Asti

This is one of the hardest albums to review I've listened to recently. The brilliance of songs like Coffee and especially None Shall Pass are palpable, but this album suffers from just being so long. None of these songs are particularly short with most ending up around 4-4.5 minutes in length, and even subtracting the dead air before the hidden track it is an hour long project. That alone is not a positive or negative, but the beats here are not particularly wide-ranging. Most of these ... read more

Almost certainly the pinnacle of mashup music, Neil Cicierega's Mouth Silence is so incredible by doing almost the exact opposite of Mouth Sounds, and avoiding All-Star as much as possible. That constraint mean that a bunch of fascinating meta clues were included not just in metadata but in the songs themselves. One thing I can appreciate about this album is that it knows when the joke is over, and how long to keep the song running. No song on this album feels like it drags, and the longer ... read more

I will admit, Better Than did grip me and pulled me in, but from there every beat sounded like an attempt to recapture the magic of the lead track, almost all to no success except for the very last song. That doesn't help these songs stand out structurally either, as due to the similar lengths of each track and similar beats they all rapidly blend together. It's all the same muddy 90s boom bap facsimiles, and the album is undoubtedly at its best when there's a genuine attempt to ... read more

I normally don't like using sort of overblown phrases like this, but I think listening to this album for the first time and immediately hearing Holiday altered my brain chemistry a little bit. It's certainly in contention for the best first track on any album I've listened to, with how strong it comes out the gate to establish the tone of the album and provide an incredible burst of energy. And the rest of the album doesn't let up, and although it doesn't keep that ... read more