Tag Archive for 'review'
Don’t get it twisted - 808s & Heartbreak is NOT a hip hop album. It’s a VnB album (that stands for “vocoder and blues” for those of you keeping score at home).
Seriously, the first two tracks - Say You Will and Welcome to Heartbreak - are not even close to anything known as hip hop. Instead, Kayne sings RnB vocals drenched in vocoder and auto-tune.
The third track, Heartless, features some sort-of-rapping. But that sort-of-rapping sort of sucks, so it’s pretty irrelevant. Getting back to hardcore VnB on the fourth track, Amazing, Kanye sings some more while Young Jeezy stops by to stink up the place.
Next up is Love Lockdown, the first single off the disc. It’s a combo of Jesus Walks drums, poorly utilized Daft Punk vocal effects, and a song structure straight out of Tainted Love. Basically, it sounds like shit.
The following track, Paranoid, is a step in the right direction. The melody is strong and the song has a powerful forward movement. Kanye actually spits some rhymes here, but they’re nothing insightful or infectious. This song is by far the best thing on 808s and Heartbreak.
Props to Kanye for naming the seventh track RoboCop. Too bad the song blows. Next up is Street Lights, which sucks so let’s just breeze past that one. Actually, come to think of it, Bad News sounds like poop too so let’s keep it moving.
This takes us to track 10, See You in My Nightmares. Now that’s a nice way to sum up this album: I’ll probably have nightmares about it. Hell, even Lil Wanye can’t save this song.
Coldest Winter isn’t as awful as its predecessors, but I still didn’t enjoy it. At this point, I’m pretty sure that Kanye’s next project will be a duet album with Annie Lennox.
The “bonus track” is a horrid live freestyle called Pinocchio Story. It’s full of people screaming in the background. At first, you might think they’re screaming out of joy. But by the end of track, it’s 100% obvious that they’re screaming in pain. They’ve just been subjected to entire concert of this crap. I would be screaming too.
I read Ross Campbell’s Wet Moon 4: Drowned in Evil graphic novel last week in preparation for our podcast interview airing on December 2, 2008. Here’s the text message I sent to Ross when I was done:
Finished wet moon 4. Loved unknown, the cleo & mara thing, and especially the ending.
For good measure, here’s an interview with Ross on Comic Book Resources about Water Baby and Wet Moon 4. And for extra awesome measure, here are the AudioShocker’s most recent podcast interviews with Ross, one about Water Baby and the other about Wet Moon 4.
I’m not really familiar with Skillz. According to Wikipedia he’s been active for a while as an artist and ghostwriter. I first found out about him via NothingButEverything. I watched the video for Be Alright and I was hooked. I sent the link to Nick and he felt it too, ‘decent feel good track’. It was so laid back that when I got home I decided to peep the whole album, Million Dollar Backpack.
The album features a ton of producers including DJ Jazzy Jeff and ?uestlove. Black Thought, Common, and Freeway are the only named guests.
My favorite cuts:
So Far So Good - Reminds me of a Slum Village cut.
Sick - Great brag track. I dig the beat and all the references. This would be good for a dance battle.
He Don’t Own Me - What is it with handdrums? They are so hot right now!
My Phone - Another name dropping brag track like ‘Sick’, but about girls. Builds up to a great ending.
Hold Tight - The horns do it for me and the rhymes are tight.
Be Alright - Like I said, it’s smooth and upbeat.
Preachin To The Choir - Remember story tracks? This is a rare treat these days.
The Bottom Line: The album has some solid tracks. But as LeVar Burton would say, you don’t have to take my word for it.
This post was supposed to go up yesterday, so sorry about the lateness. Actually, it was supposed to go up a week before yesterday, before the second episode of Fringe aired, but that clearly didn’t happen. I told myself that I didn’t feel like writing was because I was sick. When I got better, I said that I wanted to give it an episode past the pilot before judging it. The fact is, however, that I just didn’t feel like it. It’s not that the show is so very terrible or that it’s too brilliant to discuss; it’s neither. It’s just so mediocre.
We’ve seen a lot of shows like this: a wide-eyed naïf joins a shadowy organization committed to uncovering even shadowier plots and hoping to strike a blow at the yet shadowier entity that lurks behind it all. The mystery of the week is solved and understood within the episode, but our heroine still isn’t entirely sure of for whom she’s really working. Neither does she suspect that the multinational corporation she’s been consulting is really totally evil, although every audience member came to that realization half an hour into the pilot.
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