The Albums Of The Year: Janelle Monae - The Archandroid

Don't make your end of year lists too early... I'm looking at you, well, almost everyone. I literally hadn't heard one note of Janelle Monae's The Archandroid until after Christmas, but I've listened to it twice a day every day since. Why? Because this record is so mindnumbingly immense, I've got to keep playing it to figure it out!

What is it, exactly? It's got more styles of music than you can shake a stick at. There's choral folk, party jammz, glossy Euro-electro, psychedelic soul, revved up rave-ups, and more - but it all hangs together somehow. Perhaps the best album to compare it to is The Avalanches' magnum opus, Since I Left You. That record was essentially a mix of hundreds upon hundreds of samples into a crazy mash-up. The Archandroid , on the other hand, plays with actual songs - building arrangements with real strings and brass and modern beats and grooves, but it's still a crazy mash-up too.

It is not the sort of record you expect anyone to make anymore. A big-budget, ambitious work that only gives a few cursory nods to modern commercial radio. Sure, Tightrope (which features Outkast's Big Boi, one of the benefactors of Monae) works as a boom-car jam, but you are going to find more orchestral fantasias and Joni Mitchell-eqsue chord changes elsewhere than you would follow-up singles.

At its heart, The Archandroid is a pop record, but it's one of those unique collections of indulgent creativity like you might expect from a Kate Bush or Os Mutantes or Van Dyke Parks. It's too early to say that Janelle Monae ranks anywhere near those folks, but she's sure making a big splash into the pool.

(It's impossible to pick a representative track from this album but I'm digging the weird cousin of Crystal Blue Persuasion called Mushrooms & Roses and the sorta-drum&bass sorta-Time Faster.)