No Fear Of Time (studio album) by Black Star

From swagnadalf 06/22/2022 10:21

Mos Def is holding this janky-ass thing together but only just. I love Madlib's production on everything else of his I've heard but this just feels lifeless and flat. Kweli's still out here over packing bars to the point he's falling behind the beat all the time. Like, you can write but you can't edit!

It could never have hit my highest hopes and I was prepared for that but man, this was a big disappointment.

From Arthurknight 06/06/2022 12:53

Okay some people have tried to make a case that the production being shocking on this album is a deliberate creative decision, and granted that it was recorded in hotel rooms and to some extent that might be the case, I don't care it just sucks. I actually hate the production on this even more than I hate the sheer inaccessibility of the album – worse still, it means that it's not worth the effort to sign up to Luminary for this. The vocal mixing is highly variable: on some songs it's alright, on others it's terrible. Weirdly, on Frequency w Black Thought, you get a bit of both: Kweli is mixed terribly (he sounds entirely out of the song in a very unpleasant way) while Mos Def is recorded quite nicely. Across the album, Madlib basically phones it in. It didn't need to be this way, Madlib produced Bandana on an ipad and that sounds great. I think here he just didn't care – or at least that's what comes across. There's ONE good song here, the closer and title track. It's fun, insightful and offers a kind of late-career introspection that pays off nicely for what is a 24-year comeback and the first Mos Def project in like a decade. It has weight to it (vitally aided by production that doesn't sound like a soundcloud demo), kind of sad since it suggests the duo have the capacity to do a We got it from here...

From LebowskiRams 05/03/2022 19:31

AOTY