hazegirl

one song and then the same song without her on it, and they filed that as a release. real brass under her instead of the usual drama strings, and for three and a half minutes nobody makes her raise her voice. she never opens up the way she can and i think that's on purpose, the whole thing is held still. i felt it in the jaw more than anywhere else, which is a strange place for a ballad to land. i wanted more of it than exists.

lewi b gives him almost nothing to stand on and that is exactly why it works, the beat is bare and manga is the only weight in the room. sits low in my ribs before i have worked out half of what he is saying. six tracks, fifteen minutes, and this is the one i restart before it ends. twenty years in and he is still finding new pockets.

a folk song with chuck d standing on top of it and it should not work. stephen stills singing his own hook back thirty-odd years later is the part that gets me, that voice aged into something sadder than the original and nobody asked it to. rest of it is a group figuring out 1998 in public. resurrection holds up, masta killa earns his spot, go cat go i skip every time. but i go still and quiet for that opener every single time, and i think it's the last time chuck sounded like he believed the noise could still do something.

she sang "this is really part two cause you're the shook one" ten years ago and now havoc is actually on the beat, so the joke writes itself and they knew it. the murk suits her, all that low grey piano sitting under the vocal. what i miss is the space. the original left her alone for a second before the chorus and that pause was doing so much work, here something is always filling it. no processing smeared over her voice though, just her, and the way she pulls back on the hook instead of pushing still gets me. glad it exists. still reach for the 2016 one.

snoop is 54 and still sounds like he has nowhere to be, which is the whole trick here. yungfyre hands him about four elements and nothing else, and all that empty space is where snoop actually lives. the little sung bit on the can't wait line is the part i keep dragging back to, he barely commits to the melody and it lands better because of that. trinidad james turns up and does the exact trinidad james thing, no surprises, but the two voices sit warm next to each other. made for a car with the windows down and it knows it.