video review: 'renaissance' by the underachievers

Damn, I'm really getting bad at posting these on time... well, anyway, here's the episode that dropped back on Thursday, as Sufjan Stevens and crew come later tonight, stay tuned!

album review: 'renaissance' by the underachievers

I can't be the only one who feels that hip-hop hasn't exactly had a banner year, am I?

Obviously I'm not saying it's a bad year - we got solid records from Kendrick and Joey Bada$$, and that Quelle Chris record was an underappreciated gem, but at the same time, it's kind of telling that my favourite rap record thus far in 2017 has come from an album that was surprise early-released on Christmas of 2016, that being Run The Jewels - and yes, I'm going to count it as a 2017 release for year-end list purposes, just deal with it.

But maybe it's just the hip-hop I've covered in the first half of 2017, but there's been a lot of underwhelming to flat out crap records that I've covered, and I'd like to think I'm not missing anything big here out of the mainstream or underground. So you can bet I was happy that there was a new record from The Underachievers coming up my schedule to cover, seemingly with little-to-no actual buzz! And that kind of blows my mind: sure, I wasn't really crazy about that It Happened In Flatbush mixtape last year, but Evermore: The Art Of Duality was a really damn solid sophomore album that tackles big ideas with really solid bars and some fascinating dualistic production, so I was hoping that Renaissance might be the shot of life hip-hop has needed in 2017 - was I right?

video review: 'evermore: the art of duality' by the underachievers

Damn great record that took me way too long to get to - stupid overloaded schedule (really just overloaded October, to be honest). 

Next up, I need a little more time for Julia Holter, so I'm probably going to go with Avicii next. Stay tuned!

album review: 'evermore: the art of duality' by the underachievers

Goddamn it, I'm kicking myself for this one.

See, I've actually heard about this duo before when I started getting requests last year, and given the fall is always an overloaded time for album releases, I skipped over them. And given their debut album was getting solid but not exceptional reviews, I figured I'd put them on the backburner and eventually I just never got around to covering them. So when they announced their sophomore album this year, I figured I might as well check in on that debut...

And wow. As I said, I'm exasperated with myself that I let AK and Issa Gold get past me, because this is the sort of smart, articulate, hard-hitting hip-hop I really enjoy. Breakneck, multisyllabic flows that remind more than a bit of Bone Thugz-N-Harmony, great chemistry, solid psychedelic leanings in the wordplay that have only become better articulated, they broke through with the star-making Indigoism mixtape in 2013 and the better written and tighter but slightly less refined Cellar Door: Terminus Ut Exordium in 2014. I'm not sure whether it would have been enough to knock either into my favourites list, but they definitely would have been contenders.

And as such, I definitely had some interest in their sophomore release Evermore: The Art Of Duality - even though at fifteen tracks this looked to be an exhaustingly dense listen. Which I think even they realized, because from the album art to the track listening, they looked to be segregating this record into two distinctive parts, one light, one dark. But regardless, how did the album turn out?