ScHoolboy Q - CrasH Talk (April 26, 2019) Album • Page 2

This feels like ScHoolboy Q-Lite. Q-Lite isn't bad, but it doesn't come anywhere close to Blank Face which is probably like a top 5 hip hop album of the decade for me. He goes for a poppier direction in some of the tracks which I respect but he doesn't really execute very well. Gang Gang, Tales, 5200, CrasH, and Attention are all really good.

 

Blank Face was massively underrated and overlooked. Such an all-encompassing album.

Listening to this now, so far it sounds like this is his happiest/least melancholy album. I can appreciate the tonal shift, but seems to come at the price of the lyricism, which seems unfortunately dumbed down. I'm admittedly enjoying a solid amount of it at face-value though.

 

I am enjoying this(already removed Chopstix though) but it's nowhere near as good as Blank Face

 

Holy shit. Attention being the last song is such a tease. That's the Schoolboy Q I wanted from this album.

I was also surprised how much I enjoyed the songs with features. Cudi did his damn thing as per usual, but Lil Baby's verse fit pretty well on Water. YG also came through with a melodic verse I was not expecting at all.

 

it just feels like, barring 3-4 tracks, an album that pretty much anyone could have made. His idiosyncrasies don’t feel as present

 

Blank Face never clicked with me. Only 2/3rds of Oxymoron clicked with me too. Habits and Contradictions is my fave of his by far and although this is nowhere near as good as that, it’s clicking more than his last two did.

 

Blank face >>>>> Habits > Oxy

 

I'm not as enthused with this on first listen as I want to be but Attention is fantastic

 

Attention is produced by The Alchemist, so was always going to be the best track.

 

this is very, very solid

 

wikipedia says nez & rio

 

I'm still not quite sure how I feel about it. It definitely feels really short (it's literally almost half the length of Blank Face), and there aren't really any obvious standout tracks like most of his other albums have. Going in I was kind of expecting it to be pretty similar to Jay Rock's Redemption and it pretty much was, i.e. a watered down version of their normal sounds. I know that sounds really negative but Redemption really grew on me by the end of last year, and I could easily see the same thing happening here. There are some absolutely fire tracks (Gang Gang, Tales, Numb Numb Juice, 5200, Black Folk, CrasH, Attention) but there are also pretty weak ones (CHopstix, Drunk, Water), which isn't great for a 40 minute album.

I'm kind of rambling but I think what I'm trying to say is it's definitely not a bad album by any means, just not really what I want from a ScHoolboy Q album. Blank Face is literally one of my favorite gangster rap albums of all time, and Oxymoron does the mainstream/party sound combined with the gangster stuff a lot better than this does. One perk of the short length is that it's definitely super easy to listen to, so like I said I could see it growing on me a lot like Redemption did

 

Haha ooops. It sounds a hell of a lot like an Alchemist beat and Q name checks him to in it, so I assumed it was. Ah well.

 

Really digging this on first listen

 

I tested this another time at the gym and it unfortunately killed the vibe. Dont think this album is gonna stick for me :/

Edit- threw on Blank Face afterward to directly compare the two, and holy shit is it immediately better. Q sounds like a rock vocalist at times. He really pushes his limits on this record. The production is also really haunting and amazing.

 

Schoolboy Q: CrasH Talk Album Review | Pitchfork

this just about hits the nail on the head for me. score is out of whack tho, reads like at least a 7.5. either way, its super solid with a lot of really good shit. its just not as essential as his best work

 

This is a really fantastic interview. Definitely the most I've ever seen him open up, he seems like a genuinely good person

The part about Mac really had me tearing up too

 

Great, candid convo. J Cole bit was funny.

 

Not really digging this stuff, but I haven’t really listened to him since Habits/Oxymoron

What else has he got in the vein of Break The Bank/Collard Greens/There He Go? Much preferred that style

 

Listen to the entirety of Blank Face. Not only is it by far his best album imo but it also sounds right up your alley

 

How'd he go from an album as weird as Blank Face to this

 

RIGHT? Blank Face was brilliantly original. Really emotional too. CrasH Talk feels very hollow and lifeless in comparison

 

This album is a lot better when you stop comparing it to Blank Face, imo. That’s maybe one of my favorite albums of the decade, but this goes for something different entirely. And I find it to be a really easy and enjoyable listen

 

unfortunately, this album still is prettttttty bad