If you've found a route to appreciating the style of Harlem's Smoke DZA, there's a good chance it came from either (or both) of two particular releases. 2010's George Kush Da Button was the early breakthrough, a dank-fumed breeze of a mixtape that his highly motivated voice cut through sharply. Two years later, Rugby Thompson emerged, taking some of the best sour-smoke soul beats of Harry Fraud's production career and revealing DZA to be nicer with the concepts and storytelling abilities than his earlier straight-talk lyrics had hinted at. He still sounded like someone whose most memorable and individualistic traits on the mic put him at the level of a somewhat less oddball, more NYC-beholden version of Curren$y. But his strengths of grounded observation and a lack of out-and-out corniness outweighed the tendency for his lyrics to be less memorable than the beats he chose to spit them over.
Unfortunately, Dream.ZONE.Achieve has a problem: it's roughly as long as George Kush Da Button and Rugby Thompson put together. For an MC whose lyrics don't typically allow much room for narrative scope, easygoing humor, or high-concept weirdness, that's a good way to make a sporadically inventive but otherwise passable-at-best album feel like a total slog. The easiest way to get a handle on where DZA is now and how far he needs to go to get in the conversation of best MCs out of New York is to get a load of "Ghost of Dipset", the album's second cut (third if you count the intro skit, which features—here's a hell of an omen —a pseudo-freestyle interrupted by a car wreck). The ghost in question appears in the form of a Cam'ron verse where, in a handful of bars, Cam meets, describes, reminisces over, worries about, is briefly tempted by, and then dismisses a longtime female acquaintance who wants to cheat on her husband with him. All that evocative detail follows two DZA verses that ricochet from comparing himself to "Banksky" [sic] to scattershot descriptions of his gear to a bloodless interpolation of Mobb Deep's "Survival of the Fittest". The goodwill amassed by each sharp line ("Broke hearts like when Ewing missed the finger roll") is practically erased by a clunker soon after ("They call it showing love, nah, call it sucking dicks/Speaking of that, face fucking my Cambodian bitch").
At least those are punchlines that make him sound like he tried. His voice is strong—think Pusha T with a little more snarl—his flow is usually fundamentally sound, and every so often he shows he's got a way with taut internal rhymes. But where Dream.ZONE.Achieve stalls out is in the inability for DZA to take his initial spark of lyrical inspiration and build from it into something more evocative. The scenarios and sentiments he lays out are credible, and there's little doubt that everything is said without pandering to an audience he doesn't truly connect with. But without a sustained attention-getting creativity, the themes of Dream.ZONE.Achieve largely blur together in a haze of aimless defiance and frustration. You've heard tracks like "City of Dreams" (NYC-repping anti-swag call to realness), "9eleven" (neighborhood as war zone), and "Jigga Flow" (pick any Reasonable Doubt deep cut) before—and DZA hasn't come around to finding a way to make these popular, often relatable, and frankly well-worn themes uniquely his own. Considering how often the spotlight swings to personality-rich guests like Ab-Soul ("Hearses"), Wiz Khalifa & Curren$y ("Legends in the Making"), and BJ the Chicago Kid ("Robin Givens"), the contrast gets pretty stark.
Still, even DZA's detractors have to admit that the man can pick a production slate. Even if all you hear DZA as is the necessary vocal counterpart of a choice beat, there's a lot that demands to be heard. His ear for bleary yet attention-getting midtempo slow-burn noir soul is hard to compete with, and even if there's little here that tops the best moments from Ski Beatz or Harry Fraud on his previous releases, it's remarkably cohesive considering the dozen-plus names involved. Ski's late-night skulk of fusion-jazz soul ("Jigga Flow") and a couple elegaic prog-trap beats from Fraud ("I Don't Know"; "Legends in the Making") frame DZA's voice well. And qualitatively, there's little separating up-and-comers like Cardo and vets like Sean C.
But the last track, and most promising pairing, actually winds up as some kind of weird paradox. "Achieve," which marks the conclusion of the titular three-act arc of the album, is where DZA finally gets to fulfill a stated dream of rhyming over a Pete Rock beat. He does this for two pretty capable, enthusiastic-sounding minutes—and then spends another seven giving out dedications and shout-outs to the extent that it makes the coda of Jay-Z's "My 1st Song" sound like the concluding half a bar of "Takeover". In most other contexts, that'd be a waste. Here, it's one of the only looks we get into a world that's bigger than just DZA himself.
