Fresh Daily "Mothership/Land"

Hip Hop has been seeing a lot of changes and growth this year. The music has stayed flowing with a constant stream of free “mixtapes” being dropped online everyday. Fresh Daily is a young kid from Brooklyn who raps, and does it well. He dropped an album earlier this year called Mothership/Land. On the cover Fresh is their looking suspiciously like Afrika Bambaataa and the spacely feel that Bam so often infused into his early visions of Hip Hop music is here loud and clear.

“Space x Time” is a great tune that captures the dichotomy of time passing and how we choose to spend it. TreZure The Empress sings with an awesome voice the hook, contemplating what is a waste of time and what you as a person have to decide is important. Freshes verses will provoke you to consider that lateness you are running with today.

Elsewhere you will hear a cross between original production and some beats you might have heard before. Flying Lotus “Do The Astral Plane” is flipped into “AstralDance” fitting considering it’s the most dance friendly cut on all of Cosmogramma. If you aren’t familiar with FlyLo, do that. Fresh rides this beat of his to perfection, sounding crisper than ever and truely on his way to living his name should he consistently stay fucking with sounds like this.

The original production on the tape is nothing to bat an eye at. While he did choose to use a few others tracks, overall it’s all exclusive to this project and you will have plenty to digest. Like any NYC raised fan, there has to drums and Fresh doesn’t have an ear that appears to let him miss much. Tracks knock when need be, they float in the ether sometimes, and even feature the most aggressive duo’s vocals sampled over a beautifully subdued beat with a hook that says “Throw your guns up in the air.” Hearing it over the mellow soundscape makes me smile.

Electronic influences are obvious here, and help support the notion Hip Hop’s relationship shouldn’t be as fractured from the forward thinking producers of those styles. Both creators use the same or similar tools to make what they do. Hip Hop tends to be heavier on the drums and funky samples, while much of anything in the electronic realm will feature faster paced tunes that sometimes can feel hollow, sometimes full and mind bending and sometimes harder than the most grimiest of Primo bangers.

Lyrically Fresh covers a lot of ground here. Sometimes he gets lost in his abstractness but for the most part he is conveying passion. Feeling. His life put to ones and zeroes. He addresses love, only giving us a snippet but that two minutes of “Starshine” should be enough to have even LL Cool J approving. “Feel Me” is a powerful track about exactly that. He spits “They say Fresh how you feel man/I say with my fingers nigga whats the deal fam” which is the kind of real world slap in the face listeners need sometimes to feel.

I’ve been playing Mothership/Land for the last month off and on, digging deep, comprehending what he was getting at. I’m not one to say everything has a deeper meaning. You might find one in this album, I found some great rhymes that made me think about life, some beats that made me move and a young emcee who isn’t afraid of his own ideas. Get on board with this audio spaceship, expand your mind and listen to something that will remind you about what you’ve been missing yet also give you a sound unlike that which rappers have yet to truly explore.

Give the album a listen below and download it for free here!