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Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday Review: Reasonable Doubt | Jay Z

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BY EVAN VOGEL ★★★★★

On Thursdays we review albums that are considered “classic” and today we review Hov’s classic LP Reasonable Doubt. Embracing the East-coast mafioso style with enough 1990’s New York street vernacular to fill a concert hall with, Jay Z started his monumental career with his crowning achievement, Reasonable Doubt. Today, Jay Z is involved with such a multitude of business ventures that his music has started to fall victim to the stresses and pressures of pop culture. This was not at all the case of his early work, which was rooted in Jay’s struggle to make a name for himself. Now-a-days Jay Z touches a track and the internet crashes, regardless of its quality. The man has nothing left to prove to anyone, yet he still makes music which is admirable. The problem is that it is nowhere near the caliber of Reasonable Doubt. There was a definitive passion in the way Jay Z rhymed that forced you to pay attention. He commanded each song with the finesse of a veteran.

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Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday Review: Lord Willin’ | Clipse

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BY CHRIS MONTANA ★★★★★

Every Thursday we review albums that are considered “classic” in our “Throwback Thursday Review” series. This week it’s the classic fire flames debut from one of hip hop’s greatest duos: The Clipse’s Lord Willin’. Ahhh, this was the album that started it all for me. This was the very first hip hop album that I ever listened to, and Lord Willin’ was the album that got me into the genre for the long haul. This classic LP swayed me from groups like Fall Out Boy and Rise Against, genres like alt rock and punk rock, and I finally realized that rap and hip hop is the most complete genre in terms of all the factors that go into the making of an album and the complete product that is released. 

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Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday Review: Bluestars | Pretty Ricky

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BY DAN GARCIA ★★★★☆

 

On Thursdays we review albums that are considered “classic”. Without a doubt, this will be our most critically unsupported “classic” album for a Throwback Thursday review yet, but I stand by the LP none-the-less. Although it was not received with critical acclaim and accolades upon its release, Pretty Ricky’s debut LP Bluestars is a classic and highly underrated R&B album. This project was much more than just the album that brought fans ‘Grind On Me’, rather it is full of great tracks top to bottom. Released almost a decade ago, this album has aged very well, even though the careers of Pleasure P, Baby Blue, Slick’em, and Spectacular have not. With tracks like ‘Your Body’, ‘On the Hotline’, ‘Nothing But a Number’, and of course ‘Grind On Me’, Bluestar is one of the best R&B group albums of all time, no disrespect to Boyz II Men, TLC, and Destiny’s Child. It is really hard to think of any R&B group since Pretty Ricky, to do it as well as these four men did with their solo album, and although they have since broke up, just last year rumors circulated over a possible reunion tour. A Bluestars 2 maybe?

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Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday Review: Liquid Swords | GZA

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Liquid Swords
BY EVAN VOGEL ★★★★★

On Thursdays we review albums that are considered “classic”. This week we will review the classic Wu-Tang Clan LP, GZA’s Liquid Swords. Classic is a word that holds heavy weight within hip-hop music conversations. Today, it is often used as a way to describe current songs, albums and artists that will one day become a classic, or “future-classic” if you will. Yet, many fans of hip-hop will unwaveringly stand by the statement that the 90’s was the golden era for the art form, full of timeless classics. The 90’s saw the gradual movement of hip-hop into the mainstream and showed that there was a market for hip-hop outside of strictly urban communities. One of these classic groups was the infamous, Wu-Tang Clan. A group comprised of a diverse handful of New Yorkers such as: Founder RZA, Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, U-God, Masta Killa, the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard and GZA or The Genius.

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Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday Review: Late Registration | Kanye West

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Late Registration
BY DAN GARCIA ★★★★★

On Thursdays we review albums that are considered “classic”. This week we will review the classic sophomore LP that gave music fans tracks like ‘Diamonds from Sierra Leone’, ‘Gold Digger’, ‘Touch the Sky’ and more, Kanye West’s Late Registration. Coming off his critically acclaimed and Grammy Award winning debut The College Dropout, Mr. West and the rap world had great expectations for this album, expectations that most artists likely could not live up to. However, instead of falling victim to the sophomore album curse, Kanye delivered and put out another near perfect album. This album had Kanye’s biggest radio hit, in ‘Gold Digger’, and two of the best rap songs ever created, in ‘Diamonds’ and ‘Gone’ (which wasn’t even a single). You can easily make the case that Late Registration is Kanye’s signature project and his discography’s best album.

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Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday Review: Voodoo | D’Angelo

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Voodoo
BY DOMINIC BARICEVIC ★★★★★

On December 15, 2014, D’Angelo’s nearly 15 year silence was broken. His new album Black Messiah dropped seemingly out of nowhere, garnering overwhelming and instantaneous acclaim. Pitchfork Media focused all their attention on the album, giving it an envied 9.4/10 “Best New Music” rating and plastering D’Angelo mentions all over the sight. They still can’t shut up about it, as goes for most other music publications, which is rare in a digital age where trends and albums come and go without much thought. Black Messiah is without a doubt bound to gain high marks amongst best of lists with the passage of time due to the immediate positive reaction to such a shock release. However, it is imperative to understand where such enormous hype and anticipation for D’Angelo came from. This R&B aficionado’s sophomore release is the genesis of his critical and even commercial obsession.

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Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday Review: 808s & Heartbreak | Kanye West

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808s & Heartbreak
BY DAN GARCIA ★★★★★

On Thursdays we review albums that are considered “classic”. This week we will review the classic LP that has been recently named the most ground-breaking album of all time by Rolling Stone, Kanye West’s game-changing 808s & Heartbreak. While Mr. West had always stepped away from conventional rap structure since the inception of his career with The College Dropout, Ye really reinvented the wheel with this one. Creating a concept album that contained 11-tracks (and one live bonus track) of music made entirely from an 808s synthesizer, themed around love and which all contained heavy use of auto-tune, Kanye made a musical masterpiece which was widely misunderstood and polarizing during its initial 2008 release but which is now the most influential album of all time. This album paved the way for today’s popular artists (mainly Drake), further introduced the world to brilliance of Kid Cudi (who had a vast influence on the album’s sound), and showed us that even when Kanye “can’t sing” he can make a singing album better than anyone else.

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Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday Review: The College Dropout | Kanye West

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The College Dropout
BY DAN GARCIA ★★★★★

On Thursdays we review albums that are considered “classic”. This week it’s the classic album that introduced us to Kanye West, The College Dropout.  This album is still today considered one of the best, if not the best, freshman albums of all time (up there with Nas’ Illmatic and 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’). This album, released by Roc-A-Fella Records, was the album that people told the young producer that he could never make. Instead however, not only was it pressed, but it was received with wide critical acclaim and gave us classic hip-hop tracks like ‘Jesus Walks’ ‘All Falls Down’ ‘Through the Wire’ and ‘Slow Jamz’.

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Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday Review: The Moon & Antarctica | Modest Mouse

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BY DOMINIC BARICEVIC ★★★★★

“The universe is shaped exactly like the earth/ If you keep on going straight, you’ll end up where you were.” This quote from opening song ‘3rd Planet’ sums up the theme of The Moon and Antarctica; the world is going to end soon. In this song, people are quitting their day to day jobs, packing up their belongings, and preparing to head out to a “3rd planet”. This 3rd planet could be a heaven or purgatory of sorts. Perhaps it is a void of nothingness known as death. Whatever it is though, it’s coming, and people are anticipating it greatly.

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Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday Review: Black on Both Sides | Mos Def

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BY CHRIS MONTANA ★★★★★

Every Thursday we will be reviewing albums that are considered “classic”. With the 15th anniversary of this legendary album coming up next month, it is only appropriate that we start this new feature off with this legendary hip hop album. Continue reading Throwback Thursday Review: Black on Both Sides | Mos Def →