Kriss Mincey: Scratch N’ Riff: The VintageBrand Mixtape

On this five-track mixtape, Kriss Mincey keeps the focus on her voice. The opening song, “Thursday Night,” is a simple R&B track with polished vocals. Her falsetto is light and airy with great control. She sings of a lover coming over, and the anticipation of his arrival. While this track doesn’t give off an amateur vibe, the second track, “Let Go,” featuring Johnny Graham, does. The strange space-like beat in the background doesn’t mesh well with the trumpet. Her attempt at combining two different vibes is not effective. The extreme auto-tune is a strange touch. Mincey’s voice is far too pretty to make her sound like Britney Spears.

The next song, “Black Ebony,” is also a disappointment. With mediocre lyrics and a boring beat, Mincey missed the mark with this song. The bongo beat sounds a little out of place. Pair that with a beat that sounds like a keyboard program and you’ve got an amateur-sounding track. The vocals are nice enough, but it doesn’t make this song a winner.

“Dreamcatcher” starts off with a strange voice repeating numbers, which doesn’t seem to have any connection to the rest of the song. Unlike the first track, this song has very unpolished and rough vocals. Mincey even sounds a tad pitchy, which is a stark contrast from the overproduced vocals on “Let Go.” To close her mixtape, she has a guest vocalist on “Thursday Night.” Opening and closing the CD with the same song seems redundant. Adding a different voice to the track doesn’t do much—it’s not innovative, it’s just flat-out repetitive. The rapping section by Logic is very random on this album. It seems Mincey is trying to mold different genres into one, but it isn’t effective in the least.

In A Word: Unarrived