Album Review: EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL DIED EARLY by ANKHLEJOHN & V Don
V Don’s loops run chest-level and will not budge. On the right songs, ANKHLEJOHN’s bars push back, and the pressure pays.
Wiring his verses to Navy Blue’s half-deleted loops on 2020’s As Above So Below, he used every deleted frequency as a cue for when to come in. When V Don picked up every beat on EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL DIED EARLY, the equation reversed—ANKHLEJOHN’s bars now hit loops that won’t shed a single frequency, bass stacked on bass and siren synths piled into the top end until he has to push back or disappear. His deadpan clicks with V Don’s unmoving loops on “No Specifics” and “Trauma or Tragedy,” where verse and beat hold the same gear. On the LP’s quieter stretches, that gear runs without current, and the songs that need it most get the least.
Over a Watergate-era sample and a looped voice about the Arab-Israeli war, “Stoneisland” pins itself to one tempo for four minutes. Pitching his verses at the range the sample already fills, he names Stone Island jackets and trained assassins while brand names and geopolitics pile up on a single four-bar loop. Every bar presses the previous one further into the concrete, and the loop’s refusal to move gives the verse a surface harder with each pass. And “Stoneisland” makes the stubbornness count.
Stacking bricks and surveillance for a full sixteen on “Solar Faxx!,” he drops to a different altitude for one bar. He raps, “the sun ninety-three million miles away,” a middle-school fact planted at the bottom of a verse that never left the block until that line. Ninety-three million miles, buried in a verse about coke rocks, pulls the whole song into orbit. As similar shifts in altitude land elsewhere on the album, few of them stick; “Solar Faxx!” reaches escape velocity—the LP’s biggest lift-off.
Misspelled as ‘AHNKHLEJOHN’ on Spotify’s bus-stop billboards across D.C. in 2021, he had been running Shaap Records solo for six years, the whole operation down to one pair of hands and one name. Where his prior collaborators had come from inside the Southeast-to-East-Coast underground, V Don walked in as a Harlem outsider with a platinum credit from A$AP Rocky and a production ear built on Smoke DZA and Dave East sessions, outside the laundromat tape-recorder circles ANKHLEJOHN started in. It’s his first record where someone else’s instincts set the temperature. Shaap’s first Harlem visitor.
Marcberg, Roc Marciano’s 2010 debut, was built on a single producer’s dry loops and left half-bars empty by design. Where he cut silence into his measures, V Don won’t let the loop go—on “Day One,” a looped voice sits for its portrait while the verse steps away from rap. Since both rappers leave their bars half-full, the beats underneath have to carry it; his beats had blank patches, and V Don’s seal shut. On “Day One,” loop and verse stand in front of the same painting, and neither one has picked up the brush.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Stoneisland,” “King, Pawn & Rook,” “Solar Faxx!”