Album Review: TRY AS I MIGHT by SWAMP THUG
After a decade of nonstop Bandcamp releases, SWAMP THUG raps about the living he can’t make over Camoflauge Monk’s loops and GAWD’s sub-bass, and comes away with the best writing of his run.
If you know about Bandcamp, it’s all about name-your-price downloads and massive output, and there aren’t many people who can produce more than this rapper, who has recently put out two SHOCKINGLY RAW volumes just a month apart, and GET IT IN: OHIO EDITION, a Cleveland Heights posse mixtape with Josh The Author, AxL Urameshi, and Day Solo. Besides, he has released a lot of material with THUG ZINE and bromethugzine banners. SWAMP THUG has been doing things at this pace, and on TRY AS I MIGHT, he finally talks about the payment for this pace. And it is almost zero.
While over GAWD’s bass and the thump of 808 drums on “make sumn shake” track, he talks about the economics that are becoming increasingly difficult to survive in, about the dollar he stretches but will not bend, about a mom he prays for with no pension, about songs that receive no attention at all. “I am going to be 25 soon/Still not in position,” he raps on “make sumn shake,” and concludes the first verse with “Don’t wanna die, but getting tired of existing/Try as I might, I cannot make a living.” The second verse goes back in time and tells about a kid with no dreams who was making music in 2016 and was pretending that he expected something from it while praying to God in private, and the something inside him that was telling him to sink. The title track takes the thread over a Camoflauge Monk loop and exposes his voice by opening with “I can’t promise I’ll try, but I’ll try to try/Try as I might, I might never try,” and concluding with a self-correction: “If no one listen, I’m tight,” after saying it before.
None of it slows the rapping down. On “Ramaseeana,” while the drums from Camoflauge Monk track are churning beneath him, the threats run through lab equipment and consumer electronics, positrons and tomography, a Tamagotchi, polyethylene terephthalate, Clippy, and a guest appearance on the inaugural season of Eric Andre. DW, his collaborator again since 2024’s Programmatic, shows up with ten thousand hours in the rap game and an intact appetite, a straight-edge bayonet aimed at rappers who do not produce, a desire to buy back his masters and depart quickly: “A hundred million meters in the blink of an eye/I’m gone.” The put-downs become even sharper on “quadrivial” track when everything remains alive below his voice as he talks to someone inheriting the buzz, about his failure with a tremendous lead, about embarrassment of a child without a Wikipedia page whose parents have one, about losing in case of slightest tweak of variable, and then signs off saying “You fucking cattle.” The second verse of “SWAMP THUGGEE” is the same density with the brake off: Miss Trunchbull, the Manchurian Candidate, Candide, and Kali Yuga stacked in one verse with chopped-up wordplay going under the whole flow.
Camoflauge Monk uses hard drums and rough repeated sample phrases as his pocket. GAWD strips “iAngola” of everything, leaving deep sub-bass and skeletal programming with bass doing all physical work. SWAMP THUG splits his phrasing into short clusters to fit in the pocket for the bass to hit between them, and in that framework he raps the harshest verse here about the economy he actually lives in. Under a hook with the smoke in the air that “smell like asparagus piss,” he attacks the boys trading verses with the weakest rappers in the scene for $15 every five weeks, which costs him six fees to cover for the Denon and the MPC he uses to rap. “Burgeoning trick,” he calls it and says he is trying to lift up with words in it, thus giving the broke talk that came earlier another target besides his bank account.
Differentiating the GAWD tracks here comes to differentiating vocal pressure. Both “XZ” and “XSWL” ride the same sub-heavy skeletons with little arrangement. The gorilla-exhibit hook and a line explaining his prices, no fentanyl in the product, make the first one move, while the second is a quick strike that laughs and dies inside the same hook before the pocket thins. “MAN THUG” track ends the same way, nearly all bass pressure below a short hook, and abruptly cut off, grounded rather than triumphant. All of them stand alone, and when listened to alongside Camoflauge Monk tracks they blur.
The most peculiar loop here belongs to bromethazine. On “LOCUST of control (phenylacetonitrile),” the phrase does scratch the track instead of lying under the voice, and the cadence gets boxed in to match it, with lines fitting into the beat with no room for lift. The first verse is heathen talk, belief in nothing but himself, allegiance to no pledge. The second verse goes outside to blocks where dogs bury the kids early in the grave, to the country where what is rare is anyone making a living wage, the government assistance provided to placate, the system made ghost to litigate, welfare going uphill to those who already have it, and Spaghetti-Os barely available. Money trouble he talks about on other tracks remains a personal one, but here he identifies it as the policy, and the verse ends on its way to the polls with his friends.
Space finally opens up on the “teeth skin” track, where August Fanon provides more upper grit and movement than sub-heavy tracks around, a rough loop scratched open at the surface rather than buried, and metroworldpeace, another Programmatic alum, drops in as a second underground rapper rather than a hook singer. SWAMP THUG starts it living from windfall to windfall with occasional periods when everything is bad, carving scrimshaws with thin jaws and hoping they will not clench before he passes away. By the second verse his appetite is gone, yet he keeps eating anyway, the passenger who has been sitting longer than anyone can imagine, not bashful, he insists, a man of conviction. “Get a grip and then I lose it/Then I get a grip, and then I lose it,” he raps, “Money like the mental is elusive.” Ten years of unpaid labor sit in that verse, palms itching, M’s counted until the hands cramp, the handshake made to get in wherever he can.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “make sumn shake,” “quadrivial,” “teeth skin”