DESCRIPTION:
2x12" Hip Hop / Rap LP - Chicago rapper Juice WRLD quickly got swept into the emo-rap designation when his 2018 studio debut, Goodbye & Good Riddance, showed up with a richly produced collection of songs about breakups, betrayal, and numbing the pain. Despite a limited emotional range, the album highlighted Juice WRLD's musical dexterity, offering darkly dreamy melodies and druggy textures in complex arrangements that pushed aside standard commercial rap boundaries. Second album Death Race for Love continues this hybrid of lush sonics and desperate feelings. Considerably longer than its predecessor with 22 tracks clocking in at over an hour, the predominant theme remains illuminating different angles of agony. The melodramatic "Empty" opens the album with tortured verses over sweet piano loops, and the hooky "Robbery" starts with Juice WRLD drinking strong liquor before scream-crying lyrics about getting his heart handed to him in a paper bag. Pain turns to anger quickly on "Syphilis," with threatening verses yelled through a filter of distortion. Moods shift quickly, going from that overblown track into the syrupy acoustic guitars of "Who Shot Cupid?" and then directly into the almost-pop/rock tones of the overly sugary "Ring Ring." A Young Thug feature on the bouncing "ON GOD" breaks up some of the extreme sentimentality of the record's whimpery tracks, and starts to illuminate the two faces of Death Race for Love. There's the devastated outcry of heartbroken songs like the Daniel Caesar-sampling "10 Feet" and there's the dark swagger of ominous bangers like "Out My Way." It would be one thing if the album was equally divided into these two hemispheres, but instead, it zig-zags between them and other various detours, making for a dizzying and tedious front-to-back listening experience. There's no shortage of highlights, but the lack of editing or focus means every song goes on a little too long and leads to another one that struggles to connect stylistically or emotionally. Juice WRLD is wrecked, angry, and using drugs to cope, and even though his appeals come through at times, much of Death Race for Love transforms the listener into the shoulder that Juice WRLD is crying on.