Louisiana rapper Kevin Gates’ The Luca Brasi Story matched the brutality of coke rap to earnest sentimentality and melodicism with such a finesse that it obscured the record's essential weirdness. Songs outlining the perils of trafficking narcotics were heard next to those inspired by romance novelist Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook and the Twilight series. In street rap, a fixation on romance is often seen as a mark against the artist’s perceived toughness, as if the one gives the lie to the other. But the weathered rasp of Gates' voice lent a measure of grit to the love songs even as it made the deterministic criminality elsewhere in the tape feel lived-in. He's has since inked a deal with Atlantic Records (who summarily squished the 22-song tape into a digital EP) and released the low-stakes digital album Stranger Than Fiction. Where The Luca Brasi Story’s itinerant sprawl and plentiful guest appearances played like a game of show and prove, Stranger Than Fiction whittles things down to a series of pithy two- to three-minute nuggets that lurch toward resolution, often finding it within a verse or two.
The accomplished tunefulness of Luca Brasi highlights “Paper Chasers” and “Neon Lights” is pushed to the margins here. Save for the hooky despondency of late-album gem “Don’t Know What to Call It”, Stranger Than Fiction’s Kevin Gates is world-weary in all the spots where he was starry-eyed and reflective the last time around. Whether the tense shift in his songwriting is a conscious attempt to put some distance between himself and his trap house hook-men contemporaries or a function of him stockpiling melodies for a future mainstream push, his knack for detailed, despairing storytelling cogently picks up the slack.
Stranger Than Fiction draws much of its gravitas from Gates’ own colorful back story: he cuts through the airy synths and open spaces of “4:30AM” with a travelogue of betrayal for which he’s as much a culprit as a victim, and on “4 Legs and a Biscuit”, a viewing of the gangster flick King of New York trips off a broadside about the constant strain of legal woes. “Tiger” elaborates on the period when he quit dealing drugs to pursue a career in rap, only to fall prey to a series of janky promoters and label executives whose shifty machinations made him the vic instead of the villain. Stranger Than Fiction is a litany of near-misses with police and armed foes interspersed with emotionally guarded examinations of the trust issues they leave as collateral damage. But where Gates has pulled back from the emotional heft that made Luca Brasi such a compelling character composite, he’s poured his energy into the mechanics of rhyming with such fervor that what’s being said in these songs is often trumped for intrigue by the way he says it.
While Gates’ stories suggest a battle-damaged cynic, his restless wordplay gives voice to the excitable language nerd beneath the gruff exterior. “Die About It” effortlessly switches up cadences mid-flow, shifting from a laconic swing to a sparse, staccato yelp and back. On “Careful”, he goofily adopts three different Southern accents in two verses, only one of which is his own. “MYB” reduces his voice to a guttural whisper, rendering the song’s callous dress-down of a lesser criminal all the more diabolical in the process. Gates sells all of these experiments with the same verve, and the album scarcely misses a mark until Wiz Khalifa hits the buzzerbeater on the album closing remix of Gates’ 2012 single “Satellites” with a wastepaper-basket-deep verse delivered in a bratty yawp grossly ill-suited to the rest of the song.
The success of Stranger Than Fiction is as much a result of keen lyricism and inventive vocal tricks as good editing. Its 14 tracks are over and done in just a little more than 40 minutes. The brevity and the relatively monochromatic production, a glut of foreboding minor key trap beats, collude to force the spotlight on Gates’ versatile rapping. From the achy old gunshot wound that flares up after Gates gets stabbed and the glass of Sprite that’s purple instead of pink because he overdid it on the promethazine on “4:30AM” to the Popeyes dinner that lends the title to “4 Legs and a Biscuit” to the punch in the face that doesn’t hurt on “MYB” and the succession cars he laments not being able to drive on “Don’t Know What to Call It”, the record's uncompromising hard luck street narratives are dispensed with a preternaturally sharp eye for detail that dabs Gates’ economic writing with a shock of much-needed color.
