CD Reviews

Freeway

Free at Last | Roc-a-Fella

By RICHARD BECK | February 5, 2008

3.0 Stars

Nothing against Just Blaze! or Kanye West, whose flashy production anchored Freeway’s 2003 debut, Philadelphia Freeway, but the Philly native isn’t the popster they hoped he would be. No, his guttural, constricted delivery is too weird for that. On this follow-up disc, however, a more modest set of soul-heavy beats rules the day. Having graduated from knuckleheaded threats to a more hardened ghetto perspective that sometimes blossoms into tender complexity, Freeway sounds at home, particularly over the sweetly weeping keyboard loop that grounds “Reppin’ the Streets,” the album’s best track. When he isn’t feeling the pressure to make half-assed appeals to some special-interest subset of rap fandom — “Take It to the Top f. 50 Cent” for the ladies, “Spit That Shit” for the haters — Freeway lives in the pocket of a beat so confidently that you don’t even need to hear the beat to get it, as on “When They Remember,” where he raps, “Nobody but the prophet Mohammed Islamic scholars holla!”

Related: Beyond Dilla and Dipset, Two great flavors, War of the words, More

Topics: CD Reviews , Celebrity News, Entertainment, Music Stars, More

| More

ARTICLES BY RICHARD BECK

PLUCK AND DETERMINATION | March 09, 2010
People have always thought that Joanna Newsom was indulgent. At first, it was about her voice — the kind of nasal yelp that usually keeps a performer from getting on stage at all. Then, on her second album, it was about her vocabulary and her instrumentation.

SONG OF HERSELF | August 05, 2009
"Listen, I will go on record saying I love Feist, I love Neko Case. I love that music. But that shit's easy listening for the twentysomethings. It fucking is. It's not hard to listen to any of that stuff."

DJ QUIK AND KURUPT | BLAQKOUT | June 15, 2009
LA hip-hop has two threads, and DJ Quik pulls both of them. The first is g-funk, a production style that relies on deep, open grooves and an endless parade of funk samples.

FLIPPER | LOVE | May 26, 2009
Flipper formed in San Francisco in 1979, and they're remembered three decades later because of a song called "Sex Bomb" that's one of the funniest pieces of music I've ever heard.

ST. VINCENT'S ACTOR GETS A RUN-THROUGH | May 26, 2009
There were not one but two clarinets on stage at the Somerville Theatre on Tuesday night, and that gives you some idea of how intricate Annie Clark's chamber-pop compositions can be.