Infinite Review

The interesting thing about this record is how competent it is and how little that helps. The flows are neat, the multisyllable rhyming is already ahead of the local field, and the beats are warm jazz loops with brushed drums that would have sounded fine in any mid nineties basement. What is absent is a person. He is doing an impression of the New York rappers he admired, softening his own voice into something smooth and agreeable, and the result reads as a demo made by someone who has not yet decided that being disliked is allowed.

Local shops moved almost none of it and the criticism he took, that he sounded like other people, is the criticism that broke the album open. Listened to now it works as evidence rather than music. You can hear the technique arriving years before the nerve did, and it is genuinely strange how few of these songs stick to anything.