Review Summary: Two streets from Venice Beach
Many of you are not aware, but since the release of 2013s Stricksocken Swagger by german comedy-youtubers Y-TITTY, which was a huge success in german-speaking countries, there has been a wave of youtubers trying to break into the music scene. And they tried by replicating Stricksocken Swagger, a lot. All of these albums featured terrible, terrible production-values, jokey songs with no sense of embarrassment and sappy positive songs, corny enough to make you puke from reading the lyrics. After releases by „musicians“ like ApeCrime and Liont, the chance for an at least passable release by a youtuber seemed to have evaporated completely.
Enter DAT ADAM, a rap-group with members Taddl, Ardy and Marley, all of slight popularity due to their youtube-channels, who decided to ditch their youtube-careers to commit to their true passion: Cloud-rap. In german.
Let me start this off with saying that they don't necessarily do anything wrong. The beats that Marley produced are all pretty good, atmospheric and layered. You could say that they really do most of the heavy-lifting on this EP. And it isn't hard to see why. DFA kicks the album off with an instantly-memorable synth-line, 700 Main St. mixes chiptune-sounds with dark and creeping bass-pads, Forrest is instantly catchy with an indie-inspired beat and experimental outro. Also, Session is complimented by very laid-back smokey-synths. He tries a lot of experiments on this project, and they all go over pretty well.
Ardy and Taddl handle the rapping, and the issues begin here. While they do have commendable flows and rhymes, they slather their voices in extreme amounts of autotune, which ranges from awesome (700 Main St.) to absolutely horrifying (Missets). Topically, they deal with themselves being awesome, making fun of the haters, like in the song Missets which features a stupidly dumb chorus, being optimistic, wanting to leave earth and smoking weed. A lot of weed. Nothing groundbreaking, nothing too interesting, and they don't really have a lot in terms of originality inside of these topics. However, they do execute them fairly okay.
And that's the biggest issue with this EP, for all it's worth, it's just okay. In comparison to other german youtube-musicians, this is damn amazing, but they want to be defined by their music now, so I can't get around critiquing them by other standards and comparing them with other „serious“ musical outfits. And in this regard, this EP just isn't anything too special. Yeah, 700 Main St. is a damn banger, yeah, Forrest is pretty interesting, yeah, the altered voices are pretty cool, but if you want to carry on this path, you gotta do even more to lift yourself up from the crowd. In Germany, okay, this style of rap is fairly unexplored, so they get a bonus for being some of the first rappers here to adapt this sound. And still, this is a mostly enjoyable effort, so if you are searching for your quick fix of cloud-rap, this should suffice for a week or two.
