El-P + Killer Mike = Run the Jewels (2013)

I'm willing to bet that El-P is Marco's favorite white rapper or at the VERY LEAST he's got a spot in his Top 3, and I'm also willing to bet that if Marco ever got a car, he'd bump that shit at the stop lights while wearing a bandanna and eating out of a big bowl of pasta. I think El-P is pretty cool, too, and Drones over BKLYN is hands-down one of the best rap songs I've ever heard - check out dem sikk jamz. Sadly, though, I'm not too familiar with his material apart from this one song, which I'm guessing makes me a poser. 

All of this is about to change though, because this fucking release just gave this guy a huge blip on my hip-hop radar. Run the Jewels is a two-headed musical beast comprising El-P and Killer Mike, who look like they wanted to make a fun, laid-back hip-hop album together and ended up with this amazing fucking thing that blew me over. I've only been listening to it non-stop for the past three days and I'm still in that phase where I'm just enjoying the flow of the words and the beats, so I'm afraid I haven't really delved that deep into the lyrics. But the vocal deliveries of these two MCs are nothing short of flawless, with Killer Mike dropping rhymes in a pissed off, menacing tone, while El-P comes in with his signature smooth delivery, sounding tight as fuck. 

Production duties are handled entirely by El-P and everything sounds, simply put, amazing. The Brooklyn native makes full use of his musical arsenal and conjures some truly memorable beats, full of schizoid synths, distorted bass lines, paranoid minor chord drones, unsettling drum patterns and various other bits and pieces of electronic noises. It's a massive sounding album, meant to be played loud, with the bass thumping and the windows rattling. Which is precisely what I've been doing with it. 

Oh, and luckily for you dorks, they released the album for free on Soundcloud, instead of selling it like normal people and making a fuckton of money off of it, because it's really fucking good. I'm gonna chalk Run the Jewels down as my #1 musical surprise of 2013, because this thing sank its teeth so deep in me it's scratching on bones. You NEED to hear this.