Whenever I hear a rapper throwing out nostalgic band names like Blink-182 and Bring Me the Horizon, I immediately start to think I’m in for some Pink Tape bullshit. That’s not the case with Tony Bontana, a UK jack-of-all-trades with the freewheeling spirit of a streetballer out on the playground. Back when he was a kid in Birmingham, those aforementioned bands (and the clobbering unit Enter Shikari) influenced him to pick up the guitar. Like lots of young artists, he started to learn how to play songs he liked, even as his taste bent harder and further underground. For the past four or five years he’s been applying that just-try-shit ethos to the music he uploads online, whether it be Some Rap Songs-inspired soul-searching, sample-heavy beat tapes, or his post-hardcore outfit Spew. Not all the genre-hopping works—his fuzzy indie rock experiments fall kind of flat—but the stuff that does hit is like finally discovering that perfect pair of jeans.
TUMPIT, which is 12 tracks of head-in-the-clouds raps and washed-out Michael Jaguar instrumentals, does hit. (The best version of the album, available on SoundCloud or Bandcamp, runs two songs longer than the Spotify edition.) It’s a mellow mixtape with plenty of imagination, but it also has too much going on to slip into background music. Tony’s deadpan flows, which fall somewhere between the monotone flexing of RealYungPhil and the stoned wandering of MIKE’s By the Water, lull you in at the leisurely pace of a cricket match. The effect is less wordy and emotional than last year’s L’Humanité, a tribute to his mother, but the lines stick, and sound like they mean everything to him: “If you fuck wit’ me then you know I’ma ride for ya’/I’ma fall in love shawty, I’ma die for ya’,” he raps on “I’ma fall in love,” like he’s so nuts about someone it’s all he can concentrate on. On “Don’t Tempt Me,” the slow and misty beat sounds like a lullaby in reverse, and he accelerates his delivery except for a few repeated lyrics about the days when he had money struggles. After a while, it’s easy to start attaching your own memories to his reflections.
TUMPIT is subtler than the straightforward experiments on his SoundCloud page—rapping over emo guitar riffs, or punk songs—but that forces Tony and Michael Jaguar to fool around in the cracks and crevices. Here’s “A Sky That Turned Blue,” a random slow-mo jungle track tacked on at the end. There’s “My First Time,” a lovelorn ballad where Tony globs on the Auto-Tune like “Minnesota”-era Yachty. He picks up a cool new flow on “Ice Tea Boys,” channeling RX Papi with a cold. Only the extended edition has “Eyez on Me,” where a distorted, mechanical outro sounds like one of those explosive nu-metal wrestler theme songs from the early 2000s. Sometimes a song starts out forgettable and then a left-field tweak brings it to life, like the warm sax that kicks in on the otherwise glacial “In Peace” (the other extended-edition track).
What TUMPIT’s misfires are missing are those granular moments that seem inconsequential but ultimately separate his music from the heavy influences: “Bugs Life” and “Run It Up,” especially, are just sluggish spins on glassy Surf Gang cuts. Because similar to other trial-and-error barons of the internet—like the UK’s Pretty V and New Jersey’s Doris—part of the fun of TUMPIT is combing through the tape and getting stuck on a wrinkle of distortion, or the way the drums sputter for a few seconds, or a bar that probably resonates to no one else but you. There’s no good way to explain the appeal other than Why the fuck not?, which is pretty much the same way Tony Bontana songs come to be.
