Album Review: Blue Tears by BLUEHILLBILL & Tremendiss
The Dorchester rapper’s collaboration with producer Tremendiss is a dense, single-mood coke-rap record where the brand-name bars fly faster than you can catalog them.
Blue Hill Avenue runs through Dorchester and Mattapan, a corridor in southern Boston where the liquor stores have bulletproof glass and the barbershops stay open late. It is the kind of street that names people. BLUEHILLBILL took his from it, and his catalog (AVEMATIX, Housefire, BYRDS, the Chef Bogey-produced BLUEHILLBLUES) has been stacking up inside an underground Boston circuit that includes al.divino, Estee Nack, and BoriRock with the speed of someone who sleeps four hours a night. Blue Tears, his latest with producer Tremendiss, is drug-dealer philosophy front to back. Tremendiss produced every track alone. The two of them have made a record that says one thing and keeps saying it from the first bar to the last.
What BLUEHILLBILL says, mostly, is prices and brand names. He compares the size of his coke to Lagerfeld and makes a pack disappear with Copperfield, watches The Godfather twice a year to keep his mind sharp, wears shades in the dark to keep his mind dark. He stamps his bricks with a dragon. He calls himself a Gucci sock Socrates (a bar so dumb it circles back to brilliant) and references Billy Blanks, Michael Phelps, Takashi Murakami, and Muhammad Ali within the span of four songs. Every track on Blue Tears runs at this density. The references arrive, accomplish their job inside a couplet, and leave before you can decide whether you like them. On “Shoot Yourself,” he squeezes a Houdini reference, a graffiti metaphor, and a Grammy nomination into the same verse without pausing for breath. On “Steel Blowing,” he cuts coke like a taper, rolls Pradas in Providence, and passes bills like Donald Trump. The rate never drops. You either lock into the velocity or you bounce off it.
Most of Blue Tears talks about cocaine as a commodity. On “Love Jones,” BLUEHILLBILL talks to it like a girlfriend. He calls her pearly white, numb to the touch, says he finger fucks her, she’s got him stuck. If she were a person he’d take her out to Benihana’s. She gains weight when she hits the water. He gets jealous seeing her with other people. The conceit is ancient (Raekwon did his version, Pusha T did his), but BLUEHILLBILL commits to the bit long enough that the song earns a real ending:
“I gotta leave soon
I keep on fuckin’ with you and my future is doomed
This music ‘bout to take off and shoot me up to the moon.”
That’s the only track on Blue Tears where BLUEHILLBILL admits the life might stop. Every other song describes the economy as ongoing, product moving, customers arriving, enemies getting dealt with, without suggesting a horizon. “Love Jones” glimpses one, and the glimpse makes the rest of the album’s certainty sound more desperate than it did on first listen.
Only “Chasing Ghosts” breaks the album’s surface entirely. It opens with “Can I pray for you?/Can you pray for me?” and spends two verses describing weight that doesn’t come from a scale. The devil is stepping on his chest. His doctor and therapist try to figure out his triggers, and he won’t sit there explaining himself to anybody. His Libra scale has drugs and thoughts weighing on him. Turning thirty-three feels like thirty-three hundred.
“God gave us life, but only on consignment.”
A word from the drug trade repurposed as theology, a consignment deal between a person and the God who leased him a body. The track sits alone on Blue Tears. Nothing around it carries the same temperature.
BLUEHILLBILL drops political lines the same way he drops brand names, quickly and without commentary. On “Takayama,” the hook says, “We ain’t land on crack rocks/Landed on us,” a reference to the government’s documented role in the crack epidemic, wedged between threats and coke-weight descriptions. On “Trauma,” he says they’re trying to infiltrate his team like COINTELPRO, and then BoriRock’s verse kicks in with fish-scale glitter and VVS baguettes. Neither song stops to explain. The lines sit inside their verses the way a news crawl sits below a TV broadcast, there and gone, the context yours to supply.
Tremendiss keeps the range narrow. The soul samples are muffled and looped, sharing a mood that is tense, slightly drowsy, dark without being quiet. They give BLUEHILLBILL a consistent surface to rap across, and the short runtime keeps the consistency from turning into a problem. But individual songs (“Everybody Dies,” “Allergic Reaction,” “Steel Blowing,” “Name of Love”) share enough texture that they blend when you’re not paying close attention to the lyrics. The album doesn’t have a song that sounds wrong, and it doesn’t have one that makes you stop and reset your ears either, except for “Love Jones” and “Chasing Ghosts,” which do different things with his voice and subject matter.
The uniformity is the same bet Mach-Hommy and Westside Gunn have placed on their tightest projects: short runtime, one producer, locked register. Blue Tears wins that bet more often than it loses it, mostly on the strength of BLUEHILLBILL’s pen, which can hold a conceit (“Love Jones”), turn a phrase (“Gucci sock Socrates”), and make a confessional lyric stick (“consignment”) all on the same record. On “Escargot,” Kil The Artist’s verse says he’s in the car that shot Biggie, the same Impala, and then, two bars later, “New me, same mistakes like Tame Impala.” The pun is terrible and perfect and exactly the kind of bar that lets you know nobody in this room is trying to impress a grant committee.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Love Jones,” “Chasing Ghosts,” “Maya Angelou”