By: Ricky Perez Cardoza

One of the most talked about albums of this year ‘Let’s Start Here’ by rapper Lil Yachty is considered by a lot of people as either album of the year or at least a contender for it. Lil Yachty, before this album, hadn’t seen success like this before and was never really taken seriously for his music and was entirely focused on rap/trap music. That’s why people were shocked to listen to this experimental, melodic alternate rap album that sounded nothing like Lil Yachty at all.

The first track “The BLACK Seminole” had everyone hooked to hear the rest of this album and might even be one of the best intros to an album we’ve heard this year. The track is the longest on the album at almost 7 minutes. It starts the song off strong with a slow tempo with minimal instruments like synths, slow drums, and eventually a guitar riff/solo that makes the instrumental perfect. Added with the auto-tuned vocals by Lil Yachty, this makes the first part of the song sound amazing.

Added to this, Yachty takes a different approach to this song and does not rap like he’s used to but instead sings about equality and his hard work as an artist. Another thing we’ve never seen before is Yachty having deeper meanings behind his lyrics.

The second part of the song elevates the song into a theatrical experimental song where we have a great explosion in its instruments and vocal performance by singer Justine Skye. She makes this second part of the song sound majestic with its explosive drums, synths, and overall volume of.

“The Ride-“ is the next song that follows in the formula of the first song with slow tempo drums and has a vocal performance and verse by artist Teezo Touchdown that has great chemistry with Lil Yachty, who himself is vocally perfect on this song. Like the rest of the album, it’s an unpredictable good mess, like the pitch of the electric guitar in the background, and there are so many different sounds on this song even just random futuristic sounds that makes it the good mess that it is.

“Running Out of Time” is a turn on this album where we get a beachy, or summer anthem, for an instrumental sounding like a song produced by Calvin Harris. The song really sounds like a song from Calvin Harris’s album ‘Funk Wav Bounces Vol.1’ but Yachty adds the sounds we keep hearing which are stuff like distorted instruments pitching up or just some futuristic sounds/synths

“pRETTy”. The next song opens up with a great line and this is also where we get Yacthy’s best singing on the album with his auto-tunes distorted and a great feature by artist Foushee that goes perfectly on this song. It’s all about partners and relationships as well as self-love. The song doesn’t have those futuristic sounds but instead has distorted drums as well as background vocals by both Foushee and Lil Yachty.

“:(failure:(“ is more as an interlude where Yachty reflects on his failures and also reflects on how it is to fail. He talks almost like he’s talking to a therapist or even in the position of a therapist giving advice on things that he’s experiencing now like being rich and famous, but also how you should deal with freedom. He gives his own perspective on what failure means to him.

“THE zone~” goes back to those slow-tempo songs. The song elevates this formula higher by keeping it slow the whole time and adding in some great instruments like electric guitar and has Lil Yachty go in more emotionally and vocally perfect once again. This song has way deeper lyrics than the rest of the songs and it makes more sense given the emotion Lil Yachty has behind his singing. One of the most underrated songs on the album that really makes you feel something with the song kinda like the artist Tame Impala.

“WE SAW THE SUN!” is part two of “THE zone~” with the same beat and even having the best transition in the album. It builds off nicely from the previous song, and being also one of the longer tracks at 5:31 of runtime, it fully immerses you into the vibe of this album. Even when mostly just the instrumental with background humming by Lil Yachty, it’s a song that makes you feel great and there is nothing more a song can accomplish than that.

“drive ME crazy!” is the most popular song on the album and it is deserved by the amazing and upbeat feeling this song has from its great instrumental that incorporates a bassist and violinist that elevates the instrumental and makes a difference to the sound altogether. The artist: Diana Gordon takes this song up a level with her phenomenal vocal performance on the song. She brings this great vibe that Lil Yachty mimics in the song, completely having a great first half. The second half is a little Yachty where he goes and raps on the previous instrumental with most of the instruments gone.

“IVE OFFICIALLY LOST ViSiON!!!!” is the most abstract song on the album beginning with elevator music and transitioning into distorted screams by Lil Yachty, with the instrumental slowly turning into chaos as it gets heavily distorted. 1 minute after this, the real song starts, and is a great explosion of many instruments. This is one of the best songs on the album by far. It has everything great about every song previously and has great transitions within the song that just add to the amazing experimental instrumental. Yachty talks about mental health on this and does it well by singing with straight emotion in the second half of the song. The instrumental stands out because of its use of electric guitar, which instead of being a background instrument, is the loudest in the whole song making it sound super explosive and colorful.

“sAy sOMETHINg” pulls back on the explosiveness of the previous song and it’s all about a relationship of Yachthy’s which makes the song more vibey than immersing. It’s overall a great song but it just doesn’t stand out enough, other than the topic of the song, except at the end of the song where Yachty makes a great transition into more of an R&B song which flows perfectly and is something Lil Yachty should do more of.

“Paint THE sky” starts off super slow with trippy sounds and Yachty with vocals so autotuned and riverbed that they sound super futuristic and echoey. The song then transitions into the main instrument that incorporates the drums we’ve heard previously on many of the songs from the album, and this song takes the same sound we heard at the end of “sAy sOMETHINg” and makes it more fleshed out with Lil Yachty still singing about the same topic of a relationship that didn’t work out.

“sHouLd i B?” is another amazing track that gives us that explosiveness from the track “IVE OFFICIALLY LOST VISION” but pulls back a little on the heavy electric guitar and pulls back a lot in the verses from Yachty where the instrumental becomes more quiet giving emphasis on what Lil Yachty is talking about, which is regular struggles for a lot of people and also talking about how to keep going forward in those moments. By the end of the song, the guitar picks back which makes a great transition into the next track.

“The Alchemist” starts off really upbeat with the very loud guitar and is a mix of Lil Yachty’s part where he’s talking to everyone who doubted him, and how people would kill for the position he’s in, and how he’ll never listen to the hate a lot of people give him. This message translates into the sound of the song where it sounds like it’s meant to bring out that emotion of confidence everyone has and is one of the most upbeat songs on the album. The artist Foushee, whom we’ve seen a lot of, helps on this track to serve as an interlude and outdo on the track. The parts where Foushee is singing the instrumental go a lot more silent and give even more of an effect for Lil Yachty’s parts of the song by having these quiet moments on the song before going back to the loudness and upbeat instrumental.

“REACH THE SUNSHINE” starts off with artist Nick Hakim singing on purely just an acoustic guitar which Lil Yachty does the same, but then completely transitions into an explosion of a lot of different synths which then go away again to just the acoustic guitar. Nick Hakim then has another verse with amazing ad-libs from Lil Yachty and things pick back up after this verse where we get yet again an explosion of instruments. This song serves its purpose as an outro where it doesn’t provide much lyricisms but brings back the fundamentals of the whole album which is explosiveness, synths, and overall emotion in the instrumentals.

The album starts and ends melodically with the ending of the song bringing back sounds from all the previous songs almost like a conclusion summarizing all the paragraphs in an essay. It’s done theatrical and is something Yachty was going for and that is making you feel something with the music, and it’s something he accomplishes well.

‘Let’s Start Here’ by Lil Yachty is a rich immersive and experimental album that is easily one of the best albums from 2023 and one of the more unexpected successes in music, which is talked about in the album by Lil Yachty. The album does what most albums should focus on and it brings out an emotion or feeling from listening. The album is a modern theatrical experience that most people should listen to, especially those who were already fans of Lil Yachty, and can see his change in sound to that of Tyler The Creator on his similar experimental album ‘IGOR’, which even inspired Lil Yachty for the making of this album.

By: Sophie Johnson and Addie Strack

Taylor Swift recently came out with a re-recording of her 5th album, ‘1989’. This was an exciting moment both for her fans and herself as it is one step closer to her being able to own and profit off her own music. This is an achievement that she has been working towards for many years, and since she wasn’t previously able to own her music, she decided to re-record her albums and call them (Taylor’s Version).

‘1989’ is one of our favorite overall albums and we were super excited when she announced the release of ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’ last summer. The newly recorded album was released on Friday, October 27th, 2023. Not only did Swift record every single one of the tracks from the original album, but she added five new songs that she had written during the era of this album but chose not to release at the time. These five tracks are called: (from the vault).

One of the vault tracks that we both love is called “Slut”. This song, despite the title having a derogatory meaning, has a beautiful melody and almost a nostalgic sound to it. When listening to the new vault tracks for the first time, this one stood out to us because of the smooth and angelic tone of it. Her voice is almost softer this song but it still holds so much emotion which adds to the effect of the song. This song was our favorite out of all the 5 new vault tracks on the album.

Another one of the vault tracks that we really enjoyed was a song called “Is It Over Now?”. This song has more of an upbeat rhythm than the first one, and we really liked the use of different background instruments to pull the lyrics and the song together. This was our second favorite song out of the vault tracks on ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’.

Overall, we think that the album improved from the original album released in 2014, but there were several tracks on the new album that we wished had stayed more similar to the original. One of these tracks is “I Know Places”. We both loved this song from the original album, and when we heard the new Taylor’s Version of it, we thought it used too much auto tune. However, the auto tune was mostly used in the beginning of the song, and the rest of the song gets better as it goes on.

A lot of the songs were even better that we imagined. “Clean” was arguably the best song on the album and we agree that this was the most improved from the original ‘1989’ album. The bass in this song was really defined and once again the instruments in the background added many different factors to the song.

Another song that we think is better now than the original is a song called “You Are In Love”. The high notes in the song “You Are In Love” were really amazing and a big improvement that we noticed from the original song. In the bridge of this song her voice sounds especially strong and we think that her vocal range and skills have generally improved in these past nine years since the original ‘1989’ was released.

After listening to the newly recorded ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’ as well as her other re-recorded albums including ‘Speak Now’, ‘Red’, and ‘Fearless’, we think that the majority of the music sounds better than it did before. The background music fits better with her vocals and overall we think that her singing and vocal abilities improved as she got older, and she also got more talented.