Album Review: Comfortably Suffering by Duncecap & Samurai Banana
On their first album together in a decade, the Queens rapper and his longtime producer reunite with sharper teeth and heavier bags under their eyes.
Ten years passed between collaborative full-lengths for the rapper and producer who first linked up through a scrappy Long Island hip-hop collective called WATKK. In that gap, both kept working. The producer, a Providence-born turntablist and theremin player based in Brooklyn, put out an instrumental solo record and kept spinning for other MCs. Duncecap released six projects with six different producers, bouncing between Backwoodz Studioz and self-released material, each one a little more worn down than the last. When he and Samurai Banana finally got back together for Comfortably Suffering, the tenderness that ran through their 2016 debut Human Error had curdled into something confrontational. The Bandcamp liner notes, written by Gary Suarez, flag the shift. Anyone expecting Duncecap’s usual sad-sack brooding might be startled by the fury here. And the fury is real, but so is the exhaustion sitting right behind it.
The most direct material zeroes in on the internet’s colonization of personhood, and Duncecap doesn’t dress the argument up. On “Content,” he lists the pipeline: emotions go into journals, journals become memoirs, memoirs become newsletters, newsletters become opinions, opinions become reviews, insecurities become captions, ideas become jokes. Family photos turn to “fodder.” He says outright, “I didn’t make art to feed an algorithm/I didn’t make music to please an algorithm,” and then admits he’s doing it anyway, “Commodifying my art/Using every piece of this deer in the headlights.” “Doomscroll” picks up the same thread from the consumer side, cataloguing the feed as “guru, life coach, victim, scholar, thirst trap, shitpost, status update going live in an hour.” A sample about colonizing every free minute of our lives drops in, and then Duncecap confesses he tries to leave his phone at home, locks himself away from his apps, but “somehow it finds my hand and watches me ‘til I am trapped.” He dubs the phone a guillotine that turns out to be a butter knife.
Buried in the middle of “Rome In a Day” is the most jarring admission on the LP. Friday night: “I don’t wanna be alive/Eat ‘cause I gotta, I wanna get high.” Sunday night: “I still wanna die/Slept for a day and not energized.” Between those two confessions, Duncecap rattles off multi-flasking (his word), weighing everything out, building and destroying and rebuilding, “the beautiful struggle, the seed, and the birth/Withering, pruning, hands in the dirt,” and the refrain that resting only counts if it serves more work. “Ashtrays Overflowed” covers adjacent ground with more sardonic detail. He watches a roach blow away on a beautiful day, describes himself as “paralyzed by the amount of choices, promising myself fun,” then lands on the hook, “Officially stressed out, but at least I have a song.” And “Playing Therapist Only Gets You Clients” goes somewhere darker. Duncecap is the person everyone confides in, and he calls out the hero complex behind it (“Search traps like a bat signal, here he comes to save the day/Hero complex regurgitating pop psych soundbites”), and then turns the accusation head-on.
“Mediating a one-sided argument
They’re talking to the wall
I stay strong, brick by brick
I learned it from you, too.”
Samurai Banana’s production sticks to mid-tempo grooves with dusty samples, fuzzy synths, and a knack for knowing when to pull the beat back. The BPMs rarely climb above the low 90s, which locks the whole record into a trudge that fits Duncecap’s headspace. “Burn Baby Burn” starts with a spoken sample about cleansing fire and then drops into a heavy, lurching loop while Duncecap rants about not trusting words or people. “Oh No” skitters along a quicker tempo with a staccato snare pattern that gives his diss verses somewhere to jab. “Great Dane” has a menacing low-end thump that makes room for Fatboi Sharif’s characteristically abstract verse to stack its images vertically without crowding the mix. Banana’s choices tend toward restraint over maximalism, and nothing here overstays its welcome. At thirty minutes and twelve songs, Comfortably Suffering doesn’t pad itself.
When Duncecap stops turning inward, the album sharpens into something meaner. “Oh No” goes after a specific person with surgical spite: “You’re a pufferfish scared, skin thin and cold/Full of hot air with a desperate soul.” He asks, “Are you a bad politician or a grifter?” and then spends the second verse tracing the routine of walking away from someone who won’t change. “Be Upset” broadens the scope to politics. Duncecap barks, “Punch a fascist, what is the hold up?/Follow through, it’s all in the shoulders,” and paints boiling frogs turned into new soldiers. k-the-i???’s guest verse goes denser and more abstract, threading colonization, monetization, and genocide into a chain of images that refuse to settle into one clear argument. “Burn Baby Burn” is the most overheated of the three, both lyrically and sonically, and it’s the one place where Duncecap’s insistence on metaphor gets heavier than the beat can carry.
Fatboi Sharif’s verse on “Great Dane” is pure Sharif, baroque and unreadable, referencing “postcard and perplexed page master pistol whipping” and “Doctor Doom at the pet zoo” with no interest in meeting you halfway. Old Grape God opens “Sell Sand” with the album’s loosest, most confident verse. He talks about recharging in motion, each chapter being denser than the last, and concedes “easy being honest when you assume no one’s listening.” Duncecap’s own verse on “Sell Sand” circles back to the album’s central preoccupation, asking “You really want a milli, bud?/Or the feeling you have power over being completely fucked?” It’s the closest he comes to spelling out what the whole record is about, and he buries it in a song about selling sand to the ocean, which is about the right level of absurdity.
Toward the end of the record, “Invisible Walls” begins with “When’s the last time you leapt blindly?” and spends its runtime inventorying every defense mechanism Duncecap uses to keep from getting close to anything. “Ejector seat muscle memory/My brain’s protected barring arm.” He names himself “the handwritten note, the river of death” and owns up to gaslighting himself, and then the song tells him to poke his head up out the hole. Comfortably Suffering doesn’t wrap things up neatly. It keeps circling between wanting out and wanting more, between selling sand and scrolling feeds and not wanting to be alive on a Friday night and having a song to show for it. The album’s title says it all. The suffering is the comfort, the comfort is the suffering, and Duncecap knows how that sounds. He says it anyway.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Content,” “Playing Therapist Only Gets You Clients,” “Rome In a Day”