Keeping It Fresh

Today I am pretty excited to talk about one of my absolute favorite songs from Kendrick Lamar's latest album. This song features the vocals of an artist who has been quietly and powerfully been building his presence in the music world. Zacari is a soulful R&B artist out of California, and he has been featured in a few different albums and singles. But we will dive deeper into his music later. So as we are making our way through Kendrick Lamar's album. The past two songs that we have had are very focused on societal injustice. They are very heavy songs to take in, the kind of songs which require a couple of listens to really have everything sink in. The material is very angry and pointed with a clear focus of what Kendrick Lamar wants to call out. And while I appreciate the depth to which Kendrick Lamar explores the impacts of media and preconceived notion, I am even more enamored by the way he delves into the recesses of his own mind and thought process. Now what made thi...

Today we have Day 2 of the Kendrick Lamar special. This song is the one that probably had the most questionability surrounding it. When people first saw that U2 was the featured artists on the song, it definitely raised a lot of questions and left people scratching their heads. But, this song was so well executed with the inclusion of U2 that I felt the need to talk about this one. This song is a bit more subdued than a couple of the other tracks on the album, but it tends to fluctuate a bit more between being more calmed down and fired up. Kendrick Lamar starts this song off with a more mellowed out and simmered down kind of sound. In the progression of this album, I do feel like that more calmed down was necessary. As much as we all love a hype song, there is a need for a break every once in a while. And Kendrick Lamar gives us that! The basic breakdown of the song goes a little like this. We are introduced to the song with some eerie chorus singing over a softer synth melody. Whic...

This week I wanted to spend some quality time talking about an album which recently released but has left me absolutely spellbound and beyond impressed. Going into this week of music, I'm going to pick some highlighted songs off the album and talk a little bit about why they stood out to me and what makes them so unique. So if you were trying to guess which album I am talking about, the answer lies with Kendrick Lamar. This latest album DAMN. is one of the greatest albums I have heard from the rap world. In the long-standing question as to who the top 5 rappers are, this album puts Kendrick Lamar on this illustrious list. Kendrick Lamar has always been a great lyricist, but this album showcases his abilities as a rapper, lyricist, producer, and activist. From beginning to end, there is an incredible emotional charge to the album. Not all of these emotions are sad and tear jerking feelings. We get anger, frustration, contempt, vulnerability, and more. There is an incredible passion ...

Today I have some really cute and sweet music for you by the South African singer-songwriter Christoph Kotze. The first time I heard this song was in a movie called The Road to Your Heart. It was such a sweet movie, one that was easily predictable but still incredibly heart warming. This was the first South African movie I have seen, and the first movie to be spoken completely in Afrikaans. I thought that was super cool, and only enhance the movie to be something beautiful and wonderful. This is a sweet and adorable acoustic song, one that reminds me of some of my comfort artists like John Mayer and Jason Mraz. This song has an overall feel-good vibe to it, making the song something that I really enjoy. While this song does sound like quite a few other songs out there, the thing that sets it apart from the rest is the lyrical content. I just found the words in the song to be very pleasant and endearing. Not to mention, I love how unique and darling the title of the song. It ju...

Today I have some music for you by an electronic duo out of Egypt. When I first heard Aly & Fila I got really excited. Nowadays it is so hard to find some really good and solid trance music. However, these two deliver us some really good trance, and better yet, they top it off with some sick Arabic influences. This duo hails from Egypt, a fact that made me even more excited. It isn't often that we hear music like this in general, and even rarer to hear this style of music from the Middle East. So this little taste of Egyptian electronic music makes me quite excited! But Aly & Fila do an incredible job of capturing that trance style of music which was so popular in underground European music scenes during the early 00's. This song has everything we could ever really ask for in a good trance song. We have the ethereal vocals which kind of carry on throughout the song. We've got the longer buildup which brings us to this high paced and full energy kind of drop. But the...

Today I have some more new music for you! This one is pretty interesting and I am very excited to share this one because of how awesome this mix is. We all know Ed Sheeran dropped an incredibly popular song, and it's pretty much everywhere. What a lot of people don't know, is that there is a Punjabi version of the song! Something I love so much is that we are seeing these kinds of remixes popping up more often. Hearing that cultural diversity is absolutely amazing, and a lot of times it adds this spice to the original music. To be quite frank, that is exactly what happened with this song.Twinbeatz came in and remixed this popular Ed Sheeran son, and it is pretty fun! This song has a completely different sound with this version of the song. A lot of times when we see remixes like this, producers just add a dhol drumbeat to the song and call it a "mixed" version of the song. Now while they technically aren't wrong, I am looking for something that is much more integr...

Today I have some long awaited, incredible music for you. We have been waiting for new music by the British band Gorillaz for over five years. Five. Years. And my oh my did they satisfy! One of the cool things about Gorillaz, is that we never know what to expect from them. Their sound is so eclectic and strange, the persona they have is unique, and their choice of musicality and lyricism is out of this world. There are so many things which make this band a special one, a band that we can't help but want to know more about and hear from.The greatest thing though is that no song sounds the same, and each album is entirely different from the rest. Gorillaz tends to follow some kind of rock and rap combination, however, the way the two are combined is up for experimentation. Gorillaz is a band that experiments with different sounds and somehow is able to find the strangest and greatest combinations. With this song, we get a rock slow jam which features Jamaican style vocals. Normally, ...