Album Review: Salvation for the Wicked by Ransom, Boldy James & Nicholas Craven

Three hustlers split a hymnal and find cocaine between the pages. Every prayer on this record is addressed to the scale. Detroit math and Jersey confessionals over Montreal soul loops.

Courtesy of Momentum Entertainment LLC.

Most drug rap picks a lane. Glorify or repent, brag or grieve, and move on. This particular record does something harder to pull off and much uglier to sit with. It worships and sins in the same gesture, and it refuses to separate those impulses even when a verse begs for it. The album title alone should tell you the pitch: salvation for the wicked, not from wickedness but for it, as in designated, as in earned. Ransom, Boldy James, and Nicholas Craven dropped a project where every song kneels at the altar and counts product with the same pair of hands.

On “Sinners,” Boldy rattles off the economics first, two for twenty-four like Moses Malone, stashing, ducking RICO, peeling C-notes, buying his sister a Drac’ while he holds a Uzi for himself. He talks about all of it with the monotone calm of somebody reading a grocery receipt. The details are so precise they stop sounding like rap bars and start sounding like depositions. Then Ransom steps in and shifts the temperature entirely. “I can’t ask the Lord to save me/If I tried, He’d ask me why/Ain’t no place in Heaven that’ll take me.” That’s not posturing. That’s a man who did the spiritual math and came up short. He gives directions to his own demise like a Mapquest printout. Right on Prison Street, two lefts down from misery, two stops to victory. And then he asks you to admit he showed you the path. Ransom’s talent has always been disguising resignation as bravado. Here, he barely bothers with the disguise.

The funniest hook on the whole record belongs to “Forgiveness.” Ransom asking shorty to forgive him before the liquor seizes his kidneys, telling her to save her fantasies for Disney, bragging about having CDs to frisbee in the same breath he’s advertising crack vials. It’s absurd and dead serious at once, and both MCs split that same energy. Ransom brags about dinner at the Whitney with no bodyguard, then threatens to give you slugs to chit-chat with. Boldy’s turn shifts to a woman who owns her house, keeps four bank accounts, runs five or six cars and no man in sight. He describes her independence with the exact inventory language he uses to catalog bricks on other cuts. Green and red Gucci sneaks that look like an artichoke. He can say a lot about her but can’t call her broke. Boldy’s skill has always been refusing to distinguish between admiration and appraisal.

Metaphor dies on “Collection Plates.” Boldy fell asleep during church and never listened to the preacher because the work was hidden in the speaker, and the real devotion happened over scales in hopes that the weight would bless properly, blood money sliding into the church’s collection plate like a tithe. Ransom’s chorus drags election dates, rations, and rubber-banded cash into the same prayer. Young Chris arrives and name-drops Raekwon and The Purple Tape, and then his mother fighting cancer drops into the middle of a triple-time drug rundown with zero warning. “Faith be with us, God, my momma fightin’ cancer/Father, I don’t have the answer/Pissin’ out methazine from the Phantom.” That collision is the record’s gut punch, delivered bare and unrepeated.

“Offerings” coasts. Both rappers talk big, with Ransom warning that you can fit in any cemetery, telling you he’s been in every situation, daring a man to pucker up for the kiss of death, while Boldy calls himself the librarian because all his money’s off the books. These bars are capable and the punchlines connect, but neither man says anything on “Offerings” that they haven’t said with sharper specifics elsewhere, and the hooks grinding through the same chorus start to sound rehearsed. On a seven-song project, a stretch that coasts sticks out like a count that comes up short.

Everything recalibrates on “Field of Nightmares.” Boldy’s Comfort Suite becomes its own geography. A thousand Xanax in a minivan described as a bar mitzvah. Counting up a two hundred piece from a single brick. Shooting off a man’s beat if he runs his mouth. The Comfort Suite generates a couple hundred thousand and also requires ducking heat in a drought. Ransom admits to solitude on his own turn, super reclusive and hardly seen, watching Fury-Usik in a Rolls-Royce Ghost between vivid shootouts with undercover cops and collect calls to the connect from a cordless phone. All of it sounds closer to a Tuesday afternoon than a punchline. OT the Real arrives and drops the temperature another ten degrees. He broke the yolk so they call him Sheikh like a Muslim leader, and he spends the rest of his bars hungry, hunting junkie Justin Biebers, feeding his youngins by breaking a pound in half. OT’s contribution is the most desperate on the record, and that desperation gives the Comfort Suite its real weight. Luxury and survival eating off the same plate.

The closer turns numbers into the only theology that stuck, and “Leather Sandals” got there first, one track earlier. On “Leather Sandals,” Boldy stashes 2016 in the dash and floor panel, counts hundred-gram batches that look cut with glitter, and watches junkies OD off a one-hitter quitter. The numbers pile up like a ledger that replaced a diary. Ransom matches him with bullets sending bodies flying through a screen, suppliers who knew what the fire would do, living rooms full of hooded goons with open cases. He closes by borrowing Boldy’s hook line about the streets being ugly and swearing he’ll leave them bloody if anybody touches his people.

Then “16 Tithes” picks up that counting and turns it sacred. Boldy counts from one to sixteen and hangs a crime on every digit. Seven miles from where he’s from, stuffing rounds in a drum, a mini-fourteen that paints without a brush. His brother doesn’t joke much and flashes a cannon in your face like a close-up. He ends confessing that his life can’t fit in a sixteen, which, on a track titled after tithes, means he’s telling God and the booth the same thing. I don’t have enough bars for what I’ve done. Ransom matches him number for number with the four-five squeezes, the six feet deep, the seven-foot players seen from courtside, the MAC-10 and MAC-11 deleting hard drives. When he was thirteen he sold dope, and at fourteen, police shot another cousin.

Craven’s production throughout has the patience of a man who knows both these rappers need room to breathe between confessions. The loops feel like Sunday morning soul left on a dusty shelf in a trap house, warm without being comforting. He never crowds a bar, and on a project this short, that restraint kept two very different storytellers from trampling each other. Ransom writes eulogies for himself between the threats. Boldy inventories a warehouse and expects the raid any minute. They occupy the same tracks without occupying the same headspace, and Craven is the reason neither voice cancels the other out.

Seven tracks deep and not a single bar gets wasted pretending the format is longer than it is. From Young Chris mentioning his mother’s cancer between drug bars, to Ransom admitting Heaven won’t have him, to Boldy describing a woman’s self-sufficiency with the same vocabulary he uses for cocaine, and OT the Real breaks a pound for his youngins and calls it feeding, these moments matter because they refuse to separate the sacred from the profane. The sacred was never separate to begin with. These men put rubber-banded cash in the collection plate because that’s the only offering they have.

Favorite Track(s): “Sinners,” “Collection Plates,” “Field of Nightmares”