The Captain & Tennille of hip-hop.
A Loud Heart - A Loud Heart (2011) – 6.3 / 10.0
Label: Self-released
A Loud Heart consists of spoken word artist turned emcee Guante on vocals and Claire Taubenhaus on acoustic guitar. That’s right—this is acoustic hip-hop, and with that, I think I’ve sufficiently explained my hesitance toward the duo’s self-titled EP. I’m not familiar with either musician going into this album, so I approached this work preparing for the worst.
The problem with making acoustic hip-hop is that hip-hop, by its nature, is already kind of repetitive, and there’s little that I find more annoying than the repetitive strumming of an acoustic guitar. Bass and cello make appearances on a few songs, but for the most part, you only have an acoustic guitar as a backing track. The reason it isn’t as bad as I was expecting is only because I had my expectations low to begin with. For his part, Guante spends most of his time suggesting big ideas rather than exploring them, though his attempts at storytelling fare well.
I’ll give that this is a unique project, though, and that it is better than the sum of its parts. Taken all together, this is a ballsy twenty minutes of music that doesn’t go down too hard, and it’s easy to imagine a great follow-up album sometime in the future—you know, with more instruments.
A Loud Heart -- The Illusion of Movement from Unique Techniques on Vimeo.
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