Dear Annie

A little bit of redemption for Rejjie Snow… Just a little maybe…

I just want to start off by saying thank you Rejjie. You managed to make something that was definitely an improvement over your last project. Not that that was to be hard to pull off. But you did and I  enjoyed this 20 song album… Well mostly but we’ll get into that. 

The first song

This had been featured on songs of note for week (find the week and link it) and after listening to it even more it deserves its own sub heading. It is just amazing and really starts off the whole project perfectly the empowerment in the lyrics. 

These are the only lyrics to the song and it just works very well and is easily my favourite song on this album and Rejjie doesn’t even have his voice on this. This plays into something I will talk about later though so let me talk about something else for now.

The Production

The sound of the entire project does vary quite a lot over the its entire 20 songs from the more slow paced chill songs like Désolé and 23 to the more upbeat Annie , the production and composition of the album is definitely one of its strong points and a far cry from his previous project The Moon & You .

This project has the variation and progression to kept me interested while listening and allow me to follow along with the story Rejjie is trying to tell. Does he tell it well however?

The Story and Concept

I’m a firm believer that love as a concept can never be played out. As a result, you would think I would have appreciated all the love aspects in these songs. And this case the storytelling gets worse as the album progresses. The story follows his interactions with a girl called Annie hence the name, but towards the end of this album it just seems like that point becomes more and more lost. As the subject manner while I guess on the lines of love just went over my head:

or…

And there is a big of inconsistencies as well with this subject matter as it seems some songs just go on a tangent that you never would predict. I guess talking about you family is still about love but going from Jesse Boykins III singing his heart out about Annie to that it just seems a bit unstructured. This unstructured nature does continue somewhat  throughout the better part of second half of the album with Rejjie just saying shit… And I mean exactly that. It just seems like this guy was rapping for the sake of rapping a lot and many of the appeal of some of the songs is the features. I think Ebenezer kills his feature on the track Spaceships and as mentioned before there is Jesse vocals makes the song Annie for me. 

The Artist(s)

With this I realized that the songs I liked the most in this album was the ones with features on them. Annie, Spaceships , Room 27 and many more all contain features and they are in my humble opinion the best songs on the album. If its not them lacking the continuity issues that I think some other have but they also have the best sounds because of these other artists bring to the track. And there is an exception to the rule as I think Charlie Brown just isn’t very good but this holds for the most part. 

And then it hit me, I’m sorry to say it but I just don’t think Rejjie is just not the greatest rapper. He raps and rhymes because it sounds good not necessarily because it makes sense or leads to something completely cohesive. In the past this wasn’t really an issue and he has made some great songs with this. Me and Dre were talking about this before when I was listening to this album.

The Misses

I think this rears its head as a problem in terms of this project just because of it being such a conceptual body of music. It is hard to convey the story he is trying to tell if there is so many tangent in a pursuit just to make thing half rhyme. It makes the outlandish bars just confusing and is the single biggest problem with this project. It becomes a lot more style then substance overall because of Rejjie’s lack of bars. But I guess at least the style does sound good.

The Verdict

After all this I do actually like this album, its problems don’t take away from the good songs on the album itself. But I am rating the album so after much thought in writing this review and listening to the project for a while I give it the rating of…

Solid

I am very torn with this album, yes it has some issues but they didn’t really upset me and I didn’t feel insulted by the project either. If you get round to listening to it or you’re on the fence about giving Rejjie a shot. This wouldn’t be the worse place to start, I can say with confidence that this is a great improvement over his last project and that makes me very happy. It is not perfect but I am not going to act like their wasn’t a good few songs that I enjoyed. So it wasn’t terrible it just wasn’t amazing by any means, just something to listen to. It might differ for you and I have a feeling that the reader will take more or less from Rejjie’s newest outing hence the rating.