After a very successful trip to the record store I am champing at the bit for a weekend where I can listen to all my new music. I like my first listen of a new album to be just me and Sheila, hanging out and playing board games. Then two or three more listens with just me and the record before I put it on the shelf and hope to roll it for a review.
Disc 1595 is…. Nightmare Vacation
Artist: Rico Nasty
Year of Release: 2020
What’s up with the Cover? The vacation depicted here doesn’t seem all bad. There’s a lovely rainbow and a floating bed is pretty great. However, flying about in one at high altitude with lightning forking all around you could turn nightmarish very quickly.
How I Came To Know It: I read a review of this album, checked it out and liked it enough to buy it digitally on Bandcamp (I don’t believe it was released on CD).
How It Stacks Up: Rico Nasty has a bunch of mixtapes but only one full length album, and this is it. I don’t have any of the mixtapes (and the genre confuses me. Are these simply albums on cassette or is it a ‘length thing’ like an EP?). Anyway, I have the full length album but one album can’t stack up.
OK, I looked up “mixtape” and it sounds like something artists release free of charge, except when they don’t. Hmm… The modern world is so confusing.
Ratings: 2 stars but almost 3
I like melodic rappers, dropping rhymes on funky beats that make your head bob or your backbone slide. Rico Nasty is none of those things, but through sheer force of talent and chutzpah she convinced me to try something a little different, at least for a while.
In this case, that something different is a rough-edged, aggressive rhymes in short, staccato statements, with heavy synth beats dressed up in samples that reminded me of nineties industrial metal. A bit of cursory research revealed this style to be something called “trap metal” but I think it is a misnomer. This is not metal, although it does deliver its fair share of crunch on certain tracks.
Whatever it is called, Rico Nasty knows how to do it well, and she attacks these songs with a stylized snarl. It is a good match for lyrics that tend to be in your face. Sometimes this takes the form of a beef with someone (usually for reasons that aren’t fully defined but seem very serious nonetheless). Other times, the tunes are about partying, drugs, or sex. So, you know, the usual.
Rico Nasty is also quite good at swearing. You might say to yourself, most modern rappers are good at swearing but trust me when I say that Rico Nasty raises it to an art form. Swears are both violently emphasized and thrown with a disdainful disregard that makes it clear she’s got a bottomless bag full of those F and B bombs.
For all that, after multiple listens I am already feeling a bit restless about her aforementioned flow and beat choices. On the flow front, she has solid couplets with clever turns of phrase, but she doesn’t string together the kind of intricate rhymes that I tend to favour in rap.
On the beat front, these beats feature lots of weird syncopation and soundscapes, but they aren’t toe tappers. Clever is welcome, but I also want tunes I can tap my foot to. These ones are a bit too ‘robot love’ or ‘nineties modem’ for my taste.
When it all comes together, as it does on a few tracks, I can overlook all that and enjoy the mastery of the style. Unfortunately, there are too few of these moments for me to keep this record in my collection. I like it, but it just wasn’t for me. I can imagine what Rico Nasty would say in response to that, but I don’t think it fit to print on a friendly blog like this one.
Best tracks: IPHONE, Pussy Poppin, Smack a Bitch
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