Dead End Hip Hop

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Kids These Days – ‘Traphouse Rock’ Album Review

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Kids These Days truly is a rare band. With the assembly of eight separate personalities producing music that spans many genres with live instrumentation, the gap for error is apparent. Yet these eight Chicago teens do not only harmonize blues, pop, rock, soul, jazz and hip-hop effortlessly, but they do so with the execution of musicians two decades deep into their career. They dropped the very dope Hard Times EP last year and are back with their debut full length LP, Traphouse Rock, that showcases a progression leaps and bounds ahead of their previous work, both sonically and collectively.

If someone picked any song on this album, they’d be greeted with a myriad of sounds and instruments, all consistently balanced; this is crucial for a group with so many different pieces all blending into one. This shows when male vocalist/guitarist Liam Cunningham soulfully serenades about how a man’s world means nothing without a woman by his side on “A Man’s Medley,” using the cadence of a voice well beyond his years, or MC Vic Mensa’s ridiculously effortless flow on “Don’t Harsh My Mellow” accompanied by ominously haunting piano keys by female vocalist Marcie Stewart with a spiraling chorus that sounds like it’s falling apart.

The horn section alone in this band would be enough to grab hold my attention for all fifty-eight minutes of the album with trumpeter Nico Segal and trombonist J.P. Floyd. On the song “GHETTO,” Segal hits high staccato notes alongside Floyd, who provides a distorted, whiny drone throughout the song. The beat switches midway to a faster tempo where they play musical ping pong back and forth, until drummer Greg Landfair closes out the song with a sweet solo. This lush instrumentation literally permeates every song.

The subject matter Kids These Days delve into on Traphouse Rock address a plethora of different aspects of teen youth, but doesn’t get redundant or dramatic in that bullshit teen angst kind of way. The pretentious, cynical perception musicians their age typically have in this generation is cleansed by a very genuine place of youth with relatable topics.

Adolescent nostalgia breathes over subdued trumpets that open up the track “Talk 2 You” as Mensa speaks to an old friend/ex over the phone about all the old memories they shared. Pain and regret drunkenly dance with each other in the hook Cunningham sings so honestly: “Bottoms up baby I’ve been drinking/ Let me tell you about what I’ve been thinking/You’re the reason why I wrote this song/ I hope it hasn’t been too long.”

Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, who also hails from Chicago, handled a large majority of the production on this project and did a phenomenal job. The layered instrumentation and improved musicality of Kids These Days is most likely a result of Tweedy’s mentorship.

Take the cohesive instrumentation of The Roots and the free spirited style of Gym Class Heroes pre-2008, and that’s close to how this band operates. Traphouse Rock is music in its rawest,  purest form, from a group of musicians celebrating their adolescence through music played at a much higher caliber.

Death Grips – ‘NO LOVE DEEP WEB’ Album Review

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MC Ride (under no drug influence whatsoever): Done with the music, now time to make the album cover… ZACH WHIP YOUR DICK OUT!

Sacramento experimental group Death Grips have shoved enough bloody, bruised, burnt and emotionally polarizing music into the mouths of eager fans — and eagerly afraid onlookers — so the release of their sophomore album, NO LOVE DEEP WEB, will not sway many listeners.

It has, though, whipped up a ton of talk about not only its flabbergasting cover (ITS A PENIS OMG WHY) but also the nonchalant and amusingly cavalier way in which they released it: by flipping off their label and uploading it to every sleazy file-sharing site in existence.

That’s the greatest praise that I can muster for the group; after all, it wouldn’t make sense for them to whimper under the arbitrary kiss of death that is “release date hell.” But as far as the actual music is concerned, my opinion mimicks that of the F&L2, only in reverse: I totally dig the production, in disappointment with the lyrics/MC Ride’s gut-punching vocal performance.

The brand of hip hop Death Grips creates can be summarized as post-anthropomorphic music, the type that would perfectly suit a gathering of mentally and physically disfigured strain of humans who exist hundreds of years after global nuclear war. Their sound, oblique, unforgiving, and immediately arresting, gets major props for how off-the-deep-end it seems. NO LOVE DEEP WEB in particular features what may be the group’s take on electronica, as producer Flatlander and energetic drummer Zach Hill infuse 80s synth and Afrika Bambaataa-style drumbeats with their bone-crunching aggression.

It culminates in a sound truly unique and fun to listen to only for how autochthonous and unrefined the production seems. The first track “Come Up And Get Me” has an epileptic synth line just convulsing over and over while MC Ride yells in his trademark mushmouth flow, “No Love” has huge, ominous kick drums fill the air underneath a dazzle of cymbals and a sea of queasy, vomit-colored synth and “World Of Dogs” features Hill’s most impressive and punishing drumming and Ride’s death knell of a hook slicing through the cacophony like a rusty butter knife.

“Black Dice,” arguably the most pleasing production they’ve ever concocted, features a icy permafrost underpinned by West-Coast rhythm, that falls away for droplets of bass and scratchy chopped-up synth providing a backdrop for Ride’s atonal ramblings. It also stands as testament for how inclusive the group is when forming sounds, not afraid to incorporate pleasing sounds into their gruesome smoothie of noise.

DEEP WEB, based on its production, benefits heavily from a mind already aware of the group’s parasitic, face-melting tendencies. However, the lyrics probably require a greater wealth of black metal, hardcore punk and other fringe genre awareness to fully “fuck” with. MC Ride’s M. O., which is to get the puerile and misanthropic lyrics out in an annoying, primal scream or mumble that shifts rhythmically by the second is the disease-ridden marrow of the group that draws much disdain from a strictly hip hop standpoint, and the main reason for my initial hatred of the group.

I feel that Hip Hop, in its basic form, derives it lineage from the African griots of old, who would memorize and retell stories and fables precious to society backed by earthy hand percussion. Yeah, its a cheesy and romantic way to see things, but that’s my P.O.V. Now, what Death Grips did — much in line with thrash metal — was to take the basics and warp, bend, crack, smash, bruise, beat, scourge, defecate on, douse in gasoline and set it on fire until something existed that would suit the artist’s need.

I get that sentiment completely, but I still find the undecipherable vocals deceiving, especially since a trip to rapgenius feels like lifting a log and unveiling the gross insect life underneath. I do enjoy the hook on “World of Dogs” and “Stockton” though, because they mesh well with the production: “I’M BOUNCING (WOOP, WOOP)!”

Yet as I said, it doesn’t matter how much I try to analyze and theorize Death Grips: most of the people reading this have made their minds up. I can at least say that there’s an entire album of theirs which I can enjoy at least in some respect (I only dug “Lord Of The Game” from Exmilitary, “I’ve Seen Footage” and “System Blower” from The Money Store), but then again, that album cover makes it reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally hard to fully embrace. Ah, such is the aggressively anti-everything and genre-rupturing case that is Death Grips.