Rapid Fire Reviews: Another Round Of EPs
Once again I'm clearing my to do list of EPs. While they have absolutely nothing to do with each other aside from their format they did each manage to grab my interest despite their short tracklists. Enjoy!
Zoom In EP - Ringo Starr
I Tape - Vic Mensa
Vic Mensa has had a bit of a tumultuous time in the years since my personal favorite of his records, The Autobiography came out in 2017. This includes the largely panned 93PUNX experiment into the world of rock and punk music. I never got around to listening to his EP last year but a single I heard from Vic earlier this year got me curious to dive back into his work. Shelter saw him teaming up with Wyclef and Chance for probably the best Vic Mensa song since OMG. That serves as the closing track to this EP and after seeing the impressive roster of producers and features working on this thing I was sold. And for the most part Vic delivers a sort of return to form featuring a blend of hard-hitting hip hop with a more introspective and conscious style. There are songs here with tightly thematic lyrics like the excellent Moosa as well as Chance flavored gospel jams like Millionaires and the aforementioned Shelter. The only major problem I have with the record has less to do with the sounds and more to do with how they are assembled. As a tracklist and even within individual songs here the transitions are very rough. Hardly any of it makes much logical sense and some of the sonic transitions can be extremely jarring. Tracks like Fr33dom and Victory have fantastic moments but suffer from the arrangement of their compositions. Ultimately if you turn your mind off and listen to the record it feels much more like 12 to 14 shorter tracks rather than 7 fully fleshed out ones which would be fine if the switching between sounds wasn't so unflattering. Ultimately I have to give the EP credit for how much it does right, which really is a lot and is highlighted by one great performance after another from Vic. A few little changes could ultimately have gone a long way but this is still a major improvement from the last few years of Vic's music. 7/10
Perfect EP - Mannequin Pussy
Mannequin Pussy are a versatile Chicago indie punk trio who have gotten better and better with each new record they drop. I was impressed with their third album back in 2019 and excited to hear from the band again, and that was even before this EP had a couple of really solid singles dropped in its lead up. The band impressed me once again on this EP as they fluidly genre hop across these five tracks with mostly great results. Take the two singles for instance which lead off the project, the first of which is a slightly off kilter punk anthem that is closer to art punk or pop punk than hardcore. This is followed by the 82 second rager Perfect which is going full on intensity from the drop with screamed vocals and rapid explosive guitar riffing. This transitions into To Lose You a solid if not predictable indie pop cut that feels straight out of the Yuck era. Then we're back to Pigs Is Pigs which is an incredibly refreshing take on modern punk that is rewarding in its intensity but also bulging personality both lyrically and vocally. The whole thing culminates in a surprisingly beautiful dream pop number which feels like an exclamation point on the bands effective and seamless genre transitioning. This EP is yet another piece of the formula of a band that sounds like they're slowly building up to something really great and I'm digging every step of the way. 7.5/10
Ringo has been releasing music pretty consistently for like a long ass time. While I haven't heard all of it, or even probably most of it, when you're one of the Beatles I suppose that clout kind of carries with you. It worked for Ringo because my curiosity got the best of me when I saw him making some admittedly hilarious tweets and promoting this goofy ass album cover for his new EP. This is also like his 3rd project in the past 5 years so I guess I'm a little worried about getting Ringo fatigue since every time he drops its the only thing anyone talks about. Joking aside I had like no expectation going into this album and its just as goofy as I anticipated. The positivity anthem that kicks the EP off is really something even being as corny as it is there is a legitimately catchy bar band swagger to the group vocals on the hook that just confuses my brain. I don't even think its that good of a song but I can't help but smile when I hear it. The title track is also a bar band style track that is inexplicably about the entire universe. I'm serious he kicks it off talking about how we used to think the world is flat and the hook is about how everything is connected. It has all the novelty as a song from one of Bill Nye's shows but with half the songwriting. The hook on here is laugh out loud funny and I can't tell if that is somehow a level of sneaky genius or not. Unfortunately the rest of the EP isn't nearly as fun with the closing track being the best and most genuine of the remaining tunes. The reggae song is truly a low point, maybe for humanity as a whole. I have no idea if Ringo has a history of making reggae tracks and I don't really care to find out but I do know that I dislike this one greatly. Honestly this could have been a lot worse. Ringo plays it observational but rarely takes himself all that seriously and the result is a selection of incredibly corny but occasionally quite fun songs that seem to come from a place of genuine positivity and I'm really not sure what else I can say about it. 4/10
For more rapid fire EP reviews check out the last rendition of that exact thing here
