Crown City Rockers - The Day After Forever [Album]

Gold Dust

October 4, 2009, 08:10 PM

Views: 353   Comments: 2

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The first thing that any review of this album has mentioned is that Crown City Rockers are 'old-school.' Although this is not inaccurate, I feel that this is doing a disservice to the music that Crown City Rockers are being associated with. Although, yes, "The Day After Forever" does bare more than a passing resemblance to hip-hop from the early 80s, when it first came out, it was fresh new and inventive, whereas now, when Crown City Rockers are doing it, they are just copying a style and as a result it seems laboured and is not interesting to me.

The music style seems as though it's copied straight out of the Early Hip-Hop Handbook and is as impressive as when a child shows you a picture that they traced out of a book. You pretend to be impressed and grin and nod, but you know that the child has no real skills, they just copied the thing out of a book. This is the lasting impression I get from "The Day After Forever" and you end up feeling a bit cheated.

I recently made a comment to someone that when I listen to 'Rapper's Delight' nowadays, it sounds a bit rubbish. I was rightfully vilified for this comment, but I do still stand by it. I know it was ground breaking and pushed hip-hop forwards, but listening to it, the rhymes are very basic, the beat is simple and based on what we have in the genre at the moment, it lacks a lot. Now we have Crown City Rockers that are mimicking that era of music, but have none of the prestige and monument surrounding their music and this just drags the whole thing down into an area of worthlessness that can't compare. At least when people try something new and fail, they can justify their failure as an experiment, but when you try something that has been successful for 30 years, and fail, where does that leave you?

There are far too many moments in "The Day After Forever" that put me in mind of another song, by another group and I find myself struggling to find where that memory fits and who that bit sounded like and instead of appreciating the music for what it is, I'm thinking about something else and flicking through my music collection to jog my memory.

There's a lot of expectation for this band in the media, especially in the San Fransisco Bay Area, where the band are from and where they seem to be lapping it up. So there definitely is a market for bland re-runs of old music, but not in this house! Like I said, I've tired slightly of that genre as a whole, but it is the nostalgia that keeps me close and I will continue to come back to the music that started it all, but not something that rehashes old ideas with little to no merit.

All in all, "The Day After Forever" is solid and the basics are strong, but because these basics are from the late 70s and early 80s, "The Day After Forever" is tedious and tenuous.

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