Album Review: COULD BE TONIGHT by Hulvey
A 27-year-old Georgia rapper spends his last Reach Records album preaching at himself harder than he ever preached at anybody else.
Before he scrubbed supermarket toilets in Atlanta, before Reach Records was even a conversation, Christopher Michael Hulvey was a kid in Brunswick, Georgia who got cut from his basketball team at sixteen and found something else to pour the rejection into. Brunswick keeps surfacing across COULD BE TONIGHT, his third and final Reach album. “Wick” dropped into verses the way only locals say it. His grandfather, dead since Hulvey was seven, still there in the lyrics. His wife Rachael and their sons Memphis and Rocky named so often they start to feel like co-authors. The whole thing dropped April 11 with no advance press, pay-what-you-want via EVEN, produced entirely by xander. Jesus is coming back unannounced. So the album should arrive the same way.
Nine of those twenty tracks open with the same spoken tag. “Holy Spirit, speak through me.” By the fourth or fifth appearance, the invocation stops sounding like prayer and starts sounding like compulsion, which is exactly what “OCD” is about. xander.’s production holds a single temperature across the runtime, uptempo and percussion-forward, trusting the vocal to carry the emotional shifts. “DAVE,” co-produced with John Michael Howell, Micah Palace, and ZVC, jolts with a churchier bounce than anything around it; “ROOFTOP,” co-produced with Lasanna “ACE” Harris, lets the sound widen slightly. xander.’s dominance is intentional. One ear, one palette, one conversation stretched across an hour.
The first verse Hulvey raps on his own farewell record is an indictment of himself. On “HE WILL RETURN,” the opener: “I gave all I had for a rap dream/Gave my wife, gave my sons, gave up Christ for number ones/I gave all I had for Christian rap dreams/He said, ‘You actin’ like you one, but you are not my son.’” Hulvey is telling you he might have faked his entire career. The next nineteen tracks answer the accusation, and nothing gets tied off neatly. On “FOREVER SHINE,” he admits it: “I made this album to get ‘em ready for return of the King/I didn’t realize the one to get ready was actually me/Was breathin’ on tracks, but deep in my chest I couldn’t even breathe.” He had been making Christian rap. He was not sure he had been being a Christian.
A text arrived from Kanye West inviting Hulvey to write in Spain. On “INFLUENCER$,” he raps about it directly: “Got a text to work with you in Spain, out the spaceship/Producer said ‘Jesus need us to save you.’” His response was non-negotiable. “I said ‘The only way I’m going is if Doug go.’” Doug is his spiritual director. “I can’t paint for you, but we can pray for you/Jesus walks to the door and He waits for you.” “Just let go” repeats six times at the close, and you can hear the cost of the refusal in how long he holds the phrase. A 26-year-old rapper turning down a Kanye session is not a flex on this album. It is what fear looks like from inside a faith you actually believe.
Hulvey got on his knees on his shower floor and prayed for the man who made him want to rap. He never says Lecrae’s name on “HEROES,” but the clues are everywhere: “I was sixteen, cut from the team, felt seen when you rapped/A Christian with rap dreams, who else would even pursue that?” He writes to Rachael in verse two. In verse three, a fan Hulvey has never met picks up the pen: “Been a fan since 22, I heard Beautiful/Went to your tour at 23, felt the spirit full/Your melodies was heavenly and I was singing everything/Until I lost my mama, ain’t no hero for this type of thing/Your music was a gift ‘til I needed more than sound.” The fan’s verse is the one the album cannot answer. Hulvey knows it. And verse four is a father addressing his child: “Millions of fans listenin’ but you are his greatest witness/Hulvey means noble son, his name is yours to live in.” Four layers of love and inadequacy pinned to one refrain, and none of them resolve.
Hulvey is washing his sons’ baby bottles for the second time, checking the door lock for the eighth, asking God to wash his sins one more round. “Head spinnin’ on the same cycle, let me repeat it just to check/Wash my little boys’ baby bottles just to make sure they ain’t sick/Is my door locked to the Lord? For the eighth time, wash my sins.” “Again” appears five, six, seven times until Hulvey catches himself mid-bar. “Wait, I-I, I think I said ‘again’ too much, hold on.” The song’s compulsive repetitions do the diagnosing themselves. “$EPARATION” does something stranger. Hulvey writes as Christ, proposing to the Church in first person, and the allegory holds all the way to its final image. “As I look down, all I see is a chip in her arm.” The mark of the beast, tucked into a love story. And “YOUNG RULER$” retells the rich young ruler parable from Matthew 19 until Hulvey flips into first person. “Funny thing is I’m the rich man.” In the outro, the parable collapses into autobiography. “I couldn’t leave my deal, but I signed the thing/Reach told me to be free, and made it right today.” The Reach Records contract resolution arrives inside a Bible story, not after it.
Connor Price, the Canadian rapper who guests on “AUTOMATIC,” is the album’s unlikeliest collaborator and the sharpest argument for Hulvey’s ear. Price is not from the Christian rap world, but he rapped from a position of genuine alignment and it never sounded forced: “Devil playin’ grace with me, well, that’s a far cry/When I need direction, read the Bible, not no star sign/What’s a zodiac? I already know the plan.” Kijan Boone on “RICH LIKE THI$” matched Hulvey’s intensity with a testimony that justified its place: “With every inch of my body, I’m serving the Lord, I remember just serving the ounce.” And DREW., Hulvey’s little brother, closes “SPEECHLESS” by putting the brotherhood on record: “Hulvey my big bro, but I’m lil’ bro/God seeing through my pain like a window.”
Hulvey is writing “SKY PRIORITIE$” from an airplane, calculating the cost of the career he chose. “To lose a couple blue stacks or lose my baby boys?/To miss a couple mic checks or miss my wife’s voice?/Got sky priorities, I made my choice.” Then Rachael Hulvey speaks. “RACHAEL’S INTERLUDE” halts the album entirely. No beat behind her, nothing in the mix but her voice. Rachael, on faith and evidence: “You will know a tree by its fruit/Do you only care what people think of you when you’re in public?/What are you like when nobody’s watching?” Hulvey argued theology through rap for eighteen tracks, and his wife walked up to the mic and said it simpler.
DC3’s verse on “AMERICAN IDOLZ” is muddled where everything around it stays precise; his bars lose syntax in places that read like a rough draft got printed. A few of the praise tracks run on enthusiasm past the point of new information, and xander.’s single-producer uniformity wears thin on an hour-long record. You keep waiting for the sound to open up. It doesn’t. Torey D’Shaun’s second verse on “NIGHT NIGHT” is inventive, narrating the Second Coming as a normal Tuesday that gets interrupted, but it is also the kind of eschatological scene-painting the rest of the album avoids. COULD BE TONIGHT is longer and messier than CRY, and Hulvey knows it.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “OCD,” “HEROES,” “COME ALIVE”