Album Review: Sow & So by Nappy Nina & Swarvy
Their second LP plays like a small band that has been a rap album the whole time. Nina’s writing has gotten sharper around money and family; Swarvy plays the rooms most rappers sample.
Translator’s Note: Originally written in Japanese; translated into English for publication.
Does anyone need another LP from a rapper and her one producer right now? The polite answer is no, but the polite answer is wrong. Listen for the sub-bass on the second song and you can hear the rhymes striking the atmosphere, a small mechanical fact that breaks the suspicion of a working method gone safe—though the press cycle still has not caught up to it. A duo turned into a small band, and the gamble obviously lands where the safer move would have stalled.
Mourning Due, released in 2023, apparently couldn’t keep Nina’s verses from fading into atmosphere before they finished arguing. Sharper now. Her hooks on the new record hold a single phrase, and “Cut from a cloth that has been discontinued” arrives at the top of “Been Through” with the weight of something said one time on a phone call. While the older record left its lines half-finished, this one finishes them and holds the floor.
Out in Los Angeles around 2015, Mark Sweeney landed in a house with Mndsgn and the rapper Zeroh and started touring on bass in the Mndsgn live band. Sweeney, who records as Swarvy, came up playing the same instruments his peers were digging through old vinyl to find: Rhodes piano, electric bass, kit drums, occasionally a guitar. A small band’s worth of him. The boundary between a sample and a take is left undecided on his beats, since the player and the source are the same person. That is the working theory of Sow & So, and it shows up the moment the second you hit play.
Hearing Blu’s verse on “Pay for Favor” pulls a long lineage into the room. “Barely coming up with the rent, give me something, man,” Blu raps, a line that could have closed any of his own records going back to Below the Heavens. While Exile gave that catalog two decades of old soul cut into beats Blu wrote his precarity over, Swarvy plays the bass and Rhodes himself, which moves the music a step closer to a band recording and a step further from a sample reconstruction. Two duos, one shared condition, different methods.
Nina’s voice on “Mail Clerk” drops to something near a reading register, the jazz-hop pocket behind her holding steady. “The truth is half my family hurting from they mind/I’m checking every day in case I show the signs,” she raps. Two bars carry the cost of an inheritance long before any spending becomes visible, and Palaceer Lazaro answers from the next verse calling her “the flyest rapper out.” It is not what she needed to hear. Beside what Nina has just said, the compliment is a small light on a heavy room. Her grandfather’s alcoholism turns up again on “One Fifty,” and foster care surfaces in a single bar of “Deep Stretch.”
Felted drums and a high-pitched synth chime trace a slow melodic line through the mix of “Deep Stretch.” Bass guitar and a held Rhodes chord run the spine of “Half Step” while Tongo Eisen-Martin reads a poem about gun handles and snow angels on factory floors. The instruments quietly give Nina’s writing space and weight in one stroke, so the words land carrying the room instead of fighting for it. A keyboard struck by hand under all of it, the album’s working theory holding its position.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Been Through,” “Mail Clerk,” “Pay for Favor”