Send "Main Attrakionz " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 The Oakland, California DIY hip-hop duo Main Attrakionz couldn't have come at a better time. It's no news that the indie rap spectrum is beginning to widen and mutate, allowing the agit-prop of Odd Future to beam into the eyeballs of 12.4 million viewers on VMA night, wiggling polarizing avant-weirdos like Danny Brown and (more notably) Lil B into the mainstream consciousness, ramping up demand for astrally fogged bedroom producer Clams Casino's beats and grabbing up page space for up-and-coming outsiders like Harlem's ASAP Rocky. It's no surprise then that Main Attrakionz are being lumped into the same discussions (after all, they've worked with the latter three aforementioned artists), and in turn are well on their way to gaining the similar levels of notoriety. At the end of last month-- hot off their new mixtape 808s & Dark Grapes II-- the pair headed East and rocked Manhattan's New Museum as part of its "Get Weird" series, a notable but fittingly offbeat inauguration."Weird," however, seems a tad ill-fitting when describing Main Attrakionz's music: While unconventional in the sense that if you stripped away those titular 808s, you'd be left with glassy synths and watery textures that one could easily classify as ambient, rappers Squadda B and MondreM.A.N. seem simply to be products of their environment. And we're not necessarily talking about Oakland. While as prolific, as unafraid to integrate leftfield influences into their music, and as happy to keep things subwoofer-friendly as their Bay Area peers, most of their success and musical inspirations call cyberspace home. And in the case of 808s-- the fourth freebie mixtape full-length that these barely 20-year-olds have released in the past year (not including their solo efforts)-- Main Attrakionz seem to be neither the rule nor the exception, but rather a well-meaning, well-balanced rap act that has a sound that's both very "now" yet convincingly true-to-self....full text |
| Cokemachineglow |
| Green Ova Undergrounds are a Bay Area collective of college-aged high school dropouts who make music that sounds like an anthropomorphic freezer bag full of narcotics eating itself—one moment commingling with the clouds, the next neck-deep in a swamp thick as glue. It’s the most disorienting music I’ve yet heard this year. The cause of their music’s volatility isn’t a mystery. We’re familiar with creative types who are (politely put) temperamental. Place that strange verve inside the minds of a gaggle of self-medicating twenty-year-old, and watch their art hurtle across the blank space of a Bandcamp page in irregular zig-zags and curlicues. Squadda B, the group’s most loquacious member, delineated just how frayed his wires are in an April interview: “I keep it hidden though. Crazy mood swings like a bitch, I stay high ’cause it helps, but man I’m a mess. Nobody can tell, though. I just put it in the music.” That same interview is filled with undertones of arrogance. He praises Three 6 Mafia, then says their music “sounds like garbage” in 2011. He tells his fans not to smoke as much weed as he does, because he has a superhuman tolerance for the stuff. In a fetching video by San Francisco filmmaking outfit Yours Truly, he displays an adorable humility: “Just turned 20, but I ain’t gonna feel like 20 ‘til probably like another year or so. I still got a lot to learn.” Squadda and his comrades have been learning on the job, cranking out some ten-plus hours of music this year. Unlike most prolific rappers whose brilliance is scattered in four-minute hunks amongst utter dog shit, Green Ova have managed to curate a handful of essential documents. Shady Blaze, the rapper in the collective who most acknowledges the beat, released The Shady Bambino Project in February. Anchored by the bleating minimalism of Squadda B’s production aesthetic, it’s the most straightforward and immediately gratifying of Green Ova’s releases, nestling itself somewhere between the output of Bay Area forebear E-40 and the otherworldly fog that encases the group’s more abstract projects. Dope Since ’91, the solo debut from Mondre of group ringleaders Main Attrakionz, is one of the very best rap records of the year, a near-perfect example of just how delirious Green Ova’s music can get. Then there’s Main Attrakionz’s 808s & Dark Grapes II, which adds coherence and gleam to the deliria. When clarified, the Green Ova aesthetic coagulates into shimmering beauty. Over Friendzone’s spare, ethereal “Chuch,” Squadda and Mondre exist as flickering holograms, talking shit about picking up girls and getting high in the back seat of a car. For good measure, Mondre tosses in one earwormy sentiment about hiding his life from his cadre of women: “Think I’m sellin’ the dream, so I don’t say what I’m doin’.” And from nowhere, with the help of ASAP Rocky and Clams Casino, the two Oaklanders construct their first trad-rap banger, “Take 1.”...full text |
| Thefader |
| By our tally, 808s and Dark Grapes II is the eighth Main Attrakionz release in the last year. The tags assigned to the project by whoever loaded it onto Bandcamp are: based, bass, dubstep, electro, goth, hip hop and New York. Dark Grapes II’s full of windy horns and bony slaps courtesy producers Giorgia MoMurda, Keyboard Kid, NoaBoa and Squadda B. Marlee B throws in spritzes of clipped chipmunked soul on the solo-Squadda testimonial, “Chosen,” and in the great Bay Area tradition of talking about your smokeables as garden greens, there is whole track about “Vegetables.” Download the cross-country puff/pass “Take 1,” where Harlem’s ASAP Rocky, Squadda B and Mondre M.A.N. take turns talking about pudding and being down to earth over a teary opium Clams Casino beat and download the entire album, below....full text |
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