On The Bricktionary, Boldy’s poise doesn’t really feel a hair misplaced amongst Fraud’s elevated entropy—even on extra mainstream-leaning collaborations just like the standout Tee Grizzley-assisted “Cecil Fielder,” the place there’s no query about who’s wielding management. Boldy’s superpower has at all times been making minute phrases really feel monumental, packing sage knowledge on mortality and precarity into his avenue chronicles. “This avenue shit open recreation/One minute you him, the following minute you proper again in your knuckles,” he raps with trademark assuredness on “Pillar to Put up,” keenly conscious of how rapidly shit can flip on a dime. Reflection has lengthy been a trademark of Boldy’s raps, however as he continues to distance himself from the traumatic aftermath of devastating automobile crash, his vary of recollections expands to place his total journey underneath a microscope.
Boldy’s stage of evocative element is extraordinary, setting up sprawling worlds from his reminiscences of Detroit in a matter of seconds. Specificities bubble to the forefront of Boldy’s thoughts like intrusive ideas: linking with associates on avenue whose names you might solely recall in the event you’d had your individual toes planted in them, needing to be satisfied to not remove a rival on his strategy to the highest, seeing visceral photographs of bullets going by backs and out of stomachs, and sensing a lie when he hears minute adjustments in vocal pitches by a telephone. On “Harvey Grant,” it looks like he’s introducing you to his total household tree whereas doing drops off on the native Goal and House Depot, ending with a prayer request: “Forgive me for my sins and all of the evil within the hearts of males.”
Boldy and Fraud’s technical brilliance on The Bricktionary is direct and exact, not overcomplicated, and it permits their respective manufacturing and writing kinds to suit like puzzle items. This sort of no-frills method leans on intrinsic high quality and dependability, not on bells and whistles and leaps into the stratosphere. Nearer “Fish Grease” rambles with a peaceable vocal refrain that might soundtrack an ascension to heaven as Boldy takes the listener by a startlingly frank year-by-year catalog of his close-calls and epic triumphs. “Keep in mind grindin’ within the rain, nights when it was pourin’ down/Now I’m within the Vary hydroplanin’, work whiter than a dinette serviette/Hood name me Sir Brick Van Exel a.okay.a. Mr. Pyrex Chapman/Clio bangin’ off the lilac, telephone slappin’ like a telethon,” he beams with understated satisfaction. It’s true that by most estimates, the milkman started to vanish from public view within the Sixties, stymied by the proliferation of suburbs, grocery shops, and fridges. However in Boldy’s supply, you may virtually hear a figuring out wink, as if he’s sure his model of magnetism won’t ever exit of favor—irrespective of how a lot issues change round him.