Tuesday, 26 June 2012

Beats, Rhymes & Christ: 4 New Album Reviews

Had a holiday recently and had a chance to write a few reviews - three in fact. Check out my reviews of Wes Pendleton's 'Nebulous', Swoope's 'Wake Up' and Beautiful Eulogy's 'Satellite Kite'. Oh, and a while back I reviewed Cas Metah and Wonder Brown's 'The Darke Bros.' and didn't blog about it.

Here are few excerpts:

From my 'Satellite Kite' review:

Lyrically this album is outstanding – the content is this album’s absolute strength. The inclusion of all the prose-like lyrics in the digital booklet gives you that old-fashioned listening experience and the lyrics read very well and make for great material for meditation. There are tons of quotables on this release, so here are just a few so you get the picture: “Make you logically stop and think doxologically cause honestly a little bit of music and theology never really hurt anybody”

From my 'Nebulous' review:

From the off, it’s difficult to categorize what sort of release Nebulous is. Is it an album? No, too short (17 and a bit minutes) and it’s blended. Is it an EP? Could be, but then it contains a lot of found sounds. Must be a mixtape then? Not that either; it’s all original beats. This new approach to releasing music is testament to the artist’s creativity – this release is an audio scrap book containing fragments of inspiring music, sounds, verses, collaborations and beats.

From my 'Wake Up' review:

“Blind Eyes (The Good American)” – a track that will really impress with its (fairly shocking and stark) message and challenge. It’s that challenge too that perhaps will leave the most lasting memory as few artists truly manage to convict their listeners of their own, and their culture’s shortcomings.

Check the links to Sphere of Hip Hop in the first paragraph and check the whole write-ups.

Monday, 4 June 2012

Beats, Rhymes & Christ: 'Give It Up' - Stephen the Levite

Stephen The Levite recently dropped his 'The Last Missionary' album and I had enough faith in its quality to pre-order it. I've not had as many chances as I'd have liked to listen to it yet (life is busy) but my opinion of it so far is very positive. 

 The single from the LP is 'Give It Up', which is a track that really challenged and encouraged me to try to truly "give it up". The song particularly focuses on married life as well as church life; themes which are very strong throughout the album. I find tracks like this really helpful in the way I view the constant business of life as a husband, father, church member and teacher. In the past tracks like 'Fathers' by theBREAX, 'Domesticated' by Ruslan and 'Step It Up' by Braille - tracks by artists who are in a similar stage of life to me - have done the same as 'Give It Up' does for me now.

Stephen The Levite has written about the song and included the lyrics in a post over at his blog - click here to read it