Noah23

I've always been a little reluctant to write about hip-hop. It's the vocabulary, see – 'beats' and 'rhymes' and 'flow'… What if I want to talk about the tone of a rapper's voice or the structure of his songs? Are those things not relevant to the hip-hop aesthetic? Would people think I'd missed the point? I was even tempted to condense my various hip-hop recommendations into a single entry, getting them all out the way at once, but then I worried I'd be starting on a slippery slope and never be able to write about hip-hop again and oh look, it's Noah23:

A weird thing about Noah23 is he references Pavement and bands with 'wolf' in their name yet isn't every indie kid's favourite MC. Another weird thing is he rarely produces his own stuff, but when he does (as on the opening track to Quicksand, 'Saw Palmetto'), it's really great. Quicksand is Noah's second album and arguably his magnum opus, although to be honest, I'm mainly going by what other people have said there. I only have that and 2008's Rock Paper Scissors, which is predominately a collaboration record verging more towards the territory of hip-pop than Quicksand's relative traditionalism. According to Wikipedia, he has another 19 studio albums, 11 mixtapes and 12 EPs, and fucking hell, where do you even begin? No wonder he doesn't handle production duties more often. Jesus. If you want to investigate further though, Jupiter Sajitarius is also meant to be pretty good.

Bandcamp: https://noah23.bandcamp.com/

SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/noah23