How Abel pulled off his cinematic masterpiece
“TONIGHT WE START A BRAIN MELTING PSYCHOTIC CHAPTER LET’S GOOOO” tweeted The Weeknd one late November evening in 2019. The eerie out of the blue announcement followed by the blurred, monochromatic picture of the artist would signify the start of his next album run. Little did we know that this would also be the start of a whole new chapter in Abel’s career. He would use this new project to reinvent himself by experimenting with different styles of production and developing a stylized concept that only he could pull off.
After Hours is the sixth studio album by the Toronto…
The mixtape that introduced us to The Weeknd
In 2011 Abel Tesfaye was a mere blip on the radar. Having dropped out of high school a few years prior, he was living in Parkdale with a few friends, dabbling in excessive drug use and partying, but behind all this, a true star was being made. On March 21st, Abel would become The Weeknd when he released his first official project titled House of Balloons. A mixtape that would start his journey from a lowly misfit out of Scarborough to one of music’s biggest artists. Moreover, his dark, atmospheric, and moody take on R&B would shift the genre in…
The soundtrack to the apocalypse
If there’s one band who refuses to be boxed into one style or sound that would surely be Bring Me The Horizon. Since their inception in the early 2000’s, they shifted from earsplitting death-core on their debut Count Your Blessings, to melodic metal-core starting with 2010’s There Is A Hell… to full-blown pop-rock meets electronica on last year’s Amo, my favourite album of 2019. The change in sound has certainly divided their fanbase, but the quintet is more than confident with their choice to constantly subvert expectations, and the results have been quite stellar. …
How Scott Mescudi’s Music Saved Me
I’ll admit, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Kid Cudi at first. While I loved his breakout single “Day N’ Nite”, the rest of his music fell flat for me. Maybe because I was trying too hard to compare him to his contemporaries like Kendrick Lamar and Drake or perhaps I just couldn’t get into his style of psychedelic rap, but I passed on him for a while. …
Insight into the rapper’s rising popularity
If there was one good thing that happened last year it was Freddie Gibbs finally getting the recognition he so rightfully deserves. Gibbs isn’t exactly an underground artist, rather he fits into that niche category of having a fairly sizeable following with a few big-name co-signs, but just barely reaching full mainstream attention. I can’t call myself a longtime fan of Freddie, as I only starting really listening to his music about 2 years ago, but his lyricism and beat selection caught my attention almost immediately. …
The Toronto dance-punk titans strike again.
The history behind Death From Above 1979 is a bit rocky. Starting nearly 20 years ago, the duo came onto the Toronto music scene in the early 2000s with raw and unrefined energy that felt missing from most rock music at the time. With their 2004 debut, You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine they solidified themselves as a fierce rock duo, and then disbanded almost immediately after. Reuniting a decade later and dropping music sporadically in the past few years (2014’s The Physical World & 2017's Outrage! Is Now) It’s almost as if they never left, despite their limited discography.
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The duality of the U.K.’s most inventive new rapper.
Coming off the high from his 2019 debut Nothing Great About Britain, Slowthai angered the likes of British nationalists. He was an estate kid that grew up with nothing, who hated the establishment of his country and set out to make it known, going so far as to brandish a severed head of Boris Johnson during a live performance. From his punk rock energy to his quirky persona amidst his other stage antics (stripping down to his boxers being a staple.) the album showcased his raw thoughts on the social ills he had gone through, his music came at the…
Yeezus by Kanye West Retrospective | The Anti-Rap Album
Retrospective is a series where I take a look at albums from years prior, and revisit them with a 2021 lens. Examining production, lyrics, and other interesting tidbits.
It’s still hard to believe that this year will be the 8-year anniversary of Mr.West’s sixth studio album Yeezus. Released on June 18th, 2013, Kanye would take a sharp turn away from the maximalist, rap opera sound he showcased on 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in exchange for something never before seen in mainstream hip-hop. Yeezus was, and still is, Kanye’s most polarizing body of work to date. Characterized by its…
The following article was originally published on my now-defunct Wix website in 2018.
3 years ago today, Kendrick Lamar’s third studio album To Pimp a Butterfly dropped eight days ahead of its March 23rd release date. An error caused by Interscope Records made the album available in its entirety on Itunes and Spotify. Whether or not TPAB came out ahead of its set date or not, I still wasn’t prepared for what I was about to witness. This is an album that to this day, I consider to be the best rap album I’ve heard in the past 8 years…
Nearly 11 years after Man on the Moon: The End of Day, Kid Cudi concludes the series he started his musical journey with on Man on the Moon III: The Chosen. In between the decade long gap, Cudi has grown as an artist. Experimenting with grunge on Speedin Bullet 2 Heaven, collaborating with mentor Kanye West on 2018’s acclaimed KIDS SEE GHOSTS, to forming a new duo dubbed The Scotts with Travis Scott are just a few examples of what he’d been up to since the last MOTM. Seeing him come back full circle to the story that introduced the…
Mark Chinapen
I like to pretend I’m a critic.
