Rapid Review – 6/1/22

Otoboke Beaver – Super Champon: My favorite Japanese girl group is back with their unique mix of crushing punk vocals and stampeding guitars with cute presentation and silly lyricism. This strangely reminds me of legendary noise rock band Daughters’ “debut” record Canada Songs as they’re both very short yet feel like a full-length album because of how drained one is after listening to them. With an impressive 18 tracks in only 21 minutes, Otoboke Beaver present a meritoriously funny and instrumentally exhilarating work with choruses comprising of repeating English words or phrases they just learned (like salad, I don’t know what you mean, I don’t know why, too much surgar!, and more) and song titles such as “You’re No Hero Shut up F*Ck You Man-Whore,” “Dirty Old Fart Is Waiting for My Reaction,” or “I Won’t Dish out Salads.” A truly humorous and refreshing effort, yet difficult to digest by virtue of its harshness, this is an album I recommend anyone intrigued by what I have described already… 7-8.

August 08 – Towards The Sun: The former 88rising R&B singer-songwriter, August continues in his pattern of concise 7-8 track albums, this being his third. With a groovy feature from Schoolboy Q who goes out of his way to match August’s R&B vibe here, this represents definitive progress for August in the music world. Production-wise there is much diversity with more conventional beats along with some more experimental ones like the synth/bass/subtle-bubblegum-bass instrumental used on Co-Star. His songwriting skills are no less than some of the best that are pushing out similarly romantic and picturesque R&B right now, and he deserves to be up there with them. ~7

Harry Styles – Harry’s House: The pop industry giant and cultural figure releases his third studio album spanning a conventional 42 minutes. It starts with a great instrumental epitomizing immersive happiness but with cringey lyrics revolving around the sushi title. I really thought this dude would have much more to offer than the excruciatingly generic songwriting, absolutely wasting some of the best pop production I have heard this year. Tyler Johnson and Kid Harpoon deserve a lot of credit as producers here. Otherwise, the record has some highlights like the iconic As It Was and the storytelling in Little Freak, but most songs have extremely sparse songwriting efforts (especially Keep Driving and Boyfriends). 5.5-6

Babyface Ray – FACE (Deluxe Edition): These eight extra tracks are all good or great with a great showoff of his signature flow in Spending Spree, the exciting linkup with underground big-name LUCKI, and the ominous “un-analogued” Undertale-like beat in Family>Money, which are all very enjoyable contributions.