Quick Look
Plastic Garden
by: Tribe X Chop!
Written By:
DISCLOSURE: The album art for this release was designed by Priestess, a member of the Utopia District team.
To celebrate the premiere of the newest release through Bogus Collective, we’ve decided to take a bit of a special approach. We have not one, but two writers on the team taking a look at Plastic Gardens, the collaboration between Tribe Down South and Chop!, and sharing their thoughts. Read on to check out what Voiture and Gbanas92 thought of the release!
Album Art By: vaporpriestess
Voiture:
Plastic Gardens is a unique album in the sense that its confident and straightforward presentation makes both pros and cons unusually easy to pin down and quantify. The album’s playful sample choices and catchy tracks are enjoyable, if not a bit generic, upon first listen, but further inspection appears to yield diminishing returns. Tracks rely mostly on a central instrumental that makes up most of the songs, meaning that if you don’t like the beat, the track is done, but if you do, the track is sure to be uniformly good. The sampling is an entertaining way to break things up, but with repetitive structure and gaps that feel too long, the instrumentation and production communicate a need for additional creativity and ambition. Stylistic choices don’t always help this situation, with things like stabs at rhythmically creative lo-fi drum techniques making for less-than-satisfying percussion. Overall, the album is a perfectly fine “classic vaporwave” release, but when a deeper look is taken, problems are easy to spot. This isn’t indicative of an outright horrible release, but the flaws on this one just seem to stand out more than average joe-schmoe vaporwave, which this album ultimately seems to boil down to.
Favorite Track: f u t I i t y (I loved the intro sample on “t e n s i o n r e l a x” as well.)
Gbanas92:
While the brief runtime prevents the album from lingering in a way one might hope to experience from some of the more soothing strains of vaporwave, Plastic Garden does still have a lot to offer. The album displays a dizzying array of classic hip-hop beats, and makes use of sample chopping with such frenetic enthusiasm, you’d swear it was made by an axe murderer. Despite this, Chop! and Tribe Down South leave enough room for downtime, as pitched-down commercials allow you to catch your breath before moving on to the next gonzo beat.
Favorite Track: f r g t
Written by:
Copy Editing By: DJ Nonn
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