Album Review: Made of Gold by Dark Lo & V Don
The Philadelphia rapper takes a decade apart at close range, giving a store run and a stabbing equal attention and letting each verse run as long as it needs.
It has been more than eight years since Dark Lo became known as an artist among underground hip hop artists. If you have ever loved his music, then you know what to expect from him. In 2017, he began making music under the name of The Crook. All of those albums were created by producer V Don. The album Made of Gold is no exception.
Lo’s world revolves around grocery stores, as is said in the song “Burgers On Wednesday,” where he goes to the grocery store to buy some grapes, uses vegetables as a substitute for steak, uses a pot of boiling water to form an, to watch somebody stabbed over two onions. Twenty years should be enough for him. He will not get any guards. With the end of this verse, he promises that he will forever be in a free mind. The song “Chowline” follows the same story only from another angle of the same kitchen, where the employee exchanges two tunas for a green pepper, an aunt thanking him for extra to a ten-brick sale telling the buyer to leave the car and take the train and warns a young man about fake wrestling moves.
An old-timer doing life owns the chorus to “Made of Gold,” offering up the wisdom not to return or to die since it is the lifestyle he chose. Dark Lo pauses only before an apology to a group of children about falling when their mothers told them to get down when they shot “them shells” to say “My apology to the kids who fell when they mothers told ‘em, ‘Get down, they shootin’ them shells.’” And “Stay Tuned” does likewise, running long as it circles back and forth from scripture in a cell to the wine glass at home and to the former prison that he’s been transferred from. It is fitting also that one bar is “I gave loyalty, they never showed it” and that it loops to a verse about a man he cannot picture any other way but the last way he saw him.
A man moves like the obvious answer, a key hidden under the flower pot, and a mother asks if her son loves jail because he’s always there. Both get buried within “Keep Callin’,” a verse stretched out with ad-libs and a refrain that consistently swallows a thought. The second verse of “Freeze Tag” does the same, following on the heels of a strong opening, with the second half spent stretching out between South Philly, Uptown, West past the zoo but never stopping anywhere in particular. It is the first half that asks the better question, “You ever tipped your lawyer for the shit he did for you?” and the second that offers up the story of knife fights and county jails that run one after the other down the long tail of “Stay Alive 2.” It is the type of day that includes hustling in the cold with Rell, cops rolling out with guns drawn, a woman trying to get them to line up, a truck thrown sideways at a hundred miles an hour, a judge who wanted them shocked, state troopers on the highway, and all of it ending with the same report that they’re alive.
Earlier in the verse, the damage was less extensive but also permanent, for he nearly cried when his Sully left. A fiend was shot in the neck on his first eight ball sale, and a mother said that they done her son wrong for doing what he done. “2000 Grams” covers the same amount of years but from further back, with five years going by before he prays and fasts and the devil shows up in his ear telling him to get in and get out with no fuss. There were five to a bed at his grandmother’s house.
The hook to “Cabin Fever” is longer than some of his verses and is notable as one of the few instances where he addresses himself by name. It is the jailhouse tales that don’t matter to him, the plug not coming until the key comes, his having to leave his last girl, and somewhere in there “Damn, Lo, this cabin fever.” The verse that contains it is notable also for having the most economical two-line story in the whole song: “Judge said if he seen me again, then he seen me again/I went back to him.” What he and his people asked for growing up was a good life, good money, a good wife, but the universe delivered something different.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Stay Alive 2,” “Made of Gold,” “Burgers On Wednesday”