Between his solo release Tronic, Fat Ray teamup The Set Up, and his production work on Elzhi's The Preface, Black Milk's 2008 made him look invincible. And you might note the potential tongue-in-cheek hubris in calling his follow-up Album of the Year and assume that he feels untouchable now. But the self-congratulatory name of his new release is deceptive. The year in question isn't the 2010 that the drop date places its contention in, though anyone who loved Tronic or hard-bumping, densely expressive hip hop in general wouldn't be off base in considering it as a candidate. The title is actually more closely connected to a different year: 2009, when Black Milk lost his close friend, Village's Baatin, and saw his manager HexMurda go through a life-threatening experience after a stroke left him comatose.
"'09, hardest year in my lifeline," he admits in leadoff track "365", and you can hear the evidence in this album. But it's not some morose attempt to dwell on a rough period-- it's more like the product of a deeply determined effort to persevere through it all. Some artists redouble their work efforts when they're confronted by trying times, as though hours spent over a notebook or an MPC is the one thing that'll keep them centered. And whether or not that's what pushed Black Milk to another solid album, it's clear he came out of his time in the studio with something more to him: an even tighter grasp on his production-auteur approach.
That approach stretches out a bit more in ambition, even as the sonic imprint becomes more recognizably his. Album of the Year might be called his acid-soul record: "Gospel Psychedelic Rock" practically asks for that tag, but its Westbound-era Funkadelic allusions and heavy R&B mood are echoed throughout the album. And it's a logical progression from his previous work, whether placed up front (the metallic funk of "Keep Going"; "Distortion" and its reverbed, congealed-mercury wah-wah) or woven into beats that recall Tronic's digital pulses and the rich analog bass. In his work with straight-up samples, like when he reconstitutes Blackrock's garage-funk monster "Blackrock Yeah Yeah" for "Deadly Medley", he translates a dusty cratedigger discovery into one of his characteristic headknock beats while amplifying the strengths of the source material. And when he brings in live-band musicians to complete his compositions-- drummer Daru Jones and keyboard player AB chief amongst them-- it all snaps into a deep-breathing focus worthy of the latest Roots record.
There's a lot of sprawled-out jamminess to those tracks, and at their best-- like the understated Afrobeat inflections of "Round of Applause" and the sun-drenched guitar in closer "Final Chapter"-- they ride out in a way that reveals a certain synergy between the way Black Milk approaches rapping and the way he builds beats. There's a real musicality to his flow, and he raps like a producer in that it's hard to tell whether he tailors his voice to his backing tracks or vice versa. He does sound a bit more comfortable riding a sparse groove than a busy one; the wall-to-wall drum fills of "Keep Going" make his voice push like a sprinter trying to charge through knee-high surf, while sparser cuts like the electro-soul "Welcome (Gotta Go)" foreground it in a way that makes it the strongest, most elastic piece of percussion. Either way, he's got enough authority to thread his voice into a rhythm in a way that takes it over, and enough confidence in the beats themselves to let their outros ride out unaccompanied for a good minute or so.
As a lyricist, Black Milk's typically come across as a man who makes being down-to-earth sound like a source of strength. And while there was an unspectacular battle-rap anonymity to his past lyrics, they were at least spit in the service of a strong overall style. Now he's grown a bit, upping the emotional dimension subtly and letting some more specific humanistic details come through, even in the lines that read like average boasts on paper. There's still plenty of quoteworthy moments that serve equal measures of acrobatic internal rhymes ("Coolest flow, signal to my crew the cue to go/ With they fingers on triggers, gunpowder under cuticles") and rib-jabbing punchlines that might risk some eye-rolls. But they wouldn't mean as much if they weren't coming from a man who now drops them in the service of working through some heavy thoughts, dealing with the trials in his life ("Distortion") and the perseverance that helped him get through it ("Final Chapter") in a way that only makes the triumph sound that much more rewarding.
