With his ramshackle voice, high and lonesome acoustic fingerpicking, and folky anthems, there’s little denying the influence that the folkies have had on him. Kristian Matsson (aka the Tallest Man on Earth) conjures up the spirits of Greenwich Village-era Bob Dylan. The style and restraint shown here mark Santigold as one of America’s best contemporary pop artists and Master of My Make-Believe as one of the year’s best. But of course, distilling one’s influences into something as streamlined and effective as Master of My Make-Believe is anything but easy. Like many other truly great pop records of the last decade (Robyn’s Body Talk, Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die, Annie’s Anniemal), Master of My Make-Believe waltzes through a seemingly endless hall of genres, gesturing here and there at will, making the various influences available to the artist seem easily accessible, just one possibility among millions. Cole Watermanįrom the first lurching strains of opener “Go” to the skittering, surreal groove of closer “Big Mouth”, Santigold’s sophomore record Master of My Make-Believe holds the listener’s head under the shimmering, hypnotic waters of its multi-faceted pop ingenuity and keeps us there, kicking and flailing, until we have neither the desire nor the ability to fight back any further. For a night spent soul searching, grappling with existential dread as you evaluate your failures and successes, there is scarcely a better record in 2012 that could serve as your musical roadmap. The unexpected, but welcomed, shifts to tunes of optimism or playfulness go to balance the profane with the sacred, and show that even the ugliest moments of experience still allow beauty to break through. Holding court in this landscape is the id of singer Jeff Klein, howling of being, but an animal in a well on the title track, though elsewhere his primal self takes the form of a raging beast caught in a bear trap (“Born in the Belly”) or an old dog languidly giving in to fate (“Between Space”).

Southern Gothic to a T, with all the pathos, depravity, dread and redemption that implies, the record is a dispatch from the squalor of emotional wreckage. The songs of Preachers sound to bubble up as a miasma from a swamp.

New mystikal album 2012