TranscendNoise

51. Playboi Carti – Whole Lotta Red Released almost a year ago, Whole Lotta Red deserves the shout-out for being so far out of the box for a commercial rap album, that the first reactions toward it tethered on unlistenable to ingenuity. Sitting with the album over a year and getting lost in the blown-out, aggressive and almost nonsensical use of compression and overdrive bass, Whole Lotta Red and Playboi Carti made their unique vision and disregard for cohesion into a strange modus operandi. Far off from a “baby voice” and somewhat removed from actual lyricism, Playboi uses a hoarse and chewy vocal style, hopping from sing-song to straight-up shouting over the instrumentals at hand. There is hardly a pocket for the lyrics to be found in some instrumentals in their length and sketchy nature, with few exceptions such as “Beno”. Yet these more structured tracks are never the highlights between the short abrasive spewing of a few lines, a broken hook or weirded-out ad-libs. This kind of ...