G-EAZY - 'The Beautiful & Damned' - Album Review

G-Eazy or ‘Gerald Earl Gillum’, has gone in my opinion from a mostly basic ‘Cali’ or ‘bay’ rapper with generic features and a West Coast flow on charting songs to one of the few hip-hop artists that saved 2017. His first Major label album ‘These Things Happen’ was released in 2014, three years before his third studio album The Beautiful & Damned, yet in this short time the progression of this artist is immense.

Before I get into why this album is a gemstone in the never ending labyrinth of music that was 2017, I have to be honest, I used to thoroughly dislike ‘Young Gerald’s’ music. The first song of his I ever listened to was ‘I mean it’ and I wasn’t very impressed and my opinion stayed that way until ‘Me Myself & I’ eventually stopped playing in clubs and I had time to breathe and listen to other hits and my appreciation slowly grew and when I heard that he was releasing a new album, I listened with a clean slate.

The album features 20 songs and surprisingly each song has very few similarities to any others on the album where flow, music and lyrics are concerned. With each song we, for the most part, unintentionally learn something new about the artist and can connect with the music as we know this is everything to the artist, as he states, “this was always the plan”. The only thing I would have loved to see was if G-Eazy had have just went crazy on a song. Beat, flow and lyrics. I feel like he still had some pent up energy that could have been used and could have experimented with a much faster flow.

The Headlining songs off the album are still soaring the charts such as ‘No Limit’ featuring Cardi B and A$AP Rocky and ‘Him and I’ featuring his incredibly talented girlfriend Halsey. There is a reason these songs are still charting, they go harder than a wrecking ball at a construction site.

The thing that shaped my opinion the most was the amount of self confessionals we hear through the songs of ‘Sober’, ‘Love is gone’, ‘Fly away’ and ‘Eazy’ this changed my stance regarding the rapper as a whole and made me connect to the honesty of his music and lyrics whilst also being entertained.

My favourite songs were ‘Leviathan’ and ‘But a dream’ and by far my favourite lyric was “I would die a legend if today they JFK’d me” as it shows the wittiness and edginess of the artist.

Now for my favourite part of these reviews, the hot and cold awards. Whilst I think there is no song on this album that isn’t ‘good’ there is still a hottest and coldest song. The Hot award for bringing the fire goes to ‘That’s a lot’ as it’s a fun and well constructed song with a good hook. The Cold award goes to ‘Pick me up’ as I felt like the female vocals were slightly lacking from ‘Anna of the North’ and the flow was slightly generic, however, still a decent song.

My honourable mentions for the Hot award were: ‘Gotdamn’ ‘Legend’ and ‘Eazy’.

This album as you can now tell hopefully, was amazing. However, there is still something in my gut telling me that besides what I mentioned earlier there is something missing. Then again maybe I’m just fussy. I give this album a:

9/10