Customer Reviews

Mishaps Happening

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This CD is absolutely delightful. I've never been one to enjoy a full-range jazzy CD, but I'm happy to make an exception here.

With no prior knowledge of a band called "Quantic" even existing, this album surely has made a terrific first impression on me. I should clarify that this album is not jazz. In fact it really cannot be classified. Perhaps if you're completely OCD about the proper cataloguing of CDs as well as everything else in your life, you'll just have to make a new category for this. There are fine elements of jazz, a hint of reggae, groove, samba perhaps, and just a whole lot of character and ambition. Therefore you have to classify this album in a category labeled "Fun".

Each track on the album is quirky and smart, with a pleasant personality all its own. Many tracks include very talented guests for surprise vocals, albeit I've never heard of any of them. I thoroughly recommend sampling the tracks right on Amazon and I guarantee you'll be grinning.

This music is absolutely perfect to ease your way through work or a car trip. Let me put it this way: If Quantic was the music we all heard when someone on the other end of the telephone line puts us on hold, the world we be a much happier place to live in.

I didn't digest Quantic's Mishaps Happening too well at first, until I threw it on one of those car stereos that rupture your eardrums...at any rate, once I experienced this disc on a high quality sound system, I was amazed at the incredible mixture of songs that Will Holland produced. He goes from Afrobeats to pure funk to deep house to soul to jazz with the skill of someone twice his age--I understand the guy is 23! Pretty impressive being that a lot of folks his age on the scene are more concerned with an image and doing cheesy popcorn music. Quantic's music is outstanding and he never compromises on good taste. Highly Recommended!

Will Holland, the force who is Quantic is one of those no talent... (sarcasim). If you read the credits on this album you'll see that he plays guitar, bass, double bass, vibes, sax, key boards, percusion and even contributes back up vocals. He also produces and arranges the samples and beats. This is impressive but is the music good? The answer in my opinion is unquestionably, yes it's great. It's mid tempo, it's funky and groovy, and jazzy. His ear for detail is superb and he keeps things interesting with varied instrumentation. The last song features a guest musician playing a banjo with a swinging beat. It may sound strange but like everything he puts together it just works. This one is a winner for Will Holland and for anyone who buys it.

Quantic has made a masterpiece. I bought this album 2 years ago and it is still my favorite purchase over those two years. You will not find a more soulful or better construction of organic instrumentation.

Will Holland, better known as Quantic, put out two great albums beforehand in Apricot Morning and 5th Exotic. And I was happy with these thinking that he had done all you could do in organizing musicianship into an electronic format. The fact is I was dead wrong because Holland's Mishaps Happenning brought this artistry into a whole other arena. With Mishaps, he has put together all of his extreme talent and ear for producing electronic music and has seemlessly blended this with great funk, soul, and jazz musicianship and singing. The actual architecture of EACH and EVERY song on this album is as beautiful and brilliant as the talented group he has brought together. The sounds are supremely textured and blended so well that his production is almost unoticed. And I believe the mark of a great album is when you can listen and feel the soul and genius but not understand it until you go back and replay it over and over. And only then you realize there was a meticulous science used to make each song.

This album does not follow a genre either. It is an eclectic group of songs for the right reason! Because brilliant music does not follow a type. Holland writes great songs here, no matter if he has to cross all genre boundaries.

I am coming back after two years to write this review because the album has not come close to dying as many electronic albums do. This is because they are great songs, not just great electronic songs. Simply put, Mishaps is timeless!

Holland has three sides, one part talented musician, one part brilliant producer, and one part DJ. What if all of all of these sides could meld into one encompassing seemless work of art? Well, it did. Buy Mishaps Happening.

I think I picked this CD up on accident. I was looking for the artist that remade Jazzinho's "Constelacao", who is actually Quant, then looked at this CD and saw some of the musical connections and figured maybe it was a typo on the import. Well... I was dead wrong. But the irony is that after eventually picking up Quant's cd, it's this one that's getting far more rotation in the sound system! This was released on the Ubiquity label; home to some slammin' compilations and releases. Think Gilles Peterson, John Beltran, Shawn Lee, Zero dB (recently remixed a cut on Rosalia De Souza's remix project), Cuica, P'taah and even the Rewind series.

The music on this is great! It's starts out with the title track, a cut that starts out easy and smooth before kicking up a few extra paces to live to its title in a rather funky way. "Use What You Got" has a neat beat to it, but is not my favorite track on the CD. However "Sound of Everything" was the cut where I realized I would really, really enjoy this CD. Great jazz touches, mad soulful vocals and beat, and a good vibe altogether. It's followed up appropriately by a funked up French rap "En Focus". "Trees and Seas" is a pure instrumental that raises and falls, and alas as the cd continues, you get introduced to a bit of the humour and added originality of this cd, thanks to Spanky Wilson's vocals on the tracks "Don't Joke with a Hungry Man" (LOL) and "When You're Through".

Yes, CHECK THIS OUT! This was one mistake that ended up bein' a blessing... yet it wasn't such a mistake since I knew the label enough to take the chance. Meh... weird. Regardless, if you dig St. Germain's Tourist you'll probably really like this. You also would probably like music by 4Hero, Gilles Peterson, the Rewind jazz series on this same label and Nathan Haines. I mean this has soul, funk, and just about anything else. Wait a sec... yeah, maybe James Brown for some of the original funk. Give it a shot!

Yeah, I agree with the other review here so far... Will Holland has certainly challenged himself by being painly prolific on plastic... he once got his sister to take care of saxophone duties, but now he does it himself... this is the kind of guy that will be able to record as though he's nine people, but it's just him in his studio (I think he's almost just done that with Quantic Soul Orchestra, although they do play it live with a full band). Or maybe it's that other thing with his old friend that's unusually brilliant, the Limp Twins- completely overlooked on this side of the water, as far as I'm aware. This new one isn't flawless like Stampede was and is, but it's certainly worth the effort.