Cordavision Music Reviews

Preparing for that summer vibe right here. KOTA the Friend has always been an artist I’ve been hot and cold on. The first time I had heard of him was his 2020 album EVERYTHING , which I thought was a very good showing for an upcoming artist. For his second release of 2021, he teams up for an entire album produced by Statik Selektah, To Kill A Sunrise . I feel that Statik Selektah has been punching under his weight lately, and hopefully, I’m proven wrong on this. Let’s just get right into it. First, let’s get into the production. I think Statik Selektah took a lot of inspiration from Madlib and Nujabes, with the overall laid-back atmosphere mixed with some eclectic samples. With that, I do feel like Statik Selektah did underperform on this album because these beats really start to wear out its welcome over this short project. No wonder KOTA is credited first because I think he masters his flows over these beats very well. KOTA doesn’t tend to take faster flows or go hard in his verses, ...

For the vegetarians and PETA empathizers, I’m sorry for the album cover. To me, this is one of the boldest covers I’ve seen in the past couple of years. Before we start the review itself and who Armand Hammer and The Alchemist are, we need to go over the definition of haram. ‘Haram’ is an Islamic word that translates to ‘forbidden.’ This can refer to a couple different things. It’s either something sacred to which access is forbidden to the people who are not in a state of purity or who aren’t initiated into the sacred knowledge, or, in direct contrast, to evil and sinful actions that are forbidden to be done. It’s a heavy word in the Muslim community, and I have to admit, I don’t wanna sit here and dissect Islam and the Muslim religion simply because I’m not familiar with it. Since we got that out of the way, let’s get into the music itself. Armand Hammer consists of two New York rappers, Elucid and Billy Woods, the latter I’ve covered on this site before, and he’s also shown love to ...

Oddly enough, I had a quilt over me while writing this. Anna Fox Rochinski has been an artist that I found out about recently, her video for the title track from this album being sent to me by a friend. I enjoyed it a lot, so I decided to take a listen to the possibly-defunct band that she was in, Quilt. I enjoyed the psychedelic folk that was intertwined throughout most of that band’s projects, and when I found out that Rochinski’s solo debut, Cherry , was set to drop later that month, I just knew I had to jump on that. Enough talk, let’s get into the music. Unlike the works of Quilt, there are different influences at play. Rochinski herself had said that Beck (specifically Midnite Vultures Beck), Can, Madonna, and early Robyn were heavy influences on that. I can see why. I’m a fan of all the experimentation in sound on here, especially on the track “Everybody’s Down,” and all of that gives the indie-pop attempts on Cherry a pretty unique feeling. The instrumentation here almost fee...

Wow, the second film score I reviewed. Pretty awesome. Should this review come with a disclaimer? I actually haven’t seen Zack Snyder’s Justice League yet. I’ve seen some viral clips of it and I definitely plan on seeing it in the future. I’ve enjoyed a good amount of Tom Holkenborg’s score work, and if you don’t recognize his real name, just look up Junkie XL and see his work. I personally think his work on Batman v. Superman with Hans Zimmer is some of the most underappreciated pieces of music in the past five years. Now, after the fabled Snyder Cut debuted on HBO Max last week, Holkenborg released his score for the cut, which was entirely reworked from the original version. Let’s get into this behemoth. Is it odd to classify this as ‘neoclassical darkwave?’ The music nerd in me kinda jumped out because I was listening to Lingua Ignota while writing this, and I found some similarities when it comes to the sonic tone of this. Some elements from Snyder’s previous DCEU films are here, l...

 NOTE: This is the final video review for a while. Written reviews will still continue.

Serotonin fans, this one’s for you. It’s not too often that I sit down and listen to some long-ass albums. One of my favorite jazz albums, Kamasi Washington’s The Epic , is three hours long. The other written review coming out later this week is of an album that’s nearly four hours long. When it comes to long albums like this, it really makes me realize that music can be made, and a large amount of time can be put into this. For any artist, making a long album is a very risky move. Migos made Culture II , and it ended up being a nearly two-hour mess of an album that should’ve been a large mixtape instead of Migos’ next studio album. While it may not be to an extent, Drake’s 2018 double album Scorpion had some of the same issues, even if the songs were at least better. Now, in 2021 (or 2020, when the project dropped), we have one of the longest electronic projects I’ve ever heard: Charmed by DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. I had never heard of DJ Sabrina at all before this, but a friend of...

 

 

Shoutout to Fantano for hating on this so I can check it out for myself. Cordavision > TheNeedleDrop. Back in the 90s and early 00s, it was tough for independent artists to make it big. You had to be a part of the commercial machine and get big on the radio. These days, anyone can make music and get it out there, and if you gain a cult following or go viral on social media, you could gain a label contract out of it. Case in point, Maryland rapper redveil is one of the newest examples of this. He recently made it big with his debut album niagara late last summer, after putting out a mixtape, bittersweet cry , in December 2019. I’ve heard both projects many times, and I’ve finally gotten around to talking about niagara in full. Let’s do it. Right from the few first seconds of the first track, I thought of Earl Sweatshirt, specifically of his most recent LP, Some Rap Songs . I am a very big fan of that album and of Earl in general, so that was a good sign right off the bat. I also th...

 

This review was not influenced by the classic Tom Hanks film Forrest Gump . The Grammy Awards were this past weekend, and being in the music ‘journalism’ world, I watched the whole 3.75-hour telecast, and it was mildly entertaining. During the pre-show, most of the awards were announced, and Canadian producer KAYTRANADA swept the Dance/Electronic category with this album, Bubba , and one of its singles with Kali Uchis, “10%.” I have to be totally honest, I thought I reviewed this project. So, because of that, I decided to pick this out as one of the albums I reviewed in the written medium this week. Enough chit-chat, let’s talk about it. Hip-hop and R&B are some of my favorite genres of music, pop and sometimes electronic music coming in as close seconds. I grew up on pop and electronic music, and hip-hop and R&B music really shaped my palette for music and taught me to expand my tastes. When one or more of these genres combine, particularly hip-hop and electronic music, the on...

 

(ENGLISH REVIEW) This is beauty in its purest form. When it comes to listening to albums by artists I adore, I tend to have a pretty big bias. Japanese singer-songwriter Ichiko Aoba is definitely one of those artists at the moment. Her most recent release, Windswept Adan , was my favorite album of 2020 and it genuinely one of the most beautiful albums I’ve ever heard. My review of it also happens to be my most popular video at the time of writing this. Since the release of Windswept Adan , I’ve checked out her other studio albums and live performances. They’re all impressive, but I had decided to review the project that left the biggest impression on me: Mahoroboshiya . This is how I felt about it. This is Aoba’s fifth album, and based off the cover, it’s already pretty different. This is the only album that features her face on the cover. It’s her shortest album as well, clocking in at 34 minutes. Also worth going over is the word “mahoroboshiya,” which is a combination of the two Jap...

 

I feel bad I haven’t heard this until now. Musician, poet, activist, and ½ of Black Quantum Futurism Moor Mother and New York rapper Billy Woods team up for a collaborative project, BRASS . While I have enjoyed many of Billy Woods’ projects like History Will Absolve Me , Hiding Places with Kenny Segal, and Armand Hammer project with Elucid, who are dropping a project with The Alchemist in two weeks (!!!), I hadn’t heard of Moor Mother before this. Once I heard about how great this project is, I had decided to listen to it back in January. Yes, I know I’m writing about this in March, but hey, I’m glad to have listened to it at all. Boy, there’s a lot to unpack from this. First off, the production on this is pretty stark. There’s a lot of jazz influences that made me feel very uneasy. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard in recent memory, and it feels like you’re being summoned by a cult. The sound effects and sampling throughout BRASS are creepy as hell, especially the distortion on the tr...

 

I’m writing this in the future, and I’m sending it back in time to myself to publish on Thursday. My past self hasn’t even heard the album yet. Wish him luck while he’s listening to it. This is a bit of a first for me. For the ones that don’t know, I’m currently majoring in film in college, and that covers all of the bases. So, I figured, while I’m at it, I might as well review my first film score. You’d think that I’d go for more of a classic soundtrack, maybe a more well-known composer, but Ludwig Göransson has made a very unconventional score for the film TENET . Christopher Nolan’s go-to composer, Hans Zimmer, was busy with scoring the new Dune film, so now, we have a pretty unorthodox film score here. Here are my thoughts! It’s worth noting that Ludwig Göransson has been on an insane run. After working with Childish Gambino on nearly every one of his albums, he’s been making film scores for quite a bit. He first gained recognition for his work on Ryan Coogler’s Rocky sequel, Cree...

 

OH NO NO PLEASE GOD HELP ME. Backxwash is an artist that I’m mad at myself for not finding sooner. I first found out about her when the shortlist for the 2020 Polaris Music Prize was announced. For the uninitiated, the Polaris Music Prize is an awards show in Canada that honors artists hailing from that country, whether or not they’re independent artists or one of the biggest stars on the planet. Backxwash had won the top honors with this album right here, God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It , getting shortlisted ahead of The Weeknd and Daniel Caesar, and coming out over more well-known names like Kaytranada, Jessie Reyez, and Lido Pimienta. Once I had seen this, I finally got to listen to this project earlier this year. So, yes, this is technically a re-listen, but since it was taken off of streaming services, I had to resort to YouTube. Either way, here’s my thoughts on it. God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It is BRUTAL. In fact, it’s one of the roughe...