Month: August 2017

I’ve been sitting on a couple projects for a while now and before they’re too far gone with the recent influx of new albums I’m going to do a couple quick hits.

21 Savage – Issa Album

Thought it was decent, I liked Savage Mode from 2016 more. The only songs I’m still listening to a little over a month later (the album came out July 7th and leaked a few days beforehand) are Bank Account, linked above, and Bad Business. The whole Issa thing is kinda played out in my mind, but there are a couple tracks that bump on this album. I’d say its worth a listen.

Tyler, the Creator – Scum Fuck, Flower Boy

This album was great. Tyler has come a long way since Bastard. This album is still Tyler doing his thing but you get the sense that he is not the same kid he used to be, maturing from a lot of the goofiness and edginess of his previous projects. There are still a ton of Tyler moments, where he does provocative shit just to “get the people going”, but overall very solid album. Among topics such as loneliness and stardom, Tyler also discusses his sexuality quite a bit. Even if you aren’t a Tyler, the Creator fan I would still encourage you to check this project out. Check out his remix to Jay Z’s 4:44 below, which was released a few weeks after the album.

 

Meek Mill – Wins & Losses

Solid release by Meek Mill, there are a bunch of hard hitting tracks on this album. Glow Up (linked above), Issues, Fuck That Check Up, and Connect the Dots are some of the highlights, all of them have high energy and dope beats. Connect the Dots is hard as fuck, featuring Rick Ross and Yo Gotti. If you’ve been a fan of any MMG releases in the past you should give this a listen, otherwise you’ll probably just hear the highlights on the radio. Meek Mill doesn’t expand or grow much as an artist here, there is a lot of redundancy and I have to say I was expecting more from this album as a postmortem of his marriage to Nicki Minaj and the Drake beef of 2015.

 

Amine – Good For You

Good For You is a solid debut studio album from Amine, the 23 year old XXL Freshmen from Portland, Oregon. Amine is incredibly versatile on the album and preforms well both singing and rapping, the album is cohesive with an ebb and flow of energy, and it had a high charting leading single which I am sure everyone has heard 100 times by now (Caroline). I thought Sundays, Blinds, and Wedding Crashers were among the standouts. His rapping style sometimes reminded of Mac Miller, both in flow/delivery but also in the energy behind it. Amine does a good job of capturing that “just finished high school” youthful sound, although he is 23. This album is worth listening to and I am excited to see where Amine’s career goes from here.

Mr. Muthafuckin eXquire –  Brainiac

Mr. Muthafucking eXquire is an enigma, sporadically releasing music without doing much, if any, promotion. I listened to 2013’s Kismet, which I thought was a great release, and then didn’t hear anything from him again until I heard that his new EP Brainiac had dropped. Brainiac is short, only 6 songs in total. The intro is depressing song called “Lost in the Sauce”, about addiction and slipping into old patterns. At the end of the track there is a funny skit where eXquire has a conversation with his brain, akin to the old Tyler, the Creator therapy sessions skits. While eXquire can be a bit eccentric, such as in the brain conversation skit, I find that he also has a way of sounding wise and providing commentary, be it on the rap game, race, or the everyday struggle. Standout tracks for me would be 40z @ the Met Gala and Bebop and Rocksteady, linked below.

Damn its been a whole month since I posted an update, life and laziness has been getting the better of me lately. I’ve been wanting to do an update centered around Lil Peep for a while and now that his debut official release has come out it seems as good a time as any. Let me start off saying that Lil Peep is not for everyone. Some have described his music as “emo rap” and he has the image to go along with it.

Lil Peep started his career after dropping out of high school in 2015. He’s originally from Long Island, NY, but is now out in LA, California. He is a quintessential “SoundCloud Rapper”, generating a buzz almost exclusively via the internet without releasing cohesive projects. He had some success with Hellboy in late 2016, though certain internet reviewers were not impressed by it. He has since released many loosie tracks on Youtube and SoundCloud, culminating in the release of Benz Truck prior to his debut EP, Come Over When You’re Sober (Part 1).

I first stumbled across Lil Peep on Youtube by finding the above video. I liked the melancholy tone along with the “SadBoy-esque”/vaporwave aesthetic, I also liked his delivery. From there I found Your Eyes, White Wine, and Hellboy, all of which are worth checking out if you’re still with me. Lil Peep continues to change his image drastically, growing out his hair, dying it pink, most recently shaving his head, and continuing to accumulate tons of tattoos on his body and face. His lyrical content primarily revolves around drug use, his love life, and depression.  Some have tried to put him in a genre of “alternative rap”, others have called him “emo rap” as stated above. Lil Peep in my mind is definitively hip hop, although many of his songs defy rigid genre lines especially with his heavy use of rock and punk guitar samples.

Come Over When You’re Sober (Part 1) has finally come out on Apple music and Spotify, Peep’s first official release. Disappointingly, it is only 24 minutes long and made up by 7 songs, two of which (Benz Truck and The Brightside) came out beforehand. The album was supposed to come out August 11th, was pushed back to September, leaked on the internet and finally was released yesterday. The opener is Benz Truck, which is one of my favorite Lil Peep songs and I wish the rest of the album sounded more like it. Most of the other songs are slower and more introspective, U Said and The Brightside are my other two favorites. I love the beat/song switch in U Said and The Brightside probably has the best beat on the album outside of Benz Truck. Overall I thought this album was a let down, although I do still think Lil Peep has a ton of room to grow and is ultimately headed for success, be it in the mainstream or underground. Much of this album blends together into an angsty 20 minutes and before you know it its over. Hopefully we will see a Part 2 with a longer track listing and a few hits soon.