DROGAS Light - Review
Lupe Fiasco has had his ups and downs. He has made some amazing rap music, but he keeps trying to break into the mainstream, and it’s resulted in a watered down version of his work. DROGAS Light takes a step forward for him, mixing subversive rhymes with mass appeal in a way that finally clicks. The first run of tracks is fantastic, and the album somehow darts from dark trap beats to Daft Punk style electronic beats and Gambino-esque flows to slickly produced top 40 style hits. There is something for everyone here, an incredible range of sounds and style crammed into one package as he tries out every conceivable option.
John Wick: Chapter 2 - Review
It is damn hard to do action well. Harder yet is to do it twice in a row. John Wick crashed into the action scene and made an indelible mark with stylish and well-choreographed action, a highly stylized aesthetic, and an interesting world to back it all up. It took the old writer’s adage of “show, don’t tell” to heart in a way that few films do, and with it created a compelling story that dragged you in and made you want to learn more. Chapter 2 had the incredibly difficult task of following this up well. John flirts with the underworld in the first, and as he walked away with his new friend at the end, we were left to wonder if he was truly back, or if he was going to try to pick up the pieces of his shattered life.
I Decided. - Review
Big Sean had ambition with I Decided. While it does sound a lot like the Big Sean we are used to hearing, it had another layer that I’ve been wanting out of his music for a long while. He tries to grasp at something, but it is as effusive as his lyrics as it slips from between his fingers. It is an album that I’ve heard before, that we’ve all heard before. Just never out of Big Sean.
Get Out - Review
Jordan Peele’s directorial debut shows incredible promise from someone that we all knew was a tremendous talent. Get Out is a thrilling and unnerving horror movie where the horror monster is just white people.
Get Out is the story of Chris going to spend the weekend at the family of his white girlfriend’s house. The weekend turns out to be the weekend of a massively Caucasian get together that the family throws every year.
Return to the Sauce - Review
Infected Mushroom is a staple in the psy-trance community, and with their latest effort, they take a different tactic to try to introduce people to the unique sound of the genre. This is one of my first experiences with the genre, and while I’m not quite sure what I expected, the strangely dark sound grew on me slowly. There are a few things that I appreciate about the album but, admittedly, my frame of reference is sadly lacking. For a first experience, you could do a whole hell of a lot worse and it piqued my interest in a way that I definitely didn’t expect.
Resident Evil 7 - Review
Despite having had more than my fair share of dumb fun in the last few Resident Evil games, I had completely lost hope that the series would ever find its way back to atmospheric horror. Thankfully, however, it seems that the critical and commercial failure of Resident Evil 6 has led Capcom to return to the series’ roots.
That is, in all senses, what Resident Evil 7 is: a returning home for the series.
SweetSexySavage - Review
After the success of her mixtape, You Should Be Here, overnight R&B hit Kehlani is back with her debut studio album SweetSexySavage (all one word of course) which luckily fixes many of the problems that I had with the mixtape, and manages to deliver a solid, if unimpressive set of tracks. It is a pop/R&B album, heavy on the pop, and it does a good job at being easy to listen to, but it doesn’t go anywhere special or break any new ground while it does it. I hate to call something generic, but as I coasted through song after song, I couldn’t help but think that I had heard this all before.