Bumps & Bruises - Ugly God: Review
is a Houston based trap rapper who blew up in 2017 with his hilarious demenor and unique personality on viral tracks like Water and Fuck Ugly God. After his first mixtape The Booty Tape was met with critical shrugs he took some time off and even contemplated retiring before dropping two singles earlier this year which serve as bonus tracks for this very record, then dropping the his debut album full of original material.
Review By Lavender:
Ugly God is somebody I've always placed under the category of "Meme Rapper" so it was easy for me to sing along to great tracks like Water and Fuck Ugly God but as he grows it seems he has more and more of a desire to be taken more seriously and on The Booty Tape I wasn't surprised to hear him try to sound a little bit more conventional, and come up short. Given how long it has been since that record and how little we've heard from him, by trap rapper standards at least I didn't have much anticipation for this album. Now that it's here I must say when Ugly God pulls out his personality and makes a funny track it goes over very well, unfortunately that's not what most of this album is.
One of the biggest cancers that infests this record and rots it before it even has a chance is how many absolutely awful hooks there are here, and it start from the very first moments. One Two is actually a decent track but with a chorus so underwritten and atrocious I can't believe it made it onto the record in this format. For Real has an already dull chorus that is made so much worse by the fact that for some reason Ugly God includes somebody annoyingly adlibbing skrrt constantly throughout the entire hook that drowns the focus away from it and totally kills the track. Hold Up is a generic trap anthem with an equally generic hook and unfortunately Takeoff delivers a pretty decent feature on the end of the song but it is already doomed by that point. Right Now and Outer Space could both receive pretty much the exact same kind of complaints as well as the track Tell Me How You Feel which features a guest rapper called Wintertime who handles the hook and is mixed WAY too high for some reason.
Another rough element to this record is some of the laziest and most uninspired flows and rhyme schemes you will hear on any hip hop record this year. What's Up has a rhyme scheme that revolves entirely around using the word bitch to end off every single bar and even part of the hook, which makes it a very tedious listen for such a short song. The track History is somehow even worse with this awful two part flow that sounds terrible and drags the entire track, which may be the weakest on the entire album.
Thankfully there are a handful of solid songs, as well as a funny interlude here to break up the monotony. Jaguar has a great hook with some funny Nascar samples and the hypnotic keys in the instrumental sound like something Pi'erre Bourne would produce. Batman is a prototypical trap song but with some solid bars and a bouncy instrumental Ugly God just does his thing over it to a solid result.
The best tracks on the record are the ones that are pumped full of so much of Ugly God's personality that it's clear nobody else could possibly replicate it. Back To The Basics features some simple but hilariously vile bars that are exactly the kind of thing I always hope for when I hear an Ugly God track. This song is followed by HAHAHA another funny track with rapid fire bars and a pretty solid hook that revolves around Ugly God addressing some hoes he is clearly not going to commit to. Finally the closing track Leave A Tip is a great ending that is a ton of fun and should be the blueprint for the rest of this record.
Bumps & Bruises isn't that long of a project but there is so much filler, and after all the time Ugly God took assembling this thing I would have hoped there would be more that was worthwhile. I think this pretty much confirms what we all already knew, that Ugly God is a singles artist. While I will certainly look forward to him dropping some catchy and funny singles in the future I'm not sure that he can every really put it together on a full length album. 3/10
For more trap check out my review of Trippie Redd's ! here.
