As you can see, today’s themes is abbreviations.
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[5.17]
Anthony Easton: Anglo-Jamaican toasting, done with an elegant respect for form, and — no matter how much the introduction says it — with very little distortion.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: Neither memorable reggae or brostep, this is the equivalent of getting to your dorm room the first week of college and realizing you need to decorate. So you rush out to the poster sale and buy some generic prints – John Belushi swiggin’ Whiskey, something about Pink Floyd – and hang them up. They do their job (cover the wall) but add absolutely nothing of interest.
[2]
Brad Shoup: Athletes repping musicians is even worse than musicians repping musicians, although Ali knocking the Beatles out was cool, I guess. The speaker ain’t burning per se, but the grim chorus is crazy infectious, and I’m fine with the infiltration of UK buzzsynth. An effective banger, in other words: not going to set the show on fire, but it’ll get a lot of people to loping.
[6]
Scott Mildenhall: “Soundbwoy” doesn’t seem to aspire to any more than being a “hello, here I am” single for Stylo G, and it nearly does that very well. All guns are blazing (though if possible, the drops could have done with being more over the top), but it also lacks any real sense of identity. There might not be much in the charts like it, but it could easily be Chase & Status featuring A Man You’ve Never Heard Of. He’s perhaps somewhat stifled by his record label’s seeming insistence that radio edits must not exceed much more than two and a half minutes, but in any case he’s left with a grand entrance that could easily be an exit too.
[6]
Crystal Leww: Oftentimes, artists adding in elements of dubstep, grime, and garage into their genres just sound like a confusing and disorganized amalgamation of trend chasing noise. “Soundbwoy” is surprisingly successful at combining reggae, dancehall, and dance music because it stays reserved rather than focusing on moments of gratification. That’s not to say that “Soundbwoy” isn’t gratifying. The drops revert to familiar bars, but that’s welcome rather than boring. Stylo G’s just managed to create a track that sounds like dancehall but even the most uneducated club go-er can get down to.
[6]
Iain Mew: Remember that unusually dubby Knife Party single we covered? This is kind of the reverse – putting the step into dub! Despite also having a chorus on a fire theme, however, it’s lacking in much fire from either side.
[5]