Daily Music Reviews (Summer Challenge)

[rayword45]

Day 65: Soft Focus by Vanilla (Album Choice: Ohaider)

There is more than one artist with this name:

1) Vanilla is an instrumental hip hop artist based in Oxford, UK. He now has 6 releases to his name: 2009’s ‘Thought Process’, the 2010 EP ‘Night Visions’, the full-length ‘Chrometrails’ released in May 2010, the LP ‘High Life’ dropped in May 2011, ‘Soft Focus’ released in May 2012, and finally ‘For What It’s Worth’ in January 2013. Vanilla’s music can be downloaded here: http://vanillabeats.bandcamp.com/

And that's the summary from last.fm copied and pasted right here. See, I could've summarized it all up, but I'm just not feeling it today. I averaged it out to 2 albums per day and then I have 100 done. With two instrumental hip-hop albums already done let's compare! Or not. I'll decide later.

I liked this more to Donuts rather than Metaphorical Music. There's a bit of a jazz/lounge sound with a bit of funk as well (Someone New is full of fraudulent funk strumming, for example), but like Donuts, there's a heavy focus on vocal samples, usually left mostly unmanipulated, mainly consisting of soul music. And also non-vocal samples unless that's just a constant vinyl crackle effect. Compared to the party-esque vibe of Dilla's last album, this album has a very heavy chillout feel throughout. The songs here are a bit longer then the ones on Donuts, averaging a bit over 2 minutes each overall. While for many tracks this works, others it feels a bit overextended, as does the album as a whole. If you take it in pieces at a time (I'm assuming this, since it took a long time for it to feel too long), the beats here are of top-notch quality, loaded with soul (music) and great drum tracks. Packaged as 27 songs for a full hour, it's too damn long. How many times have I complained that an album is too long? Unlike the other albums where I say that, I don't think this album should be edited to be more concise, because none of the songs make me think "this is mindless filler". Instead, as I said two sentences ago, I would cut it up into a shorter album and an EP. Make it easier to digest.

I had my conclusion already, pretty much. Top-notch beats, and an album that really doesn't feel like it should be swallowed as one whole piece. How to extend any conclusion paragraph? I could go on with some crappy wankery praising the album, but instead let me do comparisons. I still haven't fully re-listened to Donuts but that's a much more upbeat album, whereas this is chillout. Nujabes is also chillout, but that barely counts as instrumental hip-hop only half of the tracks were instrumental. And that's about it for comparisons. This album is free to download on Mediafire (via his Bandcamp) so I advocate that you make a judgement for yourself.

Bonus review

I have to do two albums a day for the next few days if I want to make it to one-hundred. Maybe I'll do 3 in one day and just do an epic album on the last day. Or I could do 4 on the last day. We'll see then. Today's bonus review is October Language by Belong. Stealing what other people said, this can be compared to William Basinski's Disintegration Loops series. It's related to some tragic event, and it's described as ambient. Here though, the ambient doesn't seem to disintegrate as much (these songs are like one-tenth as long). They just fade in, go on for a few minutes, and fade out. And it works here, because this isn't horns from the 70s. These are newly recorded songs made up mostly of feedbacking guitars. Not what I'm expecting out of ambient, but feedback is awesome. And 8 tracks of feedback doesn't get old. Unlike most ambient music, I'd prefer to hook this up to a sound system and blast it, since this sounds like it should be played loud. Also, I don't get the Katrina connection, I just enjoy feedback. 7/10