Faces finds Mac Miller embracing a typical 2010s rapper trope: the exploratory between-album mixtape. Over an hour and a half, he advances on his last LP's heady sprawl with a palette stretching from rainy day introspection to playful wordplay exercises.
On last year’s Watching Movies with the Sound Off, Mac Miller earned an elusive measure of cachet among rap diehards by burrowing into his record collection and trying on the irreverent frenzy of Odd Future, the offbeat whimsy of MF Doom, and the gonzo electronics of the Brainfeeder squad. He ended up with the best work of his young career, a satisfying leap from the bushy-tailed, eager-to-please kid brother raps of his early work towards tighter rhymes fixated in a knottier headspace.
Mac has since worked tirelessly to prove Watching Movies’ gains were no fluke, showcasing his range on a series of off-the-cuff side projects: Delusional Thomas featured an impishly pitched-up Mac cutting loose on a half-hour mixtape of gutbucket murder raps, while Live from Space documented the plush sonics of Miller’s summer 2013 Space Migration Tour, which fleshed out Watching Movies’ spacier cuts with the help of Syd tha Kid and Matt Martians’ project the Internet. Odd Future associate Vince Staples’ Stolen Youth featured Mac in the producer’s chair unfurling hypnotic soundscapes under his Larry Fisherman pseudonym.
Mac Miller’s most ambitious post–Watching Movies project arrived in the form of a Mother’s Day mixtape called Faces, which advances on his last LP’s heady sprawl with a palette stretching from rainy day introspection to playful wordplay exercises. Where Watching Movies was equally concerned with refining his writing skills and presenting a personality you wouldn’t mind sparking up a J with, this mixtape prizes frankness over curation. On cuts like opener “Inside Outside” and “Here We Go,” the latter in which Mac pridefully scans his growing empire and notes that he “did it all without a Drake feature,” the joy is infectious.
Mac gets downcast for the midsection body shot combo of “Happy Birthday,” “Wedding,” and “Funeral,” a passage that moves seamlessly from excitement to fear and uncertainty (“Do you ever reach to touch her, but there’s nothing there?/Do you tell her that you love her, but she doesn’t care?”) into despair (“Doing drugs is just a war with boredom, but they’re sure to get me”). Faces goes where Watching Movies wouldn’t, picking over the fallout from a teen rap sensation suddenly becoming nouveau riche.
Much of the time, that means picking apart Mac’s infatuation with drugs. Hard partying bleeds into unexpected corners of the proceedings, from the debit card covered in “snowflakes” on “Friends” to the cautionary PCP comedown tale of “Angel Dust.” Miller catalogs reckless substance use like a news anchor would a traffic jam: He matter-of-factly calls himself a “drug absorbent endorphin addict” with a “drug habit like Philip Hoffman,” on “What Do You Do?,” and even “Therapy”’s lightweight account of a night out with a girl contains a bout of self-medication. “Malibu” warns that “The good times can be a trap” and toys with the idea of checking into rehab before resolving to just save the remainder of the coke for another day. There’s a troubling sense that Mac is tiptoeing down a well-lit path toward self-destruction and that he either feels too helpless or else too enrapt to change course , but if Faces’ good-times-are-killing-me terrors seem overbearing, they’re often offset by a sense that music is his salvation.
On the technical end, Faces is Mac Miller’s high watermark. The wordplay is limber and odd, as flows shift mid-verse and imbue otherwise nonsensical turns of phrase with jerky life. It’s enough to make unrepentantly dark lines lively. When “Polo Jeans” opens with “I give no fucks when I go nuts cause I smoke dust, overdosed on the sofa, dead/Woke up from the coma, pulled up in a Škoda, smoked, went back to bed” you’re more likely to run it back for the deft internal rhymes than the plot point about a potential overdose.
Miller’s finally able to play ball with his esteemed rap friends, too; where he once played outfield for guys like Earl Sweatshirt and Staples, here he’s matching them bar for bar. By the time Rick Ross shows up for verse three of “Insomniak,” Mac’s already run the beat ragged. Miller’s advances as a self-taught auteur also extend to production: he crafted the majority of the beats here, and he’s arrived at an unfussed, sample-based melodicism that both harkens back to the jazzy boom bap of the 75 Ark and Fondle ’Em Records era and stays the hell out of the way of the raps.
Faces finds Mac Miller embracing a typical 2010s rapper trope: the exploratory between-album mixtape. Its 24 tracks run nearly an hour and a half, each restlessly tinkering with his songwriting and production talents. The sprawl gives Faces a directionless feel, so it’s doubtful you’ll ever play it all in one sitting—regardless, the kid’s turning out the best work of his career, transforming adversity and discouragement into intriguing art. It might seem daunting, drug-crazed, and unwieldy at the outset, but given the proper time and patience, the mixtape proves to be Mac’s most consistently honest and personal work to date. Early on “Here We Go” advises that he “ain’t little Malcolm with the baby face” anymore, and whatever memory of that goofy, affable kid remains, Faces is its slow and methodical death and dismemberment.
