![]() ![]() The only duds are the genre exercises: The maddeningly insistent guitar noodles during the Public Enemy throwback "Welcome to the Terrordome" are a long way from the Bomb Squad's Prince-sampled shredding, while the disposable "Bar Tap" shows that club tracks aren't one of Monch's strong suits. Producers like 99 Fingaz, Alchemist, and Detroit up-and-comer Black Milk give Monch the kind of extraterrestrial soul he's built for. ![]() On the anthemic "Push", he drops in for one climatic verse after a long gospel workout moistened by Tower of Power horns, and on "Body Baby", he forgoes his usual boom in favor of brisk syllabic shards that slot neatly into the music's juke-joint bounce. He gives his backup singers and shapeshifting beats plenty of room to breathe, especially on the tracks he produced himself. Monch might flounder into familiar indie territory if his music weren't so lucid and lively. "Trilogy"'s fantastic pacing and its use of music as a storytelling supplement only adds to its high-wire tension. Porter (in the funky first act), Dwele (in the elegiac second), and Tone (in the boom-bap third) provides narrative compression and interior monologue. In the epic, revenge-fantasy closer "Trilogy", a chorus comprised of Mr. And like Nas in his prime, Monch combines several skill sets into a seamless package: A vivid narrative imagination and the control to bring it to life, a knack for dizzying extended metaphors and haymaker punchlines, and a complex moral sense.Īny given track on Desire displays one or two of these attributes- "Let's Go" sustains a rhyme scheme built around the names of various handheld peripherals the braggadocio-driven title track is full of wild puns like "even if you were ashes you couldn't "urn"- but the best embody them all. ![]() Vocally, he's like a Yankee Ludacris, except that he peppers his durable, booming vernacular with showy clusters of tongue-twisting homophones. This sort of deft reversal characterizes Monch's lyrics ("Slave to a label, but I still own my masters," he spits on the title track), as does an existential and oblique approach to well-worn gunplay scenarios. Monch knows it, too, neatly summarizing the dichotomy on "What It Is": "They thought I was backpack/ Slept/ Didn't know that that he kept inside the knapsack." It's a best-of-both-worlds record, formulated something like this: backpack-rap's sense of social justice (minus shrill self-righteousness) and overclocked verbiage (minus rhythmic malaise) plus the trap star's outsized charisma (minus deadening conspicuous consumption) and furious delivery ( plus rampant conspiracy theories). His long-delayed sophomore album, Desire, is primed to change that. ![]()
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