Album Review: Boatshoes by Brian Ennals & Blockhead
The Severn, Maryland rapper takes his nihilist stand-up act to Blockhead’s funkiest beats and turns in his loosest, funniest writing. The jokes run on cocaine, centrists, and the end of the world.
Severn, Maryland, is a bedroom community in Anne Arundel County about 16 miles south of the city of Baltimore. Typically, a rapper from Severn would be interested in trading up to Baltimore, but not Brian Ennals. Born in Annapolis, Ennals grew up in Severn and attended Howard University. As a rapper, he made his mark along with producer Infinity Knives on three ferocious, hard political albums full of cheap liquor, nasty vitriol and fierce, hyperactive lyrics. But on his partnership with producer Blockhead for Boatshoes, Ennals finds tracks that are way brighter and more funky than he is used to, and the subject matter remains pretty similar.
In “Aldente,” Ennals talks about how four of his credit cards are in collection. He builds then destroys a brick wall high, gets high off of a funk synclavier and a swampy solo harmonica. He claims the mantle of BB King mixed with Dr. Doom, offers a ride to hell to anyone who wants to go, and ends the song with a spoken word piece that sizes him up before thanking him for the steak and calling him “You’re just a big, sad, alcoholic bore.” On “Smirnoff, via a Straw,” Ennals calls Nicolas Cage a genius, outed Jesse Jackson as a snitch, called Hamilton “the worst thing to happen to this country since slavery,” and then heading off any redemption arc: “Don’t worry when I sell out/‘Cause I’ma still be depressed as fuck when I’m rich.”
He just left rehab, by his own telling on “Roll Call,” and the first thing he’s going to do is get high, the second thing lie, and tell everybody he loves he really tried. The chorus is a self-introduction with a razor in it: “My name is Brian/And I’m from Severn/And I hate centrists/And I hate reverence.” Hell might be real, he figures, but there’s no heaven, and his son is going to hear it before he turns seven. The confession that cuts deepest is smaller than any of that, his ex’s new man being a hell of a guy who pays her rent, takes her shopping, and isn’t too drunk to fuck. He’s still smoking ports on “Wonderwall,” dreading the day his mother grows old, and on “Wet Noodle,” under melancholic string samples and jubilant Tron synthesis, he did way too much to get it up, ate her out for an hour to cover, and went to the drawer for the strap. He splits his year in two on the chorus: “Zaza in the summer/Depression in the winter.” He does all of the lines, she wants another one, and he rides home in an Uber at 5:49 in the morning, watching the sun start to shine.
However, on “Pass the Yayo,” Ennals delivers a scathing rebuke of Senator Cory Booker, a black man who Ennals declares is “a piece of shit” Blockhead beats out the tracks for this scathing diatribe with insistent synth lines, hot guitar licks and sharp and crisp drum breaks. On “Signed Sealed Delivered,” Ennals declares that he and a number of other individuals stock “Aldente” (as seen on the cover) cyanide pills “so we die with nothing,” and proceed to plan a number of other heists, including a massive Target looting, and also promise to sign and seal and deliver Charlie Kirk’s mail to him. And on “Soy Boy,” Ennals unleashes a torrent of hatred at Bernie Sanders, who Ennals declares is “useless,” as well as at K-pop for being “blackface” and that his grandmother had been a liar when she told him that there were souls. The track concludes with Ennals offering pig-shooting advice to his listeners and providing a marksmanship tip—hold it steady. Prior to that, however, Ennals had delivered a number of confident assertions that he was being pursued by someone intent on killing him and that he woke up every morning paranoid and scared for his life.
Blockhead have produced music for paranoid men over the years. For nearly two decades, Aesop Rock, Cage, Murs, Illogic, and Armand Hammer, to name a few, have all called Blockhead the go-to man for their darkest hours of paranoia. None have gotten better material out of the Blockhead than that of Brian Ennals on this date song for the end of the world. On “Let It Burn (like Usher),” Ennals paints the scene of a couple watching as the buildings around them turn orange, then red, before blowing up with people inside screaming as blood begins to drip from the structures and fall to the bricks below. The man in the couple has makeup all over his shirt from his girlfriend and sings “It goes one by one and two by two/A couple more bombs and we’ll all be through.” The two of them make a promise to go to meetings and not to relapse, but it’s obvious to the listener that 12 steps will not be enough for the two of them and they will fall off the wagon together. This is the most romantic that Ennals has written to date, and it could easily be about his lover or the bomb that destroys the world in this track.
On “Yellow School Buses,” the chorus is handled by the increasingly frantic vocals of Mikie Mayo, Lisa Frank nosebleeds, and favorite cartoons on a lot of Adderall, little orange strips of medication pressed cheaper by the dozen by Mayo. Ennals responds to images of Skeletor cranking meth, He-Man doing poppers, by laying out three possible scenarios for a life such as this: “Jail, death, mental wards.” Defcee paints a surreal portrait of a high-school bathroom, complete with Day-Glo vapes posed on chrome toilet-paper holders in the bathroom, with orange peels or pills of every color strewn about in the trash. Ennals bookends the posse cut “Now That’s What I Call a Posse Cut vol. 87,” featuring himself, Curly Castro, Fatboi Sharif, PremRock, and DeathIRL. Ennals is portrayed with a handgun, sawing open a chest with an electric saw to get to the dead father’s heart, which he then feeds to his sad, lost dog, as DeathIRL ends the song with “I just wanna be free.”
For some reason, Brian Ennals saves his best writing for the little girl on “Shyne.” She is a celestial being that pierces through the clouds; after the apocalypse, she’ll still be around and will have come back stronger. Ennals asks to be with her for as long as she’s around. That’s it. The rest of the song is him laying out the harsh realities of his life: “Death is easy as fuck/It’s hard being alive.” He’s been numb for so long that he thought numb was a good thing; he thought that was healing. But his mother once told him, “Slowly, the time don’t stop,” and so Ennals has taken to embracing the surreal, the dreamlike quality of life. He’s a fan of Salvador Dali and on “Shyne” he’s four-wheeling towards the light. It’s as close to hope as Ennals gets.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite tracks: “Wet Noodle,” “Smirnoff, via a Straw,” “Shyne”