Mello Music Group Vinyl, CD & Tape 180 Items

A live version of the critically acclaimed 2017 album “The Iceberg,” Oddisee’s masterpiece has been performed around the world. As hehas toured, he has been joined by his band, Good Compny: Olivier St. Louis on guitar, Ralph “Real” Washington on Keys, DJ Unown on MPC, Jon Laine on drums and Dennis Turner on bass.
The first live album release from both Oddisee & Mello Music Group, this project shows what people all over the world already know- Oddisee and Good Compny put on an amazing live show. With bonus tracks from Oddisee’s albums “The Good Fight,” and “People Hear What They See,” this new project breaths life into Oddisee’s catalogue in a way we’ve never heard before.

Oddisee's breakthrough album: Imbued with love, honesty, and selflessness, The Good Fight is virtuosic in its musicality, direct in its language, and infinitely relatable.

In a landscape overrun with abstract indulgence and shallow trend-chasers, the Prince George’s County, Maryland artist has created a record that reminds you that it’s music before it’s hip-hop.

For Oddisee, “The Good Fight” is about living fully as a musician without succumbing to the traps of hedonism, avarice, and materialism. It’s music that yields an intangible feeling: the sacral sound of an organ whine, brass horns, or a cymbal crash. It’s a meditation on our capacity to love and the bonds binding us together. It’s our ambition and greed warring with our sense of propriety - a list of paradoxes we all face when living and striving.

Oddisee’s production simmers in its own orchestral gumbo. You sense he’s really a jazzman in different form, inhabiting the spirit of Roy Ayers and other past greats. The Fader’s compared him to a musical MC Escher, calling hailing his “grandiose and symphonic sound” and “relevant relatable messages.” Pitchfork praised his “eclectic soulful boom-bap.”

Jeremiah Jae and L’Orange’s noir-inspired opus, "The Night Took Us In Like Family"

Consider it the alchemy of Madvillain and "The Maltese Falcon": a five-part fable of tangled crimes, narrow escapes, and raining lead. Beats bend sinister with imagery aiming for the temples. Jae invokes dark clouds, crowns of thorns and LSD eyes. Bars written in dirt. Samples are disembodied and ethereal. It’s like a grand jury indictment doubling as a Greek chorus.

Jeremiah Jae and L’Orange’s noir-inspired opus, "The Night Took Us In Like Family"

Consider it the alchemy of Madvillain and "The Maltese Falcon": a five-part fable of tangled crimes, narrow escapes, and raining lead. Beats bend sinister with imagery aiming for the temples. Jae invokes dark clouds, crowns of thorns and LSD eyes. Bars written in dirt. Samples are disembodied and ethereal. It’s like a grand jury indictment doubling as a Greek chorus.

Detroit producer Apollo Brown has made a name for himself as one of Hip-Hop’s most legendary new producers, while maintaining a golden era sound. His production credits are a who’s who of Hip-hop greats, from Danny Brown to Ghostface Killah, Ras Kass to Westside Gunn. Even Chance the Rapper used a pair of Apollo beats on his debut mixtapes. Known for bringing the best out of musicians, Apollo has a knack for making timeless classics. Brooklyn’s Joell Ortiz started on none other than Dr. Dre’s Aftermath label and built a huge buzz in the industry. He’s worked with legends like Just Blaze, among others. He then signed to Shady Records as ¼ of the supergroup Slaughterhouse. He’s worked with Hip-Hop titans Eminem, Busta Rhymes, Jadakiss, Akon, and Big Daddy Kane. Now the pair of Hip-hop luminaries are celebrating the 5-year anniversary of their first collaborative album on Mello Music Group with a deluxe edition including 2 new songs. It’s nothing short of a masterpiece: Mona Lisa.

Detroit producer Apollo Brown has made a name for himself as one of Hip-Hop’s most legendary new producers, while maintaining a golden era sound. His production credits are a who’s who of Hip-hop greats, from Danny Brown to Ghostface Killah, Ras Kass to Westside Gunn. Even Chance the Rapper used a pair of Apollo beats on his debut mixtapes. Known for bringing the best out of musicians, Apollo has a knack for making timeless classics. Brooklyn’s Joell Ortiz started on none other than Dr. Dre’s Aftermath label and built a huge buzz in the industry. He’s worked with legends like Just Blaze, among others. He then signed to Shady Records as ¼ of the supergroup Slaughterhouse. He’s worked with Hip-Hop titans Eminem, Busta Rhymes, Jadakiss, Akon, and Big Daddy Kane. Now the pair of Hip-hop luminaries are celebrating the 5-year anniversary of their first collaborative album on Mello Music Group with a deluxe edition including 2 new songs. It’s nothing short of a masterpiece: Mona Lisa.

Classic Hip-hop meets minimalism and dusty vinyl on Anchovies. Cali Agents alum Planet Asia is as sharp as ever with his lyrical smithing. Apollo Brown’s style is evident behind the dust and grime of these smoky samples. The Detroit producer approached this album like a director would a movie. Apollo painstakingly laid out every detail of the project and knew what he wanted from the finished product. He knew that only one rapper could execute his vision. Enter Planet Asia. The West Coast legend was able to fit directly into the plan and bring his talents to the album, creating a perfect match.

When you hear the phrase, “everything’s fine,” we immediately understand it as emotional shorthand. In daily life, we depend on those perfunctory clichés (hope all is well, good to hear from you, etc.) to spare ourselves from the psychological unpacking that the truth requires. For that, there’s art. For that, there’s Everything’s Fine from Jean Grae and Quelle Chris, a jagged, acerbic odyssey that brilliantly riffs on this dystopian zeitgeist.
The thing is, anyone without a lobotomy and a toxic red hat understands that things are definitely not fine. The crush of modern anxiety, the late capitalist scramble to survive, and the brain warp rot of social media has left most of us half crazy.
“We have a dickhead for a president, and before our eyes, racial, religious, and sexual identity rights are moving backwards,” says New York’s (by way of Detroit) Quelle Chris. “Money is still a thing (I’m waiting for Star Trek life to start). There’s war, your kids may be sick, but if someone randomly asks ""how's it going?"" most people will say ""fine.""
Released on Mello Music Group, this album replaces that reflexive cliché with honest and eloquent tangents. It’s specific and subtle in its execution, achieving equilibrium between lackadaisical detours to smell the flowers and the frantic acknowledgement that there’s an inferno raging outside.
If the great political albums are often grim polemics, Everything’s Fine achieves its goals partially through withering satire. See the opening skit, a Prince Paul-style game show in which three contestants (including a futuristic robot) numbly croak that everyone’s fine despite flying high on every imaginable drug, crying themselves to sleep at night and being unemployed for a decade and a half despite having a Master’s in Fine Arts. I promise it’s much funnier than it reads off a screen.
“We’re both perfectionists in different ways,” Jean Grae describes their working relationship. “We both see huge pictures and concepts. So while listening, pay attention to the subtleties, the nuances, the dissonance and the harmony. The conversations and pieces of ourselves in the words, the flows, the beats. All of the open spaces. .Be uncomfortable and be okay with that. Be layered and be okay with that. Be angry and be okay.”
It’s rare to find a record where two rappers are so seamlessly intertwined. Yes, that’s partially a by-product of the teamwork that goes into being in any normal relationship where you wake, sleep, and dream together. But the album also bears the hallmarks of two singular creative geniuses trading bars, collaborating on beats, and combining fun with internal therapy and external observations. It features indelible cameos from Denmark Vessey, Grammy Award winner Anna Wise, Your Old Droog and Big Tone, as well as comics Ashok “Dap” Kondabolu, Michael Che, Nick Offerman, and Hannibal Burress.
In the streaming era, we tend to naturally overlook albums that require multiple listens. This is a record that will grab you on first listen, but it’s greatness only reveals itself through its careful construction, slick wordplay, and esoteric allusions.
On “Zero,” Jean artfully references Rachmaninoff and The Donner Party in the first two bars. With “Scoop A Dirt,” she name-drops the Babadook alongside the truth bomb that Friends was little more than a whitewashed rip off off Living Single. Meanwhile, Quelle balances boasts about bags of cash the size of Chris Christie with poignant existential laments. Somewhere in between, Jean will stealthily slip in jewels like, “it took me until my 30s just to put my finger on it, once you accept the knowledge/solace doesn’t follow/honest.”
It’s a record with only a couple antecedents: De La Soul is Dead, Organized Konfusion’s Stress: The Extinction Agenda, Blackstar, and maybe Cannibal Ox’s Cold Vein. Yet it doesn't sound remotely like any of them. It’s spontaneous and free, yet refined and meticulous. Even if everything is abject, it’s a reminder that music can transcend.
“This album is full of our minds. Our hearts. Our love for production, and words. flow and a lot of musicality,” Jeans says. “We don’t approach topics, issues, writing, or making beats in the same way. I’m harsh, blunt, quick, technical, I arrange classically and play more than I sample. I make joints with 80 tracks. I’m layers upon layers upon layers. Quelle is patient, he’s kinder. More loose and minimalistic. He makes sounds work together that shouldn’t fucking work. How? I have no idea. These are dreams within dreams.”

Plug in your ethernet and dial up to travel through Kool Keith’s multi-verse. Featuring Ice-T and Marc Live. Black Elvis 2 is here.

Plug in your ethernet and dial up to travel through Kool Keith’s multi-verse. Featuring Ice-T and Marc Live. Black Elvis 2 is here.

North Carolina-based hip-hop producer L'Orange and rapper Solemn Brigham are Marlowe. Quick-fire vocals and dusty breakbeats. With dazzling cinematic mise en scene, L’Orange crafts a world that sounds like an old-time medicine show dropped into 90s Brooklyn.

Limited to 300 copies.

From The Trenches to the Penthouse, A Mid-West Rap Opus from Ohio's Stalley & Legendary Detroit producer Apollo Brown

Oddisee has previously dropped 'Odd Spring', 'Odd Winter', 'Odd Autumn' & 'Odd Summer' over the years but come May 17th, 2011 Mello Music Group will be dropping 'Odd Seasons' on remastered vinyl & CD physical editions as one cohesive collection!

Limited to 300 copies. - HHV exclusive

From The Trenches to the Penthouse, A Mid-West Rap Opus from Ohio's Stalley & Legendary Detroit producer Apollo Brown