Kendrick Lamar's 'untitled unmastered.': Too good to remain unheard

I'm as happy as any other right-thinking music fan that Kendrick Lamar surprise released an eight song set of new music on Thursday night. And if the Compton rapper who won 5 Grammys for his 2015 opus To Pimp A Butterfly last month wants to call it untitled unmastered. (Interscope / Aftermath / Top Dawg *** 1/2) to underscore the immediacy of the project and its autonomy from the traditional album cycle, hey, those are his druthers.

But can we get some song titles up in here?  Do I really have to refer to the sixth song as "Untitled 6" or "6.30.2014." Couldn't have been called, for instance, "I Can't Explain," which are the words repeated in its soulful Funkadelic-flavored hook, just to make word-of-mouth conversation a little less unwieldy? C'mon, Kendrick!

In all seriousness, untitled unmastered. is a welcome addition to the Lamar ouevre, and it's clear that its generic branding aims to make sure we don't mistake it for a full fledged Butterfly follow-up. Only one track on the dense, jazzy, experimental retro futuristic set comes with a 2016 creation date, and none are identified as being from last year.  

Clearly these were songs recorded for the Butterfly sessions, and the good news is that - with the exception of "Untitled 7 - 2014-2016," which a loose, acoustic, screwing-around-in-the-studio jam about oral sex, among other things - they don't feel the least bit like tossed-off outtakes.

Many tracks are a bit less polished as might be expected from as meticulous a craftsman as Lamar. But there's still  high seriousness and probing self examination at work, as on the opening track - which features contributions from Philadelphia players including producer Ritz Reynolds, drummer Joe Baldacci and keyboard player Dominic Angelella - in which he references  the Book of Revelation in expressing frustration with his slow progress on the road to spiritual redemption: "I guess I'm running in place trying to make it to church."

untitled employs Butterfly players like the bassist Thundercat and female vocalist SZA, and it everywhere maintains the intense, extremely personal conversation Lamar carried on with himself about race, identity and America that flowed through that album, which ran approximately twice as long as the new releases 33 minutes.

Lamar performed many of these songs in various TV appearances over the past year, and after rapping previously unheard verses during the Grammy award last month, Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James tweeted at Lamar and Top Dawg executive Anthony Tiffith pleading "you have to release those untitled tracks asap!!!" Whether that was ultimately the reason that Lamar unleashed the songs on untitled unmastered. last week or not, he certainly had a compelling reason to do so: They're too good to remain unheard.

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