From Me To You

First off, I think Quadeca deserves credit for venturing outside of his comfort zone and experimenting with some styles that are brand new to him. While most rappers on YouTube stick to the same old meaningless fast rap style, Quadeca took a whole other approach to this project and I think that's pretty respectable. Prior to this release, Quadeca was looking just like your stereotypical fast rapper that's incredibly commonplace within this current era of rap. While this new approach was executed quite poorly, I'm still hopeful for Quadeca's future as he's now made it apparent that he can stand out and get away from the standard formula that he's grown accustomed to. While I didn't like this release in particular, I feel like he can eventually release a project that impresses me.

The production on this project is incredibly irritating for various reasons. First off, I need to mention how terrible the mixing is here. I rarely ever bring up mixing on projects, but most of the time there really isn't anything about it to say. However, on this project the mixing is consistently poor and both Quadeca and the features find themselves getting completely covered by the obnoxious and overly aggressive instrumentals that are presented on this project. This is more towards the aggressive side of this project, where there's always far too much volume put into the beat and it always drains out all the sounds of the artists. While this is even apparent on some extent to the more mellow and emotional side of this release, it's not nearly as bad there. Poor mixing aside, I'm still not really impressed by the musical aspects of the instrumentals either. A lot of them follow a very generic formula that tends to consist of loads of screechy tunes and incredibly punchy bass that never seems to let up. While I could see the appeal of this to some, for me it's just really poorly done and if anything takes me out of a lot of the performances found on this release. Even on the mellow side where the bass lets off a bit to allow the smoother and more calming melodies to be heard, there still isn't anything there that's really worthwhile. Much like the aggressive beats, the more mellow beats are also very formulaic and offer no switches outside of the melodies. Overall, the production really could've used work. This is probably the worst production I've heard from a release on a while and it could be improved upon greatly in the future.

The features were fairly good, but it feels like some of them didn't know why they were there. It really didn't make any sense to have Quadeca tap into these incredibly strong emotions only for the features to enter and drop verses about money and fame. While I think the features here would fit in perfectly to a release that's a lot less sentimental, that's not where they find themselves and because of that the quality of their performances definitely drop a bit. IDK brought a pretty decent verse and he definitely fit a lot better considering he was on a track that didn't really touch up on a lot of the emotional topics that are scattered through other tracks. IDK brought a very standard flow which stayed pretty steady the whole way through and even brought some decent lyricism. A lot of his bars were fairly generic, but he still switched his flow up a little bit to keep these generic bars interesting. He also displayed a few different rhyme schemes which made for some pretty solid lyrical output through his verse too. I think IDK was fairly solid on here. He definitely suited the style of the track he was on and brought an appearance with the expected quality you get from him usually. I've heard a decent amount of beats from PlayThatBoiZay before and I was really hoping that he'd stick to something a but further away from the production formula found on here to maybe let a good instrumental shine through. While there were a few good aspects to the beat (which makes it better than pretty much every other instrumental on here), I was still a bit disappointed in the output as he stuck to the standard aggressive sound on here. Poor mixing, gritty melodies, and obnoxious bass. The beat switch was the only thing that somewhat held his instrumental up. Guapdad 4000 brought a pretty good verse from a general point, however it really didn't match Quadeca's approach on the song at all. His lyrics had no real emotion or messaging behind them which was far from Quadeca's emotional take. However, he still brought some pretty unique vocals and kept an interesting and solid flow throughout. Overall, the features were decent. I was disappointed in Zay, got the usual with IDK, and was hoping that Guapdad could've suited his track better.

Vocally Quadeca takes tons upon tons of different approaches on here and while some of them are fairly interesting, most of them tend to feel very tiring and lack anything in uniqueness or energy. Quadeca's more melodic sound really isn't all that good and also contrasts very poorly to the instrumental style that you find on a lot of the more emotional sound that's present in the melodic instrumentals. For a style of beat that tended to be louder and more energetic, you'd expect the output from Quadeca's voice to match up to that. However, on here he really doesn't do that as he sounds a lot more tiresome and drained throughout this vocal approach. Another issue with this style of vocals that Quadeca uses is that he really doesn't put any emotion into his voice while covering a lot of very hard-hitting and emotional topics within the tracks using this melodic take. He keeps a very plain tone throughout all of these tracks and shows little to no pitch variation when he gets to deeper topics and lyrical thoughts. While using this vocal technique isn't a requirement, it definitely helps in bringing this emotional outlook to a far more relatable and driven level that I feel like Quadeca couldn't reach. His aggressive style of vocals is definitely where he excels at and it's clear that he's improved on this front. He brings nothing but pure energy to the aggressive tracks and really gives it everything he has with his voice. He switches up his pitches on really interesting and seems to only get more and more aggressive as the tone in the beat starts intensifying. Overall, his vocals were a mixed bag on here. While I feel like his melodic vocals could use a bit more fine tuning, his aggressive vocals really shined on here and definitely managed to entertain.

Lyrically Quadeca definitely showed some slight improvements on this release, however there are still a fair amount of problems that I found on the lyrical side of things. The main issue here is that all of his more emotional tracks spew out a ton of very loose ideas and nothing in the same track ever seems to come together. It's always just him bringing forth tons of different heart-wrenching and serious topics that fail to connect and have no real organization or arrangement to them. I think the best way to get all of these serious points across is if you were to focus in on each individual topic within individual tracks to prevent everything from feeling so messy. However, that wasn't the approach here and I feel like it made the mood a lot harder to latch onto. It becomes difficult to feel attached to a certain idea or heavy thought when it consistently changes before you're really able to immerse yourself in it. It's clear that there could've been some better placement of thoughts throughout this project. It's also important to note that two completely different approaches on this project really make for a rough listen as the aggressive and emotional styles are so different from each other that it really removes any sort of set focus to the project. With the more aggressive and ignorant style, it becomes focused on Quadeca releasing his anger while also trying to showcase a more basic somewhat conscious style. While there are some impressive flows brought through this style, they're also very generic and really don't bring anything new to the table. The bars on here are also a lot of very standard stuff with nothing that really stands out in terms of quality. Overall, I think the execution of the lyrical content on here is really what holds the lyricism back. I feel like everything on this project was arranged and thrown together in a really careless way which makes the listening of it a bit less enjoyable.

Overall, I feel like this is a start in the right direction for Quadeca, but there's still a lot that needs fixing. This project is still miles ahead of most of his other work and I think that in good time he'll be able to release some impressive and well-crafted projects.