Album Review: Elevator Music by Lord Sko & Statik Selektah
Statik Selektah’s apprentice spends his debut LP cataloging the tax of getting noticed. Every Henny pour, dead homie, and missed call comes priced.
In “Better Days,” Dave East boasts after Lord Sko’s verse: “From bumming it to watching The Covenant in the Cullinan.” It’s a veteran rapper recognizing and supporting a new talent. Sko at twenty-five from uptown Manhattan just signed to Showoff Records roster of Statik. But his twelve verses show this regularly: “Lotta times I’m showing face and probably leaving though.” This contradiction is the formidable argument for an uptown debut ever on beats from Statik. Sko never tries to resolve this contradiction.
While Sko never throws punches, he moves pieces. You hear this on “How It Is” with a bright piano and a ticking drum loop from Statik. The same strategy is evident on “Donnie Brasco” too, where he warns with heavy bass and snare: “I don’t wanna dance to the same song.” Strategy is stronger here than show. On “Star of Wish,” he prays into swelling orchestral sound: “Pray for another day, I see the light.” He moves like someone who sees his chances but knows one mistake could cost everything completely. That’s album core gamble and the boldest move for a twenty-five-year-old ever on the release of Showoff in ages. He chooses this path rather than the flashy bet his fellow uptown peers are making. He trades stamina for strategic thinking, even though flipping the table would be easier. Flash move would have been weak; this slower option is much better.
In the middle of the album, Statik makes warm spaces for Sko, turning his exhaustion into a false second wind. On “Wonder” over a meagerly dragging lo-fi piano lick, Sko delivers the most personal line about dad: “Tryna find it in me as a man to go talk to my father/And time only make it harder and harder.” “Northern Lights” rides a hazy jazz-soul groove cut with the producer’s needle-scratch hooks. B-Real and Smoke DZA pass the verse to Sko, who admits, “Truthfully, I still might be up in Peru smoking Dutches.” The haze becomes evidence: it’s the air the writing breathes.
Ab-Soul lands on “Drunk Dial” against a melancholic walking bassline. Sko answers him with the album’s most quotable confession, “I’ve had them highs and lows, almost divide my soul/Been walking tightropes while I’m getting high with a blindfold.” Soul cracks back, “Yo, if that ain’t divine, then I ain’t blind,” and the walking sample holds its single tempo while neither rapper bothers to perform catharsis. Old frame, young problem. Statik puts Sko in a chair next to a guest twice his age and lets him sound 25, and the album’s best editorial choice is to underplay the line that another producer would have scored with a string swell, a swell this record never needed.
Stretched out at the producer’s apartment near the back of “Wish Upon a Star,” impressed by the view enough to admit so but not enough to stop asking what comes next, Sko paints a domestic scene: an elder mentor laughs off the kid’s “One day I’m tryna get like you,” gives him a dap and a nod, then tells him to travel long hours and get a plaque for his wall. A spoken-word coda about Muzak’s elevator-cab origins gets spliced onto the closing strings. The arrangement could have ridden into a victory shape; the cut from earnest bars to instructional voice-over instead leaves the LP’s title hanging on a question about whether music exists to keep passengers from feeling the sway, or to remind them they are climbing. Place that moment beside “Hangman,” in which Sko draws himself into a layover bar in a city he can’t name with his flight delayed and his mind too clouded to remember what he’s there for.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Hangman,” “Northern Lights,” “Wish Upon a Star”