Big Fish Theory - Review
It is a bit disconcerting to listen to a new album by one of your favorite artists, and to hear something entirely different. Vice Staples’ dark, almost monotone voice has been rapping bars about the harsh reality of life for years, stripped away all of the glitz and the glamour that we sometimes see, leaving only vivid imagery of drugs and violence over a bare beat.
Big Fish Theory just goes in the complete opposite direction. Instead of focusing on growing up in a gang environment, it is about Staples’ future. Instead of stripped down rap beats, it takes spacey, EDM styling to create a sort of futuristic dance mix. It’s experimental in all of the right ways. When it hits, it has some great tracks, but even on the misses, we get to see Vince step outside of his comfort zone in a way that excites me about the future.
Grateful - Review
I wanted to like this album so much more than I did. There is something amazing about the lengths that DJ Khaled has gone for his newborn son, Asahd. Grateful is an album in his honor, and from its creation to its legacy, Khaled kept his son involved. The cover art for the album is even a picture of the (admittedly adorable) toddler posed in the corner of a pool, as if to copy so many who came before.
But the problem is that none of this loving heart seems to be found on the majority of the album. There are a few songs in the midst of this massive tracklist (23 songs, chosen for the date of Asahd’s birthday – October 23) like “I Love You So Much” with Chance the Rapper or “I’m So Grateful”. And in those lyrics full of praise heaped on the small boy, we get a genuine sense of adoration that is scarcely seen in hip-hop.
Melodrama - Review
With Pure Heroine, Lorde brought a unique voice to pop: smoky, honest, but also (most importantly) young and real. She was only 16 years old with the release of her debut album, and the tracks bounced back and forth between surprisingly mature and refreshingly juvenile, bringing a perspective to pop that we don’t normally see.
In the four years since, her music has had an impact, and we can see how others have attempted to mirror that rugged, pared-down style (like this year’s American Teen by another young artist, Khalid). So I was intrigued to see how she would come back, and in what way her music would change.
Beatiful Thugger Girls - Review
I never know what to expect when I hit play on a new Thugger album. He’s all over the place sonically, bouncing back and forth between sounds in a way that few artists are willing to do. Music does not often reward experimentation, as what is familiar is what is safe. But Young Thug is so far from being safe that he can play around more with his sound.
Yet even with that, the country infused, hip-hop/pop beats come out of left field. Not even thirty seconds into the first track, he lets out a raucous “Yeehaw”, a cry that echoes the more playful tone of his music. He’s “tryna put his dick inside of yo panties”, ask for his “baby girl come suck me and fuck me”. But at the same time, manages to deliver a strangely personal record.
Pretty Girls Like Trap Music - Review
I have been convinced for a long time that 2 Chainz is a genius. One of the harder working artists in the industry, sometimes it feels like you can’t go more than ten feet without tripping over a Titty Boi feature or new mixtape. I was a big fan of last year’s Hibachi for Lunch, but with Pretty Girls like Trap Music, he manages to make the most complete album that I’ve heard from him in a while, cementing his place in the Atlanta rap scene as king, playing with the convention of trap music and his trademark ridiculousness, and reminding people that you just can’t sleep on the King.
Monolith - Review
Roguelikes are a genre that we’ve written about many times before, and will no doubt continue to revisit for a long time coming. In some ways, it is the perfect genre for an independent game, as it has an inherent sense of replayability to it that other genres lack. Level design is still important, but by allowing the gamer to slot remade rooms together at random instead of having to design each level by hand makes for a significantly easier creation process. And players are far more forgiving of repeated assets and gameplay in roguelikes than they are in a first person shooter or adventure game.
Monolith takes lessons from its predecessors (The Binding of Isaac) to blend the room-by-room, top-down roguelike gameplay with "bullet hell-esque" boss fights, and the marriage is a remarkably happy one. Your little ship can flit and soar across each room, dodging shots and tearing apart your enemies. You feel capable, partly because it isn’t a particularly difficult game, with a high baseline of health that lets you tank way more shots than most roguelikes do out of the gate, and it’s relatively easy to restore your health pool, or even expand it later on in the dungeon.
Drifting Lands - Review
Side-scrolling shatters have always been a fun distraction for me, but even after all of these years, they have not broken out of their form. They are fun, and they present. Certain kind of intriguing challenge for us to play with. They are mastery systems laid bare, asking you to learn movements and actions to the extreme so you can fly through a hail of bullets and come out the other side unscathed. It’s no wonder that there are a huge number of side-scrolling shooters that also fall into the “bullet hell” genre, characterized by maze-like arrangements of bullets for you to try to navigate through with split second timing. They are the epitome of control, often giving you only a few pixels of clearance to squeeze through.
Drifting Lands tries to take these established formulas and turn them on their ears by injecting loot and leveling elements to add layers of complexity to the formerly simply design. Before you just had to dodge and shoot, but now you have to manage a cargo-hold/inventory, stat points, color-coded inventory, damage and attack types, all with the change to accidentally lose it at any moment and be thrust back to the beginning of your journey. It seems that along the way towards adding replayability and complexity into the game, they simply went too far.