Expert Witness: December 2018

Link: The Goon Sax / Mad Crush / Flasher / Weekend Friends

The Goon Sax: We're Not Talking (Wichita Recordings) Although Louis Forster takes fewer leads on this young threesomes's smoother and trickier follow-up, their unpretentious affect, plain guitar, and flat groove still recall the early years of his dad's Go-Betweens. True, Louis reports that he's barely heard them. But I doubt de facto frontman James Harrison was so cautious, and can imagine drummer Riley Jones learning that Lindy Morrison never stepped up to the mike and deciding she'd better: "I don't want distance / When distance always seems to be the thing / That comes and hurts us." In any case, a university art band they're not. Instead they're still reflecting on adolescence with a humility and concentration that hurts. No one's calling but they're not picking up the phone. Passing your bus stop hurts even though they know you need time to yourself. Come to think on it, they "never knew what love meant" anyway. Yet already mortality impends in the form of "piles of books I'll never read / And a list of things I'll never be." Twelve songs in half an hour that say more than they pretend and plenty they may only intuit. A MINUS

Mad Crush: Mad Crush (Upon This Rock) Because the guitar-bass-drums-violin as well as the vocals aren't so much subtle as mild, these seven love songs never work up the right pitch of emotional intelligence. But you still believe in your heart that John Elderkin and Joanna Sattin are a couple, because only a couple would notice these things? In the jocose "My Pre-Existing Conditions" Elderkin admits to two left feet, getting stuck in the past, needing to talk before bed, and there's more. In the pained "Where Does It Hurt" Sattin is so sick with ennui she asks only that he still be there in the morning. And he will be, because elsewhere they stay in bed, miss each other when they don't, and overnight a Christmas turkey on Amazon Prime so it'll be there for the Fourth of July. B PLUS

Flasher: Constant Image (Domino) Twentysomethings foresee, rue, and encapsulate in tightly wound pop-rock a constrained, moderately diverting life of futile, moderately comfortable survival ("Go," "XYZ") ***

Weakened Friends: Common Blah (Don Giovanni) Brave young woman gains ground in her wavery-quavery battle with insecurity, which this album proves she has the stuff to win ("Younger," "Early") **

Link: Cupcakke / Leikeli47

Cupcakke: Ephorize (Cupcakke) It would be silly to assume all this homeless-shelter graduate's literotica is literal. But from the armpit-licking "Spoiled Milk Titties" to the dickhead-picking "Duck Duck Goose," believe she's gotten closer to real-life versions of the carnal variations she dreams up than the average Soundcloud trapper has to the carnage he's mumbling about. Not only is her imagery healthier and more humane, not only do her raunchiest rhymes ride her catchiest beats, but she's inserted a public service announcement, cheering on "boy-on-boy" action that'll leave both fellas free to fuck another day. Toward the end she even finds "a new man makes me wet like the ocean." But how about that--before the song is over, he dogs her. A MINUS

Leikeli47: Acrylic (Hardcover/RCA) From her friendly, articulate, elusive, music-centered interviews, what we know for sure about this rapper-singer who never goes out in public without a ski mask is that she's from Brooklyn. Plus, right, this: "My love of fashion came of being poor." Everything else we must infer from her lyrics. On her new album, for instance, there's enough detail about historically black colleges in the Greek victory chant "Roll Call" to suggest she attended an HBC herself, although the Broad and Lombard hint places it in Philadelphia, which isn't home to a single one, a smokescreen typical on on album that gets down to cases even so. Articulated in a Lauryn Hill fan's clear, island-tinged flow is a tour of a shy, smart, moderately successful young woman's hood: the nail salons and girl blunts, the sexist UGs and subway makeout sessions, the dumpster babies and relatives who need more help than you can afford to give them. The evidence that she's as musical as Hill, much less her beloved Michael Jackson, is sketchy. But what an up it is to hear a soulful survivor-and-then-some try to get there. A MINUS

Cupcakke: Queen Elizabitch (Cupcakke) The DIY/XXX rapper's 2017 breakthrough album starts with some street sociology and an earned brag before returning to the "fuckin'-for-a-check" rhymes that remain the bliss point of an irrepressible rhymer who never slurs a phrase or swallows a word. But the clincher is "Biggie Smalls," one of several tracks that prove her heart is as big as the rest of her: not just "Stretch marks in a bikini, I'm that damn brave" but "fuck dude if he don't like small boobs," because "Big or small, it's who you are." After which, right, it's back to "Pay the damn price or go home to your wife." But that's who she is whether or not it's who she'll remain. B PLUS

Leikeli47: Wash and Set (Hardcover/RCA) On her debut, the masked marvel keeps things simple, showing off her stuff in an impressive assortment of what are more chants, jingles, and ditties than songs. After all, what bizzer in his or her right mind would say no to a young nobody who sneaks the assonant "Ski mask under my hijab" into her opening track? Next she's late to work because that Juvenile song she loves comes on. "Money"--"Not the cemetery / Or the penitentuary"--is followed by "M I L K," which is not to be pronounced "milk." Attend also to the ragga "Bubblegum" and the area-code-literate "Ho." B PLUS

Cupcakke: Eden (Cupcakke) Shows impressive expertise in both sex and the city but devises better hooks for the one that's more fun ("Garfield," "A.U.T.I.S.M.") ***

Link: Lupe Fiasco / Meek Mill / Lil Wayne / Vince Staples

Lupe Fiasco: Drogas Wave (1st & 15th) It's pretentious to complain that this musically agile, intellectually ambitious rapper has undertaken a concept trilogy that doesn't justify its pretensions. Really, why pretend there was any chance it would? Instead honor the two uncommon things this second installment does accomplish. First is a flow that never falters no matter how dense the themes--a flow that accommodates such verbiage as "conjurer" and "iridescent," "breach" and "havoc," "synonym" and "anthropomorphic," "industrialist" and "socialism." The second is that among these two dozen good-to-excellent tracks are at least four whose pitch of emotion and ambition render them something like profound: "WAV Files," which constructs a stanza from the names of slave ships, "Down," which creates a mythology of subaquatic African immortals consigned to the sea by shipwreck or their own leaps of faith, and alternate-universe biographies of two children cut down before they'd barely begun their lives, the drowned refugee "Alan Forever" and the street-slain innocent "Jonylah Forever." Fiasco should interrogate his weakness for consumer goods and study anti-Semitism's meaning as a term and history as a blight on humanity. But we're lucky the big label dumped him, and he is too. A MINUS

Meek Mill: Championships (Maybach Music Group) This post-prison freedom cry is a 19-track marathon whose beats rise and fall while a solid third of its rhymes expand on Mill's unsought status as a case study in the racism of the parole system. If only it didn't also return tediously to the females he's fucked, who by actual count occasion almost 90 reps of the slurs "bitch" and "hoe," five times as many as the affectionate "shawty"/"girl"/"mami." He does at least seem to savor their bodies sometimes, which is never a given. But he sounds far more motivated pointing out that that's rapper cash not dealer cash before Jay-Z unfurls his deepest billionaire brag to date, or delivering the hard hood truths of "Oodles O' Noodles Babies." And "100 Summers" builds to a quatrain that identifies and then contextualizes the enemy within: "Grew up 'round them monsters they'll shoot you in your face / Ain't used to showin' no love that's 'cause we grew up in that hate / Live by the sword die by the sword way / Tried to make it home they shot him in the hallway." B PLUS

Lil Wayne: Tha Carter V (Young Money) No throwaway or overreach, but after all that drama not near enough fun either ("Problems," "Mess," "Mona Lisa") ***

Lupe Fiasco: Drogas Light (1st & 15th) Light it is, miscellaneous too, but only dumbbells make light of his skills, and few rappers you think you like more have managed anything as tragic or comic, respectively, as its two undeniables ("NGL," "Jump") **

Vince Staples: FM! (Def Jam) It is my sad duty to report that he's a lot better at tragedy than comedy ("Feels Like Summer," "Fun!") *

Noisey, December 2018

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