If you live on the Internets (like many of us good androids do), you might be of the school of thought that trap could have been dead and buried sometime in September of 2012 and you'd be OK with that. It's not that we wish an early death on the latest craze in the scene, but it feels like there was a lifetime of trap originals, refixes and mixes dropped in nine months, enough to satisfy us if it did somehow take the proverbial long walk off of a short pier. We're glad it's alive and kicking, as we wouldn't have a thing of beauty like Brillz' TWONK LP, which dropped today on Slow Roast.
We're also glad that we've seen Brillz' progression. He went from "dude that worked on a number of bangers with ETC!ETC!" to having an official "Clarity" remix. That's king shit for a producer that many of us didn't now about 12 months ago. He's worth the listen, though, as he has the chops to last long in this industry.
TWONK is an album born of the trap mentality, but we don't think many of the trap set could have pulled this off. It's definitely not a story-driven project, but it also doesn't feel like a collection of bangers he had lying around. There's a sense of arrival, TWONK as a definitive statement (that statement being "I'm here, bitches"). You've heard some of these before: "Callisto," one of the two ETC!ETC! collaborations set the 'Nets on fire last Fall, and Brillz previewed a number of these during the "Mystical Wonder Mix" with Kill the Noise. But it's not just a trap party. Brillz' "Pump the Beat" with Corey Enemy kicks things up a notch, and the return to the new jack swing sound visited in "New Jack Swoop" with "Old School" has us wondering when more trap producers will be discovering and throwing their own spin on that sound.
To sum it up, Brillz' TWONK is a crazy time capsule of everything that's fresh and exciting with the American bass music movement in EDM. It's very 2013, and we feel it'll be one of those projects you'll look back at and see where a lot of people got their whole style from. Relisten to DJ Craze's TWONK teaser mix, then cop the album.
