Album Review: We Will Be Brief by Defcee & steel tipped dove
Two years after steel tipped dove mailed the beats, Defcee came back and rapped his way through his debts, his age, and a business he calls a mass grave, and every line of it is exact.
In the spring of 2024, after a couple of years of done and over files collecting dust on several hard drives, the ultimate masterminds of We Will Be Brief finally assembled as an incomparable duo in Brooklyn. The first beats originated in New York, in a pack mailed for nothing but a label. Defcee took what he wanted before shooting back to another studio and steel tipped dove shooting to placements such as on doseone and Armand Hammer records.
Friends were playing a park in Queens all summer; stars hadn’t started labeling their pot strains, and someone was selling vinyl in the streets, and someone’s CD was a blockchain. All of that is happening in “Ahem,” where dove offers him a single dark bassline, keeps it in place through the whole song, and pulls the drums out one second at a time so the verse still glides. His rival receives an even more vicious line: “But I know they’ll feel better/When they don’t have to write actual facts with real letters.” Every star proclaiming alpha status has two wolves, a cuckold and a coward, and he exterminated both. He hopes to survive to trash his own mural and hopes the stray dogs don’t reroute it to their urinal. He wonders if you saw it or fantasized it, and if it’s inexpensive or trendy. Not only that, but he watches the big homie’s big homies shrink right in front of him, and notes that they built the house while he’s still swiping the cutlery.
The drums and bass on “Heat Check” are packed tighter than anywhere else here, and only send him flying from a stop to a stop. He lives out the static that blamed every piece on everything else: “While y’all were blaming your age or your weight or the weather/We were sharpening our styles upon the blades that you left us.” The hook on “Young Oldhead” has him alone waiting for a car once the lights are out, and aging like graffiti on Stonehenge, he lines the veteran up-and-comer with a sheen of acknowledgment. dove lays down an empty circle that barely bears a trace, and Defcee supplies the motion himself, running long and then cutting to brief phrases, creating gaps for the phrase to end without him. Now he’s sailing down 290 with a skyline so perfect he nearly gave up on asking himself questions and back to having just enough in his budget to breathe.
He’s swimming toward the surface with his head above water, gets a sense of how nearby the shore is, and the writing uncoils itself, falling slack on him. The hoarse cry of “Flat Circles” states in a hundred ways that the more things change, the more this person stays the same, the grotesque of everything else in this verse. He’s got his guy or gal walking him in front of his buddies to “it is what it is” as if by magic, by the sharp nail of tanks and ruin. dove completes the job better at its end, removing bass and drums one by one until the pitched phrase takes the song on its shoulders by itself.
Nappy Nina gets her own uninterrupted run without having to pass lines with him—which is the formula behind every feature on here. She spits about being chest to chest with disrespect and leaving blessed, and when she tells the foul on her way up to just say you move with malice, it only makes her calluses that much stronger. The bass line underneath “Healing Rituals” rests even heavier than ahem. And billy woods gets you to double down on excuses for his excuses before the two come through that hit all the hardest: “I was raised in institutions/I’m a good student.” SKECH185 frontstalls for familia, a clutch of relatives who want him to marry a Black woman they can reconstruct from memory while his desire keeps things locked in neutral. Curly Castro is the slowpoke speed. His verse on “War Council” cruises through Ruben Patterson, Kenny Anderson, Deadshot Cable, the Dudleys, and Dr. Strangelove, only including the freestyle shows he saw trying to sell on Route 9. dove pushes those hands off still harder than the guests do.
Deep into “Science Project Pat” he raises the first thing away and throws out a pattern with more air between the sounds. 89 the Brainchild takes over different territory for a chunk about the men God sent to build houses, who can never be truly themselves in front of other men and can never really get a whole outfit together. He could spend an entire record not changing the subject about his day, he says. or an entire life of a record not changing the subject, and then spells plenty. The bartender numbed himself to his pain so long ago he’s begging for it now. dove places the deepest sustained bass on the album underneath that line on “A Little About a Lot” with more hard drum attacks than most of the last effort he’d built.
He reawakens family plays and hand shadow game memories of his, and claims genuine love was just like slamming a pack of trump cards or crushing axes and scrapes. At the very same second that song’s sliding, slightly under 80 inches of wasted coffin spaces in the shade come to mind. The curses he was handed down carried the names of prior generations of elders in the Dust Bowl who walked his trail, and he’s supposed to carry them, too. On “Alma,” he puts all of it on a sidewalk or where a sidewalk is supposed to be if the town his daughter lives in had one, and the walk there is where he wrote it. The crosswalks separate patches of grass and cattle flats as far as Texas. dove covers and covers up the same phrase again and again, coming in early, hot, thinning the drums so the main course can begin again.
The past year and a half bankrupted almost the rest of his life, and because of this, he’s back to stenciling espresso on one of the dark awnings. His dad used to play him “Chocolate Jesus” all the time. He mentions it before the verse kicks in. Now he’s inside a house whose ancient skeleton bows so low the plaster groans, the guitar shooting whiskey, and who can recall how he and his crew “sat around rhyming like Tom Waits over David Banner’s drums” and now where it landed him. The narrow and centrally focused production cluster snugly atop “Tom Waits Type Beat,” and the beat remains constant while he and PremRock tear their own vast sections. PremRock responds to the same weather, calling the sea the band’s best detergent and telling you the sea will drown you and omit the homily. Another winner from Defcee.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Ahem,” “Heat Check,” “A Little About A Lot”