Cassette Review: Sigrah "Beats & B-Sides" (Intelligent Sound)

[$9 // Edition of 100 // https://intelligentsound.bandcamp.com/album/beats-b-sides]

Sometimes you really have to analyze the title of a cassette to figure out what it's going to sound like.   Luckily for all of us who are listening to this Sigrah cassette we know that when it comes to the title of "Beats & B-Sides" what you see is what you get.    But don't think for one second that means that any of these beats will be second rate or the b-sides will somehow imply that they are lesser tracks than the a-sides.   (It's funny, no one ever releases a collection of a-sides, so maybe someone should)

Side A begins as dreamy glo-fi.    There are funky beats in a synth style and it's somewhere between Kid & Play and Beastie Boys, as it just has that sort of 1980's/early 1990's hip hop feel to it, you know when hip hop was safe and kind of corny but luckily there are no lyrics about how to tie your shoes or something.     Drum machine claps bring on video game power up bliss.    Pounding beats that Nas might use combine with 8bit swirls.   It's triumphant with a quieter break down, whooshes, and slower beats with synth keys to end the side.

So technically everything on Side B should be a b-side, right?   Would it be weird to have a b-side track on Side A?  Would it be weird to have a track on Side B that wasn't called a b-side?   It's symantics really.    Drum machine whistles start things off with blissful tone loops.   A sound of piano even can be heard.    This moves into something less hip hop and closer to something ending in -wave.

At this point it turns into almost straight up new wave/synthwave and there seems to be a select group of artists just really killing it right now as they tread that line between new wave and hip hop and it probably has some fancy genre name but whatever you call it, I'm really digging it.  

There is an audio clip mixed in with the music now of  a female voice saying things like "I know you can do it!  Get down!" and "You can do it, baby", which is somewhere between what I would assume to be a motivational type of cassette and Salt 'N' Peppa.   Though it is worth noting that it doesn't take a whole lot of motivation to listen to this cassette because once you get caught in the tidalwave of Sigrah you just let it do the rest.