mardi 8 Jan 2008, 12h47m
The Conscious Daughters - random downloads
Rating: 2/4 Kept: 100%
The name sounded promising and the songs were free downloads, so as part of my recent quest for awesome female emcees I checked them out. Not for me; YMMV. Their voices were a little annoying and so were the lyrics.
Black Elephant – Eat This Album
Rating: 2.59/5 Kept: 100%
Very mixed review, here. I bought the album because someone had given me a few tracks – I Know and one other – that I liked a lot. And I kept almost liking a lot of the tracks here, too – I'd get halfway through and rate it a four and then suddenly there would be pimpin' and hos and I would re-rate it down. I ended up with a high standard deviation that doesn't show in the average; most of the album was rated "2" which for me is "I didn't totally hate it, but I'll probably never listen to it again." But three songs (Beautiful Minds, The Joint, Invitation to a Beheading) went into high rotation. They sound good, with a hard-edged but catchy beats that make their stuff engaging, and I like it that they're a mixed group of male and female emcees, but the lyrics just kept being a little off for me. This album is also all held together with culinary sound bites and metaphor, which felt really strained in some places; they would have done better to leave that out and just let each bit of the album be what it was.
Dance Hall Crashers - Lockjaw
Rating: 3.28/5 Kept: 100%
Oh, my God, whee. I didn't know what to expect – I heard a few songs I liked on last.fm and stuck them on my "to check out" list ages ago, and had forgotten everything about them. But they are…it's like the Bangles and the Donnas got together and made a ska album. Seriously, it's like poppy 80's chick garage ska, which, what. And yet! Fun!
Sadly, ska seems to negate the possibility of really good hooks, somehow. Something about the structure of it? Anyway, these songs kept approaching catchy and then falling short, musically, although the lyrics were awesome enough that sometimes they had choruses that I liked a lot anyway. They were still really enjoyable and upbeat, though, and I'm glad I discovered this group.
Mos Def – Black on Both Sides
Rating: 3.41/5 Kept: 94%
I like Mos Def. I like his voice, and the lazy way he talks, and the sort of drag it has when he raps, like he's pulling his voice after him through the words, but he's never off-beat. I like his wordplay, too. Also I think he is handsome and a good actor, but that is neither here nor there. I loved Black Star, and I got solo albums from both Mos Def and Talib Kweli at the same time as I got that album. While I still think that they are possibly a more amazing force for good together than apart, I can see that Mos Def is the essential source of my fascination. I just…I like him, I dunno why.
Ozomatli – Ozomatli
Rating: 3.5/5 Kept: 100%
So when I got Don't Mess with the Dragon and totally fell in love with it, I immediately ran out and bought two more albums. These are the ones with the highest Amazon ratings, and I'd seen the fans saying that Don't Mess With the Dragon was more mainstream, so I wasn't sure what to expect. It turns out that these two albums are just way way way more Latino. Don't Mess With the Dragon is about half English and there's even a bit of Mandarin Chinese in the title track, and a much wider range of musical styles. Ozomatli is more like … I mean, I love it, don't get me wrong, but I love it the way I love Los Superseven, which is, when I want to listen to some really fucking awesome Latino-blend American-influenced music, that's where I go. There's still a fair bit of hip hop to it, and quite a bit in English, but it just felt very different.
Ozomatli – Street Signs
Rating: 3.23/5, Kept: 92%
This felt bouncier to me, more funky than the eponymous album – I'm not sure why the overall ratings are lower, except that I didn't keep one track from this one (an instrumental) and that always brings down overall ratings. Fun hooks and upbeat message; I liked tracks like Who Discovered America, Saturday Night, and Nadie Te Tira a lot more than slower and more traditional stuff like Cuando Canto, but the rapping was good, the music was mostly quite danceable (it made me wish that I knew salsa or any kind of latin dance at various points) and I think it will grow on me even more over time. Only caveat – some of the songs are just a leetle too long; a danger of having a fun hook is that if you repeat it over and over during a four or five minute song, people will grow a little tired of it.
Pumpkin – Le Vernissage
Rating: 2.25/5 Kept: 62%
The advantage of listening to hip hop in other languages is that you really can't tell if they're fucking up the meter and flow at all, because you can't tell what it ought to sound like in the first place. Also, if they're talking about bitches and hos and pimpin', I can't tell, because I don't speak French. Ignorance is, occasionally, actually as blissful as rumored.
I like all the French hip-hop I've heard so far, and I was reading an article yesterday about Marseillaise hip-hop that made it sound fairly interesting, so I'll be checking that out. There's something about French, particularly, that softens out some of the harshness of hip hop and makes it more liquid, though I'd actually be curious to hear what Pumpkin sounds like rapping in her native Spanish.
In any case, I wasn't blown away, but I wasn't put off, either; I'm desperate enough in my search for female emcees that I like that I'm calling this one a win, though there were very few outstanding tracks on the whole. Also, free, so.
Talib Kweli – Reflection Eternal
Rating: 2.85/5 Kept: 90%
It turns out that I do not love the Kweli. I thought I might. I tried. The reviews are all amazing. I love Black Star. Perhaps there is something I just don't get, here – you can see from my charts that I've listened to this whole damn album over and over, trying to get it, but my attention kept wandering so badly I couldn't even get it all rated until just now.
I feel a little like a Philistine, but you know, I like what I like. I don't like Rush, either, and rumor has it that they are a technically brilliant set of musicians. Just, not my thing. I didn't not like it, I was just profoundly indifferent.
The Killers – Hot Fuss
Rating: 3.54/5 Kept: 100%
I bought this album to write a story about it for a friend, actually. Someone had said that they thought of it as a concept album that told a coherent story about the relationships between three people, and she said she'd like to see a story about that. I don't know that I would have seen it if I hadn't been looking for it, but I wrote the story, and it turned out well enough, and my friend liked it, so, yay.
The album – I'm not sure if I like it because I like it, or if I like it because now it is this whole story in my head and I have listened to it over and over and over! There are some songs that are really not interesting to me – Andy, You're a Star, and Jenny Was a Friend of Mine – and others that I love and could listen to on repeat forever (Somebody Told Me, All These Things That I've Done). Uneven, in that sense, but overall I liked it much more than I usually like music that sounds like this – my partner pointed out to me that it sounds a lot (a LOT) like the Cure, and I was only ever a passing Cure fan. Maybe if I discovered the Cure tomorrow, I'd be way more into them – when and how I first find things makes so much difference in whether or not they really hook me.
Urban Thermo Dynamics – Manifest Destiny
Rating: 2.57/5 Kept: 92%
This sounds like Mos Def and a couple of friends in the studio having fun more than it sounds like a serious album to me, for some reason. I like Ces's voice, I like them all together, but much of it didn't grab me. The remixes didn't add anything, and while there are some fun tracks (I loved World Wide and Moon in Cancer) there were others that left me pretty cold.