After a stint on Gunn’s Griselda Records—a nice look that reduced him to a supporting act—Nack continued tacking left with instinctive performances over deconstructed arrangements, often working in miniature. He maximizes his limited screentime on THE LIFE OF ERG, flexing a wizened, expressive flamboyance, transcending the fully-loaded bars of his Tragic Allies days. “14hrflights” finds him in conversation with himself, peppering open space with interstitial ad libs (his preferred ad lib, quixotically, is “ad lib”). He deploys an incremental technique on “Nevatrustazing,” embellishing and compounding the thesis with each sequential bar. He’s always coloring outside the lines, pausing for breath where he pleases; when the couplets rhyme at all, it’s usually via some slanted internal scheme.
BoneWeso spent the 2000s working in dancehall and reggaeton spaces, but you’d never know it based on THE LIFE OF ERG. His single-tracked loops are more evocative than Daringer and Nicholas Craven’s, less frenetic than Conductor Williams and Don Carrera’s. Erg takes cues from the instrumentals, indulging nostalgia over a dreamy sax on “Wareztheluv,” conjuring Parisian flights and top-shelf liquor on “Silenceofthelambs.” The stylistic touchstones—aspirational lifestyle raps, sampling technique, newsreels recounting drug busts and art heists—are formalities of second- or third-wave neoclassicism. What’s engrossing is the trio’s divergence from canon, the local idiosyncrasies and equatorial intrigue. A subtle immersion takes place; it’s natural, for instance, when Nack rhymes “Tahoe” with “abajo” on “Intervention.” As in Mach-Hommy’s work, the colliding dialects speak to an unlikely diaspora, secret or alternate histories of would-be Escobars in New England’s rust belt.
These adaptations bestow a rich specificity, distinctive performers bending a pre-existing format for their purposes. What’s difficult about the work, broadly, is a sense of contraction. There’s no infrastructure for this stuff anymore; in lieu of label investment, working artists churn out project after self-released project. The environment promotes novelty, but also imposes a ceiling—the tightly plotted sagas of Mobb Deep and Capone-N-Noreaga have given way to thin margins, low stakes, narratives that never really go anywhere. Among a tidal wave of off-brand Griselda, Nack and Erg are small-city kingpins reveling in limited resources, splurging on sneakers rather than sports cars, middle-aged and flyer than they’ve ever been.