Album Review: BOUNDS by Beedie & Nice Rec
Beedie gives Nice Rec the whole board and turns his scars into the loudest thing in the room. His most gripping writing in years, gilded front to back.
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of restoring broken bowls with precious metal, the line of the break exposed rather than concealed. Making a rap album out of that concept is a strange one, even odder, being that it comes from Beedie, a hard-working underground MC whose albums seem to slow to a halt no more than once a year so that he can take a breath and think about what he‘s doing. Nevertheless, he‘s an elite lyricist that no one questions, and partnering with one beat-maker for under thirty minutes is his normal routine. Nice Rec gets the whole show for BOUNDS, where he turns his scars into the loudest thing in the room. This gives Beedie his most gripping writing in years, gliding front to back.
Beedie‘s voice doesn‘t need to struggle for space. Nice Rec wraps the beats around what he’s not playing, so that by the time“Kintsugi” comes, it‘s already in motion, dry and locked, the sample still carrying it, and Beedie is right out in front. On “FEARS,” the darkness is a turn colder, the dusty boom bap is hard, the space is crushed into a cozy shoebox. He drops the floor on “weight on you,” a beat that weighs down instead of moves forward and steels himself without any goopy salvation. Only“prey b4 tha meal” breaks through the spell, brighter and more anxious than the last, the grime shines through.
Mars Jackson turns “to the brim” into a flex with a chip on it. He‘s rapping that “the man in the mirror don‘t fear nothing at all,” condenses his entire code to money, power and respect, and warns that anyone testing him gets ether. His bars are more lumpy than Beedie’s, whose own bars he keeps on the long climb, the even placement of his bars and the home of the grandmother whose death he watched. Cam Chambers makes “SCARS” a little more battered, flipping the title while the front inward until every scar he has is from a friend who held a hand, then plants a flag for Pittsburgh, the city he wants to keep dope.
Always, damage comes before the gold first. In “FEARS,” he pinpoints it to what feels like the source, delineating it with tongue-in-cheek diction as a “fatal flaw” and then more explicitly owning trauma as the thing he‘s always tried to fix. “kintsugi” introduces the same fissure in the body, personifying himself as shattered into a thousand pieces and observing that he is held together by where he has fractured. Around the time of “SCARS,” the damage is overtly suspect, gussied up as “badges of honor” worn proudly, recognized to be the surest signs of trauma turned to triumphant survival. On “weight on you,” the chest-out grandeur is absent, with Beedie spending a whole verse to his daughter‘s march and bite, remembering her “take a stand and crawl” over the sounds of his own prayer, what he prayed on, not to be confused.
“window to my soul” is opened when someone almost half frozen and invited into the house to sit by the fire. Beedie is sitting there “feeling so cold” just waiting there like he has been waiting before, and following his instinct to a place where god still speaks. Beedie is feeling so cold. He has “left the window to my soul open,” and calls the soul bound by the believer. “regeneration of the self” is a compressed outline, looping the “kintsugi” hook before proclaiming that he is strong enough to take the best of everything in the world and survive. Beedie says that rap saved his life on “prey b4 tha meal,” and he makes it clear by turning trauma into triumph.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “kintsugi,” “prey b4 tha meal,” “SCARS”