This one is an interesting start, as it's surprisingly melancholy. There's this sort of warping saw bass, and a reversed piano. I'm getting like sort of... classic IDM vibes in a way. At around 40 seconds we get some glitchy noise and this sort of haunting piano. Like, just based off the two tracks I've heard so far, presuming this *is* Knife, this is a surprising mood change. Just full-on depressing. There's some cool percussion getting introduced, like paper and stuff. (Bandpass drums just came in, get ready for the emo lyrics guys.) The first impression I get is like a mix of "boards of canada" and that this would be really good on a rainy day. At 2:12, sudden drum change, it's more present. There's also this lead line that reminds me of Christ. Not God, the dude who used to be in Boards of Canada. 3:08 introduces more to the piano line, making it much more mournful. That's the general vibe of this song. Mournful. It feels quite... hopeless really. I admittedly have a preference for songs that are melancholy but this is just hopeless as all hell. One clear giveaway that it's not a 12" is there's no vinyl noise, but I digress. All in all, that was a good song. I might make a video for it. (If I ever learn how to LOL.)
Complete mood change, this is some gabber. It starts with some kinda wrestling chant then goes into aforementioned gabber. Fun! Whatever track this actaully is, I'll have to burn it to CD and see how it does with the bass in the shitty 2003 car we have at the moment. Sudden cutoff.
This starts with some 808 beat, quite a nice BPM OH MY GOD THE VOCALS. Those are actual vocals! For the song! At the moment I'm getting a sort of ghetto house vibe, which I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be. The bassline is quite sawtoothed, the vocals have some obvious ridcoulousness to them, sort of being like a strip club. "How you know them hoes *****?" is one of the best hooks I've ever heard, this song in general seems like it's gonna get stuck in my head now. The beat change from 4-on-the-floor to breakbeat is quite nice, and when it introduces the ping sound again that's also nice. This is kinda why I don't like first-listen reviews, cos you sort of get... less content. Sure, I wrote a whole bunch for that first track but that's because it gave off feeling. This isn't like emotionless but it's very much party music, which generally is not a thing that makes you feel deep in your soul. ...Hey, you know what'd be kind of funny in like... a messed up way? If someone synced like a bunch of weirdcore imagery to this stupid ghetto booty song. Hahahaha, I should seek a mental ward!
Oh my god this is just Return to Chinatown. It's not a bad track at all but like oh my god dude the fuck. Do bootleggers even try anymore? At least back in the 70s you had unofficial Rolling Stone albums named "Necrophilia" and getting vinyl plants to press shitty live recordings, this is just taking a bunch of MP3s and editing metadata! But, onto the song though. I quite like this one, it's got a huge videogame feel to it. I always hate describing things as "video game soundtrack-like" because generally that sort of makes someone think 8-bit and stuff. But this song, legitemately could serve as the track to some kind of boss fight or epic battle. It has this 2 minute build into a main section, with this dope ass bass, and some cool amen chops. The lead is this repetitive, hypnotic, redundant pluck that changes its decay time in the middle of the song. This one's only hard to talk about since it's *very* repetitive. Not a bad thing! But, generally like, once you've covered the elements, that's it, y'know? Anyways, the last 40 seconds or so, you're just left with that amen and that pluck line, as if you just finished fighting said boss or corporate office... Good.
This one is hardcore again. The kick has some pretty cool chopping done to it, for it's intro. At the moment, the main elements are:
-weird vocal sample
-clap
-kick
Then, you get this rave stab with some hi-hats. I can not say there is a wide range of notes in this song. At 1:08, even more hi-hats come in! I think this guy likes hi-hats. The "where you at bitch" at 1:28 is magical, just because that's hilarious to hear before it just has BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM. The other vocal sample that comes in, like, it kinda sounds like it was recorded from a radio or something, y'know? It has that police scanner sound quality. 2:28 gives us an interesting switch-up to a different soundset. The synth line is now this sort of bass-like clicky thing, the clickyness being interested because I just want to know how you do that with synths, have it do a bit of variation with the sound. Maybe it's more like a compression effect or something? I have no idea. I'm not an expert in music production, I've barely even made music or tried for that long. A lot of these tracks have silence at the end of them.
A switch to something that starts out very synth-based, nice. You get this bass and drum introduced in. So far, I'd describe it as like a hip-hop sort of thing. Maybe like, "Sky's the Limit" or something. It's got that interesting melancholy vibe again, though even more IDM feeling this time as it has that switch between sadder notes with a bit higher... it's hard to describe. Look at "Turqouise Hexagon Sun", that shows what I'm talking about. You have this sort of bassless drumless bit at 1:30 to 2 minutes in. Fun fact: this is technically the second album I've listened to today, the first one being my own. Two and a half minutes in, we get a guitar line that's sort of buried in the mix. Once again, presuming this is Knifehandchop, it's quite the cool track. Sort of like... you did something and it was good, but it caused a lot of suffering for some, so you wonder if it was actually worth it.
Once again, more ghetto house-sounding stuff! Wait, that's the vocals from Track 3 again. Skip.
Okay... this is the same instrumental as the last one, but shorter by like a couple seconds. I can't say I'm really psyched in this case. Okay, weird fill at 0:26 but, whatev. 38 seconds in, we get new vocals. I'm pausing it there to search up the bit I heard just because like. Y'know. Boredom. Trivia. Hot feminine boys. Okay, I don't think I searched it *exactly*, but the sample comes from Khia's "My Neck, My Back". Quite interesting how like, that song is sort of RNB tempo, being like RNB, but here, it's this uptempo house beat. It's just like four lines from the song, making it... very earworm-y. There's another glitch as we get new hihats, and then it switches to four-on-the-floor at 1:15. I kind of doubt the glitch fills were originally there, and they were added because someone might've found the song boring but... I dunno. This thing is just sort of a mystery. We get a very cool synth line halfway through, but considering that it seems to be not too far from reaching two-thirds of the song, it's probably not gonna last long. (I'm letting it play for a bit.) Ten seconds before three minutes hit, we lose the synth line, and we're just left with the vocal sample and the beat. Once again, another subwoofer banger. There's some stupid voice chops at the end, very fun to hear. Then it ends unceremoniously with hi-hats.
Guitars again. This guitar sounds mildly harpsichord-like. It's short, at 2:35 long, but it's got this neat bass line and synth, with some very laidback minimal drums. I keep describing things as IDM, but it sort of makes sense, because while I'm not that much into it, for what I've heard, a good amount of these things fit. Melancholic synth lines, weird instrumentation, being downtempo. Okay, maybe that's just downtempo music in general. I have no fucking clue. What *is* with the focus on melancholy though? Like when it comes to IDM, I think U-Ziq is the only guy I've ever heard that has made IDM music that isn't depressing. It, like the last one, ends unceremoniously, with the bass cutting out.
Ooh, this one starts out funky! You've got this 8-bit glitch percussion, then at 37 seconds.
Disco.
This is glitchy disco music. That's currently the only way I can describe it. I want to just get up and point my finger up and down repeatedly, over and over, redundantly, never stopping! You've got this offbeat gabber/hardcore kick, then at 1:50, you have this cheesy rave piano stab line. Again, there's not much to say here except... disco! Shiny disco balls! Michael Jackson! Falsetto! Bizarro! Flip phone-o! Michelle-o! That's not funny at all but it's staying because I find it dumb-o! There's also some weird vocal chopping put in through out. I can only presume that whoever made this song was commanded to by POST-MODREN ELECTRONIC DISCO JESUS. Y'know how Daft Punk's last album, which I think was Random Access Memories, was full-on disco? I liked the singles from it, but I can't say I'm a fan of it, since I kinda prefer the electronic house Daft Punk. Then again, I don't really listen to Daft Punk. One thing I've noticed so far is how many synth lines are offbeat. Why? I don't know.
Okay so, this song. It's breakbeat. The vocals are:
In the strip club, slippin yak
Lemme go put a hoe on our lap
Downtown (doo-doo brown), ???
Splat, pass, splat splat splat, pass pass
That's not accurate at all but like...what? Also it starts with a reverse cymbal hit for some reason.
Oh boy, more IDM melancholy synth line music! It's quite funky still. Once again, the main thing is just that, I'm running out of steam, y'know? OH MY GOD GUITAR AGAIN. (1:17) I also notice a sort of basic stock piano sound. This is apparently the song changeup portion. I like it, y'know? But as I was saying, the thing about reviews, especially with albums, but *especially* with me, is that I always run out of steam very quickly, like I can't finish. It's noticeable because generally I stop writing a lot in general or I don't write much about the song, though as I mentioned earlier, that also happens if it's a very repetitive song. The instrumentation is neat just cause like, it's all this synth stuff, and it gets mashed with a seemingly very real guitar, which I like. Guitar is pretty cool. That's the moral. Guitars are cool.
This starts out with a sample of some Jamaican news reporter or artist or something. The hook is "Weed wid di macka", which is all I can make out personally. It's some neat hardcore breakbeat, I think this specific genre with like the ragga stuff is well... raggacore. The song has some surprisingly quick pacing, because I feel like not much had happened but I'm already two and a half minutes in. That's a bit of a shame considering I am enjoying this. It goes out with bass and just has these microsecond vocal chops and percussion for the last minute, introducing the main vocal hook again over that. Nice. Glitchy ragga.
Okay, I think that's the same vocal sample but with a different instrumental. Which, I guess is like... the opposite of riddim. Not like in a definition, like in execution. If I recall correctly, a riddim generally refers to a sort of stock backing track in ragga music, so in this case, it's like the vocals are a riddim, cos they're the same vocals, but with different instrumentation. But, I'm not super interested in the same vocals with just different backing, soooo skip.
Okay... it's the same vocal track at the start, with a different backing, but no intro sample. This one is more interesting though, as it seems to *just* be the hook, and it's over some quite mechanical hardcore. Catchy. Well, I mean, to be honest, repeating the hook of a song, which is usually the catchiest part, over and over on end will always make it catchy. People are very hooked on easily memorizable stuff when it comes to vocals... none of that makes sense but like, you can sort of get my point, right? People like catchy stuff cos it's catchy. This is catchy. I feel more compelled to finish this since there's more switching up in the instrumental. This song must also be quite good on a subwoofer. Subwoofer music is quite good, my mom likes it a lot cause she *really* likes bass frequencies. Sub-bass, y'know? And I get it, I do too, though I can't really do it well with any of my synths. Anyway, yeah, catchy ragga rave tune.
Well, that was an interesting listen. I don't tend to listen to bootlegs that much... or at all. The only bootleg I've listened to, is the bootleg copy of the original 1977 version of "She" by The Misfits. It's from an unofficial compilation, "Beware: The Complete Singles 77-82", right? It's an unofficial CD (I keep repeating myself, urgh,) but my dad had a copy of it cos he has this huge-ass music library, which he had since quite a few years ago. I'll have to write an article on my random Misfits-related thoughts another time, but the point is, it's interesting how a bootleg can provide an interesting experience. Presuming this is all Knifehandchop, that was quite the nice taste into his stuff, very varied too. I like people who can tackle on a number of different styles as, even though you might not have as much stuff in one style that you want, you can get music for different occassions, which is quite convenient. I'll find out in a while whether or not it's all Knifehandchop, because I'll have to look for even more of his discography to check what's what. Anyways, see you some time.