This years Vol. features a cast of some of horrors biggest monsters incuding Pennywise The Clown and Jason Voorhees
As much as I love summer and wish it were longer, the month leading up to Halloween will always be my favorite time of year. As the leaves begin to fall and the spooky decorations begin coming out, even the most rational person is given a little more reason to keep glancing over their shoulder when walking alone in the evening. Many people share a love for the eerie holiday with me, but no one more than the mysterious Figure. Each year in the month of October this horror obsessed producer releases a collection of haunting bass tracks that are sure to make your heart beat faster. Complete with songs sampling huge horror hits such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Evil Dead , this year’s Monsters Vol. 5 sees Figure returning to his signature sound as well as paving the way for future releases with smashing new ideas.
As a hip-hop head, one of the reason Figure resonates so much with me is because even in his much heavier tracks you can hear him apply techniques he learned from his early days as a Hip Hop producer. The perfect example from this album would be the track “Pennywise The Clown” featuring the lyrical talents of longtime collaborator, Cas One. This tune’s powerful brass melody paired with the live drumming during Cas One’s verse provides the listener with a killer breakdown to spice up an already steller track.
Of course you can’t really talk about how Figure spices up his songs without talking about how many different directions he can take a single drop while sticking to relatively the same sounds. I don’t know how Figure designs his basses (though it probably something to do with FM synthesis), but I’ll admit it: if you’ve heard one figure bass you’ve more or less heard them all. The draw to his music, however, is not in the difference between his bass sounds, but more in how he utilizes modulation and samples in his drops to make these synths sound fresh time and time again. Take for instance the Jason Voorhees inspired track “Friday The 13th”. By adjusting different aspects of his basses and splicing in the right samples, Figure was able to create four drastically different sounding drops with essentially the same five sounds. Now, this isn’t to say Figure can’t be original with his sounds, because he actually suprised me with several new sounds I didn’t expect from him, such as the main bass in “Creature from the Black Lagoon” or those highly distorted basses on the outro of “Freddy Kruegar”
But alas, this album does have a few short comings that last years Monsters Vol. 4 seemed to do just a tiny bit better. Around this time last year Figure was working with Universal Studios to provide the soundtrack for their “Halloween Haunted Nights” experience, and as a result, last years Monsters had a bit more of a cinematic aspect in both it’s interludes and in some of the samples used. While it is nice to see Figure returning to his heavier sounds, this years interludes don’t really give me the same kind of goosebumps. Furthermore, some drops seem awkward, almost as if they didn’t match up with their buildup. Both these issues can be seen in the album’s opener “House On Haunted Hill”. Yes the song does an alright job of setting the tone for the album, it’s drop seems really out of place and I would have been happier if it had just been a stand alone cinematic track.
Despite this however, the album in general is better than last years and most of the songs are powerful bangers that are sure to be heard in many sets this Halloween season. So go grab yourself a copy or at least give it a listen on soundcloud, because when it comes to creating eerily dance-able sounds of the season, no one does it better than the mysterious Figure. You can catch Figure on his TerrorVision Tour this fall where he will be cueing clips along side his music in a similar fashion to the above video
The Funk Yard 