Good Albums at a Price
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Needledrop Review
Pitchfork Review
What's Really Good It's pretty much a flawless marriage of his earlier somewhat downtempo melodic style and his more recent trap influenced mixtape output. Freddie's range is arguably most apparent on Shadow of a Doubt. He enlists a motley crew of rappers to feature on these tracks, and they're are a few moments where it feels like he's really trying to experiment with his sound, but the basic formula of what makes Gibbs special is ever present and very rarely does it feel like he's pandering.
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What's Really Good While it would be easy to try and downplay the quality of the album's coming of age story by comparing it to other great hip-hop album, namely G.K.M.C., doing so would serve as a great injustice. The internal struggle plaguing the artists is portrayed with a spirituality and poeticism that is unique and personal despite the similarities in the general story arc.
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Consequence of Sound Review
What's Really Good The sheer range of emotions and tones on this album are astounding, it's at times brash and cold and at others overtly thin-skinned and vulnerable. More importantly, Gibson sounds at home over all of it.
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What's Really Good Village Party 2 is such a ethereal, illusory wide, with Alex Wiley utilizing his melodic rapping style to weave in and out the deep THC-laden haze filling each of the downtempo tracks. This is definitely some high-class-smoke-session-fodder.
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What's Really Good When you title an album Year of the Savage you bring upon your work certain malevolent expectations. On nearly every track Banks' brings a venomous energy and furious attitude. He honestly sounds possessed on some of these tracks like he's rhyming with the eye of the Tiger or Sharingan, standing heights over the beat on every track, which is an amazing feat in of itself considering the great bombastic production on this album.
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What's Really Good Exquire is such a unique story teller and showcases one of the strongest personalities in rap. The vivid imagery and references he utilizes throughout this little EP conjures such strong feelings of 90s era nostalgia. I've never been to New York, but the details and minutia covered in a single Exquire line transports me directly to Brooklyn in 1996 before the gentrification and beautification.
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Consequence of Sound Review
What's Really Good Spitta is probably the most consistent rapper in the world in terms of his output, but recently he's been sort of adding these little flourishes to his sound and experimenting with somewhat heavier, more lavish production. Canal Street Confidential is a big variety pack, and it's pretty impressive to hear how natural Curren$y sounds rapping over trap production. And there are these really wavy tracks like Speed and Winning whose dreamlike characteristics are only elevated when combined with Spitta's slow slurred nasally flow. The only misses are the R&B/Pop radio hiccups sprinkled throughout the tape.
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What's Really Good Mark Battles, a previously unknown rapper to me, has single handedly made me care about an every man rap album again. Numb reminds me of those early J. Cole mixtapes that displayed a rap style that was quite conscious, yet modern enough and versatile enough to keep the cringe/corn factor at a minimum. "Chicken" is one of my favorite tracks of the year.
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Needledrop Review
Consequence of Sound Review
What's Really Good Looking at the somewhat feature heavy tracklist I had suspected that Pusha had succumbed to the same music making tactics of his fellow GOOD Music counterparts, but to my surprise Darkest Before the Dawn is a fairly understated yet calculated piece. For the most part, Pusha is playing it safe rapping over the same types of minimal synthy beats that got him to this point, and the feature list actually is a bit deceiving as they mainly pop up as small components to sprinkle a little flavor over each track. If you like Pusha in the past you'll like this, but maybe it's a little too safe overall needing a little of that GOOD Music bigness after all.
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Pitchfork (Doc 2.0) Review
Needledrop (Doc 2.5) Review
What's Really Good - The good news is that if you throw enough shit at a wall some of it will indeed stick, but the bad news is that if you look close enough at the shit you will still find bits of corn scattered throughout. There are some great beats and features on both of these albums, and the little homages to the old west-coast gangsta sound all seem to work best. However, underneath all of these features and beats is the same name-dropping and pedestrian storytelling Game who understands the who, what, when and where part of telling a story but seems to gloss over the why...
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