Nasir Review

The premise was a good one. A producer at the height of his powers takes seven songs, gives them to a rapper who had been drifting, and releases the result inside a month. The beats mostly deliver. Cops Shot the Kid loops a hard old sample into something genuinely alarming. Not for Radio opens with brass and menace. Adam and Eve has a Persian piano figure that deserves a better song on top of it. Everything is a long, floating closer with a real melodic idea.

What is missing is the rapping. Verses stop before they arrive at a point. The mixing is loose enough that the vocals sit oddly on half the record. Bonjour is a list of luxuries with no observation attached. Worse, the writing keeps wandering into half baked conspiracy talk while carefully avoiding the domestic abuse allegations his former wife had made weeks before, and the record's silence there is deafening rather than dignified. It ends up as the least finished thing he has released, which is a strange fate for the album with the strongest production budget behind it.