Blown away by hip hop
There are interesting drawings in the album booklet too!
Album: The Out of Money Experience
Artist: The Optimen
Summed up in one word: Wow
Would I recommend to others: Absolutely, definitely, without a doubt.
Animal it reminded me of: Some sort of multi-animal hybrid wearing bandannas and lots of bling.
Situation this album definitely ISN’T suited for: The very first aristocratic weddings in renaissance Italy in which ballet first originated.
This musical experiment with The Optimen started out promising, I loved the CD cover and it definitely had my hopes up. The CD packaging was quite damaged and fell apart when I tried to open it but I tried not to take that as a bad omen. The CD still worked which was a good start. I’d listened to these guys briefly on their MySpace when they were first suggested to me but then months went by before I finally listened to them properly. By this point, I’d forgotten all about them.
I’m not much of a rap or hip hop fan. I’m pretty sure the closest music to rap I have on my iPod is Jay Z when he collaborated with Linkin Park years ago. I’ve probably got a few hip hop songs on my iPod without realising it though. When I put The Optimen into my laptop and begun to listen to it I had no idea what genre it was. At first it sounded like rap but a quick Google search revealed that it was in fact hip hop. Made a lot more sense. It was definitely more entertaining than rap. If anything comes from this whole music blog experiment, I’ll definitely know a lot more about varying genres of music by the end…
The song “Always” just blew my mind – everything in the song just comes together so amazingly… it never got boring and didn’t just have some guy talking with a lame beat behind him like rap (at this point I still was expecting this to be rap music). This had brilliant backing music and really was enjoyable to listen to.
“80s Babies” was pretty fun. Near the start there was a brief set of old Atari arcade sounds. Unlike the reggae version of “Let it be” from the last album I tried out these sounds were on purpose and made sense this time! Yay. It was great fun reliving those 80s days which I never got to live to begin with. I totally got the VHS reference and do like those old arcade games (yay Space Invaders), so I guess that’s good enough.
Interesting video clip too! Would have preferred to see the Flash in there somewhere…
“Interlude 1″ was entertaining. It’s only 31 seconds so I can’t really say much without ruining it. It was fun though. They should change the sign.
To be honest, I was so blown away by the quality of the music that I really struggled to actually hear much of what they were saying. Most of the meaning of each song was totally lost on me. My senses were just overrun by so many varying sounds that everything was overwhelming really. Good overwhelming though. Every song kinda merged together despite being different… it was an amazing experience where every song on the album really fit together perfectly. I was definitely caught by surprise! The only thing that disappointed me about this album is that I couldn’t think of any other clips to put in here that it reminded me of…
Last weekend I commented to my brother that I didn’t like rap music (after hearing the new Eminem and Rhianna collaboration on the radio). I had a feeling I’d end up finding music which proved that statement wrong. Good thing this wasn’t rap music in the end otherwise I’d have proved myself wrong way too soon. I was worried for a second.
Thanks to Will yet again for his awesome suggestion! If you have a suggestion, no matter who you are, tweet at me @thatpatrickguy or contact me on that email thing.
