Send "Amanda Blank " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Rollingstone |
 You may remember Amanda Blank from Bangers and Cash's "Loose" video, where she sat on a toilet slinging expletives at naked girls. This Philly rapper's got a mouth your mother could love — if your mom was Lil' Kim. "Tryin'-a get up in my pussy and smash … I'm Beyoncé, independent woman, handle that!" she brags on "Let Me Get Some," a booming highlight on her debut. Other tracks run tamer: blank machine-gun one-liners about makeup and true love over New Wave club beats by Diplo and Switch. But on an album where she's surrounded by dudes (including her pal Spank Rock), she makes being ladylike sound hardcore. "I can't be the man you need me to," she admits. Thank God for that....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| Ever since Diplo and his larger Hollertronix collective started bringing fairly unvarnished versions of popular urban genres like crunk, Bmore club, and Miami bass to the discerning hipster elite, there's seemingly always been a steady undercurrent of backlash directed at the crew either on the grounds of lazy cultural appropriation or cynically ironic repackaging. To his credit, Diplo's always seemed like a genuine, serious student of his favorite sounds, and the tunes have been almost uniformly hot, so it was easy to accept not only an icon-in-her-own-right like M.I.A. but also a savvy chameleon like Santigold and even, to a degree, expertly crass party-starters like Spank Rock. But, I suppose, a line must be drawn in the sand, and thrusting her crotch in the air obliviously on the wrong side of the divide is Amanda Blank. She's no Maya or Santi for sure, but vitriol against the girl has been especially intense considering that up until now she'd been on only a couple of mixtapes and on one track from Spank Rock's debut. Perhaps some of the extra-forceful disdain is owing to the fact that Blank sort of feels like the last bulwark between some imagined indie community of shared self-awareness and an outright void of crassness. Either she's working too hard to construct a mimetic parody of materialistic fuck-pop, or she's not working hard enough to separate herself from it. Either way, I don't see how you're not better off listening to Lady Gaga, who at least offers pretty good hooks. A few good hooks, in fact, would go a considerable way toward redeeming Blank's largely forgettable debut, I Love You. Remember, Santigold's eponymous bow certainly didn't blaze any trails either, but it was chock full of irresistible, indelible tunes. Not so with Blank, who submits an album that runs a mere 33 minutes and yet still can't manage to outfit it properly, eschewing even the pursuit of catchiness and pop fun in favor of deathly deterministic robo-chants like "Lemme get some/ You don't want none" and "hottest motherfucker on the whole damn block," repeated ad nauseum. (Admittedly, "Big Heavy" does have a nice Blondie-ish breeze.) The torpor extends to Diplo, Switch, and Blank's other beatminders, who largely recycle well-worn tricks they've ponied up elsewhere, from the skipping vocal samples and dancehall drum fills of "Something Bigger, Something Better" to the crunk claps of "Lemme Get Some". Only "DJ", with its burbling techno groove, really succeeds at wringing something useful from Blank's "persona," evocatively communicating the self-abnegation of loneliness without sounding too much like a Peaches-level lobotomy victim. Of course, it's sandwiched between two tracks that troublingly rely on a beloved 1980s pop classic for much of their juice, Blank's Top Ranking mixtape holdover "A Love Song" (interpolating LL Cool J's "I Need Love") and I Love You's first single, the pointlessly "titillating" "Might Like You Better", which cannibalizes Romeo Void's "Never Say Never". Keep in mind, to date these are Blank's two best-known songs....full text |
| Sputnikmusic |
| Amanda Blank is about as cool as it gets - and boy does she know it. As she spits out into the chorus of the utterly brilliant “Gimmie What You Got”, she is, and has been for some time, practically the ‘hottest motherfucker on the whole damn block’. And why not? With a debut album Produced by Diplo, XXXChange and Dave Sitek (of TV On The Radio Fame), and having been touted as the successor to the likes of M.I.A. and Santogold, Blank’s brand of furious electro-rap has got some serious weight pulling for her success. After all, this is the girl who made her grand entrance to the music world with the lines “I’m a trashy boastful bitch MC/ ma romps are tastefully fresh/ ma pussy’s tastin’ the best” – off Spank Rock’s criminally underrated YoYoYoYoYo. Of course, the best part was that she seemed to be able to live up to it too, going on to share mikes and turntables with the likes of Ghostface Killah and Yuksek and aiming straight for the heart of her audience, saying before the release of I Love You: ‘I get worried ‘cause sometimes I feel like it’s not weird enough for the indie weird scene and it’s not pop enough for radio… I’m really toeing the line between homegirl and artfag’, which is exactly, unfortunately, about where exactly where I Love You lies. The thing is – and this is important – I Love You doesn’t run aground because it’s a run of the mill electro-rap album – It’s not. It does so because it’s a run of the mill Amanda Blank album, the sound of a street girl so comfortable in the alleyways of her musical neighborhood that she’s unwilling to step out of it. After all, it’s not like the ideas aren’t there; they are, but they just aren’t given the space to grow before fading away, neglected by the love and nurture that I Love You so brazenly splashes across its own name. Take a song like “Something Bigger, Something Better”, which might have almost been one of the record’s defining tracks, pulsing as it is with subtle beats under the cool sway of Blank’s low vocals and dazzling flow, dripping with more attitude than anything else here. No such luck though, as Blank milks every ounce of quality and has the song wonder aimlessly (as cool as its swagger is) towards an empty plain of ridiculously lazy songwriting. It’s the exact same problem that plagues opener “Make It Take It”, or even the abysmal “Make Up”, with it’s dull plodding channeling the dry dreariness of an Uffie song. Of course, if you’re looking for a true measure of what Blank has always been about, there’s no going past lead single “Might Like You Better”. Having done the rounds on the internet hype machine, it’s the most barefaced expression of everything Blank - and just about as polarizing as the girl herself. Hinging itself on the lyric of Romeo Void’s “Never Say Never”, Blank’s wickedly aggressive delivery of “I might like you better if we slept together” is drenched in a haze of distorted electro warp and chop change beats, leaving all subtlety for dead and reveling in its celebration of horny excess like no other. It’s blunt and it’s raw, and resting firmly within the love-it-or-hate-it circle of the rest of Blank’s tunes. On the flip side, her take on LL Cool J’s “I Need Love”, billed here as “A Love Song” and taking it’s cue from Santogold, sits uncomfortably among the rest of I Love You’s repertoire of big, dumb, cornfield tunes as Blank hangs her heart on the line singing J’s line: “for the first time in my life, I see I need love… Then the thought occurred, tear drops made my eyes burn”. As one of the album’s strongest songs, coated with a fine measure of Diplo’s tender mixing, it also serves to stick out, sore thumb and all as a testament to I Love You’s rather muddled pacing. Its sad, if not just flat out disappointing, if only because I Love You ends up coming off as a collection of b-sides to a non existent record that promised to be the freshest sound of one of Philly’s most exciting breakout female rappers. Blank by the numbers, blank’s the result....full text |
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