Experimental noise hip-hop

Beats are more more noisy and artsy and a lot less accessible than on Black Ben Carson (2016) or The 2nd Amendment (2016). Melodic elements are more buried but there’s a constant barrage of sounds, noises and snippets popping up. A conscious decision seems to have been made to pursue an unpleasant atmosphere, the album only rewards with multiple listens. Earlier albums were playful while still having build-up, instead of being short snippets. Especially middle part of album seems incoherent. Personally I prefer the longer arrangements more.

The beginning trinity plus beautiful Panic Emoji, trap Rainbow Six are some good Jpegmafia. Baby I’m Bleeding deserves the laziest sampling of the year award, it is repeating a ~0.5 second randomly cut section for almost all its length. It’s been listened over 3 million times in Spotify? WTF!? Are unpleasant beats a thing now? Quite nice if that is so. It is also a single track, I guess that commercial suicide failed pretty badly.

https://genius.com/albums/Jpegmafia/Veteran is a treasure trove, when I dag into it, the album spiraled upwards immediately. It really is required to read the lyrics and dig into the background material at least for a non-native English speaker. That being said, a lot of the references are still really hard to get for a foreigner. This is not the kind of album one would expect from an army veteran!

8-/10