I'm not going to negatively judge a Buckwild album, he's one of the least recognized East Coast producers, he has given so much to the game, he has done so much with D.I.T.C. and solo, and above all he has made a lot of East Coast hip-hop quality music, from my point of view, receiving few props in return.
In the late 2000s, he came with two excellent compilations, but the second one was completely ignored despite having some of the best hip-hop remixes of the season. And after the 2014 collaborative album with Meyhem Lauren, his name soon cooled. His 2019 collaborative album with Pounds has gone under the radar even on the underground circuit, yet Pounds isn't inferior to Lauren and is practically in the same place as the NY MC was five years ago, which is that of a young rapper emerging from the New York scene who is doing well. The numerous albums released by the producer in 2020 were also discarded by reviewers: this is his second record, and it's his second record entirely instrumental, after abandoning the beats almost five months earlier, at the beginning of the year.
First cut provided with a jazzy boom bap with good sample, rapid, excellent drum, musical sample with elegant piano. A good jazzy boom bap follows, with a decent sample and a lean midtempo syncopated drum. From the first two rhythms, it's clear that it will not be the best series of beats of his career, they all seem a bit thrown at random. At instrumental tune number three, you can guess what Buckwild is looking for here: boom bap jazzy, dark vibes, it stops between simple noir and almost dark beat that has its matrix in Havoc, the result isn't excellent in this case, despite a good drum machine and a decent music sample. Subsequent pieces don't impress: these jazzy beats are all decent, just enough, sometimes there's a decent sample and some attempt to make the music forcefully noir ("Jects") tense and dark ("Half a Brick") with samples soulful and gloomy piano looped in the background.
In the middle of the tape, the producer changes register and inserts a flute sample kept in loop, creating an excellent boom bap with a just hinted melodic sample and a skinny tight syncopated drum machine, there's also a chipmunk soul sample around what should be the hook. "Hunnid Rounds" is slightly inferior, good production, hard and pounding drum, melodic sample suffocated immediately in the background, raw rhythm. Instrumental number ten also has a harder physique, while "Make It Alright" sees a new female soul sample on slow tight drum machine and dark tense vibes, before over a minute of silence which I lost the meaning of. The piano returns to be seen in piece twelve, eccentric, light and synthesized to give a dark tone to the track.
"Beef-n-Broccoli" has music similar to the previous song: boom bap, hints of soulful sample, tight syncopated skinny drum, eccentric-extravagant sample. Buck's least successful beat on this tape so far, it sounds like a typical rhythm from Young Gunz records. The fourteenth beat has rap rock vibes, quick tribal bongos and a short electric guitar riff in the background, these elements don't push the beat so much. The producer is still looking for his tense-dark rhythm in the next two tracks, but the first isn't fully accessible due to a somewhat shrill sample, while "Boss Thoughts" is better than usual even if it has an excessive duration of almost five minutes. He returns to rap rock in "Quarter Mil", then he succeeds in "Short Fuse", a masterpiece: decent piano, dark, gloomy mood, boom bap tense, perfect drum, skinny, slow and syncopated; Buck looks for this rhythm for about eighteen track and so far he didn't have it never found.
He finds it here. Ok. This is noir. This is thriller noir. Perfect for something like "The Bone Collector" (1999), if you know what I mean. A short instrumental follows: skit, boom bap jazzy, lean slow syncopated drum, perfect here too, Christmas bells typical of Buckwild, perfect, another great noir tense rhythm, not a thriller one though. Or better, we're in one of the final scenes of the movie, the suspected killer is on the run and the final chase begins, but here's the fun part: when you are getting into the mood of the rhythm and a truck is coming to cut the road to the killer, hindering his escape, and we're in the last acts of the film, the man is about to get out of the car and turn to the detectives, Buckwild decides to abruptly stop the rhythm, casually. Without sense. A choice that I neither understand nor agree with, this cut deserved to have its five minutes and instead is the shortest one of the entire record. At track twenty, I am still disappointed with the previous choice. Here I hear reggae vibes that increase my feeling of annoyance mixed with disappointment; the drum isn't evil, but the sounds that Buck proposes here are. Pretty poor choice. Closes a discreet, tense, jazzy rhythm, organ sampled with a few dark piano keys.
What to say? How to conclude? This isn't Buck's most inspired rhythm comp, they all look like scraps and B-sides: twenty-one instrumental cuts, over an hour of listening, there's no horrible beat, but most of these tracks are pretty easy forgettable. No one has an exaggerated length, even though the five minutes of "Boss Thoughts" come very close, most choices are between two and just three minutes. In any case. they're far, very far from being essential beats.
Highlights: "Luxurious", "B.X. Summer", "Boss Thoughts", "Short Fuse", "Burner on the Hip".
Rating: 6/10.
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