Stole a couple moments to run through Milo's new record,
A Toothpaste Suburb, a few times today and I like it. Mostly a refinement of his abstract kinda style. Still has that super monotone flow but it feels fresher with some of the production he's gotten this time around. The abstract LA-beat scene sound pairs nicely with his work. He got stronger on that end here for sure. Milo is a great writer, of course, and it shows several times. Still...over the course of 16 tracks he kind of wears you down. Very little deviation from beginning to end and it starts to fall into one of those zones where songs blend together and you forget where you are in listening to it. While that can be good or bad (Shabbaz: good!; Alt-J: bad), here it's somewhere inbetween. More variety in terms of content, flow, and production would have been nice. Or a shorter, more condensed record.
Overall I think he's a step behind Open Mike Eagle, but I'm not sure if that's a talent/execution gap or personal preference. Mike is a much more personal, sincere, and humorous writer on
Dark Comedy and while Milo hits those same areas, he's much less direct and his off-the-wall lyricism veers away from it at times. I also think Milo has an over reliance on media/historical references that speaks to an inability to express himself without a crutch (don't we all have that problem tho?). Sometimes he comes off as
look how smart I am, but never in the corny way early/mid 00s backpackers were rapping. With them it felt like a way to demonstrate how much better they were than "the mainstream"; very masturbatory, very ingenuine, very cheesy. Here it feels like...Milo. That's the dude he is, for better and for worse. And it's mostly, almost entirely, for the better.
There are tracks where Milo nails the fine line between abstract and personal where it's just unbelievable, like on
Just Us (A Reprise For Robert Who Will Not Be Forgotten). What's interesting is on his second verse you can hear an emotion and passion in his flow that's just not present elsewhere, even immediately preceding it. There's a lot of pain being expressed in such a sincere way...powerful track. I hope he can capture that energy more often going forward, if he's interested. I can understand not wanting to till those fields too much just from a mental health perspective.
So yeah, good album. Not quite Dark Comedy, but good. Check it out.
#adultliferap #drinkwhilelistening
