EP Reviews with Redveil, The Dare & Summer Walker

playing w/ fire EP - redveil

Redveil is a Maryland rapper whose music I first became aware of last year when his Learn 2 Swim album picked up some traction in online hip-hop spaces. I thought this project was decent and flashed some pretty serious potential but nothing about it begged me to cover the record in depth. So this year when Redveil ended up as the lone feature on the biggest underground rap album of the year so far, Danny Brown & Jpegmafia's Scaring The Hoes, it felt like an endorsement too big to ignore and I wanted to be sure to cover his next project.

That project is this new EP which runs pretty scant at just 15 minutes across 6 tracks. It was preceded by a pair of singles which when combined with the grand sweeping opener stuck makes for a dramatic first half of the project. Across this EP redveil is trying to show himself as a versatile talent and lead single giftbag is no exception as he sings the hook in a very Juice WRLD emo-rap flavored demeanor just to shift into something a little bit more confrontational and conventionally hip-hop on the verses. That demeanor shifts entirely on black enuff with JPEGMAFIA which is fittingly an experimental rap banger that I enjoy more every single time I hear it. Peggy really pours it on with his feature and the intensity of the song persists throughout. 

And the project pretty much keeps up that level of quality and versatility throughout. Even though having no "fucks to give" feels like a 2015 ass phrase to write a song about I can't lie I find the song f2g incredibly infectious and that very chorus has been stuck in my head all week. captain is the most Denzel Curry-sounding I've ever heard redveil, particularly on the verses. But even with the influence being so apparent the song is fun and redveil's performance is good enough that all his brags feel believable. Even though I think redveil still has room to grow before hitting his full potential this EP is definitely an improvement on his past album and everything about it has me looking forward to more material from him in the future. If he ever manages to put all his talents together he could drop an absolute classic and given how great he already sounds at such a young age, I would bet on him doing just that. 7/10

The Sex EP - The Dare

There are two reasons I was interested in The Dare, one critical and one personal. To take the more valid, critical approach first, hearing the band hyped up as some kind of gen z LCD Soundsystem coming out of the New York scene fusing together the rough edge of punk with the pulsating beats of electronica grabbed my attention pretty quickly. The second, far less valid reason is that the band's breakout tune from last year Girls prominently and unflinchingly shouts out "girls with dicks" right at the beginning of its horny tirade. As a trans girl, I fuck with that.

But actually assessing the quality of this music is an entirely different conversation because despite that shoutout I can't really even say I like Girls that much. More so than LCD Soundsystem the band's dance-punk style reminds me of a personal favorite act, Late Of The Pier. Unfortunately, I don't think The Dare pulls off that measure of instrumental intensity of thematic intrigue at any point across this disappointingly short song. And if you think that song gets old quickly then the EP has even more in store for you with the next track Sex whose point follows a painfully similar parallel line. I have no issue with horny music but can we at least try and have an angle to it. With these two tracks, The Dare make being horny the song itself, rather than using it as a platform to build something on. Compare it to an equally horny but vastly superior horny song from earlier this year, Fever Ray's Shiver to see just how short they fall of this mark.

I can't tell if the thematic approach to Good Time is actually any better or if I just like it more because it's a more interesting song. Though it does have its flaws this kind of fuzzed-out intensity is what I'd like to see the band expand on going forward. The EPs closing track Bloodwork is both its longest and a full submission to the sounds of house music. While it doesn't really do anything I've never heard before from the genre and I think it's pretty handily outclassed by something like the Two Shell EP from earlier this year, it might also be my favorite song on the record which says a lot about how frontman Harrison Patrick Smith's personality translates with me. Is The Dare an artist worth paying attention to, yeah I think so. But more of that comes from the potential of what they might say or what uncompromising direction the project may be taken in than the promise of any of the music they've made so far. Despite it's hype or maybe in spite of it, I think The Sex EP misses the mark. 5/10

CLEAR 2: SOFT LIFE EP - Summer Walker

For a LONG time now I've thought Summer Walker was an artist whose potential always outshined what she actually delivered on. Across a trio of albums and mixtapes she always seemed to get in over her head in a way some of her best features never had to deal with. Before jumping into this record I would have said pretty definitively that her best project to date was 2020's Life On Earth EP so Summer returning to the format felt like the right direction. It's also one of the more fleshed-out projects I've talked about in any EP reviews so far this year with 9 tracks that run just under 30 minutes giving her the opportunity to flesh out some thematic and stylistic motifs. 

Not to make this review more about the men than Summer herself, but the tracklist does sport two major features in J. Cole and Childish Gambino that a lot of people have been talking about. Cole handles much of the opener and serves as a sort of hype man for Walker flexing both her musical accomplishments and her ability to maintain focus through everything else going on in her world and it's honestly quite a strong start to the project. Gambino on the other hand plays opposite Summer on a song where he delivers this very intimate spoken word passage digging into the song's story that I actually enjoy quite a bit. I think both of these tracks manage to live up to the hype they've generated.

One thing I was surprised by on this project is just how somber it is. While I just got on Chloe a few weeks ago for having the gall to name an R&B song How Does It Feel, Summer Walker does the same thing here but takes it in a completely different direction serving up an ice-cold revenge fantasy that serves as a major highlight on the record. In fact, the EP as a whole is much more vindictive than sensual and frankly, it's a look Summer wears quite well. A lot of these minimal, washed-out instrumentals could certainly make for sex jams but I find what she's doing with them to be even more compelling. Mind Yo Mouth is about this toxic belief that women have to shut up to avoid hurting a man's ego and she takes less than two minutes to pretty much destroy it. 

While the record's final run of songs may not be as good as where it starts off, it still largely avoids duds while throwing up a versatile collection of self-reflective and appropriately hostile meditations. I think this might be my favorite Summer Walker project yet. Not only does it show her improving as a songwriter but also as a conceptualizer putting the thematic elements in place for this EP to flow really well through its tracklist. If she builds on this going forward she has the potential to drop the record I've always hoped she would. 7.5/10