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Summary: Rum still reigns at the top of the chart with her record breaking EP Word of Mouth. But though she has sat in this throne for the last 2 months, thanks to Adam Black's Memories debuting at #2, she can no longer sit comfortably, especially since next week she is more than likely to be booted out of the top spot as we await Reported Failure's Lie In with almost 200,000 pre-orders SO FAR. At #3, SYNCO's Grown jumps up 2 spots as fans eagerly await their new album but what we have all our eyes on (not us quoting an Isabel album) is Tisha Jackson's 25 FINALLY breaking into the top 5 and landing at #4. It seems throwing shade at the world's most adored pop star and then completely annihilating every venue in your She's Got Heart Tour will most definitely pay off. Penetralia's In Fear, Faith and Flaws continues to sell. charting at #6 as fans die in anticipation for their upcoming album that will include the uber-hit single, Gem. Sam Thatcher's (...)Human Disaster debuts at #10, definitely an underwhelming debut for the rookies down at Just Record Records but still doing pretty well for an indie album with no singles and atrocious promotion. Even more under-performing, Amy Meyer who has actual singles and even a bigger name debuts on our charts at #11. Meanwhile Barbie Doll, Luke Striker and Reese Hollinsworth officially drops out of the Golden 15 after a great lengthy run.
HIP HOP CHARTS
R&B CHARTS
POP CHARTS
INDIE CHARTS
ROCK CHARTS
ELECTRONIC CHARTS
PRE-ORDER CHARTS
Reported Failure - Lie In [180000]
Aliya Rose - Party Is Over EP [50000]
Abie Lena - Greatest Hits: The Best of Me [50000]
Jared Nevo - Lungs [20000]
Alec Cole - Just Me EP [unknown]
Just when we thought we’d never see those two apart again.
Critically acclaimed and commercially successful hip-hop duo, Rum & Coke, which consist of Nina Tarantino and Airemese Smith, were to release their fourth record, Better in Tongues, follow-up to chart-topper, Perks of Fame (2014); however, a change of plans (read: Smith’s wedding to rapper Kidd Amaze - whose real name is TJ Cousins, which prompted her to go into a brief hiatus) caused the album to be delayed (to which date we have yet to be notified of). To bridge fans over the wait, the rapper of the duo, Rum dropped her debut solo EP, Word of Mouth, out of the blue on March 8, 2015, which happens to be International Women’s Day. The day of the release seemed apt, as both Tarantino and Smith have been throughout their career nothing less than powerful women of the industry who empower every woman in their wake. This is not the first time one of the two has gone solo: Smith herself endorsed a Gucci fragrance which went on to become the best-selling fragrance of 2014 and released a solo EP of her own, The Sweetest Thing, which went on to top the Golden 15 for weeks on end. That being said, the release of Word of Mouth was no less shocking, as not even the most skeptical followers of the duo had never expected either of them to do their own thing ever again.
However, at the same time, most fans argue that it was about time Rum did her own thing, seeing as she had multiple times proved her knack in rapping. Just this year alone, Tarantino started the year lending a verse to the Drew Westbrook hit, One; and, of course, the highly-anticipated comeback single of SpitSet (which also include Cousins and Isaac Lovelock), Primo. Just these two singles had made fans wanting to hear an unadulterated, untethered Rum, rapping by herself about God-knows-what. What fans of the duo do know, though, is that: should Tarantino release her own material, it will be epic. Months later, she granted their wish.
Word of Mouth, which clocks in at fourteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds (14:37), begins relatively softly with raw R&B instruments which begin ‘Downtime’, the first track on the extended play. Once the beat comes in, Tarantino half-raps-half-sings over Stevie Wonder-reminiscent synthesizers, calmly letting out her frustration about double standards women face when starting a no-strings-attached relationship. Commenting on the song, Tarantino says, “It's a song about me, really. I get so frustrated when it's all cool when someone needs me for the night but when I need them, all of sudden there are these feelings and attitudes that I just have no time for." Interested in the fact that she isn’t the only one who suffer from the same issues, she continues, "I guess there are a lot of women out there who've found themselves in a 'come when I call' situation that was completely one-sided." “You ain’t nothing but a hobby,” she sings in the instantly catchy hook, reaffirming that casual sex is more her preference due to dramatic relationships which she discusses in several lines within the song: “Been gave you a chance to drop your habits/Now all of a sudden you wanna make me happy” and “Oh so now you wanna spoon?/All them cold nights I called and where were you?/Glad you came through”. The theme of the song might have intentionally coincided with the day on which the EP was released, March 8; as she talks about one of the many unjusts women face in life, she’s powerful all the way through, reaffirming again and again that the guy really isn’t “nothing but a hobby”. All lyrical reasonings aside, the song is generally a very laid-back, feel-good track (or it otherwise would have been but for the pumping beat which has been proven to be the quite the FancyN signature.) It’s quite a strong beginning to a work of extended length, one which many mainstream artists today have yet to even graze.
The second track, ‘Warm Sheets’, has quite the history among the duo. The instrumentation of the track originally founded Allison Cooper’s vocals of ‘Down the Road, I Met a New Me’, a song which Smith wrote based on her suffering from bullying and bipolar disorder. After Tarantino wrote lyrics to the same instrumentation, Anniken Dahl-Smith, who discovered and is currently managing Rum & Coke, and Yasmine Kiambang, a fellow writer, revised and edited the song, eventually giving the song to Cooper. On ‘Warm Sheets’, Rum sings on the glittery production, which is accompanied by layered backup vocals and jingle bells amongst others, about a subject almost opposite to that of ‘Downtime’: inviting a stranger with a “pretty smile” into her love life due to the romantic pressure brought on by the holidays. It’s mostly excuses and irrational reasons to avoid a relationship with the aforementioned stranger throughout the song, but in the end, she concedes, “You can get to know me in these warm sheets”. The track closes with Tarantino’s vocals fading out, singing “Fuck that walk of shame shit, you should call into work…”. It’s a rather odd thing to write about, but ‘Warm Sheets’ easily takes the prize for the first song about the holidays that actually does not mention the merries of the season, which is an absolute godsend to those who resent those kinds of things (i.e., over half of the U.S. population). It’s a solid track, but many of us on the review panel question its originality: they say it kind of reminds them of Rihanna’s ‘Skin’, the wrongly-overlooked track on the Barbadian’s fifth studio effort, Loud. Otherwise, there’s not much more we can complain about the track. But there’s one more thing I’d like to remark: the juxtaposition between ‘Sheets’ and ‘Downtime’ is quite smart from the production to the lyrics and even to its overall vibe. Whether its positioning is accidental or coincidental, it’s quite smart of the rapper to do so.
The FancyN signature strong beat returns on the third track, ‘More’. One of Tarantino’s most sexually explicit tracks, she goes all out, not withholding any cringe-worthy details. Rum utilizes two styles of rapping/singing on this one: a laid-back style for the first verse (possibly implying her submissive side) and a more fast, active style for the second (you know where this train is going). The first verse mostly entails Rum’s admiration to her love interest, which is as sweet as the next Loud-Rihanna song; but the true jewel of ‘More’ lies in its second verse, where the rapper violently (would ‘enthusiastically’ serve as a better term?) describes a tug of war between the two about which one of them takes the lead in the bedroom, which leads to Rum boasting herself and finally returning to the chorus. The song suddenly fades out (contrasting, I know) right after the hook, leaving the entire review panel kind of hanging as we were kind of getting in our zone and whatnot; but, then again, now we know what to expect from Better in Tongues. Otherwise, it’s another strong effort from Tarantino which would fit right into Top 40 radio, if the wave of sexually explicit content on airplay right now is anything to go by.
Last but certainly not least (certainly because Rum & Coke always save the best for last) is ‘Virgoan Nights’. Reminding us of Rum & Coke’s work in Perks of Fame, the track has much more depth than the three tracks that precede it, giving us a Rum-curated look into her personal life. The hip-hop track talks about being a Virgo and the struggles that come along with it, with a more-than-notable side-note on her struggles to control her sex addiction about which the man holding out on intimacy doesn’t know. In the first verse, the scenery is just that: the man suggests that they wait until “later” right in the middle of foreplay, citing her hectic life as a public figure as one reason. She retaliates, telling him not to “talk to [her] like [she’s] famous” and arguing that she is a sexual being, which is certainly not true. (This feels sort of contradictory to what we see in ‘Downtime’, in which Tarantino says that she prefers no-strings-attached sex.) She then goes on to explain that she feels like meaningless sex is her last resort although that is not what she wants most of the time in the second verse. The line of thought continues with Rum using the traits of a Virgo to describe herself, detailing on their strong chemistry and how a deep conversation made him irresistible to her (which the Zodiac claims to be the key to a Virgo’s heart; she admits that the Zodiac is true in a line early on in the second verse). The hook this time around is entirely in the other man’s point of view, who swears that one day, she will be thankful that he held out. Continuing onto the third verse, Tarantino reminisces on the events of their night, contemplating how they ended up having him sleep on her lap rather than take advantage of her, ending the verse with “Stayed up all night thinking of what we could've did/Asking myself if the morning counts as later”. She then goes straight into the outro, where she expresses that sometimes she’s tired of being a Virgo, since self-criticizing and over-thinking is of Virgo’s main traits, which probably inspired the song in the first place. It’s quite a melancholy ending to the EP, which has been quite the norm for artists who are in desperate need of showing their ‘personal’ side. But Rum is no mediocre artist who seeks attention in that way. She simply does so because she wants to. Let’s not forget that Tarantino (along with her friend Smith) has become an industry veteran; there is no need for her to seek attention, they just come flocking over.
Verdict: Through Word of Mouth, Ms. Tarantino reaffirms her position as one of the best female rappers of all time (if not the best). From the variety of her lyrics to her undeniable talent of production, and even just in the style of her rapping, she shames even the best of the best, despite some doubts about her originality.
11/15
(OOC: BIG thanks to dohaihoangnam for writing this!)
ALL boosts were added! Voting will be up tomorrow!Edited by user 16 May 2015 23:38:21(UTC)
| Reason: Not specified |
