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Oh man look another blog post what will this have?

FIRST OFF A TRACK BY TRACK STYLE LOOK AT LAKUTIS'S EP I'm In the Forest EP

I got pretty hype for this after the previews.

“Lakutis In the House”

Production for this one is seriously next level. Lakutis gets into his flow really quickly and these lyrics are pretty nuts, gonna have to go back for some serious study of what seems like a lot of Japanese sorta lyrics. Oh man what is he quoting from? His verse on “Rapping 2 U”? Okay that's fine. Seriously the beat on the hook is just supernuts. “My visage makes villages recoil” that's pretty dang. This is like postironycore straight up attack dogging party culture. “Mirror mirror on the wall/water water everywhere” and then he seems to thematically expand on this, woah nice. Cool outro on this intro.

“Death Shark”

Lol intro. Dang this beat is heavy heavy heavy. Wow this sorta flow, okay, go for it man. Beat levelling up, “Jewish Eddie Murphy in your barber shop” wow and I missed like three more good lines while I was writing that one down. “I am the flora hydraulic” cool cool. Hook solid. Beat getting more and more interesting. Same with hook. Wow NICE verse 2 intro. Beat legitimately level 87 atm. Things getting weird near the end here, hook over repeated line, very nice. I love that little horn blow too. “My blood is made of bones” woah this is getting swagger????? And then hook vs. repeated line again, really cool, really cool, very much an actual song. Outro great. Where those samples from? I recognize it.

“Swann Gangg”

Woah Jesus Christ this beat is way way way too good. Way way way too good. How you using a beat this good? All these lines so good. Breakdown so solid. Hook so heavyswag. Heaviest swag. DVS comes in oh my god he is getting ready to body this I can tell. “It's DVS, opposite of the Seacrest”, is that that American Idol guy, is he still relevant? Oh well. End of his verse amazing. This almost feels like El-P. Is Lakutis the postironic El-P? El-PEE? I dunno. I dunno what I'm talking about this song is too. Trading lines? Nicely done.

“I'm in the Forest”

Title track get hype. Wow bricklayer flow, okay, go for it. Beat legitimately scary. Death shark bitches on dick yeah okay keep at it. “Free hexes”. Wait wait wait, seven spiders of hip hop? Oh man this is gonna get oh wow what is going on this is hilarious this is excellent oh god I'm gonna have to get all these names down on like tattoo. “I'm in the forest” on repeat excellent go for it. “Flesh party” oh what wow. Now he sounds more like Aesop Rock??? But like angrier? I have no idea. Some great lines here. Stop-start sorta flow now, sounds good. Beat going absolutely insane. Namedrop machinegun style YES I like this technique. That coulda been the outro but I feel like we just warming up now. Some sorta Lil B boasting here I am very happy with this. “Hold the mic crazy” oh inDEED. “I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead” wow that is a good outro WAIT NO NOT OUTRO what's next “DEATH SHARK DEATH SHARK” yes that is prolly the coolest nickname yet. Okay actual outro sonic annihilation good job.

“Ja Rule”

Birds + heavy heavy beat, I can dig it, I love this vocal technique. Guitar sample so cool. What's he saying I have no idea. “Real hip hop, real rap”, yeah, I know what it is, can't wait. This is legit sonic bliss mang he's doing real songs that's so exciting dreamcore postrap micgaze #ironic this guy is the white black Ariel Pink does that make sense? I had to hit repeat on this one actually even halfway through the first listen that is a mark of quality, no? Couldn't help myself, this is sincerely legit beautiful sounding. Seems a lot of this new generation of rappers likes this sorta pseudo-instrumental no-rap breakdown semi-sung sorta deal and I love it 'cause I have the same taste in non-rap as these rappers see Heems has a Panda Bear shirt etc. And then we leave through the same way we came in. So cool. Maybe the coolest thing to come out of the post LCD Soundsystem system of cool.

“I'm Better Than Everybody”

FEAT KOOL A.D. This intro is better than any thing. Lil B style flow. Amazing. Amazing. Wow. Lil L. Go harder. Sample coming in of his name repeated is the coolest thing ever. “I'm Nietzsche, ho!” “If I ever die, remember me as etc” this is my favorite sorta thing. “iTunes paint job” OH JESUS. This is the best surface hip hop parody ever. Wow wow wow wow. These lyrics god tier. This beat god tier. This song... god tier. Prolly best so far. I dunno. Wow these samples going nuts. “Name your fucking everything” the theme has come to a head. The drums on this beat are like “B.O.B.” tier maybe. Outro straight bananas. “My bad” etc. Oh wow. Oh wow. This is Big Baby Gandhi production makes mad sense.

“Wifey”

FEAT DAS RACIST EVERYTHING. This beat is surreal. Sounds like some surface beat heavily remixed, like, some specific one I can't think of now. “You play Hungry Hungry Hippos?” Oh man this is like some put a ring on it ish. Okay I guess? “Wife her out” is a pretty good term for that I guess prolly coolest one I have heard thus far. I don't wanna get married but I finna wife someone out maybe. This sorta plodding flow I dunno really well done but just not as exciting as past stuff on here I guess. “Wait like the dialup on the beat” and the beat goes really cool. Good final song I guess though.

Overall

This was really good too short Lakutis drop an LP now. Best track prolly “Swann Gangg” or “I'm Better Than Everybody” but “Ja Rule” is really intriguing.

Regular blogging stuff

So a lot of time I work on stuff that just sort of spirals out of control length-wise, usually because it's easier to throw words at it every once in awhile instead of resolving it satisfactorily. I don't really mind that, it's nice to have a project to just work away on with bits of free time, but it either ends up just never getting done ever or when it is done it's so long that not even I want to read it again. To this end I have a rough plan to regularly post some sort of chunks from them as regularly as I can. Sounds good? I dunno. Here's the sort of stuff it'd be:

Regular Feature #1: Super Smash Bros Character discussion

Something I've wanted to do for awhile. Just gonna get my thoughts down about pretty much the whole cast. Prolly will post these in a random order. Today we're gonna look at... Donkey Kong!

Donkey Kong!

Playing as Donkey Kong

Generally really really fun. So many very satisfying moves to hit with. What do I mean by satisfying? I really should deal with that now because I think it'll come up pretty often. It's a combination of the actual like physical impact of the move, sort of how much it changes up the situation in terms of positioning, damage, momentum, etc. and the difficulty of landing it. Or I guess more just the scarcity of it than the actual difficulty. So yeah a lot of DK's moves are very satisfying, especially like his dair, fair, and neutral B. His neutral B is one of my favorite kill moves. Aggressively spacing bairs as a sort of approach is pretty fun but the meat of his combos is obviously grabs, uairs, spicing it up with dair techchases. So you get sort of an inner battle between just spacing it out and playing it safe and going for risky combostarting dairs and utilts and stuff. Edgeguarding is also like, get it done right with bairs or go crazy (go bananas?) with up B, dair, ledge attack, whatever. Side B and down B are cool in concept but not good enough for even me playing DK to want to mess with.

On the other hand, the guy's meaty in all the wrong ways. He gets comboed back and forth by whoever. His recovery is really good horizontally but if you're below the ledge you're as good as dead. He's pretty fast but slow in just a few wrong places that leave you high and dry. Stuff like his ftilt and dtilt seem safeish but are really punishable, which can be frustrating. His smash attacks are so cool you want to use them but rarely are they actually the best action. One of those characters where every aspect of him ought to be really fun but just a few things are too bad for it to really work. Plus I dunno I just can't get a handle on playing such a grab heavy character, I usually grab when on the defensive and I see the opportunity, trying to actively get grabs is hard for me to get my head around.

Overall fundex: A-

Tier of my playability: “Tertiary”

Playing against Donkey Kong

Yeah jokes as if. I played my friend Josh's DK a few times, I think he brought it out against my Puff when he really hated himself, and although he did a lot of really cool tricks and kept scooping me out of stuff I was able to just sort of outspace and shut him down with bairs and stuff. So I dunno. Seems like I'd have a lot of fun “getting off” with Falco/Falcon etc but maybe not enough to outweigh guilt? And then I'd probably be uair juggled to death and that would be confusing.

OKAY THAT'S DONKEY KONG

What do you mean by fundex?

Basically a rating of how much I enjoy playing as that character.

What about tier of playability?

Basically how I would describe my skill with that character in terms of when I'd “go to” them in a serious match that I was trying to win. So DK being tertiary means there's two tiers of characters that I'd be more confident with first.

Hey I bet you didn't think playability was a real word

You're right about that.

So you're gonna do this for all the characters? Who cares?

I dunno you tell me???

Possibly Regular Feature #2: Playlist Report

So I made another big playlist and I started writing about it but I kept adding to the playlist and kept writing about it but one sufficiently outpaced the other and bun here we are. So I'll just post like a song from it at a time? This I am pretty sure I'll be able to do often for quite awhile just due to the huge buffer. They're all gonna like reference each other 'cause it was originally a playlist deal so whatever just deal with that. And most of them were written awhile ago and thus might mention stuff that isn't relevant/true anymore.

Hyadain - “Hyadain no Jojo Yujo”

This is the new OP for Nichijou, well, uh, not that new, and it goes just absolutely hammer. Both the chorus and the verses, not that I really can say which is which, and the interludes that might actually be the verses, are fantastically catchy. I don't know how he does it, the guy is like actually some sort of genius. It's not like one of those weird things that doesn't sound catchy on paper but ends up being stuck in your head (right now I have “Party Rock Anthem” and “Dynamite” stuck in my head and I don't know why but I suspect that this is why surface pop is surface and pop), it's something that looks like it was calculated on paper to be super catchy and you look at the calculations and you're skeptical 'cause like, this formula seems to say that you can jump to the moon. The math doesn't lie, though!

Okay what else

The Roots – undun

Well this was a really pleasant surprise. Like really pleasant. How I Got Over has been on repeat basically continually since it was released just last year. Yeah, just last year! I have a hard time believing it too. And that one came a few years after the one before so I was used to that release schedule, so I dunno, I was surprised yeah. I was optimistic but honestly pretty reserved, it just seemed too soon for another classic. Well ha ha jakes on me hurrah this thing is really excellent. Dunno if it's as good as How I Got Over but it is hard to compare something to an “instant classic”. It's great though I mean like Sufjan Stevens out of nowhere? Is this a cover or just the same song? I dunno. First half had some songs that don't seem too memorable yet but this second half is just going wild. I think mainly I'm more in it for super stone cold ham jam songs like “Stomp” but I'm glad to see them experiment too. I mean wow this ending sure sounds cool, wish there was more rapping but whatever. So yeah recommended.

Anything else?

Nah that's probably pretty good for now.

I uploaded the Lakutis EP to my Youtube channel also started playing Tetris again so there's a new sprint video there too.