EST Gee 'Mad' Falls Behind His Previous Work With Lethargic Street Raps

Generally speaking, EST Gee makes street rap look easy. With a knack for stacking subtle details, wry humor and pathos and tightly coiled couplets, he’s become one of the more reliable gangsta rappers out — even if his song structures and all-around musicality have never been the most dynamic. At his best, he does just well enough with those elements for his projects to be memorable. On MAD, he’s not quite at his best, and bland production, along with less than memorable hooks prevent it from being more than the sum of its parts.

Released months after his excellent I Never Felt Nun album, MAD features a sizable amount of the sly rhymes Gee’s become known for, as he manages to flash bars that can oscillate between affecting and dangerous, or hilarious and sinister. For “If I Stop Now,” he serves up a Batman reference to underscore a reservoir of hidden pain (“It’s a fake smile on me, Joker”). On the same song, an outright standout, he unloads a poignant hook that spells out the secondary dangers of a life in the trenches: “I hold my gun more than I hold my son.”

Elsewhere on the project, he revels in villainy. Coasting over a malevolent instrumental, he flaunts a dazed delivery as his increasingly heinous threats spill atop one another. “I’m into extortion, we gon’ pay the work, it’s cornered/Catch a n***a early mornin’, buyin’ diapers for his daughter,” he raps on “Blow Up.” Unsparing and occasionally imaginative, Gee’s raps still include spurts of unfiltered emotion and icy cool, with his sharp penmanship allowing him to collapse the distance between the two extremes for street rap that can be as cinematic as it is nuanced. But the beats here don’t do much to enhance the effect of the bars.

While they aren’t bad per se, the samples on MAD aren’t the most inventive. The “Diamonds Are Forever” Kanye West flip already feels a bit played out, and it’s not applied in an imaginative way. The first eight songs of the project feel like alternate versions of the same instrumental — they’re the kind you might find if you typed in “Trap Beat” on YouTube. The lack of sonic variance is made even more evident by Gee’s delivery, which rarely sounds as subtly dynamic as he did on any of his Bigger Than Life or Death projects or I Never Felt Nun. There’s not much reason to listen to this particular mixtape instead of just returning to one of his older records.

His raps and beats falling short of par wouldn’t be quite as damning if the hooks managed to land. The Auto-Tune-laced choruses feel indistinct, lacking the symbolism to be truly memorable. Combined with tonal inflections that don’t feel as expressive as his previous efforts, it can all get to feel pretty monotonous. If you’re looking for bars, those are still here. It’s just a shame that they’re stifled by sounds that much less unique than the person rapping over them.