Untitled 05 | ” is the trippiest song of the bunch, one that could have been most easily imagined as a showstopper on Butterfly.
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“Untitled 03 | 05.28.13.” is the famous song he performed on The Colbert Report back in late 2014. The first track (“untitled 01 | 08.19.14.”) segues from disturbing acid jazz to what is effectively an apocalyptically fire freestyle from Kendrick (“Atheists for suicide, planes falling out the sky / Trains jumping off the track / mothers yelling ‘he’s alive’”) over quivering strings and arpeggios with quaking bass guitar. It’s a testament to the vision Kendrick possessed while writing and recording TPAB that all of these songs still coalesce as head trip-worthy sketches of nebulous funk and jazz, cocooned in tight webs of Kendrick’s knotty, thoughtful, socially conscious lyrics. sounds and feels monolithic, with each song flowing into the next with the uneasy current that coursed though TPAB. Dropping the needle on the first one, the whole project sounds like it’s in media res, as if we are cutting into Kendrick’s stream-of-consciousness creativity, and he’s bursting at the seams with ideas, production flourishes, compositional mastery and thematic richness. But the results aren’t disjointed. The record has no song titles or credits, no feature lists or album art, just numbered tracks with a corresponding date. While not necessarily qualifying as a proper album, it further cements Kendrick as the most important MC working in hip-hop today. But untitled unmastered. is one of the few exceptions.
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Under normal circumstances, the collection of rarities/b-sides/unreleased material from a particular recording session is only of consequence to superfans and completists. Then last Thursday night (March 3), after rumblings on the usual Twitter grapevine thanks to Top Dawg Entertainment’s head Anthony Tiffith, and LeBron James for some reason, Kendrick released eight tracks out of his treasure trove under the title untitled unmastered., including the three sought-after cuts he performed only as television one-offs.