God's Son Review

The center of this album is a song about a funeral. Dance is addressed to his mother, it is sung more than rapped in places, and he does not reach for a single clever line in it. Coming from a writer whose reflex is craft, the plainness is the point. Around that sit the two modes he had been trying to reconcile for years and finally does. Made You Look is a hard drum break and a rapper who sounds delighted to be rapping, the best pure booth performance of his second decade.

Book of Rhymes has him reading old notebook scraps aloud, abandoning the bad ones mid line, which is funnier and more revealing than any interview. Get Down builds a whole neighborhood out of one soul loop. The Cross, produced by an unexpected outside name, has real weight. Then the ballast: I Can is a children's chorus over a piano exercise that means well and lands like an assembly, and a couple of the guest tracks are placeholders. The album is uneven in the ordinary way most albums are uneven. What makes it matter is that the strongest material here comes from a place he had never let anyone see.