Budamunk & Joe Styles - Soul Quest

Feels like: cool, stylish, chill, witty, humorous, soulful, compassionate

This album is a collaboration between beat producer Budamunk and rapper and songwriter Joe Styles whom both come together to make a really cool hip hop album. The beats are chill like in old hip hop but also filled weird quirks like in new internet age hip hop. Styles also brings a style of rapping and lyricism that embraces both the coolness of old and the trendiness of new. The album manages to take us through 15 tracks without overstaying its welcome or becoming boring at all.

My thoughts on songs:

"BudaStyles Part 2" (feat DJ IQ) kicks the album off (after the intro track) with a bang and states the foundation of what this album is. Cool, stylish and seemingly effortless in both beat and lyric. They really present themselves here as being at an unattainable level of cool while also not coming off at all as being threatening or gangsta.

"Apologies,"as the title implies, features a seemingly endless list of apologies from the narrator, covering a lot of cliches we've heard before (being promiscuous, not being there, breaking promises.) However it's still hard not to be charmed by this song, the flow is great, the lyricism is still honest and touching past the cheesiness and the choppy, bittersweet beat makes for a very suitable compliment to the track.

The beat to "Soul Music" is, as name implies again, very soulful and totally delightful with its great melody and thin, clappy drums. The lyrics offer the same relaxing feeling as the beat, not always filled with optimism but always filled with charm, warmth and humor much in the style of Kanye West and A Tribe Called Quest. Whether you're paying attention or not you'll enjoy this track (though I'd recommend paying attention!)

"Jazz Cafe Pt. 2" is one of a few shorter interlude tracks on the album which features no rapping from Styles. These tracks are a welcome change of pace on the album between the other tracks and are one of the main reasons this album stays fresh start to finish and doesn't succumb to monotony. It's worth noting however that this track falls victim of sounding very similar to Ms. Mahogany earlier on in the album, though this is easier to overlook while listening to the album from start to finish in full.

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Impressions on: Vanilla - Sweet Talk

Feels like: cool, maximal, chill, noon, stylish, soulful, young

This is an album that I initially took interest to based on a really great first few tracks. However, this 27 track behemoth really runs its steam out sooner rather than later and could afford to lose a lot of tracks, or perhaps is serves better as a compilation than a coherent album. That's not to say that there is a significant drop in quality later on in the album, but once you've heard a few of these tracks it feels like you've heard them all and. Nonetheless I think it's worth talking about a few of the tracks I did enjoy.

 My thoughts on songs:

"Yesterday" starts off the album with an explosive collage of sampled sound: drums, horns, guitars, strings, bass, vocals; it's all there and the result is an amazingly catchy and grandiose jazz influenced hip hop beat. The start of the track is so unassuming too, a quiet phrase with just a simple hi hat rhythm and a few simple melodies that suddenly bursts with energy at the call of a drum roll. A pleasant surprise that really gives the album a good first impression.

"Getting Over You" is a prime example of the charm this album offers: its bright, sugary and maximalist but it comes off feeling relaxed and cool. The high piano notes, the twinkles, high pitched vocal samples, high string notes, it really feels like everything in this track is as high as life can be, despite the less optimistic subject matter of the lyrics, a contrast that reminds me of Passion Pit.

"Sometime" is a track toward the end of the album that stood out to me as it felt kind of different from a lot of the other stuff on the album, to an extent. This song features a minimalistic lineup of instrumentation when compared to the rest of the album and has a much calmer, low key feeling to it which is especially expressed in the electric piano melody which ended up being one of my favourite things from this album.

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