By We’re here to tell you what’s hot and what’s not in this week’s music roundup
Brother Ali – SECRETS AND ESCAPES
Genre: Underground Hip Hop
Favorite Tracks: “Greatest that Never Lived,” “Father Figures”
SECRETS AND ESCAPES is a collision of the two worlds of Rhymesayers Entertainment. On one hand, there is the downtrodden, insular, cold headtrips of Atmosphere, Aesop Rock, and Evidence. On the other there is the brighter, soulful, and explicitly political musings of Dilated Peoples and Brother Ali. While there has been plenty of intersection before (Ant from Atmosphere produced four of Ali’s albums), it’s been a long time since Ali rapped over beats this dour and solemn, the product of three sessions in Evidence’s garage. After the lushness of ALL THE BEAUTY IN THIS WHOLE LIFE and frequent use of crisp, funky licks and dramatic pianos, it’s galling to hear compressed, flickering wisps of melody or mechanical beeping over lo-fi drums and chopped-up vocal samples.
It’s not a bad fit for Ali’s introspective and mellow delivery, but SECRETS AND ESCAPES’ juxtaposition in fidelity between him and the rest of the mix is distracting, and his attempts at more abstract lyricism do not play to this strength. The storytelling that produced devastating personal tales like “Dear Black Son” and “Uncle Usi Taught Me” and historical epics like “Before You Were White” and “The Travellers” has been ditched in favor of meandering, unstructured songs without any hooks or central themes to stick with you. “Father Figures” gets the closest to his past excellence by addressing the FBI hounding him and the black legends that served as father figures to him, playing out over beautiful flutes and twinkling ambience, and “Apple Tree Me” features evocative menace and steadfast refusal to back down from the rocks that are thrown at him even as the hollow alarm noise takes away from the cacophonous drum loop.
Without any of his boisterous charisma, preacher-like, bouncy cadence, or brighter production, Ali comes across as bitter and nihilistic in the most basic way. “The Idihn” and the title track seem to hint at a heel turn, with the only gripping chorus ending with a middle-finger to his audience with the line, “I cannot feature complements to my children” and bleak bars like “Listen here: there’s no such as thing as isn’t fair / There’s only what you keep and what you kill/” and “I warned you, I’m a hypocrite.” If the secret in SECRETS AND ESCAPES is Ali’s refusal to accept his lack of compensation for his skill and disillusionment with his previous positive outlook, it could work a la Kendrick Lamar’s “u” or Eminem’s “Bad Guy” as a self-flagellating exploration on his darkest tendencies. However, the sequencing lacks thematic cohesion, the album as a whole is too undercooked for individual songs to come together, much less a full-project statement, and there’s no catharsis to any of it. Brother Ali’s Instagram claims he had no regard for pleasing the internet with this project, and I’m sad to say he more than succeeded in pissing off this long time fan, because SECRETS AND ESCAPES is a dreary slog of mismatched tones that force him into a mold he does not fit. [Blake Michelle]
Wiki – OOFIE
Genre: Lo-Fi Hip Hop
Favorite Tracks: “Downfall,” “Grim (featuring Lil Ugly Mane & Denzel Curry),” “Way That I Am (featuring Your Old Droog),” “Dame Aquí (featuring Princess Nokia)”
The social post for Stereogum’s recent review of Wiki’s OOFIE boldly ran with this caption: “Wiki: Better Than Earl Sweatshirt.” The comparison isn’t really the focal point of the piece, Tom Breihan acknowledging simply in conclusion that the two exist on different sides of the same coin, making cloudy, personal, insular (perhaps to a fault) rap but going about it in different ways. And yet Breihan or, more likely, whoever is running the social media for Stereogum, makes a fun, controversial claim in that social post, and they’re not wrong: Wiki really IS better than Earl Sweatshirt these days. The comparison began on Sweatshirt’s imprisoned I DON’T LIKE SHIT, I DON’T GO OUTSIDE, when the two shared the mic on highlight “AM // Radio,” where Wiki, despite feeling equally agoraphobic, read as far more the showman, something Sweatshirt’s teen-ridden angst had propelled early in his career but has, since that release, fallen off. Across both the wildly underrated NO MOUNTAINS IN MANHATTAN and his latest, OOFIE, there’s an urgency to the way he’s communicating his fears and anxieties—he comes out of the gates on early cut “Downfall” desperately taking swings against his inevitable collapse, but as earnest as he seems those swings are fun to watch, a Looney Toons jab to the air. It’s Lil Ugly Mane who perhaps most succinctly puts the album’s hyper-engaged looming dread in one bar, concluding on highlight “Grim:” “When I die, play my failure on the blooper reel.” And while the sluggish, lo-fi beats and drowsy, looping samples are still the kind of thing Earl Sweatshirt excels at, even in direct comparison to Sweatshirt’s FEET OF CLAY there’s something far more listenable about Wiki’s music. Call it pop ambition or just his ability to find perfect features and navigate a hook, the melting soul samples on “Way That I Am” or the piping synth beat that gleefully plays on “Dame Aquí,” as well as Your Old Droog and Princess Nokia’s respective features, are masterful in their own way. “Did it for the freaks,” Wiki says on the fully defiant closer “Freaks,” and certainly you can hear and feel whatever carnival OOFIE concludes as being a flag-waving victory lap on his slowly rising star this decade. It’s time we allow Wiki to fully take over, and let the shut-in inmates run the rap asylum. [CJ Simonson]
Comments