various artists - The Best of Deep Flow Radio presents... Fed Up (Deep Flow Studios)

This 16-track CD was based on the simple concept of taking songs that had gotten 4 of 5 star ratings on DeepFlowRadio.com and compiling them on one CD. The little tweak on the concept that Amotion decided on, however, was to cram 60 songs into the hourlong compilation, with several songs on each track, organized by artist, with folks including TestMe, Young Hustlers and Dynamic Compositions. And I can see why that seemed like a good ambitious idea, but personally for me, it's the reason I found Fed Up to be a really unpleasant listening experience. I hate listening to snippets of songs, hearing 30 seconds or a minute of a song and then it cutting off just as I'm getting into it -- if it was a DJ mix and it was all blended together in some graceful way maybe it would work, but here it's just abrupt every time and there's no groove. A lot of times it's just oddly selected portions of freestyles, too, so you just get a few seconds of someone ad-libbing over a radio song, which is not exactly a great showcase for the artists. I feel bad saying this, because I think Amotion really thought this was a good idea and was eager to get feedback when she sent it out, but I think this was a big mistake and it's just not lister-friendly at all. The title is kind of wrapped up into a theme with a lot of the artists talking about what they're fed up about at the beginning of each track, but usually the music has nothing to do with that.

LP f/ Mooda (mp3)
LP is a female rapper who I saw perform at Melodic Mondays last week and I was really impressed by her set. Haven't been able to find a MySpace page or any more info about her online, though. As with the other tracks, this is just excerpts of several different songs, so it doesn't have a title.

Labels: Deep Flow, Internet radio, mixtape/album review, mp3, TestMe