ALBUM REVIEW: 'ii' by Denzel Curry and Kenneth Blume

Denzel and Kenny join forces once again. No Pixar disses this time.

The pair’s previous collaborative EP UNLOCKED was an exciting mixture of playfully braggadocious bars and experimental boom bap. I loved it so much that it made my top albums of 2020 list. Allegedly the whole record only took 24 hours to produce and record. It made me wonder ‘what could these two achieve together if they didn’t rush themselves?’.

Well, now we have an answer. They’ve reunited to give us this follow-up album ii, which I believe took longer than a day to make (although I can’t find any info on the timeframe, so they could have churned it out in 7 hours for all I know). It certainly sounds more complete. And despite its unimaginative album title, it’s not just a rehash of UNLOCKED.

Kenneth Blume (who has since scrapped the ‘Kenny Beats’ alias to appear more professional and grown up) is back sporting a lo-fi Madlib-inspired sound, but this time the samples are weirder and woozier, often detuned to sound like a warped vinyl record. There’s a heavy use of guitar samples, most notably on ‘Gone Fishing’ and ‘Candlelight’ that gives the album more of a rock flavour. The detune effect makes these samples quite challenging to listen to at first, but the uniqueness of it has kept me coming back, which seems to have been the intention (as Kenny stated in an interview ‘I hope when people hear ‘Gone Fishing’ they think ‘aye what the fuck is that beat?’).

Denzel is meanwhile continuing to throw out wordplay-infused boasts. I particular love the puns on 'Cold Night In Hell', which include 'that's a bar mitzvah, don't let the bars miss ya' and 'I'm hanging off a roof, but ain't nobody fallin' off' (which, at first, I thought was a bit lame until I realised it was a clever double J Cole reference). Unfortunately, I do think Denzel's delivery is relatively reined in on this album - we don't get the acrobatic inflections as found on UNLOCKED's 'DIET_'. However, guests like JPEGMAFIA and Westside Gunn do help to keep the album dynamic.

★★★★☆

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