What Are You Listening To? (warning: Nsfw Language)

Isaiah is awesome. Cilvia is one of my favorite projects from the past few years.

I just listened to the new album. Good stuff. Gonna take some time to absorb. TDE is just consistently amazing on the production. What I loved about Cilvia was that so many of Isaiah's lyrics seemed kind of minimalistic, but over time they all tied in together and made me interpret them in a pretty powerful way. I'm sure I'll get some similar interpretations from The Sun's Tirade. He has a very subdued flow and voice, but there's a message there. After my first listen though, the main issue I have is that the album was too laid back sonically. Cilvia had a few songs where he got aggressive with his raps and those were probably my favorite points off that project.

In other news, Frank Ocean's "Blonde" has consistently been in my rotation since it dropped. Might be my AotY.

Travis Scott's new album is dropping tomorrow morning. I'm pretty excited for that. He's more of an "ignorant/turn up" rapper, but "Rodeo" was just super enjoyable. One of the best in that lane.

Also, Childish Gambino is having a series of concerts in Joshua Tree this weekend where apparently he's playing his new album. I wish I heard about this in time to get tickets since Joshua Tree is such an awesome place and Donald Glover is one of my favorite artists. I'm guessing the album will get a full release the next week. On top of that, his new show is premiering on FX. Seems like kind of a "dramedy" in the vein of "Louis" or "Master of None". I'm very excited about the show and his music.

 

I picked up this mixtape as well as a K-Dot/Jay Rock collab mixtape from Amoeba in LA a few months ago. I gotta look for the Training Day CD in my car soon. I remember being super impressed with his flows at such a young age.

Unfortunately, I spilled soda or something on some of my CD's so the K-Dot/Jay Rock got messed up and I never got to check it out (yup, my car is a mess and I have hundreds of unorganized CD's). From the track-list though, it seemed super interesting. There were a lot of tracks that featured Ab-Soul too, so it might've been the closest thing to a Black Hippy project.

 

Not sure where this goes...

 

I pretty much love everything TDE puts out and I've been a big fan of Soulo for a while. I was pretty disappointed in "These Days" but the first half of this album has been amazing. Been too busy to sit down and listen to the whole thing though, and I feel like that's how Ab-Soul should be listened to. His wordplay is amazing even if he occasionally gets overambitious and drops a corny line.

I'm also as some of you know a huge Kanye stan. So maybe I'm biased in saying this, but J Cole's new album that dropped last night too is whack. It's not terrible, but it sounds like a collection of B-sides. And I loved his last project 2014 Forest Hills Drive. How are you going to call out one of your peers to hype your project, whose clearly suffering from mental illness issues, and then come out and drop such a generic album?