Album Review: if i’m being honest by Dame Atlas
Dame Atlas produced nearly all of his confession himself and aimed song after song at the woman who kept coming back.
Male R&B stopped begging for forgiveness for its role in the relationship somewhere between Usher’s Confessions and Brent Faiyaz’s player records. Dame Atlas is the latest guy putting his case forward with if i’m being honest, entirely solo-written and solo-produced, with the object of his attention one woman—the one who blocked him, begged him to stay, left, and returned. He’s the judge and jury in this situation, and there isn’t anybody disputing in the room.
Dame starts with his questioning on the titular track, wondering where she has been while he remained right there, hurting as much as her, down as much as her. The accusations are laid out straightforwardly. Her ex remained a bum, and it was Dame that made the difference. She begged him to stay on nights when she recalls things differently now, and the pinky promises aren’t worth their weight in whatever they promised. He claims his dirt at the end of the song: “I just been plottin’ on the low, low/Schemin’ on the low.” He owns up to that much and continues to the attack. The compliments on “face card like Angela” come from a man still trying to keep score, a face cut like Angela Bassett, a body like Jessica Rabbit, and the bridge reveals the game. She was supposed to be the girl he tells his mother about, the girl he takes to the pastor. He closes with muttering that she is so hard to love, and the cursing sneaks in at the end.
Dame stops fighting in the middle of the album with “second round,” telling her to stop painting her burns, burns that get seen but never felt, and picking apart her independence talk, every man that she calls toxic mirroring her frustration. He asks the question that lingers below the entire dispute: “You want chaos/I want silence/Do you love my noise?” The brutality gets Biblical on “god don’t make mistakes.” He mocks the baby shower pictures she took by herself, the two kids that a man gave her in his absence, wonders what she was crying for, and insults her body. His final words are theological by putting himself in a sentence with God (“God don’t make no mistakes/I don’t make no mistakes”).
She calls him during the kickoff on “super bowl sunday,” the national anthem playing in the background, when she says she is praying for protection while in fact she is praying her man doesn’t discover anything. Her man is a football player in mid-warm-up as she sits in Dame’s car with mascara running on the fourth down. “He chasing rings/You chasing peace,” says Dame, and he refuses to indulge in sympathy. Crying in the Rolls doesn’t help anything, and she finds herself back in her ‘02 Honda. She would have had better luck with a librarian, sixteen an hour, reading at night, but runs away from good men because she feels something scary. Then Dame turns the camera around: “You’re addicted to chaos too/That’s why I pick up every time.” For one moment, the prosecutor admits to being the getaway car.
Dame, the producer, works with a limited set of sustained keyboards. His preferred trick is subtraction, removing the drums beneath his own voice and letting them hang as he completes a thought. The Pete Rango mix of “crying on the floor” defies that tendency by introducing a pulse that doesn’t pause even if Dame does, dance music for a man watching her dancing through somebody else’s eyes. He makes his phrases shorter on “race ur mind,” riding the drums that are busier than he allows himself, a constant ticking of high percussion under Prada, Balenciaga, and a trip to Argentina like she’s Messi, and pleading not to be the one who will waste her time and her mind. The stillness dries up on “beauty and the beast of Calabasas” and “take it all,” two songs that sit in the same space defined by the bass notes played separately. He describes himself as the beast alone in Calabasas, telling her to tell her mama she loves a bastard, and doesn’t try to build a song beyond that hook. On “take it all,” he pleads to remember the ways he loves her, but doesn’t give her anything more to hold.
Dame promises on “dame’s interlude” he will stand at her side while the trumpets blow, the sky tears open, and the two of them will depart together hand in hand before the moon drowns in blood. It’s a love vow written in the vocabulary of Revelation, sung softly and doubled as the drums drop out around him. After that, the end of the world doesn’t sound romantic anymore. He takes a pill to feel something on “all eyez on me,” wanting hundreds thrown if he dies, seeing his daughter and everything he wants to give her, but seeing something else: “I see the killers/I’m gonna let it off.” The entire song lasts less than ninety seconds. The daughter he envisions speaks. She is the small voice on “aaliyah’s intro,” going through her school week over room noise, Crazy Hair Day, then the day when she wears two mismatched socks, then Dr. Seuss Day, deadly serious, doubling back once she loses track of what she says. Dame places her ahead of any note he sings. He drops the drum grid on “moody’s outro” altogether, slow chords and stacked harmonies under a sequence of questions: “Will you always stay and love me?/What if I spent my last?” She fell for him long before he did. He used to be broke just to see her, but now he flies first class and stays high through all of it, life passing so quickly that he doesn’t land anywhere.
For “high horse,” Dame removes the drums completely from a long intro along with one arpeggio and his voice, and he tells what loving her did to him: “I’ve been bleeding quiet/Just to keep you comfortable.” The distance she talks about he describes as abandonment. She acts like an angel when the lights go on, hides the knives, and tells God she was innocent, but he pulls God into it as well: “If God was watching/He looked away too.” The full drums appear behind him, overlapped with background vocals, and he concludes without hate, saying that he finally sees her and considering it the worst thing she has ever done to him. It’s the only song where the honesty hurts him more than it hurts her, and he pays up.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “second round,” “super bowl sunday,” “all eyez on me”