Buck 65 - Situation
Buck has a new number to scratch up in his intros: 57. Situation is centered around the year 1957, a year that Buck believes to be one of the most important in western history, for all of its atomic paranoia, white people doing black things, and howling poet types, I’m not sure if there is supposed to be a modern day parallel but it’s an easy line to draw. The beats are more “Square” than “This Right Here”, and the subject matter takes a few listens to really sink in and become rewarding, but this is a Buck album no matter what, so you can bet on dusty loops, gritty voice, and (refreshingly) outdated subject matter.
Iller Than Theirs - Iller Than Theirs
This is definitely real. Nuk Fam’s Tone Tank and Krayo put together a nice little piece of honest, undiluted hip hop on Iller than Theirs. Tone and Kray won’t bullshit you; in fact, they spend the short 40 minutes of this album deliberately doing the opposite. Of course every hip hop album wants to be a reaction to all things fake and ‘mainstream’ (whatever that means these days) but very few can achieve such a real attitude without even trying. Highlights: ‘After All’ had me actually believing that “it’s not so bad after all” (it was the ill piano loop that did it), ‘Good peoples’, an ode to all the decent people in your circle, made me call up every friend who let me crash on their couch and eat their pop tarts, and ‘The Same’ (with a fantastic verse from Masta Ace), a track railing against the gentrification of Brooklyn, made me feel like a dick for moving to New York and even setting foot in Brooklyn. Enjoy.
Ivan Ives - Iconoclast
What’s with headquarters hitting me off with all of these Russian rappers? It’s all good I’m broke. Ivan Ives came from the former U.S.S.R. and has spent time on both U.S. coasts. His style reflects his multicultural background, but this is essentially an “East Coast” record. Ives’ cultural identity is that of an immigrant kid who was brought up from the Bloc to the Block. His flow is deep and world weary, but always looking up, embracing the dark and shitty times as a step to something better (namely on ‘Mad Game’), and lapsing only occasionally into his native tongue because lets face it, sometimes there just aren’t enough words in the English language. Iconoclast is dope, but if you have any doubt, just know that at one point he claims he is “better than jay-z on reasonable doubt”. Check it out and see if he is full of shit or not.
10 ft. Ganja Plant - Presents
There's two types of dub in my mind. The first (chronologically, and for the sake of this review) is that blunted, warm, lowdown and lo-fi sound that makes you wonder why we ever desired to ditch the analog. The second is that clean, updated digi-dub shit that makes you realize the benefits of our modern (but still blunted) technology.
This album is a beautiful specimen of the first class. John Brown's Body core members put together an album far from their jammy expansions, reducing their dub sound to a mellow, old-school uni-rhythm, scratched on the surface by analog delay and haze in the air. I want to go on, but to quote my father on the day I was born, "As usual, I'm way too high for this."
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