Albums I've listened to for the first time today:
Hollenthorn - With Vilest of Worms to Dwell (2.5/5.0) [Symphonic Death Metal]
It's okay, I guess. Orchestration is a little blasé/amateurish and the riffs are fine, but not really great. Vocals are not really spectacular either.
The Monolith Deathcult - Trivimvirate (2.5/5.0) [Symphonic Death Metal]
Better use of orchestration than Hollenthorn, for sure, but that's balanced by really stale and poor mixing and some mediocre growls. Riffs are about the same quality. There's also a weird Nazi bit in the middle of the album. Not really a fan of that.
Noisia - Outer Edges (3.0/5.0) [Half-time/Neurofunk/Breakbeat]
It's not quite as good as the other album of theirs I listened to, but honestly I'm really liking this group. They're much more interesting than the average EDM artist and have some good sound design and a great energy.
f(x) - Pink Tape (3.5/5.0) [K-Pop]
Honestly this slaps. There's a lot of great pop jams on here and it's a really balanced and entertaining album overall. There's some corny English moments on here which brings it down a little for me, but it has some great production and some catchy vocal parts in it. They've got two other acclaimed albums that I'll probably check out later.
JGives - Fly Exam (4.0/5.0) [Christian Rap]
This was really good tbh. Much higher quality than a lot of Christian music I've heard (not counting Classical) and there's some genuinely clever lyrics here. He has a great flow and the downtempo, chill beats somehow compliment that. I'll definitely jam to some of the songs on this later.
David Crowder Band - A Collision (Or 3+4=7) (4.0/5.0) [CCM]
DCB has always been one of the best Contemporary Christian bands, given that they actually put effort into the arrangements of their music and go beyond the "repeating 2-4 chords over and over with a band that's waaaay too huge with none of the parts actually doing anything interesting while repeating the same lyric over and over again" of a lot of CCM. Plus they write their own music instead of just covering the same 10 Bethel/Hillsong United songs over and over. Very stylistically diverse and overall an enjoyable album, although a little padded in parts.
Kanye West - Jesus is King (2.0/5.0) [Christian Rap]
I've never really been much of a Kanye fan tbh, I've only heard one or two of his songs off of ye and I didn't like them at all. Plus, he's always been a total dumpster fire and I didn't really want to support that. I heard he was doing a Christian album and tbh my curiosity got the better of me, so I figured I'd finally check him out. I'm going to be straight: this album doesn't sound finished. There's some super clunky lyrics on here ("You my Chick-Fil-A / Closed on Sunday"
), the album has absolutely NO flow from track to track, and the mixing is really poor. On the other hand, if the songs themselves were actually worked on a little bit more and fleshed out, this would be a really good album. The beats on here are really, really great. The lyrics also have potential if they were refined a lot more. Overall, I think this album just needs an outside producer to finesse it. It's an album with potential but it doesn't sound finished.
Also, I've read some of the threads on reddit in the wake of this, and some of the lyrics they're highlighting as "quality" from his old songs are really awful. I'll just go back to not listening to Kanye.