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  • Mass Appeal

The Detroit rapper/producer follows up the instrumental The Rebellion Sessions with a solo rap record that confirms him as a serviceable emcee—and a session leader with a sense of purpose.

It’s bad news for a football player when a scout marks him down in a draft report as having tight hips. The suggestion is a lack of fluidity, a general sense of strain. It’s a weighted assessment generally reserved for skill players, like running backs or wide receivers, for whom looking stiff can forecast injury or inertia. Black Milk used to rap like a skill player with tight hips. His flow can be jerky and the calculated stammer in his delivery can reveal his straining. But a few years ago the Detroit artist seemed to switch positions for the better, slowing down and loosening up to take the load off his raps.

At the same time, over his last few albums Black Milk has sidled into the role of bandleader first and rapper second, to the point that his last record was an entirely instrumental affair. He didn’t play any of the instruments on the meandering The Rebellion Sessions, for which the leader and his band were billed as Black Milk & Nat Turner, but he produced and arranged every song. Freeing himself of the pressure of the microphone—he was always a producer first—seemed like an epiphany, and the album was one of the most gratifyingly experimental that Black Milk has recorded. His new one, a solo rap record called FEVER, confirms he’s still a serviceable emcee prospering as a session leader with a sense of purpose.

FEVER continues the Detroit rapper/producer’s expanding live hip-hop jazz-band tradition and leans into psychedelic neo-soul in the process, something like P-Funk meets the Ummah. Black Milk is using a softer touch with drums than his previously bludgeoning boom-bap productions might have predicted, with a pair of accomplished session players, Chris Dave and Daru Jones, at the center of the mix. Their shuffling breaks—loose but punctual, and never boxy—quietly gas most of the record. The whole album has a warm hue, but the shape and pace of the tracks morph quickly.

Opener “unVEil” tumbles a dreamy reggae step out of the hum of a wavering synth line. Guitar guitar licks are frequently ornamental filigree on top of bulbous bass notes. “But I Can Be” has the rigid loop of a traditional Black Milk beat, but most of the songs take a more open-ended shape and allow room for woozy wandering. In the very middle of the record, a floaty instrumental interlude without any drums captures the muddy palette of the whole thing as warm synths flutter around each other and under a reverberating guitar. On “Will Remain” Black Milk channels a softly bubbling jazz soul, while “Drown” is a swampy funk groove.

Lyrically, FEVER reads like Black Milk has been stewing in political turmoil and is now breaking his silence with calculated thought. “Everybody hot in fever pitch/Heat is rising you can see the temp,” he raps bruskly on “unVEil,” setting the album’s tone. On “Foe Friend” his flow swings naturally across a pair of verses about backstabbing and greed. Throughout, soulful guest vocalists dot the landscape with side chatter and choruses that bleed out of the mix.

“Drown” is a pensive rage against police violence over a sparse, rattling funk groove: “Do you feel like you drownin’?/Walkin’ round black in a world trapped feeling surrounded.” He often still raps in a jittery stop-start flow that can split his words in awkward, unconventional halves—he rhymes “mission” with “quicksand”—but there’s a budding economy to his raps that leaves much of the show to the music. “Laugh Now Cry Later” epitomizes the effect with a groggy and unconnected series of gut checks in spare couplets. It’s the same free-association trick he’s been commanding as a band leader. Less than a minute in, he ad-libs to himself, “Let me try something else,” and changes his course. It’s good to hear him loosen up.

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