Fade
The Beat Strangler
Administrator
illest o.g.
Hazwaioh, one of IllMuzik's veteran members, released his album a few months ago, titled "Auf Messers Schneide".
Hazwaioh says: "It took close to 1.5 years to finish the album, which features mainly German artists, and overall the atmosphere is quite dark.
That's why it also features some instrumental songs. We recorded the vocals at various places and I traveled a lot through Germany just with me and my Laptop with FL Studio."
The Intro sets off and I get really interested. It's a really nice beat and cool cuts which looks promising for the rest of the album.
The first track starts. It's a really nice and soft beat. The flow and style of the rappers are really good and the delivery is nice. It quickly turns out to be a really nice and laid back album. Well produced and with nice mellow melodies that gives the beats a really nice vibe and cool style. I have come to realize that German Hip Hop is very melodic and very melancholic, this is in no way an exception. Well composed tracks over classical instrumentation as piano, rhodes and strings. Sometimes the feel takes a turn from melancholic to eerie. An excellent example of this is the use of crickets, barking dogs, a choir and crows in the background making the feel really ominous and eerie.
My German is very rusty so I don't get a grip on the lyrics but I definitely feel the red thread that should go through all good albums. The composition holds a mood and keeps it trough the whole 19 tracks.
On the minus side I get a little feeling of samplings downside (at least in my point of view). Some bass especially feels a little pitch bent. For those of you that don't know what I mean, it's when a note is sampled and then pitched into different keys. It makes the bassline kind of simple and it's not easy to make the bass feel "real" and fluent over the beat.
Nonetheless this is a very well made album. It's nicely produced with nice melodies, great rap and flow and a mood spanning the whole album.
My grade on this album would be 3 out of 5. I think the album needs more solid tracks. It's a little bit too many skits, interludes, preludes etc. The impression leaves a little scattered impression on my eardrums. But once again, the Germans impress me with a solid production that I encourage you to check out.