Album Review: Today Sounds Good by Like
The Pacific Division producer’s contentment is real but thinly written.
Like, the Pacific Division producer who has been making solo rap records since 2016, decided to host this album, not headline it. Twelve songs arrived on Squatch Records, but only ten of them are self-produced. Three outside producers fill in the rest. Phonte appeared twice, and Blu and Exile reunited on “wut happened” with Huey Briss in tow. The role fits him better than the headliner job ever did. The choice was its real central decision and is also its weakest spot.
The album sold contentment on its surface, but the writing showed the bill anyway. On “Washed Gang,” Phonte played Reasonable Doubt in a hybrid “at a reasonable volume” while Like rhymed Birkenstocks-with-socks, pasta made of squash, and shoulder pains, yet the bit was doing something stranger than a flex about middle age. Though the comedy was funny, the premise (that the only available stances were young-at-the-club or old-at-home) narrowed what could be a sharper writer’s argument. Phonte was needed; without him, the verse fails as anything more than a dull checklist.
Generic. “Build Me Up” settled for it, and the song became the softest writing anywhere on the record. The lyric resembled an L.A. wellness brochure, with its oregano oil drops in spring water, glass bottles instead of plastic, food over pharma, and low-vibrational frequencies avoided. Though the items arrived sharp and specific, they describe a brand more than a person. The woman behind the lyric never escapes product placement; she wasted the song. Jansport J’s soul-heavy sample reached for a song the lyric never wrote.
The Met Gala scene on “Dog Park” arrived in a cashmere cardigan with Mims and B Young in tow, then turned the verse around with palo santo, balanced chakras, Red Lobster cravings, mobster flicks watched at the crib, and a charge-it-to-the-game look that everywhere else on the album would feel like a flex but here became a fact about who was in the room. Verse two left the gala for the flea market and the studio, where the rapper smelled of weed, laughed at corny jokers, and asked how you preach Garvey then move like Steve Harvey. Then the phone buzzed before stage; he said it sounded sketchy and stayed where he was. The dog park, a public space chosen over the party, was the song’s whole argument about what distance buys him and what it costs. He chose distance. The song stays inside the choice, missing nothing it could have used, awkward and alive.
Over Like’s heaviest low-end beat, Stevenson sounded anonymous on “wut happened,” the dullest of the three verses on the song. On the title question (“We the last MCs really rappin’, what happened?”), Stevenson asked. Blu answered it three minutes in: “I’m cold, I know, but I’m tryna be righteous.” Huey Briss wins minute three; Stevenson is missing from his own song. Host became host, not headliner, and the imbalance shows what the writer decided about himself.
Serious is the mode on “Intention,” and the writing turns sharper than anywhere else on the record. Over Jacob Rochester’s beat, Stevenson opened with “an ode to the ones with soul beneath the rubble road” and wrote sentences nobody else here tried. BeYoung, the Pac Div third who had sounded underused on the early projects, wins the second verse and out-thinks him with the central line on the record: “I’d rather chop it up with myself, a free therapy session, bet I come up with help.” Asking “what’s the money worth? You blow your brains, the spinach gooey,” he gave the album its only sentence with real stakes. It is the song. The two verses made the record’s strongest case.
A monologue. Between Like’s verse and Sir Michael Rocks’s on the “Namsayin’” interlude, the host stepped off the stage as the instrumental thinned behind him and walked the listener through his stance on showing up. It was the album’s plain stance in his own voice, a refusal of the room he could afford to be in but won’t, and the best move on the record. Over the sharp rhythmic pocket of Like’s beat, he stays home, and the song wins for it.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Intention,” “Dog Park,” “wut happened”