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Feat. Roc Marciano. Highly recommended.
Pitchfork review:
Ka's voice isn't overexcited. It's not larger-than-life, not a caricature, not a distillation of TV rap fantasies. His voice doesn't swell with braggadocio or bristle with rage. It's cool, but not cool in the way some people flaunt themselves and their own unflappable attitude, or callously disregard the lives of people they look down on. It's the cool of someone who, by necessity, has figured out how to detach himself from the emotional stress that would otherwise knock most people in the dirt. What's the point of embellishing something you already know is intense in itself?
The initial appeal of The Night's Gambit and Ka in particular is lyrics, and it'd be easy enough to just lay out a string of them to prove it. The Brooklyn rapper's thoughts scan well on paper, then unspool in a delivery that lets the internal rhyme structure provide the emotional emphasis. �You Know It's About� offers a scene of a street business days gone by with shifts of tense that make old memories fresh, emphasizing the cycle he can't believe he's not still stuck in: �With a toast to rap that roasts your fabric/ The friends, if conflict ever ends we're post-traumatic.� After that opener, the album is a litany of scenarios that play up guilt, betrayal, anxiety, resilience, and everything else that reduces interpersonal workings into a high-stakes chess match. Not for nothing that the three biggest thematic presences in intros and outros are games of strategy, martial arts philosophy, and the church-- tactical, adaptive maneuvering cut through with deep moral weight.
Maybe that seems a bit Recommended If You Like GZA. But while the Wu MC has the bearings of someone doing scientific analysis, Ka's vibe is more like that of a true-crime reporter, trying to find a balance between laying out all the facts and trying not to let that excess of knowledge take a toll on his soul. Reformation narrative �Our Father� packs in enough observations, introspective and looking outwards, to drive this home clearly. But it also puts its point across by situating the rehabilitated perspective in the first verse and the vivid criminal revenge he's trying to atone for in the second. A mid-album stretch of cuts gets even more Scorsese with it, pervaded with criminal guilt on �Barring the Likeness�, restless brass ring-grabbing on �Nothing Is�, and calculating, whistling-through-a-graveyard iciness on Roc Marciano team-up �Soap Box�. And when he really does get double-meaning conceptual a'la �Labels� on �Off the Record�, it's a brilliant recursive trick: the rap he classics he references aren't evoked as mere namedropping, but reflections of how many different artists found indelible, unique ways to tell similar stories.
It's hard to separate the stark tone of Ka's voice and narrative from the equally stark mood music he embeds it in. As a rapper/producer, he has that finely-tuned awareness of how a track works from every angle. Some moments of upfront beauty shine through, as the soul-blues guitar licks and electric piano on �Jungle� cut through like a cold wind, and the aching, wordless hum that intermittently pierces the organ drone of �Knighthood� turns a meditative dirge into a hairs-on-end spiritual. But, like his voice, a lot of his production's pull lies in how its sparseness deeply sinks in just through exposure. The interpolation of that riff of doom from Black Sabbath's �Black Sabbath� on �You Know It's About� is a telling point of reference. Like the source material, he draws a lot of strength from the same insistent tritone, but turns its immediate menace into lurking dread by pushing it into the background and melting it down into bass frequencies.
Last year's Grief Pedigree showed a DIY auteur with one of the more unique and underreported stories in hip-hop. Despite the exposure that comes with his professional working partnership with Roc Marciano and a base in the ironclad diehard world of 1990s-steeped NYC hardcore hip-hop, the stakes of his come-up seem more personal than anything. His outlook on that recent groundswell of support has the levelheaded perspective of someone hitting his stride in his forties: �Of course this isn't over night sensation music...it's the music of the sensations you get over the course of the night�, he quipped on Twitter. And his work's total lack of compromise has the drive of someone who only got stronger when he stopped trying to do things on some other label's terms. If The Night's Gambit has that same imprint, the same ruminative, clinical yet human scale as its predecessor did, it also seems to have the renewed idea that this voice has something that really needs to be heard. Listen, then listen closer.
by Nate Patrin |
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