Riding on the success of Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, two of the most critically and commercially successful rappers of all time have come together to record a collaborative record, Watch The Throne. But where the former succeeded, this album falls flat on its face. Gone is the flow and cohesion that poured out of Dark Twisted Fantasy; gone is 95% of the emotion and 100% of the killer verses.
Watch The Throne has ambition. It is blatant that Kanye is trying to carry over his trademark highly dense production style to this collaboration. Samples from all sorts of genres are flying in from left, right, and centre as Kanye and Jay-Z lazily rap over the top of them. The production is brilliant, no doubt. But the problem, unfortunately, is the rapping. Unlike the clever, intricate rhyming structures that we know both rappers are capable of, Watch The Throne seems to be constructed of boring monosyllabic rhymes and effortlessly (not in a good way) written lyrics, for the better part of the album with no deeper meaning to them at all. Both Kanye and Jay-Z have become complacent – on this album we have two of the greatest rappers in music, and all they can do is talk about how brilliant they are, which is a shame.
There is never really any true chemistry between the two, either. Jay-Z and Kanye both have their own verses and songs, but very rarely do they rap together, playing off each other’s rhymes. The final product is an album which sounds mostly like Kanye recorded some songs, Jay-Z record some songs, and someone mixed them up and put them in random order.
Props go to a few songs, such as “Otis”, but for the better part Watch The Throne is what happens when two of the most famous and successful musicians in the world get together and let their egos absorb them, resulting in a complacent, self-righteous mess.
5.6
Posted by Pearly 
Primus are… different. After not releasing a single album in the last decade, they’re back with their distinctly Primus sound in Green Naugahyde - and again, if you like Primus, you’ll like this. If you don’t, then, quite simply, you’ll hate it.
Aqua will forever be remembered for their albums Aquarium and Aquarius. I’m the first person to admit that I genuinely enjoy their first two records. Who could forget “Barbie Girl”? “Lollipop (Candyman)”? And what about “Doctor Jones”, “Heat Of The Night”, “Cartoon Heroes”, “Roses Are Red”… the list goes on and on. But despite the abundance of subtle sexual innuendo, Aquarium was as much an album for kids as for adults, perhaps even more. Their songs were about fairytales and action heroes. They were mentioned in the same breath as other 90s “Bubblegum dance” groups seemingly aimed at children – Vengaboys, S-Club 7, Eiffel 65. So what happened?
When three middle-class college students from New York City released “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” in 2008, their immediate rise to fame on the Internet went hand in hand with their dismissal as a novelty rap group – one of the worst things that can happen to a band after a debut single. In 2010, Das Racist countered these labels with two highly respectable mixtapes, Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man; the former bravely including the aforementioned song that gave them the novelty label in the first place. Inevitably, however, the question that has lingered around Das Racist since 2008 still remains – are they for real?
Creatively titled “New Album” is the first of three full-length Boris records (and one shared LP with Merzbow) so far this year; and, living up to its name, New Album sticks out like a sore thumb in a sea of happy, healthy thumbs that make up Boris’ back catalogue. All traces of Boris’ position as one of the world’s leading noise bands are totally shunned to make way for a melody-heavy, shoegaze, almost Visual Kei record. Yes, it’s a “New Album”, as this is unlike anything Boris has ever done and likely will ever do again.
Generally, when an old band starts to slump, that’s the end of them. All it takes is that one bad record and their music will start getting worse and worse. For R.E.M., the band that produced masterpiece after masterpiece up until about 1992, this slump began with the departure of Bill Berry in 1997 – the band’s main reason to continue after this was Berry’s own request that they stay together.
