iloveitwhentheyrun - Nikita, the Wicked

The good: Nikita, the Wicked (I'm just going to refer to him as 'Nikita' for the sake of readability) does a pretty good job at maintaining a solid mood here. Slightly edgy and fairly dark, "iloveitwhentheyrun" sticks to its ideas for much of the project, and the shadier edge Nikita adds are particularly present in the basslines and sampling. A consistent mood is always appreciated, and on the production side of the coin, those very basslines and sampling supplement the sonic makeup of this project very nicely — the former in the strong sub-basses and scratchy and/or gritty leads "iloveitwhentheyrun" employs, and the latter throughout the tracklist. Nikita's clearly got a penchant for sampling, because they help each track along very nicely.

The bad: It's very sad that the sampling needs to do that much heavy lifting, because even if it's good stuff, the rest of the soundscape is quite empty and a little tired. Strong moments are contrasted with comparatively shallow surrounding moments and a lot of the production ends up as quite inoffensive, with practically nothing going on. Other than that, I can't say I'm big on the whole edgy branding of it all.