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Album Reviews Music

Brother Ali – Us

September 28, 2009 – 12:32 pm

So I quickly mentioned this the other day in my post about some upcoming albums in 2009 and I have to say that since I’ve had a chance to listen to the whole thing, this is just a stellar effort.

I was grossly underwhelmed by the Rope-a-Dope and by The Undisputed Truth, but Us’ target=_blank>Us is one of the best albums I’ve copped in a good while.

Unlike his previous efforts, this is not one that is overtly political.  Far shy of Uncle Sam Goddamn, this album has a lot more soul and melody than anything since Shadows on the Sun. 

Take Us (the track) for example.  It was featured in my last post, but it is soulful and haunting in a way that shocked me.  It starts off sounding almost like spoken word, and his phrasing is poetic.  There’s no hook, just solid bars and words that actually sound like he meant something.

Slippin Away is grittier and is more traditional Ali.  He’s telling a story of losing control and trying to deal with a childhood that was just downright oppressive.  It’s a story we’ve heard a lot of times, trying to make your way and resist the crazy peer pressure flying his way.

The Travelers is a bit surprising, coming from a white fellow.  It’s a matter-of-fact approach to telling the story of slavery.  It’s one part memorial and one part documentary, and comes across as both honest and not at all trite.  At least in my impression.  It’s totally possible that you may have another opinion.

Travis Lupick of Straight.com makes a pretty interesting observation when he says: “Us is a concept album that gives the impression its songs were inspired by the lives of a thousand real people. Hence the record’s name. It’s a portrait of America that is told with an amazing level of empathy. And it sounds damn good. Entirely produced by Atmosphere’s Ant, Us includes tracks that could almost find their way onto the radio, but overall, remains a jazz-infused product of the underground.”

I like the phrasing of that, but y’all will have to check it out to decide just how hyperbolic he’s being.  Frankly, I love this album and encourage you all to go find it.

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4080Review: K’naan – Troubadour

March 30, 2009 – 7:30 am

knaan300K’Naan,the Somali-born Canadian rapper, is making huge waves right now.  With the release of his sophmore album, Troubadour, he is pretty much on top of the world.  Pitchfork loves him.  Canada loves him.  In fact, most people are  already starting to say he’s just been shaming the other rappers in the world today.

We here at 4080 have loved his breakout album, The Dusty Foot Philosopher,  but I must admit I’m a bit torn on this new effort.  He is, without a doubt, one of the realest emcees around at this point.  He literally grew up in Mogadishu and fled during the first civil war back in the early 1990s.  His mom eventually brought him to settle in Toronto, where he learned to speak English.  In fact, his love for hip hop and the melody behind the rhymes was a prime motivator for him to learn the language.  Why? So he could rap.  That’s right.  He basically learned English just so he could spit rhymes.

NPR has done some pretty good coverage of K’Naan, and this is perhaps one of my favourite quotes.  Move over 50 Cent, I think this one is aimed squarely at you.

K’Naan could not be mistaken for an American rapper: For one thing, he has a kind of vintage Bohemian look. He says he doesn’t think that American rap has much credibility, because even the toughest American neighborhoods aren’t nearly as dangerous as Mogadishu.

“Where rocket-propelled grenades are fired around you on a daily … a guy bragging on TV talking about how gangster he is?” K’Naan says. “For us, it’s more a source of entertainment. It’s more like a comedy or something we watch. Say, ‘Oh wow, that’s kind of cute of American gangsters.’ But it isn’t hardcore, it isn’t that bad. Let’s get things in perspective, you know?”

If you want to get a sense of him, you can stream some K’naan tracks from his MySpace, or you can download the live show off CBC Radio 3 here.

On a track-by-track basis, I sadly must say that I think The Dusty Foot takes the crown.  Troubadour has it’s strong moments, including the moving tracks Waving Flag and Fatima.  But when you juxtapose this with the crime that is the re-recording of If Rap Gets Jealous and the sheer abomination that is T.I.A., the album starts to lose lustre. 

Troubadour features some extremely strong guest stars, but for the most part I feel like their talents are wasted.  Chubb Rock makes a triumphant return on ABC’s, which is one of the stronger pieces on this record.  However, Mos Def and Chali 2na seem to fly under the radar on America.  It’s a song that I assumed I would like, seeing as three dope rappers were combining.  I felt a Captain Planet moment, that with their powers combined I would witness greatness.  Instead, I can only say that it was creative.  Truly, K’naan did push the enveope a little bit and America is no exception.  He raps in Somali, and makes this track sound completely different than you probably expected.

Still, no matter what  small criticisms I can aim at him, K’naan is still truly pushing the limits.  He’s expanding people’s understanding of what hip hop is.

WPvideo 1.10

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Universal Mind Control reviewed – and the results are not good

December 7, 2008 – 9:22 am

Despite our hype, it doesn’t look like Common’s Universal Mind Control is getting too much love in the hip hop community.  That doesn’t mean it’s not a commercial success for Common. In case you haven’t seen it, Common and Afrika Bambaataa have a little TV spot for Microsoft’s Zune media player.

All tangents aside, I’ve gotta say I just can’t get excited about this album. And the readers over at Check the Rhime seem to agree with me.  Some of the comments are reproduced below:

ans says: December 2nd, 2008 at 4:14 pm

Man, coming from Common, this album is garbage. “I be on top of her like a philosopher.” Honestly…

I gotta be honest and say that Common trying to come hard just plain doesn’t work.  In Announcement, he actually says “When it comes to hip hop it’s just me and my bitch.”  That is not a lyric I expect from Common, and it pretty much dissapoints me.

Just compare this, a verse from Announcement:

representen shaw town to the fullest
raps are bullets
see those rappers they be dunken
when comm be bucken in the kitchen f**ken
on the sink got my momma a mink
common is the link
thought the game was extinct

And there’s always this little gem from the same track, which I guess is targeting people like me who think he’s still cerebral:

Brah’s say are you a philosopher?/Yeah, yeah, I’ll philosopha on top of ya.

Or this, from The Sixth Sense, a killer track from a while ago:

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want millions
More than money saved, I wanna save children
Dealing with alcoholism and afrocentricity
A complex man drawn off of simplicity
Reality is frisking me
This industry will make you lose intensity
The Common Sense in me remembers the basement
I’m Morpheus in this hip-hop Matrix, exposing fake shit

That’s like Walt Whitman sitting down and writing a Harlequin romance novel.  Just a complete and total sellout.   If you haven’t had a chance to hear much of the album, here’s Announcement.

The Chicago Tribune is clearly on my side in this fight too.  In fact, they take it a step further:

Designed as a feel-good summer album, its release was delayed for several months because of the rapper’s burgeoning Hollywood career. Arriving on the doorstep of winter, its tone isn’t just out of step with the season, but with the unprecedented sense of possibility in the African-American community.

The Chicago Sun-Times calls this album pandering.  They talk about how Common’s always wanted to move units and gets fed up being pigeonholed as a backpack rapper.  Here’s my favourite quote:

As superstar producers the Neptunes deliver some of their weakest, most cliched and most phoned-in tracks ever — heavy on the generic techno thumps, synth burbles and played-out vocoder backing vocals — one of hip-hop’s most accomplished freestylers drops one leaden rap after another. Most are about sex, although there also are a couple of uncharacteristic “ain’t I great” boast-fests via “Gladiator” and “What a World.”

Even other newspapers are getting in on the action.  At least one has picked up on the fact that this album, and Common’s general trend towards the mainstream may be partly due to Jay-Z’s backhanded compliment from a few years ago.   On the Black Album’s Moment of Clarity, Hova rapped: ‘If skills sold, truth be told, I’d probably be / lyrically, Talib Kweli / Truthfully, I wanna rhyme like Common Sense / But I did five mil/ I ain’t been rhymin’ like Common since”.  And I guess this was the world’s most successful diss.  Not only did it make Talib fall off, but it’s gotten Common all crazy as well.  Money is power, I guess.

Even though he’s gotten bitchslapped by his own hometown papers, the folks over at Vibes and Stuff have posted a full review of the album that’s quite positive.  In fact, they state that it’s a “necessary departure” from Common’s last two albums.  Frankly, I disagree.  Be and Finding Forever both had heavily commercial aspects to them, and nececssarily got the Kanye pop flavour as well.  This let them cross over into mainstream appeal but Common still kept his lyrics tight and didn’t have to make tracks that sounded like someone having a seizure on a midi keyboard.

Now I’m not even saying that Common should only be restricted to making deep tracks, I get that club bangers have a place in hip hop and everyone’s entitled to a little artistic freedom.  He shouldn’t be pigeonholed.  However, I think there’s a big difference between making a club track and making a whole club album when you’re reputation is built on being a lyracist.  And Rolling Stone gave it 3/5 stars, so I guess they’re on board.

The worst part is that I know he still has it in him.  Changes, the one old-style track on the album is a anthem for Obama and not a bad track by any means.  it’s more traditional Common, which I obviously like, but more importantly it just shows some thought and effort.  The rest just sounds hastily cobbled together off of internet keystyles.

If you need any more proof, the final nail in this album’s tiny plastic coffin has to be the god-awful Sex 4 Sugar which is an awkward, cornball track and an embarassment to anyone involved in it.

Oh Common Sense, where art thou?

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Album Reviews Music

Pete Philly and Perquisite have the most slept on album of the year

September 6, 2008 – 5:37 am

The title of this post says it all.  2007′s Mystery Repeats by Pete Philly and Perquisite is definitely one of the best album’s you’ve never listened to.  The Dutch hip hop duo is getting some mad underground love, even having done a collabo with sometimes-great emcee Talib Kweli.

Mystery Repeats (the single, not the album) has made it’s way up the Dutch charts and is enjoying some major airplay.  If you head over to their Myspace page you can see they’re touring quite a bit too.  You European readers may have a chance to see them live!

This album is straight up all over the place.  A combo of jazz and breakbeats with some weird electro influences on a couple of tracks.  Clap Kick Flow will take you back to the old days.  A mellow beat and harmony layered with what can only be described as a vocal hand clap.  Seriously, it’s overstimulation in a good way.

Just to highlight the diversity, we’ve shown you a couple of tracks below.

For a super upbeat track, here’s Womb to Tomb. Personally, there’s something about the verse around 1:50 of this song that I love.

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Here’s Believer.  This is by far the jazziest song on the album and, in my opinion, one of the dopest.

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And yes, the album is available on iTunes and some of their older albums are available on Amazon.  Mindstate, their first album, even got tons of love from Epitaph Records.  Also, Remindstate (the remixed version of Mindstate) got some special treatment from our new boy Arts the Beatdoctor.

No joke.  Find this album, any way you can.  It’s worth it.

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4080Records Reviews: The Jazz Liberatorz

August 20, 2008 – 3:29 am

In what is apparently one of the sleeper hip hop/jazz albums to hit your shelves in ages, The Jazz Liberatorz is a fantastic performance.

Insanely dope jazz beats and surprisingly erudite rhymes from each and every performer make this something to desperately get your hands on.

Featuring a pretty stellar cast of emcees, everyone from J. Sands of the Lone Catalysts to Buckshot, J. Live, and Sadat X brings their best performances.  I’ve heard a lot of these emcees put out less than stellar tracks in the past, but this is by no means even close to that.

From the sounds of it, the Jazz Liberatorz are three dope beatmakers from France who somehow assembled an all-star cast of underground talent to put together a nearly flawless album.  DJ Damage, Dusty and Madhi (the Jazz Liberatorz) have also included some dope songstresses to add a little flavour to the album, so there’s a little something for everyone.

If you want, you can stream a lot of the album from the MySpace link at the top of this post.

Here’s Ease My Mind, f. Tre Hardson, Fat Lip and Omni.

You can buy this album off iTunes for $10, and it’s absolutely worth it.

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Album Reviews Music

DL Incognito is not as great as I hoped

June 8, 2008 – 7:04 pm

Based on the strength of Spit Forever II, I had high hopes for DL Incognito‘s new album, Organic Music for a Digital World.

While my hopes weren’t entirely dashed, I was left…unmoved.  Okayplayer, a website that I actually tend to trust, had really high praise for the album.  Hell,  they went so far as to say that “DL Incognito’s third release, Organic Music for a Digital World is a great display of hip-hop as some of its finest moments—both producing and lyrically. DL Incognito’s lyricism is only matched by his backdrop of beats; the two (lyrics and beats) seem to be intertwined and play off of each other, feeding off of the others energy to create a fugue-like structure throughout the album.”

I don’t ENTIRELY disagree, I just don’t think it’s as good as I had hoped.  I think, in the end, Okayplayer agrees with me.  They say that “However, this record sounds very similar to a Jay-Z album for the majority of the album. It is the brief minority of the time that DL Incognito works his magic and shows that he can provide a new and unique sound.” Maybe that’s just it.  I think I know that DL is a better artist than what he showcased on this album.  It’s a solid B effort.  It’s like what teachers say to all the middle school kids.  We know he has the potential, he just didn’t let it shine through this time. 

There’s just something lacking from this album.  I still think it’s a pretty solid showing, and is likely to get loads of radio play.  For Canadian hip hop, that’s a huge thing, of course.  Any love is good.  But I just don’t want him to get too sidetracked looking for that radio play.  Instead, he should stick to making killer hip hop.

Here, just try to compare these tracks:
Spit Forever II (from his old album, a Sample and a Drum Machine)

Live in my Element (from his new album, Organic Music For A Digital World)

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Album Reviews Music

Slum Village – Fan-Tas-Tic Vol. 1 (1997)

May 25, 2008 – 10:40 pm

It’s been a minute since we’ve posted any music on 4080, so I figured it was time to upload some auditory dopeness. And Fan-Tas-Tic Vol. 1 fits that bill perfectly.

Recorded in 1996 and 1997, Fan-Tas-Tic Vol. 1 is Slum Village’s debut album. Produced by J Dilla and recorded entirely in his home studio, the album was leaked as a bootleg in 1997. It became an instant classic among underground heads in Detroit and, later, across the world. In fact, according to Wikipedia, at one point copies of Fan-Tas-Tic were fetching $50 apiece. Still, despite its popularily, the album wasn’t officially released until 2005.

Musically, the album is notable for several reasons. First, most of its 25 songs are no more than a minute or two long, perhaps because Fan-Tas-Tic was intended to be a demo. Second, J Dilla’s consistent use of heavily filtered jazz and soul samples and intricate bass lines (seriously – every beat is dope, but they start to blend together after a while) was unique at the time, meaning the album sounds unike most mid- to late-’90s hip-hop. Third, T3 and Baatin – the group’s two mcs - transcend underground convention by rapping as much about women and money as about anything else. Their verbal back-and-forth will also remind you of Golden Age duos like Q-Tip and Phife or EPMD.

Slum Village – Fan-Tas-Tic Vol. 1 (Counterflow, 1997)

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Binary Star – Masters of the Universe (2000)

April 27, 2008 – 4:02 pm

Binary Star was formed in 1998 when rappers One Be Lo and Senim Silla met while serving time in a Michigan prison. After their release the duo recorded, mixed and mastered an album called Waterworld on a paltry $500 budget (apparently all of the album’s verses were recorded in a single take).

Although only 1,000 copies were made available, the album gained a significant underground following and in 2000 Binary Star released a remixed, rearranged version of Waterworld called Masters of the Universe. It went on to sell 20,000 copies and is widely regarded as one of the finest indy hip-hop albums released in the last decade or so.

Indeed, on Masters Binary Star come correct with dope beats and ill rhymes. Produced largely by One Be Lo and a beat maker from Michigan called Decompoze, the album’s beats are mostly up-tempo, boom-bap joints built around funky soul samples (“Slang Blade,” “Binary Shuffle” and “Honest Expression”) and jazzy piano loops (“Indy 500″ and “New Hip Hop”). Several of the tracks also begin with samples lifted from martial arts movies – an obvious nod to the Wu-Tang Clan that works suprisingly well given how often it has been copied by other cats.

Lyrically, One Be Lo and Senim Silla are virtually without peer. Profoundly poetic, the duo’s rhymes are characterized by intricate wordplay, subtlety, humour and a deep understanding of poetic device. Moreover, both rappers posses incredible flows and deliver their rhymes with a cadence that is near perfect. To better understand what I mean, check out some of my favourite tracks below:

Binary Star – Honest Expression (Masters of the Universe, 2000)

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Binary Star – Slang Blade (Masters of the Universe, 2000)

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Binary Star – New Hip Hop (Masters of the Universe, 2000)

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Download the album here, then buy it here (or at your local independent record store) and support dope hip-hop!

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Album Reviews Music

EPMD – Strictly Business (1988)

April 16, 2008 – 1:46 pm

EPMD – Strictly Business (Priority/EMI, 1988)

If you don’t like Strictly Business, you don’t like hip-hop. It’s that simple. Released in 1988 by EPMD (Erick and Parrish Making Dollars), Strictly Business is a straight classic, its legendary status forever preserved thanks to the 5 Mics it received from the Source. Created in an era before producers were constrained by the need to clear samples, the album’s sound is best described as a messy collage of classic funk loops (think Kool & The Gang, The J.B.’s, Zapp Band etc.) and up-tempo, recognizable breaks (Mountain’s “Long Red” is used at least twice). Among Strictly Business’ best tracks are “You Gots To Chill,” “It’s My Thing” and “I’m Housin’,” on which EPMD samples Aretha Franklin’s “Rock Steady” to deadly effect. Check it out:

Aretha Franklin – Rock Steady (Young, Gifted and Black, 1971)

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EPMD – I’m Housin’ (Strictly Business, 1988)

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In addition to their irresistible beats (your head will be nodding the whole time), Erick and Parrish come correct on the mic as well. Delivering their rhymes with a monotonous flow that would make Guru jealous, the two mcs trade verses that, when first heard, were years ahead of their time and elevated EPMD to hip-hop greatness.

 

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The Chicharones – When Pigs Fly (2005)

March 31, 2008 – 2:38 pm

The Chicharones - When Pigs Fly

The Chicharones – When Pigs Fly (2005)

Mixing astute, introspective rhymes with irony and self-deprecating humour, the Chicharones (aka Vancouver’s Josh Martinez and the Oldominion crew’s Sleep) are a talented, yet underrated duo. On When Pigs Fly, their first full-length album, the Chicharones combine dope beats and dope rhymes (what more do y’all want?) into “a tuneful and catchy piece of mature hip-hop.” Martinez and Sleep’s verbal back-and-forth on tracks like “Surf Rock” will remind you of Golden Age mc duos like Tribe and EPMD, while more serious fare such as “Can’t Find The Time” while have you nodding your head and listening closely to their melodic rhymes.

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