Lance Washington was four years old when a heart attack killed his father. Raised in Chicago, Washington moved to Arizona for college, where he planned to study film. He developed a dependency on Adderall and dealt with depression during his freshman year, something he helped counter by writing poetry. Poetry became songwriting, and Washington started making music under the name Lando Chillrissian, which he soon shortened to Lando Chill.
Late in 2014, Washington began to write the songs that would become the basis for his debut album on Mello Music Group, For Mark, Your Son. He’s referred to the album as “self-medication,” a means of treating a loss that he had yet to come to terms with. But if the record represents a document of extended grieving for a father barely known, it’s just as much an introduction to a young artist who, after writing songs partly for his own personal betterment, abruptly finds himself in front of an audience.
Piano-based boom-bap and chipmunk soul beats are sprinkled throughout the record, (courtesy of Duncan “D-Funk” Odea and David “Jetlag” Manin, two Arizona producers), and Washington raps more than he does anything else. But For Mark is not a traditional rap record; Washington was a fan of folk music in college, and his songs are rough-hewn and acoustic-sounding. Several of them feature his unaffected singing and though his voice is vaguely reminiscent of Kid Cudi’s, frequent comparisons between the two artists speak to their shared interested in a variety of genres (and the fact that Washington has mentioned him as an influence) more than anything else. They’re not all that much alike.
Lando Chill is a competent rapper, and a competent song-maker, but the concept of For Mark, Your Son is more promising than its execution. It’s difficult to learn much about Washington on scattered songs like “Early in the Morning,” a pleasant little ode to the pleasures of morning weed and morning sex without a single memorable line. And for the most part, we don’t get a good sense of how his grief has affected him, even on songs like “Proud,” which explicitly reference his father.
That’s not to say there aren’t interesting things going on here. They’re simply underdeveloped. In the two-minute song “Save Me,” Washington wrestles with bitterness and doubt, asking “Who’s gonna save me when this God ain’t enough?” In the next line, he blames the same God for taking his father. It’s the rawest and most moving moment on the album, and it hints at why Washington may not be particularly well-suited to rap. Most rappers thrive on verbosity, or at least the raw ability to do interesting things with language. But Washington’s music is strongest when his lyrics are most concise.
Washington is nothing if not ambitious. He is already eagerly discussing his next record, another concept album, this one based on Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist. It may be that writing about a less closely held topic will allow him the room to open up, and to experiment with a style that fits him better than much of the music on For Mark. In an interview with Respect Magazine, he declared that he didn’t have a definitive sound, saying that instead he had “a voice, a message.” But while there’s no reason why an artist should be wedded to any particular genre, for a largely unknown musician like Lando Chill, developing a comfortable musical approach might accentuate that message, and allow it to resonate.
