Young cats love hot girls that play video games and blow trees. Man, I’m off that. Non-profit, post-colonial literary geeks are my grown-man BI. I kid, though, there’s always room for the juvenile. Sam Lachow’s “Hash Muffins” clip is weed rap playfully sex-ified.
What I want to know is how does Detooz Films manage to get around so much these days? Oh, right, human cloning.
Click album cover to purchase at Bandcamp.
The lazy blogger in me wants to immediately throw Katie Kate into the suddenly ubiquitous White Girl Swag Rapper category. To do so, however, would not only be grossly inaccurate, but also majorly unfair to the artist. While Katie is (at times) guilty of parroting a steez that borders on the racially offensive, her style of electro-infused, party-oriented brag rap is ultimately a valuable addition to the Seattle rap scene, a mostly male-dominated expanse criminally devoid of female voices in general.
In the local context, Katie is the feminine answer to Mad Rad. The two acts incidentally share a label home at Out For Stardom, as well as a similar fundamental identity: that of the emotionally tormented (exhausted?) seven-days-a-week party purveyor. On Flatland, Katie Kate’s debut album, the MC/singer/producer makes it perfectly clear that she has problems and that the absolute best way to deal with them is to dance and sing her way through the strife.
On “Totebag” Katie fills a proverbial knapsack with emotional remnants from past loves, both tragically good and bad. A well-executed flip of those killer chimes from The Brothers Johnson’s “Strawberry Letter 23” is like a bittersweet sprinkle of stardust over the track’s synth-laden thump. Most of Flatland’s ten tracks are similarly charming exercises in rudimentary beatmaking. Katie employs a learned appreciation for bare-knuckle 808 knock and the endless array of effects at her synthesized disposal. The best example is “Hunting,” an industrial-grade dance workout that finds Katie on the prowl; it’s here that she’s at her most charming, toying with her sonic creation with deft switches between rapping and singing. Unfortunately she does neither exceptionally well…yet. Her attempt at lyrical miracles on “Uh.. No” leaves much to be desired and “Bodyout Princess” (an inane declaration of the artist’s unique identity and perhaps formal unveiling of the Official Katie Kate Tagline) is simply too far out-of-bounds for her, vocally.
Still, there’s much promising on Flatland. Katie, like the best electro-pop artists, is capable of finding the fleeting humanity within electronic music’s artificial constructs. Whether it’s the lovely reserve of her singing on “Houses” or the playful yet astute romantic observations on the echoing “Constellations,” a significant swath of Seattle’s music-loving populace can relate to Katie Kate’s point-of-view, and for this reason Flatland is an invaluable entry to the game. In a post-genre musical world like today, where some folks find themselves stumbling through (the grumpy rap purist set) and others drift seamlessly between genre amalgams (the wide-eyed youngsters), it’s mad scientist artists like Katie Kate who have the most to gain and the least to lose.
206UP.COM has already sung the praises of Malice and Mario Sweet’s EP Happy 2 Year. It was simply one of the best R&B projects to come out of Seattle in recent memory. Emotionally and creatively heartfelt, it drew a straight line between the city’s bustling hip-hop scene and the more in-the-cut R&B landscape where there remains greater room still for expansion. Today, Malice and Mario offer this reissue of Happy 2 Year, a Deluxe Edition that includes the new track “Love and Friendship” and three remixes.
In time for Halloween, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis just released the video for “And We Danced” (from 2009’s The Unplanned Mixtape). The cast of this epic clip has single-handedly ensured the financial health of all Seattle-area Value Villages for the next five years. Here’s to hand-me-downs.
Peep the visuals for “Zeused Up,” Notion’s god-of-the-summertime anthem.
John Harry Baluran of Detooz Films directs his best video yet for the homies J. Bre, Luck-One and Grynch. “Memories” takes a simple concept (T.R.O.Y.) and draws out a wealth of emotions with poignant images related to hip-hop, social issues and pop culture. One of the best Town videos of the year.
Will Johnsen, curator of all good things over at Seattle’s Members Only blog, was gracious enough to let me contribute my review of Phonte’s Charity Starts at Home to their site. This LP resonated with me in a different way than most, so pardon the self-indulgent turn my writing takes. Click here to read the full review over at Members Only.
Click album cover to D/L.
The last time I was at a house party, a dude who could not handle his liquor (four drinks in he was puking in someone’s bedroom) became very upset at a former girlfriend and proceeded to defile her character in all sorts of horrible ways in front of everyone in attendance. The last time I was at a club with a group of people whom I mostly didn’t know, I spent the majority of the night practicing my lip-reading skills (of which I have none) and nodding at what seemed like appropriate times during the course of a dozen meaningless conversations with people I will probably never see again.
Thank goodness, then, for music like Stevie and Sam’s SwimSuits, the soundtrack to a fantastical world where every hot girl at the party wants to go down on you, and every night out at the club feels like you’re kicking it in someone’s living room with a thousand of your closest friends. That’s the reality SwimSuits (and its other similar electro-R&B/rap ilk) exists in. It’s fun. It’s hedonistic. It’s impossibly expensive. And it’s a pleasure to see a crew from Seattle parroting the themes of more well-known taste-makers who share the same subgenre.
Stevie and Sam don’t do it as well as Frank Ocean or The Weeknd, but not for lack of trying. They’re not excellent vocalists yet, though both are effective in imparting the flippant casual cool that’s so vital to the mood. State Of The Artist’s TH lends his gravelly MC register to “Timeless Opulence,” a lifted bass-heavy slow-roll that celebrates a contented rap-life stasis derived from being high either off drugs or your own delusions of grandeur. Themes and aesthetic remain mostly the same throughout SwimSuits with Stevie and Sam bouncing their cocky brag-rap/sing off electronic soundscapes awash in keyboard waves and bounding with rapid high-hat and electronic adornments.
Unrelenting talk of debauchery aside, there’s a detectable element of innocence here. Almost like Stevie and Sam don’t quite know what it is they’re engaging in, even though they’ve seen it a thousand times before on television. Frank Ocean can’t help but bare a cautious optimism that’s betrayed by his old soul. The Weeknd’s Abel Tesfaye seems to have already hit bottom and is trolling the void for as many good times as he can before beginning the essential steps toward survival. Stevie and Sam still have room to grow into their indulgences, both musically and habitually. For this duo, a million different directions are possible and virtually all are promising.
Unlike Logics, Jake One (?) and IHOP, I hate it when my friends pay me in Kit Kats. Makes me feel like I’m 10 years old. F-ckers. Sometime-Seattle MC Sez Batters gets away with it here, the candy bar (get it?) presumably allegory for that dope rap sh-t, of which this is only a moderate example. Detooz Films behind the lens again.
And now for a more benign video concerning a lady’s shortcomings. It sounds like DTC made this song on Garageband which, of course, makes me like it even more. This video makes me hungry, makes me dance, makes me yearn for simpler times in the Fall when the most critical thing on my dome piece was choosing what color pencil erasers to put on the end of my #2’s.
Also, this gem:
A SEATTLE HIP-HOP BLOG 