Album Review: Labor of Love by Blxst
Blxst self-produces a record that calls love a kind of work. The reassurance songs run together, while the fatherhood and survival songs are where the work shows.
The opening voice on Labor of Love is doing no singing at all. Over stripped-down keys, dry and right up close, Blxst lays out the argument he’s here to make: Love is just something you keep showing up to do, something you’re there for even when you’re there wrong, even when you’re there tired, perfect or not, as long as you aren’t there on your way out. The South Central singer, rapper, and producer who composed and performs all of these tracks himself, and on the follow-up to 2024’s I’ll Always Come Find You, he pushes a bigger, harder word onto this recurring theme. Devotion has always come easily for him. The title wagers that it’s not supposed to, that there’s an actual cost that should bring, and the core, unresolved question lingering over it all is whether he can make it sonic or if it’s just a more polite way of saying the smooth assurances that came so naturally to him.
Blxst keeps arriving at the same declaration, by a slightly different door each time. On “Outside,” a man staying in is the whole love story; he turned down the club for someone worth more than it is, a spot held in case she somehow forgot, and “Waking up to you don’t get boring.” On “Why,” the woman he’s speaking to is his singular reason for stopping his search, “You my why/Yeah, you my reason why.” On “Something Bout It,” the words are there to dismiss any fight as just another thing they can conveniently forget, because “All we need is outside.” They’re all warm, well-rounded, and easy to slip into, and each just loops the reassurance of the one before, the low end and clean production holding up as they keep insisting he isn’t going anywhere.
When he’s forced to truly sing through an actual disagreement, the writing tightens up. On “Ruin,” the rare love song with more than one person in the room, not one lone guy smooth-talking his way into peace of mind, Blxst admits early on, “You say I start off with the hurting, my fault/My bad, I’m certain I do,” and then Sasha Keable takes it on and refuses to allow the admission to suffice on its own, “Don’t make it/Seem like we ain’t both in the wrong,” before handing it back to him and posing the rhetorical question: “Isn’t it so ironic you put this pressure on me?” Two characters pulling at the same knot give this track a tension the solo reassurances never manage. “Just My Type” thrives on the opposition, the day-glow tenderness and the late-night need smashed together in a single breath, “Love you in the morning/Fuck you late at night,” the guy ready to make a runner’s exit picturing himself waking up with a wife. “Is That Too Much” presents the familiar plea for a sake in Osaka, a passport, some quiet, but a sampled voice at the end turns the entire query upside down with the simple question: “Is that too much of the Black woman to ask of the Black man?”
Outside the bedroom, Blxst works harder. “Work” goes back to a father who Blxst admits is “far from a deadbeat,” the kind who “loved his kids and never was hardly home,” whose “middle name was his job” “Work was his middle name,” he raps, and the rest of the song is him trying to do the inverse without ever becoming that man. “Can’t imagine my kids not in the same house as me,” he insists on the heredity that terrifies him (“The apple too close to tree”), so he speaks the countermeasure out loud, over Cheyenne Wright’s “After midnight, never leave me,” “Generational curse, let’s put a reverse to it.” Love is what you do for someone unable to reciprocate yet. “Right Back” echoes this worry quietly. Blxst counts who remained, “I can count on one hand who the last ones left” before listing who it is he is raising for, “I’m raising two kings, God gifted me hope.” While the love songs address a lover asking them to remain, these songs ask Blxst.
Lori Perry sings the hook for “Day After Day,” an old vocal about working through difficulty, “Down on my luck and up against the wind,” and it’s the only place where Blxst seems beaten down rather than fluid. He sounds like he is calculating losses, “L after L ‘til I won with it”, but then confesses the victory never fixed the “floor beneath him” “I made it out/But back to square one, God, what is that about?” Big Sad 1900 goes on the second verse, colder. He sounds like a brother lost in the sky who will not question God and a mother he intends to right with; pain is what “made him who he is.” “He Can” responds to all of this grief later with pure nerve; a man who “bottled up my life, let it out in the booth/They pay for my pain” and put together the rest “Brick by brick.” When he asks, “If not me then who?” the confidence he possesses carries the weight of all that he was already burying in the earlier song.
On “Home”, the fear has blood relations. Blxst spans further on this one song than any other; “Still a eastside baby,” he walks back to the block, circling around one memory; a drive-by “Flashbacks to five, remember they drove by/Shot up the whole crib.” He is instantly drawn back into that doorway by the sudden, deafening blast. He watches it affect his son: “I feel for my son, he show me the same face/The one when you realize your innocence ain’t safe.” He is not addressed to anyone here, but a father observing his son experiencing a fear he felt at five; a father hoping that the “palm trees and the ghetto bird” in the hook outlast it.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Right Back,” “Work,” “Home”