MIND INVERSION

Do you ever find that there’s music that you criminally slept on (see: The Only Color That Matters is Green) ? More often than not, I end up finding out about a project that I managed to neglect for some reason or another. I was looking for a weekly column that I could do, and I feel like Slept On Saturdays is the perfect idea. Every Saturday I’m going to take the opportunity to shed some light on a mixtape, album or track that I overlooked because of sheer obliviousness. After all, the saying goes, “it’s better late than never”.

I remember hearing about XV years ago, and for some reason I never thought to check him out. The phenom from Witchita Kansas has been on his grind for a better part of the last ten years. Over the last six years, Vizzy has dropped somewhere around fifteen mixtapes, and that includes 40 Days and 40 Nights: a project where XV decided to release two tracks a day (one each day and one each night) for 40 days straight. All of his aforementioned material led up to the release of his latest offering Zero Heroes.

Every once in a while, I have a project hit me so hard that I can’t get it off of my mind, and Zero Heroes is definitely one of those cases. Everything about this mixtape makes a Hip-Hop head like myself nod my noggin in sheer approval; from beginning to end, Zero Heroes burns slow like the finest kush rolled up in a honey dipped blunt. Those who know about me and my taste in music know that production is a huge facet in my opinion, and it can easily make or break an album; most of the brain bashing beats on this album are courtesy of Kansas City’s own Seven. The thing that makes Zero Heroes so well-rounded is the perfect see-saw balance between lyricism and production. Vizzy is quickly becoming one of my favorite new emcees in the game; all of his 90s references give me a sense of nostalgia, and they bring me back to the days of being a careless adolescent in the Midwest.

It’s so hard to highlight singular tracks from this mixtape because I love every single one; every adjective that I can think of to describe Zero Heroes is a synonym for incredible. If this mixtape were an official album, I can assure you that it would garner damn near a perfect score from me. If Vizzy plans on releasing material like this on a regular basis, he is going to go from “zero” to a “hero” in Hip-Hop in no time at all. Simply put, this mixtape is…

Download: XV, Zero Heroes

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21, 2012 at 10:52 am and is filed under Album Download, Media, Slept on Saturdays with tags Midwest Hip-Hop, Seven, XV, Zero Heroes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.