Album Review: War Cash by CRIMEAPPLE & Evidence
The funniest rap album about greed this year might also be the most honest about what wealth costs. On War Cash, CRIMEAPPLE makes that distance sound earned, funny, and a little sick.
Spending and suspicion live so close together on this record that they might share a lease. Marrakech one bar, Hoboken the next, as if a passport stamp were the only proof of forward motion. Humor rides alongside real malice, and neither one apologizes for the other. Doubt about other people gets burned as fuel. CRIMEAPPLE built his name on rapid-fire threats seasoned with absurd comedy, a New Jersey rapper of Colombian descent who’s released an almost unhinged number of projects since 2017. Evidence, the Dilated Peoples co-founder and Rhymesayers fixture, has spent decades chopping samples into gritty, lean instrumentals. War Cash packs the two of them into a short effort, with no wasted minutes.
“Last Day” lays the whole thing bare. CRIMEAPPLE talks about “Kevlar everything,” about keeping his life “hater-proof,” about running on fuel from people who counted him out. He did a dangerous route before his life “straightened out” and now watches rappers debase themselves for attention. He mentions shows in Marrakech without a press junket, and the line sits there with a shrug, not a boast. The drums on this one push him forward with an impatience that matches his own. He barely breathes between thoughts. When he says “no sick days in this school of thought, rather move than talk,” it reads like a personal policy carved into drywall.
On “Dr. Scholl’s,” greed and disgust occupy the same verse. He brags about needing twenty hands to count his plugs, pivots to watching “life decay,” and then cuts a friend loose for gossiping. The album’s funniest image sits in this song: doing graffiti on his foot in doctor’s shoes because he “ran it up so much, I got rotten toes,” a few bars from a flat admission that loyalty expires. Evidence lets the sample breathe in a way that makes the silences between bars feel loaded. CRIMEAPPLE fills them with talk about revoking memberships, about catching someone’s betrayal and being somehow unsurprised. He’s been “the same since the bucket with the rusty rims,” and that line means two things at once. Nothing changed him, and nothing will.
Most of this album’s swagger protects something fragile, and “Ventilation” is where the armor slips. CRIMEAPPLE survived storms, prays for forgiveness, caught a vision he “executed” without hesitation. Success made him colder. He developed what he calls “a colder demeanor,” put “an ocean between us,” and rendered himself unreachable. His old associates can’t get him on the phone, and he is fine with that, which is bleaker than any punchline elsewhere on the project. He chose “options more tropical, maybe less logical” and bet on crime “every single day and twice on Sunday.” He’s telling you he abandoned people and explaining why it penciled out. Evidence’s instrumental here has a crack-the-window looseness that makes the narration feel overheard rather than staged.
Geography becomes personality on “Karachi,” where his product hits overseas and he rinses blood off cash in water without flinching. The most unsettling moment on the project arrives without a punchline: “put my cash in the water, rinse the blood off,” stated with the flatness of someone describing a chore. He’s dancing in the rain, bumping Diplomatic Immunity, announcing he’ll “probably be in Peru when they reading your eulogy.” The drums thump heavier on this song, and Evidence’s sample chops push the verses forward with restless momentum. The loops don’t resolve, they just recycle, and CRIMEAPPLE keeps stacking cities like gambling chips.
Blu cracks a seam in the album’s bravado on “Pinto.” While CRIMEAPPLE talks up his dog food company and starts every sentence from the wallet, Blu arrives sounding like someone praying at a bus stop. He’s “omnidimensional, spirit sent from celestial,” he keeps “a minimal differential” between himself and God, and his pen “is a pistol.” CRIMEAPPLE hides whatever is soft behind money talk, and Blu strips that cover clean off. That split exposes how much of CRIMEAPPLE’s humor doubles as deflection, how every joke about motion and guap is also a barricade. Evidence gives both rappers the same sparse, loop-driven platform, and the difference in how they inhabit it is stark.
Obsession wears itself openly on “Two Left Feet.” CRIMEAPPLE calls perfection and hits “do not disturb,” but he still set the bar. He won’t feel “inclined to reach what I design as peak,” which sounds like arrogance until you notice he’s also talking about vitamin and mineral intake, cylindrical projectiles, and having people “living underground with all the reptiles.” The brag record keeps sneaking hunger back in. He hits the Republic first, catches a budget, draws plays from the dugout. Evidence’s percussion on this one snaps harder, shorter, and the compressed groove forces CRIMEAPPLE to stack syllables tighter, his voice climbing over itself.
Monday Night steers “Rio” toward discipline, almost devotion. He mentions “spiritual hygiene on ten at all times,” breaking out in hives around certain people, a new kid at home who changed his reasons for sliding. CRIMEAPPLE, before him on the same song, tied prosperity to ancestry. He rose “up in a storm,” thanked his older brother for showing him the “pitfalls of hustling,” and admitted fried bologna sandwiches still hit. That confession, tiny and offhand, says more about where he comes from than any flexed trip itinerary. Evidence keeps the instrumentation warm here, almost lounging, and the sway lets both rappers talk at a register closer to conversation than spectacle.
The record ends in a “Green Room” full of routine. Turkey sandwiches, Diet Cokes, writing setlists with a pencil and tracing them over with a marker, a prayer before the show. Minutes later, he’s counting money, and the whole thing shrinks down to a performer’s workday. The last line is about calling his girl to say he’s on his way, and it’s the most domestic sentence on the project. CRIMEAPPLE spent nine songs making money sound like armor, and then he finishes by counting pages and going home.
Favorite Track(s): “Ventilation,” “Pinto,” “Rio”