What a year both CLBRKS and YUNGMORPHEUS have had: ALL MY IDOLS LIVED FAST, HABITS 2, BAG TALK DELUXE, SLANG CASINO, Up Against The Wall, A Degree Of Lunacy, The Iceberg Theory, Burnished Sums, and now we have the two coming together to deliver A Place I Got Lost In. I’ve had this project on my mind for a year and a half before it was released after CL mentioned it in an interview I did with him. But here we are, winter 2022, and I don’t think there is a better time to unleash such an arresting collaboration between two of hip-hop's most captivating artists of the last half-decade.
Feelings of winter start in the cover and seep into all that comes after it. An oil painting by the artist best known as 'infilthitshallbefound' is almost alien in its form, giving you no guiding light and forcing you to get lost in its bleakness and to try and find your own way out. Lyrically, these themes of fall are abounded like dead leaves:
“Steaming through the winter with a runny nose” (Couldn’t Be It)
“I’m cold like a popsicle in January, out in Skegness, you couldn’t handle me, I’ve been chilly” (Imagine)
But if I had to choose a favourite, it would come from the opening track, ‘Nightrider’:
“Drive the jet ski through the Thames in the winter”
Going from a project like Slang Casino by Obijuan, fully produced by YUNGMORPHEUS, to A Place I Got Lost In, also fully produced by YUNGMORPHEUS, certifies his versatility as paramount. The dichotomy of summer and winter has been captured by YUNGMORPHEUS with beautiful nuance this year, a nuance which is personified on ‘Nightrider’. A tight bass line plays front and centre on ‘Nightrider’ with swooning strings of synth swelling into a perfectly chopped vocal sample. The percussion is varied and hard to place as it floats above the strong-armed bass and chilling synths, but my favourite production element has to be this crunching, 8-bit motif that is somewhere between the Knight Rider theme and a Nokia ringtone. YUNGMORPHEUS transports us to the banks of the Thames on a night where we can just about see our breath, wading through a slushed mixture of ice and grit, gazing on a silk-laden man jet skiing into the moon rise, screaming such lines as:
“I turn the Peugeot into Knight Rider, it had the Bluetooth and everything, my seats were full designer”
While I’ve focused on winter so far, it doesn’t mean we don’t get any brightness on the record. ‘Take My Hand’ pulls us into the warmth of the hearth with a new paradigm of sample-based hip-hop. One of the greatest things about sampling in rap is the idea of taking something you love, and manipulating it in a way of saying, “You like that? You recognise that? Well, I’m using better”, and that is case and point with this production. Although it seems CL is set up for the gargantuan task of outshining the sample, it's a task that he handles with ease.
CLBRKS’ charisma is off the charts, floating in between sung melodies and lyrical acrobatics, but if I had to focus on one of his 10s, it would have to be this:
“I gotta go in three bars, already left them dead, like you was up in Biggie’s garden, dots up on your head”
The reference to Biggie’s ‘Warning’ is a gem in itself, but my favourite part here is how it sets up a punchline which isn’t paid off until, well, three bars later, where CL proceeds to apologise for going over, as he continues to prove why he’s one of the most captivating MCs working today. Few can pull of such playful wordplay in a self-referential manor, Rakim did in ’87 on ‘Eric B. Is President’ and 35 years later, CLBRKS is surely making the greats proud.
Be sure to check out A Place I Got Lost In, and if you enjoy it as much as I do, purchase a vinyl copy through Tuff Kong Records.