by MIKE
Released June, 21 2020 via 10k
Reviewed July 6, 2020
Top tracks (based on community voting)
Weight of the Word* (36%), Allstar (30%), What’s Home ½ (23%)
Motherly love is unconditional, and an unerasable feeling. Recognizing the great people in life is much easier when that love’s presence is felt. But even those people eventually fade. Weight of the World’s soulful acceptance of losing that unconditional love’s source is much less a mourning, but a celebration of such a beacon of love and light. Even if a mother dies, the love for her children never will. – Ben (Synth) (9/10)
Grief. Grief is the weight of the world on your chest, bruising the sternum like a 200-lb bench press that came crashing down. When this happens, you either raise the bar, wiggle out of its possession, or you have friends that help make that weight a little easier to deal with. As MIKE chronicles his day-to-day struggles year after year, he continues to accelerate his skills at doing so. Every other beat is a home run and every other line is a 200-lb bar. Good grief, great album. – DeVán (9/10)
The titan Atlas was forever condemned to hold the celestial worlds on his back as punishment for defiling the gods of Olympus. For all eternity, life itself was dependent on his unbridled strength and compassion for the world to hold it up. Never did he buckle, give up, or stop caring. Though he had all this passion, his life was constantly a struggle. In the current times, it’s very easy to relate to the mythical giant. It appears the entire world has collapsed into a never-ending internal dread that weighs more than any measurement can document. Passion is at an all-time low, because why bother if your life is just meaningless in the grand scheme? It’s hard to communicate all the little emotional fractures always going on, but at the end of the day, this struggle is something we all have to endure. Atlas, though a giant, was just a representation of man having to always analyze his surroundings and survive knowing all the horrible truths around them. New York rapper MIKE uses Weight Of The World to beautifully display the hardships of man. His delivery seems like he’s on the verge of breaking down and quitting, the beats match that sentiment, but he always finds a way to shine a light on the little things that make the weight worth the burden. It is a beautiful representation of the state of being and what it’s like to be at the tipping point of buckling, but having to find the way to the light at the end of the tunnel. – Jared (8.5/10)
Ben (Synth): 9/10 | DeVán: 9/10 | Alan: 8.5/10 | Jared: 8.5/10 | Pax: 8.1/10
Cam: 8/10 | Enth: 8/10 | Hadley: 7.5/10 | Dominick: 7/10
