Every now and then you come across a source of potential muddled in garbage. Much like a gold mine, it takes effort to get to that polished final product. There’s the excavating and digging, the refining- and then when all of that is done you’re left with a valuable item. This is how I feel about Mic Mountain and his 2018 release, “The Avalanche.”
Right off the bat, the audio quality is terrible. It’s entirely unavoidable to talk about. The irony of someone named “Mic Mountain” recording with a microphone that sounds like a landline from the early 2000’s is all too real. But maybe it’s not the mic, because sometimes- actually, a lot of times- the entire instrumental sounds fuzzy and distorted, as if the upload to Spotify simply failed. It’s very distracting.
Mic also has this bad habit of rushing and forcing his words to cram far too many syllables in a single line. He’ll go from 8 or 12 syllables, which sounds clean, to suddenly 20 for no reason, then back to 8 or 12. It honestly sounds like a little kid trying to get in the last word of an argument before recess ends, which makes it just awkward to listen to.
As far as his writing, it’s not bad. He’s got decent flow, some decent bars, but every now and then, he says something dumb. I don’t mean silly or goofy, I mean like clinically stupid kind of dumb. Case in point, his song “Girls Around the World” is about all the girls that Mic supposedly knows and how much he “loves girls.” There’s a part in the song where he says:
“I knew this Italian chick, her name was Lisa/ I never took her out, we just ordered pizza.”
This is a direct quote. It is so lazy, and so horribly boring. In fact, the entire song can be summed up by those two words. The chorus is actual trash, the verses are generic and blatantly false. I can only hope that this is Mic Mountain at his worst, because this song is scraping the bottom of the barrel for intelligence, originality, and artistry. However, this is not what most of his songs are like. Most of the time, even if Mic isn’t saying anything important, his bars are really not that bad. He has a clean 90’s flow that is very reminiscent of Biggie, and the way his words bounce to the beat can be hypnotic and pleasing to the listener.
My only other complaint for this project is that the instrumentals sound very basic. From what I noticed, most of the beats are just two to four bars repeating. I don’t remember hearing a single break throughout the entire album. It essentially sounds like the basic functions of FL Studio were implemented over a few default sample loops seventeen times and then packed together to make an album.
To summarize, Mic Mountain needs to clean up his syllable counts and lines, clean up the audio quality, make or find fleshed out beats that capture the listener, and not put out ignorantly egotistical and dumb content. This album is hot garbage. But he has potential and if he combines all the right elements, I could be writing a review with a very different tone in the near future. I wouldn’t count him out yet.
Highlights: 90’s Vibe
Rating: 4/10
Follow Mic Mountain on FB, Twitter, Youtube, and at his website.
Source: UndergroundHipHopBlog.com