(re-posted from Facebook, edited)
Completed New Music Week 3 through Tidal.
Each Friday release day, I’m going to download 5 albums with the only criteria being name recognition or the best pieces of cover art and review them. These are the releases of 1/18. This marks the first week of the year with a robust selection to choose from too.
- Album: Future Hndrxx Presents: The Wizrd
- Previous Knowledge: Moderate, having listed to the last two releases in full.
- Chosen: Name recognition
- Review: I’m really, really, really trying to find something in the trap era that I really like but holy shit this is hard. This is 62 minutes of the same fucking 808 beat and the same fucking mumbled vocals that’s on all his releases. It’s an hour of absolutely nothing remotely new, making it virtually useless. The only thing I give him credit for is that unlike almost every rap album, there are only a handful of other rappers on this disc, so he actually performed on 90% of his own record. Wait, maybe that’s a bad thing.
- Rating: 3/10
- Album: Fever 333 – Strength in Numb333rs
- Previous Knowledge: Heard their song “Burn It” on Sirius Hits 1 no more than two weeks ago and that’s it.
- Chosen: Name recognition
- Review: Fever 333 is being hailed as a metalcore supergroup. I’m no metalcore expert but I’ve never heard of the three bands these three dudes come from (Letlive, The Chariot and Night Verses) so I’m not sure how “super” this group is but they are at least interesting. They’ve been labeled as post-hardcore, which I don’t agree with and rapcore, which is at least a little closer. This album falls squarely in the space between Linkin Park and Rage Against the Machine as you’ll hear both influences in almost every song. Or essentially what might have happened had Chester Bennington been the lead singer of Audioslave instead of Chris Cornell.
- Rating: 7/10
- Album: Malibu Ken – Malibu Ken
- Previous Knowledge: None
- Chosen: Album Art – the exact opposite of what Malibu Ken would look like. A drawing of a pus filled, rotting, strung out kid. Or what they call a “Pizza Face” in the song “Tuesday.”
- Review: Malibu Ken is a new hip-hop duo consisting of Aesop Rock and Tobacco – the former I’m familiar with it, the latter I’m not. But Aesop Rock is an alternative rapper and Tobacco is an electronic musician and you get that mix perfectly here. A clever, sometimes humorous and well composed electronic rap record. I’m still partial to rap like this – vocals you can actually understand without looking at online lyrics and something that challenges the normal sound of what’s the radio.
- Rating: 9/10
- Album: Malevolent Creation – The 13th Beast
- Previous Knowledge: Very familiar with most of their catalog.
- Chosen: Really wanted to mix in something heavier with the rap albums.
- Review: This beast is not surprisingly the 13th record from the group – however, it’s like Malevolent Creation v2 (or V900 depending on how you calculate this). Long time vocalist Brett Hoffman died of colon cancer last year and the rest of the lineup departed ways with original guitarist Phil Fasciana. So, the 13th Beast was created with an entirely new lineup. It’s still Fasciana’s vision so it sounds very much like a Malevolent Creation death metal record, though be it not one that challenges the norm at this point. And really, that’s fine. This does no harm to their stellar reputation in the Death Metal scene.
- Rating: 8.5/10
- Album: Buke & Gase – Scholars
- Previous Knowledge: None
- Chosen: Album Art – a drawing of a three headed dog, either digging a hole, standing over a pile of shit or looking in horror at a chocolate Easter egg. I’m voting for the pile of dookie.
- Review: This is interesting – an experimental rock record from a duo that use their own handmade instruments (the “Buke” is a Six-string Ukulele and the “Gase” is a hybrid guitar-bass. Got to hand it to them – they’ve created something with a sound that I’ve never quite heard before. It’s rooted in rock and pop for sure, but the unique instruments make it sound really fresh and innovative. The title track is linked at the bottom. Damn cool.
- Rating: 9.5/10
2019 albums ranked 10/10:
None
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