Blu has the tendency to frustrate, willingly or otherwise. Many of the people he frustrates, specifically, are folks who latched onto his music back when his magnificent debut, the Exile-produced Below the Heavens, left a permanent dent in their subconscious. Blu's jumped through a succession of sideways evolutions and detours-turned-thoroughfares ever since; even his much-awaited Exile reunion Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them saw a premature, lo-fi release on Bandcamp before seeing a proper release a year later.
At worst, the work Blu's put out during and after his doomed Warner Bros. stint can be categorized as "not bad"; at best, there's last year's NoYork!, which put him square in the middle of the conversation on who best reps the 2010s semi-underground Los Angeles scene. But as Blu continues to find new sides to his voice, his early adopters find new reasons to be alienated, so following his ongoing battle with everybody else's demands can be exhausting.
So Blu's latest, Good to Be Home, is especially aggravating in that it's a decent record from a way-better-than-decent artist. The album operates under a concept that, typically, either results in pro forma nostalgia or immediately resonant memory restoration: a West Coast rap "Back to the roots" homecoming, hence the title. Good to Be Home doesn't really fall under either category, though—instead, Blu's gathering memories he found spilling out of an old shoebox and taking stock without feeling the need to tie any of it together. The end result is too vague to resemble overt wistfulness, or for that matter, a uniquely insightful autobiography—the latter of which he nailed amazingly on his and producer Mainframe's 2008 self-titled effort as Johnson&Jonson.
Good to Be Home does possess a certain duality, revisiting a hazy-yet-formative Angeleno G-funk upbringing while filtering it through the lens of abstracted, flow-first free-association lyrics and dusty-soul production that keeps in line with the L.A. underground. The juxtaposition makes sense; Blu's always integrated a contradictory complexity into his persona, struggling between frustration and triumph, widescreen observations and introverted tunnel-vision focus. He builds ancillary details into perceptive storytelling or, inversely, breaks down the big picture into separate components.
An indie auteur too mercurial for the majors cutting his teeth on Pac isn't unheard of, but it points to an intriguing artistic backstory that Blu could conceivably give vivid insight into. Unfortunately, he doesn't. He's equally talented at constructing personal, detail-riddled narrative lyricism as he is spinning impressionistic takes on his daily existence; those gifts work best when paired in tandem, but when he operates almost exclusively in the latter mode, he generalizes his more human-sounding sentiments instead of owning them powerfully. "The West" finds Blu simultaneously looking at yesterday and tomorrow, blending memories of his parents' disapproval with his unaffiliated, gangsta-coded gear ("Sagged and rocked rags when my folks ain't condone it") with rapidfire shifts in focus.
But it often takes deeper readings between the lines to find the sparse details on Good to Be Home that listeners who aren't '80s L.A. babies can latch on to. The thematic focus on youthful rap-steeped cockiness rolls along aimlessly like an unplanned weekday teenage summer evening spent driving without a destination, the first half's steady stream of N.W.A. memories and driver's-seat sermons ("The Return", "Boyz N the Hood", "Whip Creme") coasting on Daytons that look like they're standing still even when the car's rolling. Influences frequently emerge, from pop-rap standbys (Skee-Lo's "I Wish", DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince's "Summertime") to bicoastal street-rap canon fodder (Nas' "Life's a Bitch", Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day").
Blu is clearly focused in his intensity when he rattles off these pieces of a past that haven't entirely vanished from his present. The beats from relative unknown Bombay aren't that innovative or surprising; when he's not on some under-quantized, shrill-stringed, obscure-soul-loop I Can't Believe It's Not Madlib business, he's reaching for known quantities like Kool & the Gang's "Summer Madness" or Gil Scott-Heron's "Angel Dust". But Blu's dedication to Blake Griffin-ing every syllable and punching in the internal rhymes like a Tekken combo keeps the momentum charging ahead.
On those rare moments where Bombay keeps the beat sparse, like the melted-on-the-dashboard G-funk creep of "Rap Dope," the individuality that's sometimes missing in Blu's lyrics springs out in his voice, the past tense of his memories' waypoints rattled off with the snarl of someone yet to come down from the adrenaline high and the ensuing rush. Maybe that's the point: Good to Be Home's recollections are only meant to be alluded to, a summer-jam album riddled with familiar nods to shared experiences but still walled off from observers who think they really know Blu.
