TOWN LOVE is an online art museum dedicated to celebrating the vibrant past and present of Northwest Hip-Hop. You can browse by artist or browse by year.

This gallery page is organized to highlight the creative work of

Tag: Crispy

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

What We Leave Behind

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What We Leave Behind was created in and features appearances from:

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Love, Love? Love.

Someone recently described Seattle to me as an exhausting place where everyone is trying to out-cool everyone else. I wonder if Isabella Du Graf was feeling those vibes when she wrote the chorus of her latest single, “All The Different Ways.” In it she sings, “Take off your cool, let me show you, all the different ways I could love you.” For those unfamiliar with this record, Du Graf’s music occupies a terrain somewhere between jazz and R&B, while also dipping her toes in Seattle hip-hop, on local tracks as featured vocalist, guest performer, and producer. Her body of work speaks to the ongoing malleability of music is this town. The aforementioned “All The Different Ways,” channels a space-jazz sound reminiscent fellow local chanteuse JusMoni, while “Looking All Around” shakes a Motown dance floor. Both are tracks from Love, Love? Love.. an album that it appears is being assembled in real-time, with new songs added to SoundCloud every few weeks. (Current track count: 6) It’s perfect music for a sunny Saturday afternoon like this one.

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Shifting States

Evoking the spirit of the kite-like image on the cover, Shifting States by All Star Opera swoops and soars. I first heard their music a few weeks ago at the record release party for this seven-track EP. They were heavily hyped to me, and this record—and their live show—does not disappoint. Wistful raps are backed by a proper, six-piece rock band, with guitars, bass, drums and so on, used to full effect on the reggae-inspired opener, “Marooned,” and in the guitar and horn interplay on the instrumental “Dock Ellis.” The low-key, not-quite-title-track, “Shifting Statements,” taps a spoken word coffee shop jazz vibe.

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High & Mighty

The Stranger picked High & Mighty as the very best album of 2013, saying that:

Released on the very last day of October, High & Mighty has three things that make it the top record of the year. First, the production on this album is just solid. From the first track (the darkling “Crime Waves”) to the last (the brilliantly twisted “Sounds Like the Outro”), the music keeps the listener engaged and pleased. High & Mighty does not have a single weak or lazy beat. Second, it has a unified sound that corresponds with reason three: Nacho Picasso’s rap mode. His rhymes pulsate just above the subliminal, often spiral into the surreal and pornographic, are often packed with references to deep and dark parts of popular culture, and imagine a nocturnal 206—a 206 that never sleeps but is also not really awake, existing in the twilight of the two states. High & Mighty is a record Seattle can be proud of.

Seattle hip-hop blog 206UP also picked this record as one of the “Top 10 Albums of 2013,” saying that:

Nacho Picasso branches out sonically on High & Mighty, which makes for his best release since 2011’s For The Glory. Nowhere to be found on H&M are common collaborators Blue Sky Black Death, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the atmosphere is lighter. Here we have out-of-Towners Swish and Swiff D providing gothic, trap-inspired soundscapes, in addition to local heavyweights Vitamin D and Jake One on more densely composed beats.

And of course Nacho, possessor of the most recognizable voice in Seattle right now, is in rare form, laying out his bleak philosophy on life on “Crime Waves”, making (ahem) fowl assertions on the opposite sex on “Duck Tales”, and laying out the skeletons in his closet on the emotionally bare “Alpha Jerk”. In 2012, it was often difficult to see the forest for the trees in Nacho Picasso and BSBD’s collabs: too many clouds shrouding the deeper layers of the rapper’s complex psyche. High & Mighty, though, is a step through the looking glass, lyrically and beat-wise, and it results in a much more intricate picture.

High & Mighty was created in and features appearances from:

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