The Daily Spin, November 21
Mura Masa | Mura Masa
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite songs from each album right here.
Album: Mura Masa (2017)
Artist: Mura Masa
Link:
I was first introduced to Mura Masa through his hypnotically choreographed videos - for ‘Love for That’, a standalone single later cut from this record released in 2015, and two tracks that feature here, on his major self-titled release - the garage-tinged ‘What If I Go?’ and the calypso-hued ‘Love$ick’, the latter featuring American heavyweight rapped A$AP Rocky in a continuation of his willingness to collaborate across the pond.
This is where Alex Crossan, at the time a 21-year old producer, excels - despite a guest list that is laden with big names, Rocky included in a list that also has Charli XCX, Desiigner, Heloise Letissier (of Christine and the Queens), and Damon Albarn (of Gorillaz), at no point does Crossan feel as though he’s out of his own depth.
This is even more impressive, in my eyes, given that he’s melding so many styles, and doing so with a deft eye for how it works with each artist. In an album that builds and grows itself around the city of London, a faraway beacon for Crossan in his youth on the island of Guernsey in the Channel, it’s the little touches as you move through the city - literally, as clips and references make points of highlighting neighborhoods around the metropolis, but in a more meta sense, as you tour the musical history of the immigrant population. It’s experiencing London through the ages in a joyful, brilliant sense.
Compounding this is Mura Masa’s comfort with future-esque genres - from house to bass, he’s more than competent at the wheels of anything electronic, it seems, and that bleeds through here - his collaborations to end the album stand out head-and-shoulders above the rest - as he steps away from more of the older influences into his own growth, featuring Letissier, A.K. Paul (brother of Jai), and Albarn, it feels much akin to a torch being handed off. This album is trying to claim its stake as the future of British electronica - and I think it makes a case.
Rating: 8.7/10
Best Tracks: Love$ick; Second 2 None; Who Is It Gonna Be
Worst Tracks: NOTHING ELSE!