Curren$y - Pilot Talk II (2010) [DD172] // Grade: B+

I know it must happen all the time, but, I refuse to believe that a dude has successfully ever kicked real heavy game to a super bad chick while wearing sandals. I know every year during the summer mad dudes mack on chicks, probability dictates; some of them have to be wearing sandals. But, how does that work? You’re in complete chillax mode — your attire says “I don’t give a fuck about anything but chilling,” you’re rocking the sweatpants of footwear and you’re going to sell yourself to a lady? How do you convince a chick that, in fact, you are the shit when you’re wearing open toed shoes? Curren$y’s Pilot Talk II is oddly enough, the soundtrack to pulling a chick while wearing sandals. Pilot Talk II has some of the most smoothed out, laid back, sandal appropriate instrumentals paired with some grand shit talking and chest thumping.

On paper this shouldn’t work, if you want to talk about how awesome you are, you go one of two ways. One way is to go hard over an active, forceful beat (think Jay-Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulders” or this summer’s “BMF” by Rick Ross) — a forceful declaration of your excellence. The other option is to rap over a more laid back beat and sound entirely detached and bored by having to reiterate how awesome you are (Snoop’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot” or pretty much any Biggie radio single). Those techniques are great marriages of lyrical intent and musical affect. On Pilot Talk II though, Curren$y is working against conventional wisdom with his delivery, spitting fairly hard over beats that are on some strict “feet up in a comfortable chair” shit. “Flight Briefing” exemplifies this with it’s string section flutters and warm electric organs, it sounds like Willie Hutch style orchestrated soul played gently at dusk. Over that luxurious track Curren$y drops his usual talk of effortless living, wealth and disdain for dudes hating on the ease with which he has sex with their significant others – topics we can all relate to. When he drops lines like “Im trying to get a bigger home/ Put my niggas on/ They putting they niggas on, we getting really strong/ Next, Rex, Jets/ Best shape ever/ Winner circle, squares need to get it together”  you can hear him playing with his punctuation and timing so the middle three lines dart out and punch against the slow beat. On previous releases Curren$y would’ve been liable to drop similar lines with a more languid drawl, letting those lines flow into each other in the tradition of the great Juvenile. This album though, it’s more often clear punctuation as opposed to his usual sleepy eyed stoner rap.

Don’t worry though, there are still copious references to weed throughout and the album is probably better suited to smoke to than the previous effort. The songs go down smoother, they have less of a neck snapping hard beat and more of a bobble head, half closed eyes swing to them. “Famous” has some of the finest jazz saxophone on a rap record this year. It’s a slow burning song that demands a video montage of Sonny Crockett pensively driving a Ferrari Testarossa around the streets of Miami. “Real Estates” has a hypnotic wah-wah pedal bassline that sounds like a slowed down recreation of the teacher from Charlie Brown. That makes Curren$y’s boasting and bragging sound like a particularly vivid day dream the much maligned beagle owner had in the middle of class. Remember Charlie Brown, when you’re shinning with a bad bitch and that chick who always pulled the football out from under you is 30lbs overweight and three kids deep into a loveless marriage, you’ll have truly won.

Curren$y has created an admirable follow up to Pilot Talk. This album, instead of being a collection of leftover tracks released less than 6 months after the original, actually surpasses the original. It’s a more mature effort showing Curren$y being more deliberate with his phrasing and comfortable in his brand of stoned shit talking. His beat selection has also gotten better, these songs are more consistent and maintain a mood of relaxed airiness that was only alluded to on the previous album. Perfect music to try and talk a chick up to. Just make sure you get some kind of shoes on when you do, just because, the laid back sandal flow worked for Curren$y doesn’t mean it’ll work for you.

- Behold the Destroyer