ALBUM REVIEWS
Lil Baby, Lil Durk
Mario Pujals*Superstar collaborations between two platinum rappers are a dime a dozen since Drake and Future linked for What a Time to Be Alive in 2015. Still, a summit with Lil Durk and Lil Baby carries a special sense of anticipation. Peaking in critical and commercial acclaim, both seem ready for a mainstream ubiquity beyond the melodic and street rap fans that eagerly absorb their work.
You could argue that Lil Baby is already there – his 2020 album My Turn landed on numerous best-of lists, and his performance of his socially-minded (if slightly maudlin) single “The Bigger Picture” at the Grammys in March was widely shared online (and caused some controversy). Meanwhile, Lil Durk has survived numerous career and legal twists since breaking out with his ferocious “L’s Anthem” in 2012. It’s remarkable that he’s grown into a true comer, with last year’s Just Cause Y’all Waited 2 peaking at number 2 on the Billboard charts. Lil Baby and Lil Durk clearly have the Apple and Spotify playlists on lock. But turn on an iHeart radio station and you may be more likely to hear Lil Baby’s feature on the late Pop Smoke’s “For the Night” or Lil Durk on Drake’s “Laugh Now, Cry Later” than one of their own headlining tracks.
Given the stakes for making the leap from 1B status to franchise players, it seems odd that the duo’s The Voice of the Heroes doesn’t make a firmer claim for attention. Maybe it’s the nature of these increasingly common Marvel Team-Up-styled projects: one week it might be Future and Lil Uzi Vert, the next week it’s YG and Mozzy. (To be fair, Lil Baby and Gunna’s 2018 Drip Harder was certainly a superior event.) Perhaps it will just take time for these songs to worm their way into our collective heads. Given how much music both men produce – Lil Durk has dropped four projects in the past 13 months, while Lil Baby is a bit more selective – the inclination may be to bop The Voice of the Heroes for a week or two and move on to the next thing.
“I wasn’t trying to be no idol,” harmonizes Lil Baby on the opening title track. It finds the duo taking the stage like they’re kicking off a starry concert. “And I’m just getting started, relax, wait ‘til I warm up,” he adds. Meanwhile, Lil Durk focuses on his troubled life, from past stints in prison to carrying his “stick” wherever he goes, and the sex and drugs he consumes. The two bring clear and subtle contrasts. Lil Baby prefers Adderall. Lil Durk likes “perkys.” Lil Baby has a gravelly voice that he uses with surprising deftness. It’s a powerful brand that’s impossible to mistake for anyone else’s. Lil Durk’s isn’t as distinct, but he can shift from a world-weary melody to a sharp and aggressive Chiraq tone, the equivalent of suddenly pulling on a ski mask.
The first few tracks go hard. On “2040,” the duo delivers verses in double-time over a Flex OTB and Forever Rollin beat reminiscent of a late Aughts Dirty South banger, while “Hats Off” find them joining Travis Scott over a dramatic and infectious synthwave trap rhythm. For “Who I Want,” Lil Baby offers his perspective on love. “You can’t just pop out and say you’re the hero, you gotta put on a cape and save the day,” he raps. “Man of My Word” boasts plenty of stick talk and staccato keyboard punches as Lil Durk riffs, “You gotta be a killer just to hang with us.”
But despite occasional and welcome cameos from Meek Mill, Young Thug and Rod Wave, The Voice of the Heroes eventually loses its propulsion. Whether intentionally or not, the producers – London on da Track, Wheezy, Turbo and a host of others – ladle computer washes and keyboards over the album’s latter half, and the sentimental tone doesn’t quite fit Durk and Baby’s brooding flows. Some cuts have strong hooks and others don’t, though the duo’s chant of “I need medical” on “Medical” stands out. Eventually, it starts to sound like an 18-track blowout that’s taking a bit too long to wrap up.
All in all, The Voice of the Heroes isn’t bad. Lil Durk and Lil Baby will continue on their respective paths. Maybe they’ll make a sequel if this sells well. But both have gotten close enough to the crown to realize that there’s more to the rap game than simply feeding the streets.
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More than most bands that began in the backseat of the family car, Car Seat Headrest seem well-suited for a high-concept rock opera. From the band’s earliest days, when the project was just Will Toledo recording alone in Virginia, songs were never just as simple as singer and subject—his 2011 album Twin Fantasy was a romantic epic sheepishly masquerading as a ramshackle emo record. His 2020 record Making a Door Less Open was essentially a treatise on fame itself, and culminated in Toledo adopting the persona “Trait,” a gas-masked, bunny-eared protagonist previously introduced in a Car Seat Headrest side project called 1 Trait Danger. When Car Seat Headrest began teasing their new record, The Scholars, via an alternate reality game-style website, it felt like an appropriately elaborate rollout for a band who’s rarely taken reality at face value.
And yet, Toledo was hesitant to dive head-on into the full-scale world-building of a rock opera. To hear him tell it, he seemed afraid that he might stumble into one of the genre’s many pitfalls. “You pull something off of The Wall—it’s not necessarily going to be banging on its own. It needs that context,” he told the podcast How Long Gone. “I like when you can pull a song out and have that individual piece.” It’s a brutal assessment of Pink Floyd, though it comes from a deep respect (the original version of Twin Fantasy’s “High to Death” interpolated “Jugband Blues,” after all).
On The Scholars, every song aims to be an “Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2”—nine self-contained epics that, Toledo hopes, will sum to a greater whole. But overburdened by a confusing plot, with no room for a listener to digest the bevvy of settings and characters he’s just introduced, The Scholars is mired in and muddied by the madcap impulses of its creator, drowning out what would otherwise be some of the band’s most inspired, experimental compositions to date. The Scholars is a rock opera for the playlist era; it wants to contain both a richly textured narrative—with all the character development, internal motivations, and rising and falling action required therein—and also nine songs that can stand alone, plucked out of context and jutted up against whatever other songs happen to land on Spotify’s autoplay.
So, the plot: The Scholars takes us to the imaginary Parnassus University, where we meet a cast of students who are all on parallel searches for meaning: our narrator, the Chanticleer; Beolco, a playwright who’s paranoid his best ideas are behind him: “A thousand ideas piled up in the tomb,” he says on “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)”; Devereaux, the “son of a backwaters religious conservative” who hopes to find higher meaning on the libertine lawns of the American university (“Devereaux”); and Rosa, a medical student who can revive the dead (“Gethsemane”). There is also, of course, a local community based on dressing in furs and feathers (“Lady Gay Approximately”), which I’ll let the Redditors decipher.
These plot points matter as much as you care to listen closely: There are pivotal moments in the form of a deadly plant and clown raid that I somehow missed in the first listen, too distracted by the stylistic changeups and clouded metaphors crammed into every song. Most of the key narrative drivers are buried in liner notes on the lyric sheet but aren't represented anywhere in the music. Certain songs carry enough momentum to warrant repeat listens out of the album context: “The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)” takes the familiar punk-leaning pop shape that has defined Car Seat Headrest, the chiming strums of an acoustic guitar giving way to drum fills, reverb, and Toledo’s fuzzy, clipped vocals. The same goes for “True/False Lover,” which careens from guitar solo to verse with the practiced ease of someone who’s spent the past 15 years writing hooks.
But the preceding three songs, which range from 10 minutes on the short end to 18 at the longest, test the premise of the album and the patience of the listener. “Gethsemane” begins quietly with just a synth and Toledo’s voice; “Reality” brings to mind Air’s Moon Safari; “Planet Desperation” is the most forthrightly self-serious, with somber piano and the slow beat of a kick drum. Yet they all manage to wind up in about the same place at their halfway points—stuttering prog interludes, towering electric guitar solos, belted refrains that seem to come out of nowhere and fade just as quickly. Storylines are lost in the mayhem: I feel like I’m catching the plot but then as soon as guitarist Ethan Ives, as Parnassus’ Liberal Arts school dean Hyacinth, sings “I would go out/But there’s a world war,” I feel totally lost again. It’s almost impressive how much these disparate modes seem to converge on a central sound, and how much that sound boils down to: play loud, play fast, repeat. There’s a reason, it seems, that The Wall includes comparatively quieter tracks like “Empty Spaces” or “One of My Turns”—if every song needs to stand alone, they each require some sort of internal climax, a summit that feels exhausting to climb song after song.
Still, The Scholars is filled with compelling experimentation and glimpses of greater potential. Toledo’s voice sounds stronger than ever here, warmly recorded in analog, and songs like “Devereaux,” which lean into power pop influences like the Cars and Cheap Trick, feel like the most successful attempt to combine narrative with concise songcraft. “CCF,” one of the album’s standout songs, sounds like a potential future path for Car Seat Headrest—one that introduces elements of jazz and funk to his fundamentally scrappy sound without overpowering it with heavy-handed signifiers and seemingly endless trips up and down the neck of his guitar. Car Seat Headrest is a band almost predestined for the kind of high-stakes storytelling a rock opera requires—if only Toledo could let his own ideas breathe.
