producers: karma infinite

Karma Infinite is one busy man. He produced like 200 tracks the last three years, that were used by a bundle of artists, as well as by his now defunct Alliance crew. This "Basement Symphonies" release is now bordering the compilation and album, as while he did all the beats, there are a host of tracks on this 17 cuts offering, where he didn't pick up the mic himself. Hence we shall review this as a producer album, and they don't get rated, just in case you wonder.

Another good reason why to consider this a producer album are the eight short instrumental interludes, that are mixed in between all the tracks with the lyrics. And some of them are actually quite good, like "Hard Times", that features a very cool quirky sample, that then is kept rather looped though. "Basement Symphony" is also nice, as it combines a bouncy bass with a well fitting string section. And we are also okay with the more creative "Purple Haze" while "Flashback" then features an almost smooth melody. Hence what we can say is, that Karma does have it in him to put together some cool beats. It's just unfortunate that he doesn't give those to people to rhyme over, as well as it's unfortunate that he keeps things very looped, instead of playing with the samples.

And another thing that we have already criticized in the last review that featured his beats, that sometimes Karma opts for already well known samples, or samples that are somewhat similar to something we have heard before. Case in point is, when on "Koyotte" he goes to sample the "Rocky" theme. Even worse, with the Jay-Z voice bit at the beginning, we wonder if he just sampled the M.O.P. track, instead of the original. Or "D.L. Prophecy" by Down Low Squad features a simply looped Isley Brothers sample. But we gotta come to the same conclusion again too, that when opting for these excerpts, the tracks actually do sound better, simply due to the dopeness of the samples. And if we want to mention another cut that we are really cool with, we name "Knowledge Gods" by Karma Infinite featuring Legend, that is strong due to its beat, as well as the lyrics that stray away from all the slicing, threatening and all that crap.

As if we dig into what's bad on this record, then we again gotta mention the lyrics. They are just too violent, and violent in a unchoreographed, clumsy, over the top, unfunny kind of way. Hence while Koyotte offers one of the best tracks on here, with his "Koyotte", we are cool with the opening lines "you really don't wanna battle me / cause all you get when you battle me / is you got to say you got to battle me", but after that he goes into some violent rambling, as if he's coming up with new punishments for the sequel to "Seven". It's still one of the best cuts though, due to the chorus working with the beat, and with the howling sounding corny, but still showing that this actually tried to write a song, rather than just boast over a beat. Hence tracks like "Lyrical Swordplay" by Karma and Pot-C then suffer from said violence as well as from a mediocre beat.

As you can tell, we are not that harsh on Karma's beats, due to them being better than on the releases we've already reviewed. Lyrically we still gotta criticize the same lack of creativity. We don't know who these cats want to impress with their childish threats, they don't sound too scary to us though.