Lil Yachty – Let’s Start Here.
You have to start with Let’s Start Here. being a psychedelic rock album by an Atlanta rapper. There are albums where the means of production are key. Let’s Start Here. would be a much less remarkable album were it not made by Lil Yachty.
A lot of the album is pretty forgettable psychedelic rock. The frustrating thing with this album is that psychedelic rock is so close to Soundcloud rap. They both love soundscapes and they even use similar ones, they just get there from very different places. There could have been a quite interesting album that fused the two better.
Let’s Start Here. sometimes even finds that space. “IVE OFFICIALLY LOST ViSiON!!!!” has some trap vocalizations and some interesting hit-and-runs in the soundscape and is a very impressive track overall. “the BLACK seminole.” emphasizes blackness to good effect and starts the album the right way. “the ride-” works well with a falsetto that could have come from any psych-rock band you could name, but then transitions very nicely into Soundcloud yelps.
However, the majority of the album is just a substandard, uninteresting rock album. “THE zone~” is as boring as rock ever gets and “:(failure):” is, possibly unsurprisingly, the same. There’s even a Bob Ross clipping to really cap off the lack of imagination. He also drops in some more funky songs like “running out of time” and is even less fun there.
Even in the boring parts, this album is something of an intervention and there are pieces that show what this album could have been. The simple fact that it exists is the most interesting part of the whole project, but it finds enough fragments to be at least a little more than just that.
Jean Dawson – CHAOS NOW*
When I was a kid, I would watch VH1 after school and I got fed a lot of 00s alternative rock as a result. I loved it then but when I look back, it’s hard to get away from the fact that a lot of it was garbage. It was a cultural wasteland and there’s not much more to say about it. Jean Dawson tries to take the pieces of it and make something interesting out of them in CHAOS NOW* and succeeds, albeit sporadically.
“THREE HEADS*” has a strong energy to it and punches hard. His changes of pace do well and he keeps a good intensity throughout. “SICK OF IT*” does 00s alt-rock better than any of them ever did and is what it should have been. “0-HEROES” is the song that Blink-182 wishes they made. Unfortunately, even that doesn’t make for a very good song. It just spends too long playing with uninteresting sounds. Sadly, the same is true for “GLORY*”, which sticks too close to the Blink-182 it draws from, even if it has the wonderful line “My mom thinks I keep a gun tucked / Yes ma’am.” There are glimpses of a better song in there, but only ever glimpses.
CHAOS NOW* isn’t as consistent as one would like and so not quite as groundbreaking as one could hope, but it’s always fun to see someone make something of my misspent youth.
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