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This week, I’ve got another four albums for your listening ears. There will be three new albums from the past week (on a monday to monday basis) and one classic album we’re celebrating the anniversary of.
Just a reminder: if there’s an album YOU want to see covered that we missed (or a review that you disagree with) write a review of your own and submit it right here!
Megadeth – Megadeth
5/10
Megadeth is a thrash metal band who– at their peak– have perhaps the longest unbroken streak of high quality metal records (the only streak that I think rivals them for best six album run is Black Sabbath’s first six records). After 1994’s “Youthanasia” however, they sort of plummeted quality wise and now have decided to conclude their legacy with a final, self-titled record: “Megadeth”.
Bandleader, vocalist and guitarist Dave Mustaine’s voice has been on a downward spiral, honestly since their very first album. His almost effervescent, gritty anger is a signature part of their music and while I was worried that quality would hurt the record, he actually doesn’t sound too bad here. I got a taste of the album with some singles leading up to it and they honestly got me pretty excited.
After listening to the record, I honestly don’t have a lot to say. It’s thrash metal. It’s not particularly interesting or exciting but it’s certainly not bad. I definitely enjoyed a solid amount of the tracks but none of them are really what I would call “high quality”.
There’s a lot of discourse I’ve seen surrounding the cheesy, anti-government lyricism on the album. I think that’s a bit ridiculous and frankly Megadeth, while not really “over the top” with it, has always sounded like a pastiche of themselves. Has it always been as explicitly obvious as “I don’t care you can kiss my ass! [Guitar Solo]” from “I Don’t Care”? Well, no. But my point stands regardless.
Musically, it’s what I would expect from an ‘80s band’s final album: mediocre mixing, decent guitar solos and vocal-performances that almost make you think they still have it. The guitar work is not bad at all but it doesn’t have that edge that draws me to their earlier work. I’ll stop there with the comparisons to their early work however; did anyone really go into this expecting Mustaine to create Rust In Peace 2? I didn’t.
The really interesting thing here is a “cover” of “Metallica’s” hit song, “Ride the Lightning”. For the uninitiated, those quotes are because Dave Mustaine contributed pretty heavily to the song during his stint with them. Actually Metallica’s debut album “Kill ‘em All” was virtually penned entirely by Dave Mustaine before his firing. I wonder then: why did Mustaine choose to feature it as the final track on this album? I guess we’ll never know.
For all metal fans, give an OG their respect by at the very least checking this record out. If you want good thrash though, I wouldn’t bother looking here.
If The Sun Dies – Greg Weeks
6.6/10
This album really does a great job of capturing the feeling of its title. The melancholy of each track screams apocalypse, the bizarre, liminal album cover doing even more for this imagery. Returning for his first album since 2008, Greg Weeks’ “If The Sun Dies” is an honest, albeit a little repetitive americana record that was a comforting warmth during the cold of the past week.
The vocals are haunting. Not quite soft, but Weeks isn’t in your face either. There’s a very subtle aggression to be found while he serenades you. The instrumentation is what you might expect from a contemporary folk piece, virtually all guitar, stripped-back drums and the sprinkling of a flute, vibraphone, or slightly amped electric guitar.
While the music here is good– and I definitely liked it. It felt really repetitive to me. I understand there’s only so much to be done with the limited instrument ensemble of the genre, but track-to-track I really didn’t feel it varied enough– every song sounded way too similar. That’s not to say it sounded bad at all, but this sort of folk has to be really phenomenal to really please me and this album simply wasn’t.
If you like folk, at least give this album a listen, but I’ll get my kicks elsewhere.
Yatta! – YīN YīN
7.6/10
“You tapped into that dutch sitar funk?” is a text message I received from a former colleague earlier this month. I– being the fool I am– was NOT tapped into “that dutch sitar funk”, and simply had to right this wrong as soon as possible. Herein lies the solution to said problem: dutch sitar funk at its finest with “Yatta!” by Netherlands based group YĪN YĪN.
With boogie-esque drum shuffles, fusion jazz guitar, a surprisingly pleasant vocal mix and that electric sitar-esque sound at the centerpiece, this album is absolute ear-candy. I really don’t like to use this word unless it’s describing funk, but this album is (totally) groovy (man).
The production is really top notch. Every instrument is in its right place, and the result is something that is endlessly replayable. While I highlighted the similarities during the intro, there actually isn’t a sitar in the lineup, just a guitar played with the perfect tone and technique to emulate such a sound. The imitation here is not to the band’s detriment at all, though. It’s actually quite fun and it allows more unique effects to be applied to the strings. Reverb, echo, delay, all sorts of effects that give it a psychedelic feel.
Achieving this tone is incredibly impressive, and on certain songs like “Elma” or “In Search of Yang” I was genuinely baffled to know there isn’t a sitar (or guzheng, or any of the other thousand traditional asian string instruments). On some level, I wish it was a real sitar, but the fact I can barely tell is enough for me.
Some of the slower, less energetic songs like “Night in Taipei” don’t really do it for me. They are good, yes, but not quite as interesting as the rest of the record. As much as I love a perfectly walked bassline, I felt a lot of the lines were a little repetitive. This was especially weary considering funk is a genre that I find a nice bass groove to be the heart of.
I really adore the vocals here, the microphone effect gives the entire thing a radio broadcast, italo-disco feel and when it’s utilized it’s phenomenal. I’m not one to complain about instrumentals, but they have the potential for some good tracks to become great with even just a few lines of singing.
Overall, this wasn’t a bad album. It gains points just for its uniqueness and the fact that it sets out to be an asian inspired psychedelic funk album and succeeds really makes me smile. Readers, please “tap into that dutch sitar funk”.
3 Feet High and Rising – De La Soul
8.9/10
Hey all you kids out there! Welcome to my review of “3 Feet High and Rising”!
In 1988, three kids from Amityville, Long Island, New York formed a rap group called “De La Soul” and while they wouldn’t know it, they would not only invent one of the most influential (and perhaps my favorite) subgenre of hip hop in the form of jazz rap, but would also perpetually inspire many, many greats. The three founding members were Kelvin Mercer (who went by “Posdnuos”), David Jolicoeur ( who went by “Trugoy the Dove”) and Vincent Mason (who went by “Maseo”).
Okay! Now that we’ve met our contestants, let’s get to the review.
“3 Feet High and Rising” is a bouncy, eclectic, youthful journey through early hip-hop, life in the poor neighborhoods of Long Island and the number three. This album, while over an hour, is a whopping twenty-three tracks long, putting the average track length at just over two and a half minutes. That means that De La Soul is going to be punting ideas at you constantly. Every track delivers a major beat change, vibe change, flow change. Track-to-track there’s almost nothing similar other than the members behind it.
The introductory skit, “Intro (3 Feet High and Rising)” frames the album as a gameshow with the various songs throughout being commercial breaks. This is such an interesting framing and it gives them room to play around with the structure and feature skits to break up the action. While you may think the constant cut back to the “contestants” being unable to answer ridiculous questions breaks up the flow, I could never listen to this album without them.
The first song, “The Magic Number” starts with a smooth, jumpy bassline before the famed “amen break” comes in to get the drums moving. Posdnuos starts rapping about hip hop and nonsense about the number three, repeatedly calling it “the magic number”. It’s a super fun track and is one of my favorites from their entire discography. It’s a great way to kick off the album with a more upbeat, energetic vibe. Later, “Can U Keep a Secret” features what I would best describe as whisper-rapping, where the lyrics are aggressively whispered right up into the mic, with funny lines like “everybody in the world, you have dandruff”, and “Posdnuos needs a haircut”.
“Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin’s Revenge)” is a song about Jenifa (Oh!), a girl who Trugoy the Dove and Posdnuos are in love with, going to her house. It isn’t until the line where Posdnuos says “But asked was I a virgin, Like some kid named Derwin?”. A few seconds later, the music cuts and they say “Little Derwin got something to show us that Jenny could never do!” and the piano song “Chopsticks” starts playing as the band members cheer Derwin on. Then, it immediately goes back into the vinyl-scratching, groovy bass sample and jazz guitar chord samples as the song finishes out.
That moment, to me, perfectly captures what this album is all about. Not only are De La Soul changing the entire rap game with their aggressive use of sampling and jazz influence– but they’re having a lot of fun along the way.
It’s not long after that their masterpiece “Eye Know (feat. Odis Redding)” hits. This song utilizes a gorgeous sample. Taking “Peg” by Steely Dan and pitching it up slightly, speeding it up a bit so that it fits their groove. They then combine two different drum beats into one rhythm, which is a huge feat in and of itself. Finally, after adding a cute guitar strum pattern sample, they add a chopped up sample of Odis Redding whistling.
I could go on, but do you need any bigger example than two drum samples at the same time?
It’s this combination of juvenile humor and masterful sample chopping that makes De La Soul’s debut album irresistible to me, listen after listen. Despite that irresistibility, there are some less exciting parts throughout. An album standing at roughly an hour with little-to-no filler songs is insane, is that really the case? Well, sort-of.
The reason there’s no filler songs is because of the unfortunately excessive amount of filler skits. However charming the breaks to focus on the game show contestants are– they do cut off a lot of momentum of the tracks. I would also be foolish to not mention “De La Orgee” a skit as awkward and gross as you might imagine a skit by that name would be. It’s really just faux sex noises over a beat for almost 90 seconds. This would be pretty short for a song, but is an egregiously long amount of time to spend on pantomiming sex and it hurts my soul every time.
This “issue” would eventually get cleaned up a little, and become part of their sound, but sometimes I get the feeling lyrics were written before the tracks were finished. I often hear Maseo and Posdnuos having to spread their bars in jittery, stop-start ways. Even worse I hear them rapping off beat to try and catch up with themselves after they fall behind, it sounds lazy.
Though the misses are short in number, they tend to hurt the overall experience a lot. Despite that, it’s part of the charm you have to accept about De La Soul. There’s a sort of genuine tenderness that comes from a project as authentic as this, despite the missteps. You have contenders for the best hip-hop songs to ever come out of the ‘80s in “Eye Know” and “Me Myself and I”… and also the sex song. That’s De La Soul, though.
