G Perico might initially sound like a straight-ahead West Coast nostalgist. But if he’s craning his neck to look back, he does not stumble over himself in the process. There’s no way around the DJ Quik, Too $hort, and Eazy-E comparisons: Perico lilts his nasally voice with the same crassly blustering swagger, atop similarly synthed G-funk. Still, there’s nothing imitative in his music, and the 29-year old Perico doesn’t fetishize the past, even when stomping around South Central in a still-wet Jheri curl. He’s spent 2017 on a forward-looking tear, releasing a fiercely concentrated solo debut this spring, and sharing space with a pair of fellow up-and-coming California rappers on a collaborative mixtape called G-Worthy this fall. 2 Tha Left, then, is G Perico’s third full-length release of the year, and it feels like a bit of a heat-check.
2 Tha Left is similarly spare as Perico’s last solo outing, though it is bookended by matching intro and outro tracks—which add time and sound a little out of place. This solo album also, for better or worse, folds in a busier cast of featured rappers. TeeCee4800 and A.D. nail their appearances on “What Up Cuz,” building it into a sinister turf taunt. Meanwhile, Curren$y sounds lazily at home on the steal-your-girl “Send Her Home,” clocking in the same verse he’s been rapping for years alongside Perico’s bouncy shit-talk. There isn’t a moment where Perico is upstaged, and his immediate charm is in the stylish near yelp of his rapping voice, the way he struts over a beat. He seems to always be at the top of his register, but he tucks a deceptive range of perky melody into each verse and hook.
All of this plays out over a sleek G-funk backdrop, with plenty of playful nuance in the production. Sleigh bells briefly shake in time with the bass on “Mind Yours,” and some pizzicato tucked deep in the mix on “Affiliated” lends the stomping anthem a delicate menace. Still, it’s the synths that build the world. Most of them are up-front and warm but they take various shapes: pierced whistling, chunky bass tones, shimmering atmosphere.
Perico raps with a casual, plain-spoken lyricism. He never explains or obscures a detail in his storytelling, a writing philosophy he captures in the album’s bark of an opening bar: “Don’t ask me how I do it, watch how I move.” 2 Tha Left catches him perpetually stuck in the middle, almost compromising his come-up. On “Everybody,” a solo track with a jubilant hook that sounds like it was written by or for Kamaiyah, he makes the simple prospect of hope sound wistful with a bare, pattering quip: “Look at me tryna get rich with everybody I know/But I probably can’t trust nobody I know.”
That same paranoia washes over “One Two,” when Perico snaps: “Yeah I love you my nigga, but I don’t know if I can trust you my nigga.” With a droning hook and menacing economy to his detached narrative, Perico turns a song about a police raid and its aftereffects into something grimly mundane. On “Affiliated,” a stomping G-funk anthem with a bassline that sounds like it was pounded out on a janky living room piano, Perico injects the same depressingly shrugging perspective, finding a silver lining in his 10-toes-down ethics: “The G homie just took a dub/I know what you’re thinkin’ ‘Yeah that sounds super long’/But he comin’ home.”
Music is a second act for Perico, who once just dabbled but is now doubling down on his reinvigorated rap career. He went to jail for the second time in 2012 on a gun charge, releasing an album on the day of his surrender. Ever since, he’s been pitching himself as a convincingly timeless and hyperlocal hero, burrowing deeper and deeper into the groove of a second chance.
