When critics make comparisons between untitled unmastered and Radiohead’s Amnesiac, it might just seem like an easy headline: Amnesiac (along with Zooropa) has become the go-to reference point for the weirdo experimental album released shortly after the grand statement album, and untitled unmastered, with its anonymous track titles and strange, mid-song left turns, certainly fits that broad bill.
But there’s a lot more to that comparison than the lazy surface-level elements, and honestly, the two records make for an improbably perfect double-bill. The similarities are striking: the skittering beats, the whispers of trip-hop strings, the vocal manipulations, the queasy jazz, the hazy frightened atmosphere, the existential terror of being famous in a dystopian world. If you follow the high-concept logic that Kid A is commentary on the event that Amnesiac describes, then that also follows through to untitled unmastered, which is every bit the feverish, uncertain psychological landscape that Kendrick is trying to make sense of from a distance in To Pimp a Butterfly. Thom Yorke begins Amnesiac describing that years of waiting have ended in nothing; Lamar opens “untitled 01” with the declaration that “life no longer infinity.” Something has imploded. He’s a reasonable man, get off his case.
But enough about sad British dudes; this show is Kendrick Lamar’s, and if there’s anything he’s shown us in the past year and a half, it’s that there’s nobody out there as capable of giving a heart-stopping performance as he is. On the record, he’s a stream-of-consciousness wizard, both an actor and director who has, with his multitude of immensely talented collaborators, crafted a pained and sprawling soundscape out of apparently tossed-off studio fragments that ranks as probably the most complex and fascinating philosophical statement the popular music world has seen since, well, To Pimp a Butterfly. Live, there’s even more life in these songs as Kendrick breaks out of the record’s quagmire to deliver fast, loud, and furious versions of the raps here over backdrops of imagery that pull from black nationalism, history, and current events in ways as free-associative as his lyrics. His performance at the Grammys earlier this year remains my favorite musical performance of the year, followed closely by his BET collaboration with Beyoncé—both performances that might seem like victory laps if it weren’t for how far the world of 2016 feels from anything resembling a victory and how Kendrick’s impassioned showmanship is anything but self-congratulatory cruising.
In short, I really dig it. As far as I’m concerned, Kendrick Lamar is the star to be watching at this moment and into the foreseeable future, and untitled unmastered only reinforces that status as King Kendrick.
