Sometimes, when a mix-tape is released as an album after two years, the old labeling still sticks to the record. Her Favourite Colo(u)r already lacks album-qualities due to its length of only thirty minutes, but also the sample-fiddling makes the record rather line up with Madlib’s Medicine Show-Tapes. Her Favourite Colo(u)r, together with its videos, is a stroll through an antique shop full of films like Buffalo ’66 and old, well-known, Jazz-records. The raspy and dusty sample-layers sound much more like a sunny day in Georgia than like the hard West-coast. The vintage-sound echoes through the speakers, sounding timeworn and rustling, so that the Rapper is hard to make out under his own multilayered production. Between sample-dialogues with Billie Holiday’s warm voice and trumpets, the lyrical highlights often find their way to the listener’s ear only at the second hearing. When harkening to the voice that’s hard to grasp, which gushes in loneliness and pity, the summery ease merges into a picture of Blu with a bottle of Whiskey, tinkling away at the piano and mumbling: »Fuck a rapper / I’m an actor in a film called Leave Me The Fuck Alone Till I Find A Real Job«. Still, when Blu’s foggy and convoluted production, combined with unsorted film-quotations and love-scenes seeming like nostalgic retrospections, intensifies his raps’ melancholy, the album eventually builds up to a defined and coherent portrait of the rapper. That’s why, Her Favourite Colo(u)r can’t be compared to the Exile-produced Below The Heavens. Unfortunately, the record lacks the usual dose of energy that Blu proved to have with Exile and the Johnson&Johnson-project.
Her Favorite Colo(u)r
