It’s one thing to be a prolific rapper in 2021, but Rxk Nephew attempts to reskin himself with every release. None of the nearly dozen projects the Rochester rapper has dropped this year sound the same, and he clearly relishes laying his non-sequitur raps over as many regional styles as possible. Nephew’s music is breathless and unpredictable; he’ll call out rappers for lying about gang activities one minute and diss a producer while rapping over their beat the next. This tenacity makes him suited to a place like YouTube—where his page is updated frequently—and would theoretically make him a great mixtape rapper, but his ever-growing discography fluctuates wildly like a polygraph test. The drawback to being a loose cannon is not knowing when or if your firepower will blow up in your face.
But Nephew keeps the steady drip of music coming anyway. Make Drunk Cool Again—which isn’t even his latest project—is another left turn in a short career already brimming with them. The beats, handled mainly by producer Rx Brainstorm, swerve from the chopped samples and 808s of Crack Dreams 2 toward swaying synth-funk, house music, and bachata before collapsing into a pile of thrash metal on the closer “Slitherman Solo Set.” While Drunk is still a little too scattershot to sustain itself as a project, Nephew is landing more darts on the board than usual, and it’s fun to hear him experiment.
Much like his brother turned frenemy Rx Papi, Nephew’s appeal lies in his bluntness. Most of his punchlines and stories reframe bizarre scenarios in the most direct way imaginable. On “Peter Gunnz X2,” he makes several jokes and comparisons to Gucci Mane, Joe Biden, and infamous rapper-turned-manager Wack 100 in under two minutes. Other times, like on “Wake Up the Dead,” he’ll pause mid-bar for emphasis and draw out unexpected laughs: “I told myself I’ma quit Henny/Shit... I lied.” Every word is a potential landmine primed to shock and surprise.
What sets Drunk apart from Nephew’s other 2021 projects is the wild variety of beats and new tweaks on older formulas. Slitherman, Nephew’s gravel-voiced alter ego, pops up occasionally to highlight a punchline or to growl out a handful of bars. This works best when Slitherman has the track to himself, like on the sludgy “Slitherman Solo Set,” and only sporadically when Nephew slips in and out of the persona on songs like “Gunnz” and “Dead.” The funk slathered across the album’s first half inspires Nephew to try singing his hooks, and his passable vocals are refreshing in context.
What’s less refreshing is that Drunk can’t figure out how to make all its sounds cohere. The synthetic funk of “Too Tuff Tone Tarantino,” the 2010s EDM-lite of “Time 2 Not Go Home,” the Latin flavor of “Cuban Plug,” and the crunchy guitar riffs of “Slitherman Solo Set” all sound good on their own, and Nephew navigates them well, but each plays like it belongs on a different project. This discord would work better if it said anything about Nephew outside of “He likes lots of music,” which, if you’ve listened to any of his other drops over the last few years, you already know. These are good songs grinding up against each other for the sake of chaos with little rhyme or reason, a valid creative outlet that nonetheless grows more and more tired with each release.
Luckily for Nephew, his personality and still-shocking bars are enough to keep things interesting. Listening to Drunk is like watching a professional daredevil perform their signature trick for the third or fourth crowd of the day: the opening beats generally play out the way you expect, but the element of danger lurking underneath ensures he won’t pull the same move twice. Nephew doesn’t crash often, but even when he does, there’s always something to take away from the wreckage.
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