Sweet Valley: Eternal Champ (Colored Vinyl) Vinyl LP

Fools Gold originally dropped this beat tape by Nathan Williams (Wavves) and his little bro as a digital download back in 2012, and now it’s finally available on wax via Williams’ Ghost Ramp label. “I had bought a house in L.A. and basically asked Joel to come and live in it with me under the condition that we start a group called Sweet Valley, because I'm letting him live here for free. Otherwise he'd just sit around smoking all of my weed all day,” Williams explains. “We didn't really know what it was going to be, we just wanted to base it around samples and keyboards. I wanted to do something not like Wavves.” Kitchen sink trap beats, Sopranos clips and video game samples galore make this somewhat of a post-Soundcloud update on the formula laid down by The Avalanches on Since I Left You, rife with colorful dialogue beaming out like a 90s-baby stoner flick marathon. Right off the top, the clapping hooves of Epona and the gentle piano tickling of Koji Kondo that opens the intro track will be familiar to anyone else who spent 1999 smoking weed and playing Ocarina Of Time, but there’s plenty more where that came from, as that’s not even the only Ocarina sample in the first track (let alone the first minute!). Some of it sounds exactly like what you’d expect Wavves making trap beats to sound like, but some of it is super fucking legit, and you can just imagine someone like, - oh I don’t know, Max B? - spitting on joints like the 8-bit rocksteady swang of “Spirit Temple,” the dragonslayer trap of “The Great Bay Shrines” (more Zelda samples) and the sleepy boom-bap of “Bros Beyond” (still more). You can even picture Drake doing one of his signature self-serious album outros over “Sentimental Trash.” First-ever vinyl pressing on blue colored wax with matching color euro sleeve, limited copies.

• first-ever vinyl pressing
• blue colored vinyl
• digital download included
• limited edition
• music label: Ghost Ramp 2018

reviewed by sakura incident 08/2018