Angel Haze

Yeah, this has the odor of a stunt.

nah, i'm sure the label would still like to do the physical release along with the digital at the very least.

xp

i dunno; a label faced with this would ask pr to make straw into gold
so either planned as a stunt or as a tantrum, the result would likely be the same

very suspect that NOBODY got it tho

I think the span of time between her tweet and it being yanked was all of ten minutes.

yeah, but TEH INTERNET. certainly somebody should have gotten it and it should be everywhere now.

2013: for the first time, the internet falters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e10pzjb4ZnU

The way things are now with rappers, the first official album almost feels more like the end of their career than the beginning

sad truth bomb

Pretty much otm

In that case, I hope Azealia hurries up with her album ASAP.

Do you really think she would have had the type of promotional schedule that would have included TV appearances and shit? Like yeah 3 months of build up is better but how much build up are they gonna do for Angel Haze?

I could see her getting on some of the lower-tier shows: Conan, Kimmel, Arsenio, maybe Fallon, maybe some of the daytime talk shows.

she'd be in pretty much every monthly music magazine left

prob still will be but the lede will be "why did she force the album to be released now"

a major could def get her on fallon or conan

Not hearing a lot here that I love. Needlessly self-important, and these beats don't go anywhere or do anything. But "White Lilles/ White Lies" is excellent

Polica has been on Fallon & Kimmel and they aren't even on a major

So, this album.

Lol. Anyway, I'm finding this a bit difficult to process, it's not as...hard as I had hoped?

i like "deep sea diver" a ton, but that chorus loop probably does go on a bit too long.

Someone just posted a photo of some majestic trees on Facebook, with a one-word note: "Birches." Had to fight the temptation to comment "These birches is awful" because a) it's not someone I'm ever in contact with otherwise, and b) would have been very confusing.

just cracking it now; been too wrapped up in end of year stuff.

I listened to the first four or five tracks this morning and it sounded pretty banging, I'm vaguely hoping this record unites her more in-your-face battle rap persona with her more soul-searching side.

i'm not sure what i think about it, there's some strong stuff on here but...i'm just not sure what i think about the blustery choruses. even if some of them are good, idk if they're what i wanted from her, and they kind of bury her good ideas a bit. first half is pretty strong though, and "white lilies/white lies" is one of those songs that NO other rapper out there could pull off.

the spoken intros are a bit heavy-handed. show don't tell!

sia has secretly become as much of a hack as ryan tedder hasn't she. all those clichéd "inspirational" choruses that are all identical.

basically i'm not sure i wanted her battle rap side and soul-searching side to be united because it means we get neither...

Ugh this basically goes to shit after Black Synagogue. I agree on the choruses, just so ponderous and nondescript. The spoken word intros are part of the same phenomenon really, underestimating the audience.

This really feels like her answer to Yelawolf's Radioactive, a hedge-betting crossover grab that stops an artist's buzz cold

word so true

sort of no surprise that both emerged more fully-formed on their mixtapes than most. like, trunk muzik and reservation were essentially amazing and striking debut albums in all but name

This really feels like her answer to Yelawolf's Radioactive, a hedge-betting crossover grab that stops an artist's buzz cold

― Evan R, Friday, January 3, 2014 8:27 PM

Ouch.

and instead of having the opportunity to take that further both kinda had to redo their debut album statement for major labels and sort of consciously move away from what made them brilliant in the first place

i mean, i would be hesitant before writing this off completely though

radioactive wasn't actually as bad as people like to make out it was

i mean, not great, but i'd take it over several other albums that get handwaved through without half the criticism

it has its fair share of good tracks but pretty regrettable from a conceptual standpoint

with angel haze i think the conceptual aspect of the album is less disappointing/surprising because she never really made it a secret that she was gonna try and pull off some corny shit ("i most want to collaborate with jason mraz" etc)

yeah i think everyone had trepidation over that stuff - which was there from the start - and actually we might have got off lightly (ie, no actual collaboration with jason mraz)

i think with both, i can imagine major labels thinking these artists can ~transcend the rap fanbase (not that that's where they had the biggest support in the first place, i guess) but getting the ways in which that could happen a bit confused - like, thinking you have to be corny/on-trend to appeal to pop fans rather than just carrying on with what actually made them special

and in both cases their lyricism hasn't so much gone away as just been...buried a bit

What kind of audience did the label expect her to have? Serious question. That this (so far) sounds undercooked is a testament to a label's willingness to dilute an artist's personality for the sake of non-existent mainstream attention even in 2014.

This is a dumb point but her name elicits blank stares whenever I mention her to young rap fans, so this project seems doubly depressing.

did the hip-hop community ever really support her though?

yeah i have no idea what her fanbase is

ILM and forty other critics, I'd imagine.

the one time i've seen her live it seemed like a really mixed fanbase, though a really enthusiastic one. lots of lesbians but really not a homogenous group at all. assorted waifs and strays with troubled backgrounds who would have had livejournals ten years ago, maybe.

xp nahhhh look at her twitter followers etc, she does have a proper fanbase, and it's a cultish and devoted one. but it's not one that really screams commercial smashes

That this (so far) sounds undercooked is a testament to a label's willingness to dilute an artist's personality for the sake of non-existent mainstream attention even in 2014.

do you mean the label has diluted her sound? bc i don't know about that, angel's insistence to put the album out in 2013 seems more like this is the kind of music she really wanted to make but her label were more hesitant

like lex i don't want to abandon her just yet because i thought reservation was really, really special but yeah initially i'm disappointed by this, particularly the languid second half

angel has a legit nyc fanbase but it's not trad hiphop fans afaik

not - predominantly - trad hiphop fans i mean

angel haze and yelawolf also share an overemphasis on technical frippery at the behest of musicality

behest totally the wrong word there. what is the word i'm thinking of? I think just "expense."

sorry havent gotten much sleep

Ugh, "Angels and Airwaves" stuck in my head all day. This is one of those albums where the more a song sticks in your head the shittier that song is

On the first song, I thought to myself "who told her 'sad Nicki Minaj' would be the way to go here?"

On the second song, I thought to myself "actually 'sad Nicki Minaj' is working pretty well, I shouldn't prejudge"

Then she started doing a spoken word about how she doesn't connect to things tied to her ethnicity and that people shouldn't expect it to be in her music over tribal chanting and I thought "okay, I'm gonna be late for my dinner reservation if I keep listening to this bullshit" then I died of irony over the word "reservation"