Now Reading: Future, Evol: ‘Rapping romantic heading down a dead-end street’, album review

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Future, Evol: ‘Rapping romantic heading down a dead-end street’, album review

August 1, 20162 min read

Swathed in echo and reverb, Future’s raps on tracks like “Maybach” and “Ain’t No Time” are miasmic flows of seemingly disconnected phrases, from which protrude the usual brand-spattered references to girls, guns, cars, bling and booze. And set against the stark electro beats of producers Metro Boomin and Southside, with their sinister, swirling synth figures, subterranean basslines and those incessant staccato electro hi-hats that sound like angry dolphins, it’s an effective enough method, especially when applied to the enervating confusion of the hip-hop gangsta lifestyle on tracks such as “Fly Shit Only”, “Photo Copied” and “Lil Haiti Baby”.

The last is particularly evocative, with its triumphal fanfare loop of tinny synth-horns, and Future getting increasingly frantic, blurting ever more desperately as the pressure of success grows. But elsewhere, things can become virtually unintelligible, as when his autotuned bleating is swept up in the whirlpool of fizzing synths in “Lie to Me”.

Other highlights include the mistrustful “Seven Rings”, with its backdrop of synth lines and eerie echoing voices deftly creating an atmosphere of paranoia; and the frankly ungentlemanly “Xanny Family”, featuring Future’s hypnotic monotone over squiggles and scrawls of synth and dark, spacious booming bass as he celebrates some carnal encounter.

But the overall impression given by EVOL is that it’s an emotionally dead-end street that Future’s heading down, something that The Weeknd recognises perhaps more clearly than him when their collaboration on “Low Life” presents them as two dark souls adrift in a world of empty, decadent glamour, “always rappin’ for the low life”. What sort of future is that?

 

 

AlwaysBeOG

Baariboy

Artist, photographer and blogger.

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