Monaleo likes fight music. Kicking ass suits the Houston rapper’s rowdy, swaggering persona, which channels a pro wrestler’s physical might and theatrical libido. Though she doesn’t make outright slab joints, in spirit Monaleo carries the torch for the Texas sub-genre of big sounds and bigger personas. She raps with force, her boasts and punchlines landing like strikes, her outsized confidence beating down your block like a candy-painted swanga.
Her debut, Where the Flowers Don’t Die, offered a peek beneath this steely character, pairing her slap-happy revels with schmaltzy R&B and gritty storytelling. She has a strong singing voice, but generally the latter fit better with her She-Hulk raps. The fists she’s so often hurling hit different in the context of her white-knuckle tales of poverty and depression on songs like “Sober Mind” and “Ridgemont Baby.” EP Throwing Bows lacks that ballast. The Monaleo of these chintzy, throwaway songs is a caricature who says anything and fights for nothing.
The anger Monaleo constantly invokes is canned and impersonal, more bit than catharsis. That might be fine if her rapping were compelling, but the quality of her writing is inconsistent. From line to line, she will swing from slick and menacing to deeply corny. “I’ll take out her teeth so she can really pop her gums,” she snaps on opener “Drunk Freestyle,” a truly clever bar. But a clunker referencing Spongebob immediately follows: “I’m the one who wear the pants, but I’m not a square.”
The record is filled with such momentum-killing wordplay. “Queen and Slime,” a Bonnie and Clyde-style duet with Stunna 4 Vegas, sounds like Tee Grizzley fan fiction. “Ee-er” turns “eater” into a double-entendre for the sound of a squeaky bed but doesn’t feel particularly raunchy as she and Sauce Walka pile on weak puns. “I be twitching when I nut, oh my god, am I a streamer,” Monaleo raps. A lot of her sex songs, which make up about half the record, don’t have any spark. She likes to assert her dominance in bed, but her escapades are pleasureless. One of the strangest lines comes on “Leo Luv the Sluts,” a dull ode to her roster of simps. “Treat a nigga like the bros, I say no homo when we fucking,” she, uh, boasts. I don’t think it’s kink-shaming to call that line stupid.
The beats are just as phoned-in. Most of the instrumentals are generic trap fare comprised of 808 kicks here, snares and hi-hats there. A few deviate from the template, but the lack of style and texture persists. “Wam Bam,” a grating facsimile of a Waka Flocka song, is built around a dull flip of Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” “Pimpin’ Ain’t Dead” takes the Beastie Boys sample popularized on Big Tuck’s “Not a Stain On Me” and tosses in tinny drums and a ringtone-quality melody. The overall effect of these canned beats is numbed familiarity, copies of copies of copies.
In theory, a wall-to-wall basher should fit right into rap’s current obsession with rage, mosh pits, and grudges. But unlike, say, Rico Nasty’s Anger Management or Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red, Throwing Bows lacks a unifying vision of anger—and one of Monaleo. She’s said she wants to be more than an “aggressive artist,” but feels compelled to keep writing these kinds of songs “because of who I've become in people's lives.” But the songwriting here is so perfunctory that it doesn’t even register as fan service. Monaleo may think she’s pleasing the crowd with all this rah-rah flexing, but from my seat, the fight looks thrown.
