To put this week in perspective, B.o.B's new mixtape, Fuck 'Em We Ball, came out just hours before this was posted, which was too late to be considered for this week's post. And yet it already has just as many downloads as every mixtape covered this week combined.
But that doesn't mean the mixtapes aren't worthy of being covered. That just means this week's post is filled with artists that many, including yours truly, have never heard of before. That's Stack That Cheese, for you: always keeping it fresh.
The Good:
Right off the bat, this mixtape sounds mathematical. Not in the lame multiplication table way, but the cool way they say it on Adventure Time. (Do I get any extra street cred for referencing a children's cartoon? No? I didn't think so.)
Rubixx is a rap trio from Massachusetts that describes itself as having "unique instrumentals and lyrics," and I have to say I agree with them.
"Join the Rubixx covenant / And I'm loving it, I use it like an oven mitt / My hand is in the flame and I can tell I'm truly touching it."
That line was from the third track, "Day Dream." When I heard it, I was already pretty impressed with the trio's rhymes on the debut mixtape, but that line made it so that I had to include them this week.
And the trio continues to impress throughout the entire mixtape.
"Persephony" might be my favorite off To The Third. It's a love song with a string-based beat. There are some good lines, such as "Let's relight the candle and let it melt into our hands," but where the song really shines is the fluency between the three rappers: Gabe Thompson, Ari Wrubel and Phil Dumont. With something as personal as a love song, you would think changing from person to person for each verse would cause some emotion to be lost in the process, but that's just not true when it comes to Rubixx.
If I have one gripe about To The Third it would be that the hooks are really just mediocre. But the trio's rhymes and fluency makes this a non-issue. At the very least, this mixtape deserves more than fifty downloads.
The Bad:
I spent a good amount of time deciding whether Live Your Dreams or Die Trying or the next mixtape belonged in the "Re-dic-yu-lus" category. Both mixtapes are pretty bad. The only difference is the subject matter.
On Live Your Dreams Or Die Trying, Blizz opens up about his past and leaves it all on his first mixtape. The other mixtape is about, well...you'll see.
While I respect Blizz for being so open and going through the stuff that he's had to deal with ("I remember those nights / When I wish I had a gun"), that doesn't mean he's a good rapper.
Blizz's biggest problem is that he's being too generic. I mean, the mixtape is called Live Your Dreams or Die Trying, for Christ's sake. Everything the man does is generic.
He uses overused rhyme schemes, such as the interchangeable life/night/knife/right rhymes.
He's got old lines, such as in "'Bout That" when he says, "Y'all niggas ain't got racks / Stop talking 'bout them stacks."
He even has cliché songs, such as "Be Yaself," in which he talks about how he "came up from nothing" and everything else you would expect in a song with a gooey title and a grammatical error.
And it's really too bad that he's so generic, because it's clear he comes from something so different. But he failed to deliver. Simple as that.
The Re-dic-yu-lus
Okay, now do you see why this mixtape was saved for last?
While Blizz is busy being serious about his life, Kyoto has an album titled Sextape.
And it doesn't stop at the title. Every track on this mixtape is named after a porn star (at least that's what Google told me). So, just for the added fun of it, let's provide a picture of each song's namesake that I review (fully clothed, of course). I'll even turn Safe Search on, just for you, my Cheese Heads.
Let's start with "Alexis Texas." Strangely enough, it starts with a creepy voice-over about how greed "for lack of a better word, is good" over some marching. If this album wasn't entitled Sextape, I might look into it and try to figure out what it meant, but, as you probably know by now, Kyoto's mixtape really is called Sextape. Kyoto actually isn't a horrible rapper. He has some decent lines: "I used to be a violent adolescent / Pay attention, smoking weed because I'm always stressing." But he loses the listener with his production. Over the last 30 seconds, he starts singing about how he wants to see that "40 ounce bounce, bitch," except he adds a horrible auto-tune that sounds like it was done by that old "Sound Like T-Pain" app.
He continues using that same crappy auto-tune in the song "Brianna Love," where he raps, "I've got that Brianna Love for you / Presidential candidate Al Gore for you." He even sings in auto-tuned falsetto at one point!
And then there's "Eva Angelina," which is just a whole new level of horrible production. The song is just under two minutes long, and yet all of it is incomprehensible. That's because, for whatever reason, Kyoto thought that it would be cool to change the pitch of his voice and make it really high. But he didn't stop there. He added another recording of him, but deepened it, and made it sync up with the chipmunk recording of him. So we end up listening to both high-pitched and low-pitched Kyoto rapping together.
This is just an embarrassing go-around for Kyoto, mixing bad production with an immature theme. Plus, my Internet history looks sketchy as hell now.
Before I end this week's post, I feel it's only fair to give the ladies a little eye-candy, too. Because here at Stack That Cheese, we respect women!
You're welcome ladies. ;)
-- Xavier Veccia, dropping the mic for now.
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