This freewheeling approach both adds some levity to the often murky production and makes his stronger lines hit harder, like a joyride with sharp turns. Mirroring the album’s cover art, throughout the album Rashad mostly drifts along, floating through hookups, late nights, and binges.
The Sun’s Tirade isn’t as consistently weighty as Cilvia, which tackled suicidal thoughts, parental abandonment, and addiction with bold vulnerability. “How you tell the truth to a crowd of white people?” he asks on “Bday”, the gravity of the question overwhelming. This increased vocal ability adds some serious heft to his lyrics. Likewise, the second half of “Stuck in the Mud” sounds exactly like its title suggests, Rashad using the bottom of his throat to trudge through a drug-induced haze. The twinkling “Bday” is just as sludgy as a Cilvia track, but the drag is entirely generated by Rashad himself, his voice pure gravel. The Sun’s Tirade draws from the same playbook, but the execution has considerably leveled up. On Cilvia Demo, this dilemma was resolved by layering entire verses (“Modest”) and subtly chopping Rashad’s voice to make it drag (“West Savannah”). Because his vocals can be just as sauntering, there’s a high risk of redundancy.
Rashad prefers foggy beats, hazy numbers with elements that float past each other, only occasionally making direct contact, the musical equivalent of an all-ages skate. The result is an album that’s liberated from concerns about regions and charts and homages, giving Rashad ample room to experiment, and starting to pull Top Dawg Entertainment out of the long shadow of To Pimp a Butterfly.Ĭilvia Demo was a feat of mixing. The Sun’s Tirade, the follow-up to 2014’s Cilvia Demo, is a careful refinement of his previous work, hunkering down instead of scaling up. Luckily, Rashad insists on keeping his hands on the wheel. Package these traits together and leave them in the right blogger’s inbox, and the car drives itself. Isaiah Rashad could easily be a southern rap revivalist: He’s from Chattanooga, he’s rapped over “Elevators”, a slew of his songs allude to southern rappers (“Nelly”, “RIP Kevin Miller”, “Webbie Flow”), and he loved his first car enough to name his debut EP after it.
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