record reviews

Ghostface Killah and Adrian Younge

Album: “Twelve Reasons to Die” (Soul Temple/RED Distribution)

Grade: A

“Twelve Reasons to Die” unites Wu-Tang Clan vet Ghostface Killah with Adrian Younge, one of music’s brightest young composers. The album’s 12 cinematic tracks trace the trials of a masked Mafioso who is resurrected after his remains are pressed into a dozen vinyl LPs.

Playing like a graphic novel, the Ghostface persona jumps off the page. Ghost is in the type of pure storyteller mode last heard on the breakneck hood-noir of his song “Shakey Dog.”

Ghost’s controlled and committed wordplay is the ideal accommodation for Younge’s lush accompaniments. At times the arrangements approximate RZA conducting live musicians, but Younge appears versed in the back catalogs of titans such as David Axelrod and Ennio Morricone.

—Jake O’Connell, Associated Press

The Flaming Lips

Album: “The Terror” (Warner Bros.)

Grade: A

Wayne Coyne is at a sensational point in his career. With or without his Lips, Coyne has become a professional weirdo.

Enter “The Terror.” With its nine songs unfurling in just under an hour, the Lips take their time though densely ruminative melodies and foggy noise-synth arrangements as never before. Through this muzzy, rapt haze, Coyne mulls the grim realities of a society’s toxic future (“Look ... The Sun is Rising”) and the destruction of interpersonal relationships (“You Are Alone”) in a small, broken falsetto. Yet, through the busted balladry of “Try to Explain,” Coyne musters what seems like his final gasp of emotion after having spent his Flaming past stuck out in the cold.

This is the Flaming Lips at its most bracing.

—A.D. Amorosi, Philadelphia Inquirer