Last year, the 18-year-old Florida rapper Chester Watson released his second album, Tin Wooki. The 28-track, 70-minute album is a sprawling work that allowed the laconic young rapper to explore the depths of his mind and ability. He had a hand in producing 15 tracks from Tin Wooki, many of which are left as instrumentals. The album is an introduction to the jazzy, downtempo mood of Watson's music, as well as his heady, alliterative rhymes. Summer Mirage is Watson's first rap release since *Tin Wooki (*he's released three beat tapes in the interim). A 19-minute EP with just six songs, Summer Mirage is more easily consumed than its predecessor, and also finds Watson better in command of his free associative, internal rhyme-heavy style.
Watson operates in the darkness on Summer Mirage, surrounded by sparse, bass-driven beats. Most songs begin with a loud noise as an introduction: a heavy xylophone on "Chosen", a thump and a door creak on "Deep Sea Tundras", a flat, UFO-like synth on "Wrath of the Guided". From there, Watson unleashes his unassumingly brilliant lyrics. Like his obvious influence Earl Sweatshirt, Watson rarely strays from his natural monotone, and his delivery is never strained. In that way, Watson's voice is as much a platform as it is a tool for his wordy bars.
The EP consists mostly of the 18-year-old's musings, both abstract and mundane. His near-stream-of-consciousness lyrics connect the lines with tangential thoughts and homophonous words. On "Islands", for example, he works his way from a maze to Greek mythology to teenage nerves: "I think I'm done/ Lost inside this maze, I think it's won/ Now I'm gazing at the sun/ Son of Hades, wish Poseidon would have claimed me/ I'm at one, with the spaces and the waves, and yet I quaver breaking blunts." Through sound alone, he maintains a logic to the mental leaps within the bars.
Watson succeeds most when rhyming for the sake of rhyming. On "Chosen", he demonstrates MF DOOM's uncanny ability to articulate every little syllable of every word with precise rhythmic cadence: "See, my kindness is diminishing/ Five bitches and middlemen/ Process to belittle them time-ticking." (Watson underlines the influence with a reference to Madvillainy's "Curls" later in the song.) The words don't have a natural internal rhyme, but Watson enunciates each syllable so particularly that he creates his own rhyme-like scheme.
Watson does his fair deal of self-mythologizing on Summer Mirage. He is, once again, very aware of the ridiculousness of some of his own claims: He calls himself a "self-proclaimed pharaoh of the future" on "Deep Sea Tundras", a tacit acknowledgement of that boast's inherent flimsiness. Like a young DOOM, Watson masks himself behind a persona of grandeur (though not literally). We learn little about Watson, but he'd like to keep it that way. We, instead, get a mix of his presumed daily activities and some pseudo-philosophical contemplations ("The moon is my conscience/ In tune with the waves and the loom on the starship"). But, again, Watson's rapping is so strong that it covers any flaws or lack of revelations in his songwriting. His raps are so enthralling that it is up to him how much of his own life he'd like to put into his music. For now, he's finding success with a mix of fact, fiction, fantasy, and pure ability.
