Album Review: Life Is... Fleeting by Lync Lone
Lync Lone writes dread and defiance of weed, money pressure, and Rochester street names.
For some MCs, the measurement of their career comes in bars; for others, in months. The second category is what a Rochester writer has resembled over the past two years, dropping full-length after full-length, self-recorded and self-released under his Gonzo! Records imprint—the Hunter S. Thompson streak laid across everything like a coat. We’re talking about Lync Lone, and Life Is... Fleeting pulls one pressure tight underneath, time running out, and the daily question of what that makes us do—stop short or keep going? They don’t take turns between dread and willpower.
He isn’t one for lingering; he might as well present the threat and, before the line even finishes itself, reply. He can take the ice that makes the winter of Season of Ghosts a reality and answer it, mid-breath, “It’s cold but God know that my spirit won’t be broken.” Whatever life dishes him over “November Rain” lands as an examination, with the solutions laid down prior to any test even coming close: “Life keep givin’ me tests, it’s no pressure though I’ma beat ‘em.” And on “The Big Picture,” he straight out gives the bad news, plainly: “I’m in a bad state of mind, but I get through it every time, so don’t ask if I’m okay,” putting the admission alongside the cure in one bar and giving no room to acknowledge the fear sans the will.
The hook to “Bearer of Bad News” is laid bare: “As long as the smoke keep twirlin and the blunt keep burnin/I don’t really ever got too much complaints,” content rented out blunt by blunt. The stronger chemicals become more of an aid to see than something to rage with: “Shroomwich” starts off with Lync Lone eyeballing his reflection in a puddle, “I look inside a puddle and see a portal to be immortal,” boredom defeated through the science. “Fidelio” brings him into an alien world with the same stuff, shrooming out toward a long silence while whatever eyes hang in the atmosphere cast his passage back upon him. The trip doesn’t get him away from the thoughts; it just douses him into them a little better, a more well-defined darkness than the sober sort.
The similar clear eye that Lync Lone directs toward the journey that the highs provide turns itself toward him: “Voodoo” begins dull with years lost to holding someone down, feeling them like stone in his chest, a love-lost quote that he cannot get past: “If it’s meant to be, it’ll be.” Then it’s one moment that sets off fireworks: waiting in a store lobby in line at the free sample station, grabbing four small pastry-like items from a “take one” display. His ex asks why he has to take them all, and Lync takes a breath before answering, “Through years of speculation, I surmised it was an ego problem/I could always see the next high, but couldn’t see the bottom.” It isn’t subtle about the lady; it gets to the heart of the matter, starkly: “I fucked around and found out how not to treat women,” a straightforward adult confession. It is easily the most straightforwardly observed song on this LP, the lone track on which the strength ceases for an hour long enough for him to wonder what the issue genuinely is.
The city streets he mentions are the real streets: “Monroe Ave” built out of the walking itself, “Walking down Woodlawn with nothing to lose/Walking down Pearl Street with something to prove,” these very avenues hold alternate weights depending on the time. It feels like the album at its darkest, tightest, like a pressure is coming at him until the verses push back against an immovable wall, when he can admit, on a tune christened with his hometown block’s name, that he “don’t know where home is.” He’s inhabited Monroe long enough to question and accept it both. “Woodlawn St.”—short, raw, and a perfect picture of the community—exudes grit, but then Lync Lone plants his feet with a flat, “I’m opp, but this on my God, so I’m locked into what I chose.” It remains a home he can’t completely accept and doesn’t have a problem leaving, when he can stand still there or not.
The featured artists rarely seem to get apart from the spell; mostly they play off of it. On “Life’s a Trip” Brother Tom Sos picks up the hook with a local nuance, “They say that life is a trip/But coming from where I’m from, we learned that life is a bitch,” then declares his affection for her all the same: “We love her because she righteous and thick.” Jay Cinema catches Lync Lone’s contempt for the public persona on “88,” ashing his blunt on expensive fibers and claiming, “Still before my time to go, I’ll be ashing on Persian rugs,” along with the kids that came up alongside him, flatly rejecting the fame and stating, “You won’t find me within the industry/You can catch me in the streets.” Elcamino brings some serious grit from Buffalo, matching it with Lync’s Rochester accent on this track, and stacking successes against all that is negative: “They gave me a hut, and I turned it to a fortress,” then comparing the length of his timeline to Minaj and Drake. Every one of them is returning to the money and mortality Lync Lone can’t put away.
Many of these songs are completed by audio from cinema dialogue. Nothing that we hear is by chance. A sliver of a Terence Fletcher quote from Whiplash about how “good job” is “the two most damaging words in the English language” finishes “November Rain,” already on wary footing, while a bit from Eyes Wide Shut—the password to get into the hidden world—concludes “Fidelio,” a song about secrets and who gets to know about them. Moonrise Kingdom’s disembodied voices that announce two kids’ intent to meet in a field end “Voodoo,” a sad and painful cut about losing someone. More spoken word sections are unaccredited, including a monologue that details how much a man enjoys keeping his options open, not choosing anything, and a concluding lament to how swiftly it all passed. While none of it’s written by him, none of it’s just trivia; it serves only to toss his ideas back, to mirror them in another man’s words.
Loss does make it into the album and goes in without much ado. “Divine Intervention” offers the most unfortunate representation: “My homie died, should I admire?/Don’t even know how the hell I’m still alive here.” He even has a conversation on this tune with the dearly departed that’s a year removed and far from a full process after all that’s come and gone. However, there’s no prolonged grieving, because almost immediately after, he declares, “My demise is just a myth,” turning the dial back on to what everything else here is. All of it underneath lies the spirit of a kid who’s been writing for years, counting the amount of time he has and taking that time to push even harder, not pull back. “It stings a little, but it hurts a lot,” is how he expresses it, but he moves on anyway, as he’d decided on this path as a five-year-old and, when he explains it like this, he still seems like he’s got to convince the listener to believe that this is for him.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Monroe Ave,” “Voodoo,” “Divine Intervention”