TOKiMONSTA - Oasis Nocturno
Written by Chi Chi Thalken on March 23, 2020TOKiMONSTA is a producer from Los Angeles who is over a decade deep into her career, navigating her way through dance, hip hop, R&B, and beyond over the years. Her last full-length, Lune Rouge, came out in 2017. She now returns with her sixth album, Oasis Nocturno.
Over the years, TOKiMONSTA’s career has been a little up and down. The good news, though, is that her downs have really just been mediocre instead of bad, but there have also been times when she has absolutely knocked it out of the park. 2014’s Desidirium was especially inventive and the beats absolutely bumped, while Lune Rouge was just a little uninspired. Going into Oasis Nocturno, I was really hoping that TOKiMONSTA would come back strong. Listening to the first three tracks, I felt a great relief, going from the beautiful downtempo instrumental “Love That Never,” to the experimental bass-heavy “Fried For The Night,” with EARTHGANG, to the fun and sexy R&B/dance track, “Get Me Some,” featuring Drew Love. From there, TOKiMONSTA maintains that magic, with exception, over the rest of the album, moving from house to downtempo to neo-soul to hip hop and back again. Along the way, we also get some nice guest spots from varied acts such as Sunni Colon, VanJess, and Rosehardt. It’s an album with incredibly warm bass lines that will fill up your speakers, and TOKiMONSTA is always switching up her rhythmic patterns and tempos, keeping you on your toes from track to track. The only real slip up here is the inclusion of the song “One Day,” featuring Bibi Bourelly and Jean Deaux. The production isn’t bad, but it’s not enough to save the track from the extremely generic, immature, and just generally weak lyrics about how they hustle and how they’re going to have big cars. It doesn’t help matters that this is also the weakest vocal performance on the album as well. It’s the one track on the album that I consistently skip over. And that’s fine, because that takes you to the grown and sexy “Phases,” with Sunni Colon, who is singing Latin flavored R&B that is strictly for the grown and sexy.
A decade-plus into her career, TOKiMONSTA is giving us some of her best work on Oasis Nocturno. It’s not perfect, but overall it’s incredibly well produced, brings together a lot of different genres in coherent and inventive manner, and showcases some talented guest artists.
Title: | TOKiMONSTA - Oasis Nocturno |
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Label: | Young Art |
Year: | 2020 |
Rating: | 8/10 |