Isaiah Rashad: IT’S BEEN AWFUL Album Review

To hear Isaiah Rashad inform it, he is each a junkie and a prophet, a boyfriend and a girlfriend, a porno-loving intercourse addict and a father who’s “grown up for my child’s sake.” Since his 2014 debut Cilvia Demo—an unsung traditional, top-of-the-line rap tasks of the 2010s—he is turn out to be a contradictory and sophisticated character, one second banging his chest and sending warning pictures to “bitch-ass rappers” in all places, the following sticking a gun in his mouth and relapsing on liquor and benzos. But Rashad renders even essentially the most harrowing scenes with levity and heat. He recounts his traumas and triumphs in largely the identical register—his scratchy sing-song stream that slides and swings over beats that draw as a lot from ’90s neo-soul as they do from the annals of Southern rap. “We done went through a lot of emotions,” he says throughout an end-of-song outro on his new album, the aptly titled IT’S BEEN AWFUL. “So I guess, you know, I try to be a little lighthearted.”

Rashad has all the time been reticent to comply with within the footsteps of his Top Dawg Entertainment labelmates. He was, in any case, TDE’s lone Southern consultant, all however annointed because the crew’s subsequent breakout wunderkind. In 2016’s The Sun’s TiradeRashad detailed current experiences of substance abuse and despair. Five years later, after disappearing from public view and hitting a couple of extra rock bottoms, Rashad dropped The House is Burning, a painful portrait of an individual recent out of rehab and uneasily looking for a path towards redemption. While his star-in-waiting window might have handed, he was largely sovereign and making a few of the greatest music of his life. “I was dead and now I’m alive,” he said within the run-up to the album.

Five years after making this declaration, Rashad appears to have grown conscious of the excellence between being useless and alive. “I’m cut from a sinful nature and I feel afflicted,” he raps on IT’S BEEN AWFUL opener “The New Sublime,” a tune the place he requests prayers for his incarcerated sister, his mom, and himself, fearing that he would possibly “relapse again” and sink to his “lowest.” For Rashad, dying and struggling lurk behind all supposedly good issues: getting excessive, falling in love, fame, wealth, even sobriety. If The House is Burning captured the joie de vivre of reclaiming your life after years of disassociation and detachment, IT’S BEEN AWFUL depicts the excruciating strategy of residing along with your eyes broad open, of holding up the mirror to your face and never wanting away. This entails ruthless self-evaluations: the shameful recollections, the self-loathing, the confusions and delusions and sufferings that refuse to vanish. More impressionist than linear storyteller, Rashad’s tales of wrestle and survival nonetheless handle to coalesce into one thing like a thesis: He is each useless and alive, eternally a multitude of slithering contradictions.

Aside from the lead single “Same Sh!t” and nearer “719 Freestyle,” by which Rashad playfully snaps over entice drums, IT’S BEEN AWFUL maintains a affected person and shuffling tempo, preferring contemplative tempos and muted textures for Rashad to ruminate on. He’s all the time been relaxed maneuvering over R&B manufacturing; a few of his greatest songs have been duets along with his TDE colleague SZA. So too right here: “Boy in Red” reaffirms the chemistry between the pair, and “Supaficial” and “GTKY” characteristic a few of the smoothest hooks he is ever sung. Helmed largely by producers Keem the Cipher (KTC) and Julian Sintonia, the soundscape right here is hazy and sample-driven, with pitched-down, syrupy percussion slinking round heat electrical piano and brass. The vibey, often anesthetized sound can start to really feel flat and mushy at occasions, however Rashad’s nimble flows and sharp songwriting preserve the album in focus, even when the thematic and sonic heaviness appears like strolling via the desert in a weighted vest.