★★★★★
The triumph of "Rap Album One" is that Jonwayne manages to experiment sonically while his rhymes maintain an undeniable true school appeal. Rap Album One is 23-year-old LA-based rapper Jonwayne's long-awaited "debut" Rap release on Stones Throw records--aptly titled after an incredibly productive five years in the music industry spawning three cassette format mixtapes, two full-length instrumental albums, and a handful of self-released EPs, demos, and digital mixtapes...
- www.hiphopdx.com
2013-12-11
★★★★★
Considering his immense beatmaking ability, it's impressive-cum-sickening to hear how versatile Low End Theory alumnus Jonwayne is as a rapper. The opener on this title-making-it-obvious debut MC LP, 'After The Calm', is reminiscent of pre-Drake emo-rap, and is followed by the thudding, braggadocio-brimming piano-led boom-bap of 'You Can Love Me When I'm Dead'. Later, fellow Digital Diamonds representative Scoop DeVille shows up with a low-rider-designed beat for 'The Come Up, Pt...
- www.clashmusic.com
2013-11-21
★★★★★
There was a time in my life when I would stay up till 5am in hopes to catch a 30 second verse from an MC that I felt was doing something special and unique. Most times this included having the antennae wires wrapped around my toes because it was the only way I could get clear reception, so I would sit in one place for 4 hours with hopes of catching that ground breaking nu-nu...
- www.syffal.com
2013-11-14
★★★★★
There are many ways of loving hip-hop, but there's one in particular that most fans go through at some point that involves thinking really hard. Listen the right way, and the music turns into this fantastic puzzle, or maybe an equation that works out just so: Hook the beat up, convert it into hip-hop form, write a rhyme, etc...
- pitchfork.com
2013-11-12
★★★★★
Available on: Stones Throw Records LP In the 2003 movie American Splendor, Paul Giamatti's character Harvey discusses the merits of the movie Revenge of the Nerds with Judah Friedlander's character Toby. Harvey is curious as to what movie could be worth driving 260 miles for, to which Toby replies by giving an explanation of the movie's uplifting nerds vs jocks moral. Harvey quickly follows: "So what you're saying is, you identify with those nerds...
- www.factmag.com
2013-11-09
★★★★★
MC Jonwayne first gained recognition through the groundbreaking Low End Theory nights in Los Angeles as a producer. Through a series of mixtapes and other releases, such as his series and the sinister piano-laced heat rock "Ode to Mortality"(curiously omitted here), he established himself as a capable MC. Jonwayne's flow is verbose, cerebral and free-associative by nature; toss in the gruff delivery, and the MF Doom comparisons are inevitable...
- exclaim.ca
2013-11-30
★★★★★
The revival of cassettes is just another trend that is making me feel like an old man. I listened to music exclusively on cassettes until I was sixteen. I still have a stack of tapes in my parent's garage that I don't have the heart to throw away, despite the fact that I haven't owned a cassette player for fifteen years. Cassettes were always a second-class format. They didn't have the cool cache that vinyl LPs have, and they didn't sound as good as either vinyl or CDs...
- rapreviews.com
2013-09-10
★★★★★
It's easy to get lost in the hyper-existence of one's life, which eventually boils down to singular moments of greatness, and then some failures. In these quick stop sections, we begin to piece together the value of our lives, our success and our downfalls. It's with these fleeting pieces of information, that each of us carve out a caricature of what he want to be, or appear, so as to satisfy our own egos, and have the world understand us as how we allow them to...
- www.sputnikmusic.com
2013-08-22
★★★★★
That's rapper Jonwayne's reaction to Kendrick Lamar's verse on "Control (HOF)", a verse which temporarily made rap seem like the competitive lyrical landscape it once was. Wayne's response is telling: he shares Kendrick's small-c conservative tendencies and longs for those halcyon (if not mythical) days where a rapper's facility with a mic alone could elevate him to stardom.
His new mixtape The Marion Morrison Mixtape is the third of a series of cassettes the rapper's released with Stones Throw...
- pitchfork.com
2013-08-15
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