Louisiana rapper Kevin Gates is a star on par with Lil Boosie around his stomping grounds in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, but he hasn’t had much luck in popping nationally. Gates got a taste of nationwide notoriety after inking a deal with Lil Wayne’s YMCMB imprint a year ago but spent most of his tenure there on ice with YMCMB’s well-populated roster of benchwarmers. It’s a shame they couldn’t find a use for him. Gates’ mixtapes peruse an emotive, melodic style that often gets him incorrectly lumped into the same milieu as introspective lady-killers like Drake and Future. His similarities to those artists starts and ends with the fact that he’s a capable rapper and singer. He’s more technically gifted at both than Future, whose acerbic croak is often cloaked in a mist of Auto-Tune, and he’s more weathered and streetwise than Drake, whose background in soap opera acting undercuts his talk of hardship of its relatability. Gates has been at it at least as long as either of them, and his new mixtape The Luca Brasi Story imbues trap’s claustrophobic bleakness with an emotional nakedness, capable lyricism, and melodic certitude many of its recent breakout stars have lacked.
Gates openly plays off the complexity of his character in naming the mixtape after The Godfather’s Luca Brasi, a brutal but unerringly loyal contract killer whose first scene in the film adaptation shows him mulling over how best to present a gift to the don’s daughter at her wedding. Gates shares that devotion to matters of the heart and matters of the street, and The Luca Brasi Story oscillates wildly between the two poles. Street anthems like “Paper Chasers” and “Weight” hold court with tender tales of love under duress like “Arms of a Stranger” and “Twilight” (yes, that Twilight). That might sound like a strange brew, but Luca Brasi’s portraits of lonesome lotharios and traphouse paper chasers all teeter over the same the brink of collapse, and the intensity and break in Gates’ voice make it the perfect vehicle for these stories of desperation. He’s got his method down pat, so The Luca Brasi Story really lives or dies on the kinds of songs he chooses to apply it to.
The Luca Brasi Story soars on upbeat productions like Swiff D’s “Paper Chasers” and Nard & B’s “Hero”, which apply Kevin Gates’ sing-song cadence to 808s and frenetic synth runs. Gates is also at home on the moodier stuff: the twinkling keys and trance vibes of “Hold Ya Head” and “Twilight”, and the ethereal, pulsating bass of “Neon Lights” and the spectral keys of “Arms of a Stranger” all provide the perfect space for him to examine his shortcomings and insecurities. The only real problems arrive when Gates gets more conventional trap sounds to work with. “Weight” and “Flex” both overlay ominous hood gothic beats with vocal performances that are a touch derivative. “Weight” proposes a clever nutrition metaphor, but Gates plainly approximates Young Jeezy’s asthmatic wheeze on the song’s guttural, multitracked chorus. “Flex” finds Gates co-opting Gucci Mane’s smooth but subversively verbose flow when guest Terrance Hines isn’t hammering away at the song’s grating chorus. 22 tracks is a few too many opportunities to flounder, and while The Luca Brasi Story’s misses are mercifully scant, there’s maybe just a little too much of it to go around.
Kevin Gates is a gifted, pliable songwriter figuring out how to reconcile the cold embrace of street life with a longing for companionship. On The Luca Brasi Story, he mostly settles for ping pong, cordoning off its more contemplative fare from its tough talk and shifting radically in tone from one song to the next. It isn’t really until the mixtape’s closer “IHOP (True Story)” that we get a glimpse of what Gates can do without barriers. “IHOP” is a winding story-song rapped a capella with what sounds like Gates tapping out a rudimentary beat on his chest. It recounts a story of a man at wits end from relationship troubles who stumbles into a set-up and survives to coldly execute a revenge attack. It’s a chilling bit of dopeboy determinism that digs deeper than the self-aggrandizing boasts of invincibility that anyone who lived it would have every right to express, instead examining the outward stimuli that coerce us into losing control. You immediately get the sense that there’s more to Gates than he’s even letting on, that The Luca Brasi Story’s deft exercises in adjoining pop sensibilities to trap are just Gates working out the kinks, and that something special is just over the horizon.
