BROCKHAMPTON
Kolejna recenzja:
It’s hard to appreciate this album for the material on it. The album constantly reminds you of what ISN’T on it. The family has fallen apart in a messy fizzle. One can’t help but hear the ghosts of the other members on these songs, an album about absence and hollowness more than anything else.
Kevin does a great job with most of these verses. Confessional, dark, pained lyrics detailing the divorce of the band. The flows work for the beats, which are mostly soul influenced, occasionally moving into drumless or hardcore territory, though not sounding so much like what one would typically expect from a „Brockhampton” album. This is probably a service for the album, it would feel disingenuous if Kevin was trying to remake the Saturations as a solo vocalist. But it further services to remind you this is not a Brockhampton album.
Much like Twin Peaks the Return or the works of Devyn Smith, the lyrics, the structure, and the atmosphere remain in an uncanny valley of everything being off. Nothing on The Family is as it should be. It has the dejection and regret of a bad ending in a video game, with Kevin experiencing the regrets of letting the family fall apart, directly failing at obeying his mother’s command as expressed in RZA. Frequent mentions of the RCA deal mandating this album also further compares it to The Return: corporate interference requiring a new work to put art to rest in a way that would not have been required if meddling had not killed it unjustly. The title track contains a line where Kevin mentions cutting someone else’s verse (or multiple) from the song, giving an even more twisted and sinister feel to the album, as if Kevin’s solitude is self-imposed and self-destructive. The album is twisted up in the fact that it should not exist.
The Family is like an album from a bleaker timeline, where coming of age breaks into solemn acceptance (or denial) of a dark reality (like All About Lily Chou Chou). A person scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to figure out where God is, like the lamenting of Job. I’m very curious to see what the second album will be, considering the way this one makes me feel.