I wonder how older readers will respond to Chief Keef’s first official release since whenever. To alternate play between Almighty So 2 and Rapsody’s Please Don’t Cry is to leave the company of an erratically charming rogue and occasional swine who can draw a crowd for an earnest prodigy and historically conscious post-bohemian who doesn’t cop to idiots. Billie Eilish, standing athwart history, doesn’t have to choose.
Billie Eilish — Hit Me Hard and Soft
Each of her three albums has chronicled her maturity, aesthetic and otherwise. Engaging a world against which she had defined herself in 2019, she remains herself whether she’s allowing herself dirty thoughts or giving a lover unsolicited advice`. Speaking of lack of acceptance: I’ve seen social media grumbles over “LUNCH” as an aberration, a concession to skittish record company execs as if even in an era more grudgingly tolerant towards queer culture they’d dig a fat, stentorian song about cunnilingus. Hit Me Hard and Soft makes good on its title: hard and soft as needed. At the heart of a bedsit king and queen is a pupal maximalist, and those years writing 007 anthems have given Finneas O’Connell’s arrangements an essential symphonic pomp. Sometimes this results in clones like the back-to-back “CHIRIRO” and “BIRDS OF A FEATHER”: wordless multi-tracked vocals over minimal percussion and emphatic synths. “BITTERSUITE,” with its discordant clang of an opener that’s a false flag move for one of Eilish’s whisper-to-a-whisper performances; the fadeout suggests the quiet-sinister parts of Portishead’s Third. A queer album devoid of bygone subtexts, Hit Me Hard and Soft reflects a sensibility too giddy about her new talent for engagement and commentary to retreat. Hit Me Hard and Soft is evidence of how introversion and shyness are blood relations but not intimate.
Chief Keef — Almighty So 2
Fourteen years after “I Don’t Like” became Chicago’s Song of the Summer (at the Pitchfork Music Festival that July “I Don’t Like” was part of the scrim), the South Side rapper releases the kind of emphatic, vulgar, self-confident album I’ve wanted for months. The self-production at first doesn’t amount to much — trap beats with exceptions like the annoying as hell chipmunk vocal effect on the otherwise terrific “Believe” — and neither do guests like Sexxy Red, but Keef can’t shut up about how liberated he feels, even if it means evoking Tony Montana. After a couple spins I noticed the snare drums against sliced-and-diced Carl Orff on “Almighty” and Quavo’s low-boil boasts on “Never Fly Here.” Nothing low-boil about Keef’s barking on “I’m Tryna Sleep.” To look for “evolution” is folly. Almighty So 2 is a throwback to an earlier rap era and proud of it. Key line: “I could live in the jungle and come out with a hyena hat.”
Humanizing The Vacuum 