Rapid Fire Reviews: Playing Catch Up With Hip Hop Again with Westside Gunn, Armand Hammer, and Nas

And Then You Pray For Me - Westside Gunn

The main core of Buffalo-based rap collective Griselda releases a LOT of music. So sometimes you just have to pick your battles and only cover the most relevant releases. That's why I wanted to make sure to get my opinion out on this album after missing some of Westside's other work last year. The biggest reason being that from the album art and sonic motifs of the record it is clearly meant as a sequel to Gunn's 2020 album Pray For Paris. That project is one of my favorite in the entire Griselda catalog and I had high hopes for him returning to that well of icy, spacious, and vintage instrumentals with his lethal, detailed and distinctive flows. Unfortunately though, And Then You Pray For Me delivers a full 75 minutes of music and much of isn't Gunn's best work. 

That doesn't mean that the album doesn't have highlights. Mamas PrimeTime is an early standout on the record with a chilling JID verse that might be my favorite thing on the entire album. I can say the same thing about Rome Streetz performance on The Revenge Of Flips Leg at the very end of the album. FLYGOD 2x is fittingly a vintage piece of Westside grit with some of the best lyricism on the entire album. The borderline spoken word verse that Giggs delivers on the back end of Disgusting is a surprisingly highlight on a song I'm otherwise not a fan of. There are moments and verse elsewhere like Jalen Rose and MR EVERYTHING that I also enjoy, but for the most part that's the best stuff on offer. 

My biggest problem with And Then You Pray For Me is the absolutely ungodly amount of wasted time. Without exaggeration this album is probably about 55-ish minutes of rap music and probably a full 20 minutes worth of interludes, long intros and even longer outros that make up an absolutely monumental challenge to work all the way through. On top of that, Gunn himself and many of his guests are often far from their A-game. Stove God Cooks is the worst offender, appearing numerous times on the project and never really coming through with anything close to his best, but it's an epidemic across the album. The fact that the project frequently wastes time is annoying, but it isn't a death blow. Many good rap projects and even good Griselda projects are vulnerable to the exact same thing. But in combination with the fact that the actual material underneath is very underwhelming by Gunn's standards and the results are an album that feels a lot more like coasting on reputation alone than I ever expected from him. 4.5/10

We Buy Diabetic Test Strips - Armand Hammer

Because I normally tend to like Billy Woods' releases a lot less than the massive amounts of hype they receive, I may have let this one slip by for a bit too long. I liked the Bill Woods & Kenny Segal collab album earlier this year quite a bit and the buzz from this project was even bigger. So despite me not loving the singles from Test Strips I definitely should have gotten my thoughts on it out sooner. Even though the JPEGMAFIA featuring single Woke Up And Asked Siri How I'm Gonna Die hasn't grown on me much, I do think the album gets off to a strong start. The opener Landlines is one of the album's best songs and hits a stride so entrancing that the surprise outro on the song feels like necessary relief. I also love the extremely sparse The Flexible Unreliability Of Time & Memory with its eerie samples and the absolutely killer billy woods verse on the second half. And the momentum keeps up with When It Doesn't Start With A Kiss which features one of my favorite beat switch-ups on the entire album completely shifting the momentum and intensity of the song. 

I think the album definitely hits a snag from there. While the duo continue to be sonically experimental is ways far more ambitious than a lot of their contemporaries, some of those bolder experiments can come off as distractions from what they're actually trying to achieve. Luckily they come ROARING back on the album's third single, which is by far my favorite, The Gods Must Be Crazy. Unfortunately, the album doesn't really keep that momentum up. The next couple tracks do feature some intense performances but they never quite reach the same highs. Not to mention that Moor Mother comes along to basically put everyone on the entire album in their place on the song Don't Lose Your Job. 

Even though We Buy Diabetic Test Strips doesn't exactly keep up with the momentum it sets in place for itself during a strong start, I still like more of the album than I don't. I think the full 53 minute runtime doesn't necessarily do that project many favors though that definitely could have been amended if the experiments it indulges in around the middle of the record connected with me more. Despite my nitpicks though, billy woods and E L U C I D continue to be a talented duo who have carved out a solid place for themselves in rap and they deserve it. This may not be one of the best rap records of the year or anything, but it's certainly worth a try for any fans of the genre. 7/10

Magic 2 & Magic 3 - Nas

Originally I wasn't going to cover the Magic series. I skipped putting out official thoughts on the first edition because it felt like a clear side show to the vastly superior King's Disease trilogy. I was going to do the same after the scant Magic 2 felt like the most phoned-in Nas project in years. But with the surprise release of Magic 3 which was hyped up as the finale of this prolific period of collaboration between Nas and Hit-Boy I figured I should cover both albums. 

Magic 2 gets off to a decent start. Opening track Abracadabra is one of the best on the album and I think Office Hours at least begins decently.Much was made about the 50 Cent feature on the song and it just adds up to absolutely nothing, serving basically as a vacuum for all the momentum the album had built up so far. But from there on out the album never really recovers its quality. The beats are decent, I like how consistently they manage to be dark and murky but often quite dramatic. It's really just the underdeveloped flows and song ideas that make so many of these tracks just glide in one ear and out the other. Parts of it are decent. Black Magic is an alright song and I still really enjoy the Andre Risen line on the chorus of Earvin Magic Johnson. The album also ends on a pretty exciting note with One Mic, One Gun which features 21 Savage. But even then the song feels like it was tacked on as an afterthought if anything. The rest of the album is just deeply forgettable in a way that Nas hasn't been at any point throughout this Hit-Boy run, even on the original Magic. 5/10

Magic 3 on the other hand is lengthier and it seems to be slightly more thematically focused on bringing the collaboration era between Nas and Hit-Boy to a conclusion. The first big highlight the album hits is I Love This Feeling which features a pinpoint flow from Nas that feels automatic at this point in his career, Another major standout is the Lil Wayne featuring cut Never Die which features a world class feature from Wayne. But even beyond that the song itself is just pretty damn good with a vintage beat whose origins Nas even references in his lyrics. Acros a trio of tracks in the middle of the record, Nas gets introspective digging into his own history and telling some really compelling stories. As is usually the case with him, the highlights are the specifically detailed moments that just lend so much weight and credence to the real life lessons he's trying to teach. I like this album a goo bit more than Magic 2. In fact, I'm more than willing to say that this is my favorite of the Magic trilogy. Despite Nas playing it pretty familiar there's an obvious reason why he has the reputation he does. While it may not be elevated to the level of the best projects in the King's Disease series, this is still a pretty strong outing. 7/10