Mixtape Review: DJ Tuff Luck — "Circle City Certified Vol. 3"

Disclosure before anything else: Tuff Luck runs this site. I write for it. He did not see this before it went up and he does not get to.

Vol. 3 is the most complete document of Indianapolis rap that exists. That is not a compliment about the music, it is a statement about the archive — twenty-two tracks, eleven artists, everyone from the 317 and nowhere else. In ten years this is what people will use to figure out what happened here.

What Works

Track 9 is the best thing on it and it is not close. Tone Deep produced fourteen of these and the run from track 7 to track 11 is the strongest sustained stretch on any volume of this series.

What Doesn't

It is four songs too long and everyone knows it. The back half loses the thread somewhere around track 17 and does not fully recover until the outro. Vol. 2 was sixteen tracks with nothing skippable. More artists is not the same as more record.

The no-features-from-outside rule is the best thing about this series and the reason it will outlast everything else on this site.

Four out of five. It would be a five at sixteen tracks, which I have now said in print about three different projects this year and will keep saying.