Neil Kulkarni's Blog, page 3

CATS OF TRANSNISTRIA - 'DIVINE' LP & 'AWAY' EP REVIEWS

Derivativeness is a pejorative in most music critique, music where you can clearly hear the sources must clearly not be 'challenging' and must be confronted for it. I think that's utter bullshit. I don't care if what I'm hearing is totally new in those terms - the newness of music comes from the people involved and how they put together what's fed them up to the point of their own decision to express themselves. All music is derivative - it's whether people are able to surpass their sources and ...

HAVOC & ALCHEMIST - 'THE SILENT PARTNER' ALBUM REVIEW

Like Curren$y (who of course he worked on with this year's superb 'Carrolton Heist' mixtape) I love the fact that Alchemist is so BUSY these days. By far the best project he's dropped since last year's astonishing 'Israeli Salad' is this set with Mobb Deep legend Havoc. Where 'Israeli Salad' benefitted from its outrageous psychedelic luridness, this is a way more minimal set of beats and loops, conscious that Havoc's voice and rhymes deserve close non-distracted attention and thus hitting on a k...

S***TIEST MOST REPELLENT AND DEPRESSING MUSIC VIDEO OF THE WEEK : SOME C*** CALLED YOUNGR PLAYING TO OTHER C***S AT SOME F***ING HELLISH MORNING RAVE TYPE S***FEST

Of course, goes without saying that I would dearly love everyone and everything in this video to be consumed by a ball of fire and that this is not a 'true definition of an artist' (as stated on the horrific FB EDM rave page I stumbled across this on) but a true definition of a wanker. However, it does identify something I've noticed among younger musicians, and some dipshitted older ones - this idea that your 'quality' as a musician resides in 'how much' you can do. How many notes you can play ...

COMMODO - "HOW WHAT TIME" ALBUM REVIEW

After its nephews, the cousins d'n'b, grime, dubstep faded in the 00s inevitable that hip hop would reassert itself as BASS-music's most powerful drunkuncle-like force, coincidental with hip-hop's ongoing journey in from the coasts and back to the party, back from the real and imagined frontlines to the trap called home, the home called Trap. The best dubstep is touched by hip hop for me, hits some of the exact same pleasure centres - and in recent lean years it's mainly meant stuff on Deep Medi...