AOTY #1: Freddie Gibbs & Madlib - Bandana [2019]

Welcome to my Album of the Year highlights! I’ll give you a little run down with a brief history to start, show you the tracklist (with the tracks in bold being my favorites) with all of the featured guests (if any), give you some descriptors that might make you more inclined to check it out (if my recommendation isn’t ain’t for you), and I’ll provide links to stream/buy the project down at the bottom. Enjoy!

If I had been doing TSDK back in 2014, Pinata would have been my Album of the Year way back then. It’s only fitting that, five years later, the sophomore effort from Freddie Gibbs and Madlib, Bandana, tops my Album of the Year list. This album is #1 because everything about these two artists have gotten better over the course of five years: Freddie is more experimental with his flows and melodies, and Madlib has nailed the selection of beats he provides for Gibbs, tailoring them to his exact flows and capabilities. These two men are two of the best to ever do it, and Bandana is the result of a chemistry that goes deeper than music; it’s a mutual understanding of the art they create, a symbiosis that could only result in perfection. The biggest of thank you’s are due to Gangsta Gibbs and The Beat Konducta, and a congratulations for beating out an incredibly tough field of artists and albums to be come Tha Soup Dude’s #1 Album of 2019!

Tracklist

1. Obrigado

2. Freestyle Shit

3. Half Manne Half Cocaine

4. Crime Pays

5. Massage Seats

6. Palmolive (Feat. Pusha T & Killer Mike)

7. Fake Names

8. Flat Tummy Tea

9. Situations

10. Giannis (Feat. Anderson .Paak)

11. Practice

12. Cataracts

13. Gat Damn

14. Education (Feat. Yasiin Bey & Black Thought)

15. Soul Right

Madlib (Left) and Freddie Gibbs (Right) are two of the best in their respective fields. Madlib is one of the most famous samplers of all time for good reason, and Freddie Gibbs will go down as one of the best to ever do it.

Recommended if you like:

Oh No, unbelievably good and technical flows, MF Doom, strong song topics, 50 Cent, amazing but sparingly used features, Method Man, soul/funk sampled instrumentals, Big L, rhyme schemes for days, Black Thought, mixture of furious rapping and melodic crooning, Big Daddy Kane, old legends taking risks, The Alchemist, Griselda, Daringer,

Here’s my original write-up of Bandana:

June 2019

↓ Listen to Bandana ↓

Spotify/YouTube/Apple Music