Artist — album: DJ Screw — “Bigtyme Vol II: All Screwed Up”
Label: Bigtyme Records
Release date: 1995
For fans of: Shlohmo, J Dilla, Madlib
Rating: 4.0
In a 1995 interview curated by Bilal Allah, the household name of the Southern USA hip-hop scene, DJ Screw, gave insight to his creative endeavors that involuntarily shed light on his opus, “All Screwed Up.”
Besides giving credit to marijuana for chiseling his slow-moving pitch-shifted sound, Screw describes “the Screw sound” as “I mix tapes with songs that people can relax to. Slower tempos, to feel the music and so you can hear what the rapper is saying.”
This style obviously stood out in a time of horrorcore and boom-bap rap styles, which were seen in the East Coast Wu-Tangs or Three Six Mafia. Much of rap at the time steered away from its early MC-led roots of simple house music and easy-to-digest lyrics, moving in a direction of abrasiveness for the sake of being the hardest in the game.
When listening to tracks like “Short Texas,” the listener wouldn’t be wrong to think, “is my phone running slow?”
The signature Screw sound is like crawling syrup through the ear canals, with many of these beats that rarely hit above the 110 bpm mark mixed with detuned, salivating MC vocals.
If it were to be placed in an analogy, “All Screwed Up” is like lounge room gangster-rap.
When these beats are slowed down, Screw doesn’t just try to make it easier to listen to. He also makes his remixed compositions more interesting to listen to.
Aside from the expert deck scratching over the DJ’s whole discography, he takes the songs —likely with two copies of the track — and edits in instrumental breaks, putting the original song in the background of the groovier, edited mellower cuts.
Occasionally the beats surprise you, like the tempo changes on the penultimate “Headin’ Fo My Trunk” or the sampled soul guitars that provide a gorgeous contrast to the obvious anthem raps about memory on the standout track “My Mind Went Blank.”
Although there are moments of skeptic experimentation, the 73-minute runtime stays relatively consistent. With over half of the tracks lasting at least 5 minutes, these songs run more like instrumental hip-hop beats than a typical 90’s Southern hip-hop record.
The style of Bigtyme Vol. II could even be attached to a modern sound, like the influx of vaporwave — whose slowed down beats and vocal samples likely take direct inspiration from the Houston DJ himself — or the cultural explosion of lo-fi hip-hop beats.
Granted that Robert “DJ Screw” Davis wanted to place an emphasis on the slower MC vocals and lyrics, the end culmination over 20 years later is more impressive in the overall complexity and composition of his sound retaining its value over numerous renaissances in the hip-hop scene.
Artist — album: Mitski — “Be The Cowboy”
Label: Dead Oceans
Release date: 2018
For fans of: Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, Hop Along
Rating: 2.5
For Mitski Miyawaki, breathing life into the female singer/songwriter genre of indie rock has continuously been a motif of hers.
However, her fifth studio album, “Be The Cowboy,” is lacking the New York City-based artist’s living characteristic that albums like “Puberty 2” or “Bury Me at Makeout Creek” highlighted.
Much of the record centers itself around an anxious bout of feelings from the perspective of Mitski, with songs like “Lonesome Love,” speaking on two lonely people loving one another and the plight behind maintaining that relationship.
Or the closing track “Two Slow Dancers,” whose Rhodes piano plays dreamfully alongside Miyawaki’s serenading cadenzas about young love and the reflection of it from the two reunited lovers’ perspective.
Although through times of momentary grunge-rock influences and occasionally appealing production, where “Be The Cowboy” fails is in its solemn attempts to move the listener through its already short run length.
Tracks, such as “Remember My Name,” start off strong, as well as the intro-track “Geyser,” but these songs are few between sub-two-minute-long forgettables like “Blue Light” or “Come into the Water.”
Mitski’s shtick of creating bittersweet ballads to smash framed pictures of your ex to isn’t done without its highlights, like the upbeat disco dance grooves on “Nobody” that rip the floor out from beneath her loungelike jazz scatting, or the fourth track “A Pearl,” which layers the vocalist’s subjectively most inflective performances on the album over triumphant orchestral horns and distorted shoegaze guitar licks.
Mitski’s cultural efforts to be the generation’s nihilistic Kate Bush come off more as a diet St. Vincent, with indeed peeled back vocals and love themes being scathed by her hit and miss songwriting.
While “Be The Cowboy” is short and is what should be the turning point of an artist’s discography, it altogether lacks consistent displays of innovative pop music.
Devoid of a captivating ending, the album finishes while echoing the observable lack of energy throughout the course of the project.
Within 32 minutes of adequate indie-rock, this record proves tamer than the 27-year-old’s previous catalog, where many of the tracks on this new release touch lightly on basic concepts of loneliness with dry-cut instrumentation barely supporting Mitski’s lazily delivered vocals.
Being a well-produced record with its respectable highlights and noticeable lows, I can’t help but hope that this point in the artist’s career prophesizes her eventual return to energetic, enthralling, and unpredictable experimental art pop after a momentum-deficient album like “Be The Cowboy.”
Rem Jensen can be reached at [email protected] on Twitter at @Remington__J