It has so many lines that catch you after they pass like when he writes a million dollar verse on a napkin while waiting for his Baked Alaska (see Get Down). You have to give Curren$y that kind of listen to really gauge the staying power of the music. I wanted to listen again and again and again until every inch was a space I knew and loved.
This was released last week but I didn’t want to review it at that time. Even his bragging tracks like All I Know are stated so matter of factly that it doesn’t feel like bragging. While you can bang Froze in the car or work out to Pot Jar most of Pilot Talk 3 is meant to be played with your feet up and your head gently nodding or laughing with people at a barbeque. It’s exactly what the tape needs, a song that stands way the heck out from the rest.
It doesn’t really matter how you feel about Riff Raff, this beat is so damn ugly/attractive full of that lumpy bassy sludge that Fraud traffics so well. Maybe the most profoundly eye opening first listen of a beat is Froze by Harry Fraud. The consistency is so thickly layered that other producers like Joey Fatts and Jahlil Beats fit in. Ski Beatz produces seven songs, Cool & Dre are behind five and the mixture is perfect. Pot Jar hums and knocks and moves at a pace that pushes Jadakiss (another famously great guest verse) and Curren$y to move out of that summer beach music space into a zone where they can see banger from where they stand. As rich and soulful and hard-hitting as Ski is, Cool & Dre are able to take that feeling and kick it up ten or fifteen miles an hour. Ski Beatz is masterful as ever crafting corridors of tough sonic minimalistic golden age East Coast grime on Audio Dope 5 or warm Bossanova hip hop on Search Party but he’s not the only one doing great work. While stylistically muted his gift of imagery is in a special class, listen to how he starts Audio Dope 5 “Bunsen Burners, laboratory beakers pour it in the speakers…” the way his mind works is one of the true draws for Pilot talk 3. He’s so low key and easy going that he can seem unimpressive when he’s making magic. I like the idea of a loud business dude standing in front of the world shouting about how talented Curren$y Is, because he needs that. My initial thought was a wish that it worked out. On the Opening Credits (the first track) of Pilot Talk 3 Curren$y references his lost relationship to savagely independent hip hop mogul Dame Dash “then I tried to start a business with Damon…charge that to the game, learned some things…” he implies the money wasn’t right. Like other Curren$y releases, it makes up for its lack of revelations with a contagious joyfulness.Free Album Review-Pilot Talk 3 by Curren$y But if you’re still with him after all this time, there’s virtually nothing not to like about Pilot Talk III. Sure, he’s still conveying a small emotional range. His braggadocio continues to be more congenial than arrogant you want to be forking down those cranberry crepes with him. Even if a song’s intro is woozy, the drums eventually hit, and Curren$y is off.Īfter first emerging as a No Limit prospect in the early ’00s, Spitta has become an underground favorite by waxing poetic about the finer things in life, from gourmet meals to shuffleboard.
Unlike To Pimp a Butterfly - another new album that owes more to jazz and soul than it does to any current rap trend - Pilot Talk III is strict about form.
But still, credit the likes of Ski Beatz, Joey Fatts (whose “Cargo Planes” track is a dark, slithery outlier here), Harry Fraud, and Jahlil Beats for delivering production that sounds both expertly fine-tuned and humbly low-key. It might be telling that the most epic-sounding song here, “The 560 SL”, is a collaboration with Wiz Khalifa. While it makes a fitting companion to the previous Pilot Talk albums, it’s a regurgitation of neither, with fewer towering standouts than the original but more cohesion than both. He’s never seemed like a perfectionist in the traditional sense.Īs it turns out, Curren$y kept his good judgment intact while making this album it never overreaches. Curren$y is supposed to be this stress-free “weed rapper” who loves luxurious instrumentals that enable him to flow freely. Given the success of the first two Pilot Talk releases (dropped within months of each other in 2010), the supremely smooth New Orleans rapper and Jet Life leader was left no choice but to devise a worthy third installment - and once work on it officially began, it took him around two years to finish. Coming from someone who makes everything he does look easy, there’s something unusual about the circumstances surrounding Curren$y’s Pilot Talk III.